Public Affairs Reporting

All right, Sarah, I think we're.

All right.

Good to go.

I'll go ahead and introduce everybody, so welcome everybody. My name is Sarah Adams. I'm an admissions counselor here at University of Illinois, Springfield. Before we get going on today's presentation, I just have a couple of housekeeping items to go over. So just so you know, the webinar is being recorded and will be made available for viewing later. So don't feel like you need to take frantic notes. And within your share screen, you can actually see there is a closed captioning option. It's up in the bar in the top right corner with a little.

Go off. Go on a walk.

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Just go.

C button. So right next to it is the option to make the video full screen as well if you'd like. If you do have any you need to resync or have any audio or visual issues at this time, just refresh the browser and it should clear things up for you. We definitely would love to hear your questions in the chat. Feel free to post those throughout. You know, we'll be looking at the questions at the end of the session, so we'll put those on pause until a later point and then we'll get through them. So we're excited to have you all join us today. With that, I'm going to introduce you to Jason Pisha.

The Director of Public Affairs reporting program and I want to thank you for joining us again today, Jason.

Thanks, Sarah. Good to see everyone. Good afternoon everybody. I'm Jason Pisha, director of the Public Affairs reporting program at University of Illinois, Springfield. Just wanted to take a few minutes to, to run you through the basics of our our ten month Masters degree program that trains reporters on how to cover government and politics. I do have a couple of guests with me that I'll, we'll talk to you in a little bit. But first, Nika Schoonover is a current student. She is a DePaul University.

Undergraduate graduate and she is currently interning for Capital News Illinois, which is a wire service that covers things going on in the capital. And then also joining me is Alex Degnan, who is an alum of the program graduated a few years ago.

He did his undergrad at Western, is that right? Western. Yeah, Western Illinois University. And now he's currently working at WBZ, the public radio station in Chicago. He's working in their Springfield office here at the Capitol.

So we'll get to that in a minute, but I just wanted to go through just some quick facts about the program. Like I said, 10 months where we learned about how to cover government politics with, you know, the state capital sort of being the living laboratory for that.

You spent the first semester in class doing class work, but I still do my best to make it an authentic experience. Here's a couple of pictures from fall semesters where we, you know, had live news conferences with the House Speaker and we got to meet the Supreme Court.

Of Chief Justice at the time and and talked to her as well and you know we got in front of the governor on zoom this past semester as well. So that was pretty exciting for the students and helped build their confidence when it comes time to you know ask questions of these people for real and then you know do stories about them.

The highlight of the program is our six month internship.

You're guaranteed an internship if you get into the program. We partner with professional news organizations that have a presence inside the state Capitol. These are some of the places we've sent interns over the past few years. You notice the sun TimesDaily newspapers in Arlington Heights. The general registers the Springfield Paper Lee Enterprises runs newspapers in Decatur and Bloomington and a few other smaller cities or mid sized cities. Capital News Illinois is the wire service Illinois.

Times is the weekly newspaper and then we CIA is the Champagne affiliate. Gray TV has a bunch of myth TV stations around Illinois, sort of a mid sized cities and then NPR Illinois and a couple other NPR stations and WBZ should be on there as well. They are doing our internship program as well. So when you're an intern, I don't know if you've been an intern program situations before.

Especially in a newsroom. Sometimes it turns out the ones who, you know grab quotes from people to give to the real reporter to to write into their story. Or maybe you're getting coffee or just doing other menial tasks around The Newsroom. That's not the way it works with PR, you, you know?

Become a sort of an equal opportunity contributing member of the new staff. These are a couple of our interns from last year and sort of where they ended up now working full time in journalism. So they get to be, you know, on the front lines covering news conferences and get to be in front of the camera and get to do real journalism things.

Umm, we we feel compared to other Masters degree programs, we solved that problem where you know, in order to get some, you know, experience, you know, get some professional work example work samples. You have to get some experience in order to get some work sample, you know, in order to get the experience and need some work samples and vice versa. And sometimes it doesn't work out. This solves that problem. You get to, you know, both the best of both those both were worlds. We're also affordable.

Um, I haven't updated this this chart in a little bit, but good news is EU of I board of trustees just last week voted to keep tuition rates the same for next year so that tuition rate will not change. We do charge by resident and non resident based on if you live in Illinois or not. So you know that you pay full freight for tuition and fees in the fall. But then you'll notice the spring and summer semesters tuition is zero. We offer a full tuition.

Waiver is sort of compensation for being a a working reporter. On top of that, there's the internship stipend, which is a money that goes right in back, your right back into your pocket each month up in the form of a paycheck.

And then everyone is guaranteed to get some form of scholarship award as well, that $1500 for or $2000, whatever number I have there for.

Resident internships is a little bit conservative. This past year, everyone in the class was closer to about getting $3000 or even a little more.

And excellent job placement rate as well. You know, each year if you know if you are ready to get a job in journalism, when you're done PR, you're most likely going to get one. I had nine students in my class last year and all of them are working in journalism at the moment, so.

People who graduate from our program are well known around the state. We have a lot of air grads working in newsrooms all over Illinois and all over the country, and when they see a a resume comes come in, they know that's a student who can hit the ground running and and get going.

This is my contact information. Feel free to contact me whenever we need and I'm happy to walk you through any details or help you through an application. I've even been known to do tours of Springfield and the capital in the US as well to get you acclimated to the to the area. I want to take the second-half of this just to bring in our guests. Like I said, Nika is a graduated from DePaul just last year. She worked on the campus paper and did a bunch of other things and she's had other.

Internships and journalism over the years. And Nick, I just wanted to just talk to you for a second about, you know, as you were coming up sort of this time last year when you were trying to decide what am I going to do after I graduate from DePaul, sort of what led you here and then what ultimately put you over the top to actually apply and show up?

