TEACHING HOSPITAL
Students Report on
Immigration Issues in Puerto Rico By Mauro Whiteman Photos by Brandon Quester
Top: Kailey Latham takes a photo. Bottom: Gardenia Coleman interviews a Border Patrol Agent.
Buffet Foundation The Puerto Rico project undertaken by students in Carnegie Professor of Journalism Rick Rodriguez’s depth reporting class was funded by a $1 million endowment from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The foundation is headed by Howard Buffett, a philanthropist with a passion for photojournalism and the son of well-known investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett. The Buffett Foundation has funded six reporting projects at the Cronkite School since 2006. 10
The Cronkite Journal
In March 2012, 18 Cronkite students spent their spring break in Puerto Rico, reporting on the U.S. territory’s immigration issues. The students traveled to the territory as part of Cronkite’s annual depth reporting class trip. The program, funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, has taken students to numerous countries over the years, including South Africa, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. While in Puerto Rico, the students covered immigration, business, labor and statehood issues, creating a multimedia project that includes a website, a documentary and numerous text stories and still photographs. Each student worked on a different aspect of the project, and a group of students created a documentary telling the story of the trip. The trip gave Cronkite graduate student Jerilyn Forsythe a chance to put months of research and planning to use as she worked on an article about Puerto Rico’s Vieques Island and its recovery after years of weapons testing by the U.S. Navy. “All of it (was) definitely … a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Forsythe said. “For me it was really rewarding. It gave me a new perspective on journalism and about what it means to be a reporter.” A new perspective is exactly what Rick Rodriguez, Carnegie Professor of Journalism and Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor at the Cronkite School, teaches in his depth reporting class and on the annual trip. Rodriguez oversees the class and the trip with fellow instructor Jason Manning, director of student media at Arizona State University. The two act as on-the-ground editors and work alongside students, giving advice and occasionally helping students set up and conduct interviews. “We spoke to just about everybody — from Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in Congress to the secretary of state to ex-governors to coffee plantation owners to undocumented citizens to the Coast Guard to the Border Patrol,” Rodriguez said. “It was a fabulous trip in that sense.” Rodriguez, former executive editor of the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, said many students knew little about Puerto Rico before they started the depth reporting class but had to become experts in order to succeed. “If you prepare enough — about the country, 2012-2013
about the issues — you’ll be able to understand (the situation),” he said. “You’ll put yourself in a position to get good interviews. You’ll also put yourself in a position to ask the right questions in the limited amount of time that we’re there.” The depth reporting trip is a unique opportunity for students to report abroad. “Actually being out there in the field to be able to help (students) navigate new situations is really important, and it’s one of the really good things about this program,” Rodriguez said. “They can see that these things can work out, and a lot of times when you’re out on stories like this, things don’t work out like you’re planning them.” Cronkite student McKenzie Manning, one of three broadcast journalists on the trip, learned firsthand that plans have to adapt quickly to new circumstances. Manning, who was working on both an article about the U.S. Coast Guard in Puerto Rico and the documentary project, found out the night before a scheduled ride-along with Coast Guard personnel that she wouldn’t be allowed to go. She would later find out that the vessel she had been scheduled to ride on took part in an interdiction — when the Coast Guard encounters undocumented immigrants on their way from Puerto Rico to the mainland U.S. “I would have been on the boat that … spotted the yola (a small wooden boat). (I) would have been completely in the middle of the situation,” she said. When a second Coast Guard ride-along also was canceled, Manning found herself scrambling to report her story. “I was kind of in a panic,” she said. “I’m sitting here thinking, ‘My story just went out the window.’” After a phone call with Rodriguez, Manning formulated a new plan for her piece, and she was later able to join another Coast Guard excursion. “No matter what type of journalism you go into … when you’re forced into a situation, you have to think on your feet to still get the best product that you can,” she said. Rodriguez said the students gain confidence because they have to handle challenges while still producing high-quality journalism.