We (yes, we) won a big award!

This past week, Spitfire News went to MediaFest, the largest convention for professionals and college students in journalism, held this year in Washington, D.C. It was a fitting location for the most pressing topic, which is how our democracy and our profession are under attack. The day I left the city, more than 200,000 people gathered downtown to protest Donald Trump’s administration, which he responded to with an AI-generated video of himself as a king, dumping poop on everyone. A few days later, he started ripping apart the East Wing of the White House, leaving an ugly, gaping maw where the First Lady’s offices used to be.

With this ongoing backdrop of wanton destruction, I came to MediaFest for a pretty special reason: to accept the highest professional honor awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists, which every former and current journalism student in America will recognize as the organization behind the Code of Ethics that we all learn about early on in our education. My fellow honorees this year were Valeria Fernández, who founded the mentorship program Altavoz Lab to support reporters serving Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other communities of color, and Dean Baquet, the first Black journalist to serve as the Executive Editor of The New York Times. Together, we represented legacy journalism, community journalism, and independent journalism (that’s us)!

I say us for a reason: this simply would not have been possible without the Spitfire News readership, which includes lots of new faces and plenty of people who have been supporting me throughout my entire career at both traditional and new publications. Independent journalism is one of the best ways to hold power to account, in large part because of the direct community support behind it. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being here. And a huge thank you to SPJ, especially outgoing president Emily Bloch.

Another reason I was thrilled to attend this conference was because I got to meet and chat with a bunch of student journalists, including some from my alma mater Ohio University, which was recognized as having SPJ’s Campus Chapter of the Year. I love talking to the next generation of journalists about what the future holds, and I wanted to share some of what we discussed and the points I made during the SPJ Fellows keynote panel.

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