The Associated Press Media Editors Awards for Excellence in Journalism will honor the Reentry Project, a collaborative journalism project focused on bringing attention to prison issues, at their 2018 ceremony. Julie Christie, KLN ‘19, was cited specifically for her work on an infographic for the project.
The Reentry Project, a project of the Solutions Journalism Network, represents a new trend in reporting— collaborative journalism. The yearlong project brought together a group of reporters and news outlets to investigate issues around challenges for the formerly incarcerated.
Instructor Jim MacMillan leads the Center for Public Interest Journalism, and orchestrated the partnership between the Reentry Project and Klein College. In addition to providing operational support for the year-long project, MacMillan brought in 10 interns and volunteers from the journalism program. He believes that collaborating on this project presented a unique opportunity for students.
“They’re getting eyes on a startup, and on collaboration and on nonprofit journalism,” MacMillan said. “Those are pretty hot trends as we look forward into the new paths for journalism.”
In addition to understanding how reporting is changing, students who participated in the project also work to directly advance the project’s goals. They take part in weekly conference calls with news executives from 20 organizations. “I’m learning so much from hearing what these executives have to say,” said MacMillan, a veteran journalist whose work for the Associated Press won a Pulitzer prize in 2005. “I imagine it would be priceless for a student.”
Jean Friedman-Rudovsky was the project editor for the Reentry Project. “Klein [College] students were vital to what we were able to do,” she said.
Friedman-Rudovsky worked with Christie, who served as a full-time intern, on her infographic, a one-page visual and text reference answering foundational questions about reentry. “Reentry is a complicated issue,” said Friedman-Rudovsky, “We needed to try to educate a lot of our audience that had never thought about that issue, so we wanted to do that in a very simple and visually pleasing way.”
Christie took on the project with characteristic passion. “She really delivers,” said MacMillan. “She overdelivers. She’s a market-ready professional.”
As Christie considered how to present the information, she kept her audience in mind. She didn’t know much about the issue of reentry when she began the project, and as she put information together, she tried to do it in a way that she thought would meet readers where they were. Friedman-Rudovsky, she said, was a big help.
“Her expertise and understanding helped so much,” said Christie. “It was a really awesome learning experience.”
Presenting the information in a visually interesting way was a challenge because of how difficult it is to get images of incarcerated people, given limitations within prisons and privacy issues. As a result, Christie relied a lot on what she had learned in her Design for Journalism class, creating a representative graphic from scratch based on open source images. She carefully considered the genders, body sizes and skin tones that she would include in her central image. In the end, she chose to represent all kinds of people. “The infographic was meant to appeal to and apply to every single person in Philadelphia,” said Christie.
When choosing the font, however, she had a more practical motivation. “I had to choose a font that I would be staring at all day, every day for weeks,” said Christie. “So I chose one that doesn’t make me angry.”
In their announcement, the Associated Press Media Editors specifically mentioned Christie’s work, writing on their website, “The journalism was exceptionally strong; the infographic especially impressive.