Umm, yeah. So wait, can you hear me?

I can.

I when I heard about PR, I was still. I knew that I was gonna do an internship over the summer, so I wasn't even really looking for jobs yet. But I had heard about the park program throughout being at DePaul.

And I had talked to an alum who was also went to DePaul about the program, and I knew I wanted to do political reporting that I just didn't feel ready to like.

Jump into the job market yet? So after, you know, looking into PR more and applying and getting in, it just felt like the right decision.

Yeah. And we're glad you're here and you started, all the students started their internships just actually in early January. They come back from a short holiday break and jump right in. And so you've been at Capital News, Illinois for about a month and you know, we mentioned, you know, it's not.

You're you're doing real journalism work in your job. Maybe talk about what you're doing and what you're covering and and how it's working out so far.

Yeah, so I didn't hear like you said, for less than a month, but.

I know it's been kind of a weird month, but I the first piece I did were on the inauguration, the Governors and constitutional offers inauguration and then shared a byline with one of my colleagues for the General Assembly inauguration. Helped out with some of the coverage during the lame duck session and in have been just working on a couple smaller things in this first week. So like the actual session.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's been nice to just kind of jump in and try to just really get a feel for what's going on at the Capitol, and it's been a really good experience so far.

Good. And it'll get busier soon, I promise. They'll actually come to the capital on consecutive weeks and actually do things. Alex wanted to bring you into the conversation, maybe start off, you know, talk about your sort of.

They always get.

Spring.

SPR is getting ready to end sort of in that spring and you're trying to figure out, you know where you're going to get jobs, sort of how that job process searching worked and how PAR maybe helped you along with that.

Yeah, I came into PAR without really any set idea of what I wanted to cover as a reporter. I knew I wanted to be a reporter, but I didn't know that politics was going to be the wheelhouse, that I became interested. And so as PR was ending, I was essentially using a lot of my connections that I had formed through the program. People like news directors that I had met. Jason, you mentioned the portfolio that we put together.

That that work samples that we have, those were crucial because even though through my connections and PAR, a lot of people in Illinois journalism already knew who I was because they had been hearing my stuff all over the state for the past year or more. There were some people out of state who didn't necessarily know, but they were able to hear the work that I put together professionally as an intern. And it did end up getting me my first job. It helped through the connections in my tape. It ended up I got I got my first job. Sorry Mushmouth ended up getting my first job.

Pretty soon after graduation, and this was during the height of the housing bubble, like the housing bubble burst in 2009. Nobody was getting jobs but.

Thanks to PAR I that it definitely helped me get one, so I'm eternally grateful for that.

And where did you intern your PR year? Where was that?

OK, so.

I interned at the Illinois Radio network and that still exists in some form, but it's not the same as it was. So you heard me on stations like WBBM in Chicago, WTMX and Springfield, etcetera.

Yeah. And that's one point I want to make as well. You know, you're, you are getting your name and your byline and your record, your stories out there to the entire state of Illinois. You know, Nika, for example, capital News Illinois serves papers all over the state and they pick up what CN I writes about state government so they can have that sort of coverage for their readers back home. So you know Nico will see her name and.

And, you know, hundreds of newspapers, dozens of newspapers throughout the state as she goes on through her internship. And Alex, maybe it's just talk about, you know, now.

Yes, exactly.

You know, you've, you, you've worked at a few places, but in within the last year or so, you've returned to Springfield to take the Bureau job at the WBZ Public radio station. And so you're kind of doing what you were trained to do back again. But maybe talk about how what you learned in PAR not only helps you now obviously, because you're covering the same stuff, but you know, even in those other jobs weren't necessarily covering Illinois government, you'll probably learn some skills that were still useful.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's because I knew that I was going to be in the same room as powerful people and politicians and things like that, that I wanted that experience. I wanted the experience for PAR to be able to go up to a governor, JB Pritzker.

To be able to ask him a question to his face and not be worried about it and not be and not be like scared that I'm not doing it correctly. So that's what I went in there for. So even if you don't think you want to do politics, this program is good for a lot of other reasons and that's one of them. So in the jobs that I had that work politics related, it still helps to know how to listen to somebody while they're giving you an answer while you're also trying to prepare for the next question.

It helps to be able to multitask. It helps to be able to practice in really intense situations like you might experience in the Pixar program. Because, you know, one of the first things I did during my internship was and, and I'm not kidding, chasing an SUV while I was trying to report live on the radio as an intern like.

I don't think there are many other situations that will come close to that in your career. There could be. But I was pretty, I felt pretty well prepared if I thought to myself, if I can do that and I survived it and it didn't sound terrible, you know, I think I might be OK. So.

Even though I learned a lot about politics during my internship, it was the actual practice of reporting and learning how to report breaking news and learning how to.

Take things that are really complicated and.

Like just kind of crazy that people don't normally think about and making it digestible. That's what PAR taught me how to do, and that's what I think any job is going to want you to be able to do.

Yeah. Who was in the SUV that you're chasing after? Do you remember?

Rabinovich.

That sounds about right. I was going to guess that, even if you didn't tell me.

It was the that that was the time when we had multiple reporters staked out at every entrance to the capital because we didn't know what staircase he was going to try to sneak out of. So we all happened to be there at that one. We guessed right that time.

Yeah. Well, great. Well, Alex, Nikki, thank you for for joining us today. And I don't see any questions in the chat. So I will go ahead and wrap up this short presentation. Like I said, my contact is there on the screen. Feel free to visit our website or tweet me or e-mail me or however you want to get ahold of me and I'd be happy to take you through the rest of the process to get yourself applied for and and enrolled in the program.

Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it and the admissions office.

Thank you.

Thanks guys. Have a good rest of your day.

Thanks, Alex. Thank you, Nico.