Carolina students pitch, develop and place stories with local, statewide media outlets
by Barbara Wiedemann
“Having the initiative to find a passion project together and pursuing it almost at all costs. Really owning it. Having the perseverance to knock on different doors to push your project through the different stages. That was a different kind of challenge than any of my previous classes,” says Rocio Sevilla ’15, Miami-based live producer for NBCUniversal Telemundo, about the most valuable takeaway from “MEJO 625: UNC Media Hub,” a class that was offered for the first time during her last semester at Carolina in Fall 2015.
“MEJO 390: News Bureau”
Seven years ago, the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media leadership team was looking for a way to recreate the opportunities the school’s students had to meet and work together in their introductory classes, before their areas of interest at the school found them traveling in more specialized circles.
“This was a new skills course we were trying out,” says course creator Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and John H. Stembler Jr. Distinguished Professor C.A. Tuggle, the former broadcast sports reporter and producer with a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Alabama.
“It was essential that students had the opportunity to work collaboratively and across platforms. We sought out — and still do — top students from various concentrations, generally seniors and graduate students only, to work together all semester long to find, produce and market integrated multimedia stories with state, regional and sometimes even national appeal.”
The course instructors seek 20 top “by invitation only” students per class with a goal of forming four teams of five students each — ideally: reporter, photographer, designer, public relations strategist and broadcast journalist; with some flexibility if a student wants to focus primarily on copy editing, for example, and can take on that role for their team.
“Having the initiative to find a passion project together and pursuing it almost at all costs. Really owning it. Having the perseverance to knock on different doors to push your project through the different stages. That was a different kind of challenge than any of my previous classes.”—Rocio Sevilla ’15
A 2015 UNC Hussman bequest from the estate of film executive John H. Stembler ’65 affords the school multiple interrelated initiatives, including giving UNC Media Hub students the ability to travel on assignment to where news is breaking. That’s been restricted to the state of North Carolina during the COVID-19 pandemic, but past Stembler Scholars have travelled as far as Austria, England, France, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Mexico to track down the story.
Sevilla, who today is studying for an online MBA at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alongside her Telemundo work, remembers “Dr. T” with admiration.
“Looking back, Dr. T knew the resources and had a lot of understanding of each person’s strengths and could point you in the right direction,” she says. “Now I also see that he was letting us own each story, and giving us that sense of responsibility. He was a strong manager, without micromanaging.”
Over time, the new course proved its usefulness. Its graduates found themselves in job interviews highlighting the collaborative, cross-disciplinary nature of their work to interested media professionals whose internal restructuring sought to foster similar team efforts across platforms.
What was “MEJO 390: News Hub” became a capstone course at the school: “MEJO 625: UNC Media Hub” (625 for UNC basketball coach Dean Smith’s win/loss differential, says Tuggle).
“MEJO 625: UNC Media Hub” blossoms
Since Spring 2017, Adjunct Coordinator John Robinson has helped shape UNC Media Hub.
An adjunct faculty member at UNC Hussman since 2012, Robinson graduated from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in south-central North Carolina with an English degree. His first job as a reporter at the Monroe (N.C.) Enquirer Journal in 1976 was “by far the most fun,” he says. His last job before turning to academe was the best. “I could affect so many things from a position of power and influence,” he says of his 13 years as editor of The News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Angelia Herrin, a former Washington, D.C.-based reporter and editor respectively for Knight-Ridder and USA Today and a Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University, is also making her mark on UNC Media Hub. She started teaching a second section of the course this spring semester alongside Robinson, the second semester in which two sections of the class have been taught. Tuggle acts as an adviser to both sections and edits the video reporters behind each instructor.
“Media Hub has something for everyone at UNC Hussman regardless of their specialty. It’s a great steppingstone for our post-graduation work.”—Praveena Somasundaram ’22
Students find their Media Hub stories regularly end up published in professional media outlets. Robinson says he doesn’t solicit stories from his former newspaper colleagues across the state, nor does he offer exclusive stories. He does help the public relations students at Media Hub to actively pitch completed stories to local, statewide and sometimes even national outlets.
Brainstorming story ideas is something that comes naturally to Robinson after nearly three dozen years in the news business. But he knows from experience that spring semester students can run out of pitches when the weather turns warm and the sun starts shining enticingly on Carolina’s campus.
