AND THE These alumni can trace their path from Marquette student media to journalism’s summit. Journalism students earn their first bylines at the Marquette Tribune and Journal, learn from professors with real-world experience and graduate ready to make their mark in the media world. The ultimate examples of this trajectory may be the distinguished alumni who have gone on to earn the top honor in news journalism, the Pulitzer Prize. Like the Tribune, the Pulitzer is also celebrating 100 years this year.
GOES TO ... Jacqui Banaszynski, Jour ’74, won the prize at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch in 1988 for “AIDS in the Heartland,” which Pulitzer officials describe as “a moving series about the life and death of an AIDS victim in a rural farm community.” Looking back on her time as a reporter at the Tribune and editor of The Hilltop yearbook, Banaszynski said working in student media was as essential to her education as journalism classes. “You need to know the language, ethics and practice, but you also need to know where in the field you belong — where is your home.”
John Machacek, Jour ’62, former Tribune editor-in-chief, worked in Copus Hall, the journalism school’s home before it moved to Johnston Hall in 1975. He called it a “miniature newsroom where students … practiced the art of storytelling and collaboration.” Machacek won the Prize in 1972 with his Rochester Times-Union colleague Richard Cooper for their coverage of the Attica prison riot in western New York.
George Lardner, Jr. "It was a fine old building while it lasted,” George Lardner, Jr., Jour ’56, Grad ’62, said of Copus Hall, where
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he also spent many nights working as Tribune editor. “It was a lot of fun working there … a lot of work, but a lot of fun, too." Lardner went on to report for The Washington Post and won the Pulitzer in 1993 for a story he said he would give anything not to have written – an “unflinching examination of his daughter’s murder by a violent man who had slipped through the criminal justice system,” says the Pulitzer website.
Margo Huston, Jour ’65, got a taste of the challenges she would face as a female journalist when she wrote a student media story that included a shocking quote from a university faculty member. “He said that women should go to college to get their MRS degree,” Huston recalled. “That’s a good one, isn’t it? He said that to me.” One of a few women reporters at the Milwaukee Journal in the 1970s, Huston shocked the newsroom when her series on home care for the elderly and the process of aging, “I’ll Never Leave My Home. Would You?” earned the Pulitzer in 1977. For more Marquette alumni with Pulitzer ties — including editors of Pulitzer-winning projects, Pulitzer finalists and a Pulitzer winner who didn’t study journalism at Marquette — read Marquette Magazine’s coverage: go.mu.edu/pulitzer-proud. — Elizabeth Baker, Comm '17
100 years of student media
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