“I tell them to start thinking of ideas and create their own story lists in the first week of class,” he says. “Because they’ll inevitably run out of ideas mid-semester.”
Visual storyteller Lucas Pruitt ’22, a Hearst Award-winner for multimedia in 2020 and again in 2022 — and a 2021 “Documentary Award of Excellence” College Photographer of the Year —took Robinson’s class last fall and learned a lot about pitching stories.
Pruitt’s team pitched, developed and placed stories on barbershop mentors, autism and surfing, exhausted nurses, Naloxone shortages and the right to vote. All in all, their stories were shared by over 20 media outlets.
He was drawn to the UNC Hussman capstone class by the unique opportunity to get his material published in media outlets — not as “student work” but as a full-fledged news story.
“I loved this class,” says Pruitt.
“Our team’s writer [Anna Mudd ’22] was good at finding most of our stories,” he says, describing how he learned from her writerly instincts for what made a good story, which differed from his own. “As a writer, what you look for is different than what a visual journalist looks for.”
He says he enjoyed the real-world challenge of taking Mudd’s reporting and trying to find ways to make it visually compelling, rather than seeking out stories for their visual appeal.
“JR wanted our work to do well,” he says of Robinson’s teaching style. “He wanted us to get published. And he wants us to get good jobs in the future,” says Pruitt, who noted that although he’s not in Robinson’s class anymore, he received a text from him recently congratulating him on his recent Hearst Award.
“It’s really cool to have someone like JR in my corner,” says Pruitt.
Jess Abel ’19 is another JR fan. She’s a UNC-Chapel Hill communicator who started a new gig with the College of Arts & Sciences communications team this week after more than three years on the marketing and communications team with Carolina Performing Arts.
As a J-school student, “I toed the line as long as possible to stay on the journalism side of things in order to get as many experiences as possible with JR,” she says. “He really ignited a passion for feature writing that I didn’t know I had.”
Abel remembers her team pitching a project about a UNC student who found $18,000 worth of “magic“ playing cards in her parents’ attic in Charlotte, North Carolina. The story ran in The Charlotte Observer, The Charlotte Post, on WRAL.com and in The (Richmond) Daily Press.
“My goal with the class is that each student who comes through does four remarkable journalism projects,” says Robinson. “Something that they can show to hiring managers, stories that will showcase the breadth and depth of the work they can produce.”
“I tell them I’m going to edit their work like a professional,” he adds, noting that an anecdotal story that’s been shared by an alumnus who is now a political communication professional in Washington D.C. is true. “I did send her story back seven times for rewrites,” Robinson says with a laugh. “I’m proud of that anecdote.”
Morehead-Cain Scholar Praveena Somasundaram ’22 is editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel. She also studied with Robinson last fall and says that she loved that UNC Media Hub provided a real-world experience in live reporting, within the security of a classroom.
“My work at DTH is more in a leadership role, which is why a focus on developing and honing my writing and reporting skills was really important to me,” says Somasundaram about enrolling in MEJO 625.
“Media Hub has something for everyone at UNC Hussman regardless of their specialty,” says the Carolina senior who plans to work as a general assignment reporter after graduation, on the road to becoming an investigative or features reporter. “It’s a great steppingstone for our post-graduation work.”
Both Herrin and Robinson open each class with a story from the road, touching on topics like networking, mentorship, harassment on the job, leadership in media, interviewing skills and resumes. Visual journalist Pruitt says those opening lessons made an impact.
“I think that was to teach us not so much about journalism, but more about life lessons, and about working hard to succeed,” says Pruitt. He appreciated the insights.
“It is particularly fulfilling to me to work with them at this point in their careers. This is as close as possible before they go into a newsroom or PR agency or other professional setting. It’s a pleasure to help hone their skills.”—John Robinson
Some UNC Media Hub students have asked for an opportunity to extend the experience across two semesters. Each year for the past three years, Tuggle says, the school has had the opportunity to award the Eugene L. Roberts Prize to two or three students to continue with that level of reporting through an independent study. “It’s essentially an opportunity to continue their Media Hub work,” says Tuggle,“ and the prize money allows for a travel stipend.”
“It is particularly fulfilling to me to work with them at this point in their careers,” Robinson says of his UNC Media Hub students. “This is as close as possible before they go into a newsroom or PR agency or other professional setting. It’s a pleasure to help hone their skills.”