Article

Once little known, Florida International University
now takes the lead in training Hispanic journalists

NEW YORK Compared to America's long-established journalism education powerhouses, the j-school at Florida International University still qualifies as a start-up. A young program at a university that didn't open its doors until three months after the Watergate break-in, FIU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication first won accreditation barely 15 years ago. But no school in the nation has more experience in teaching bilingual and Spanish-language journalism - a specialty that is urgently needed in the United States to fill the newspaper industry's demand for journalists fully equipped to cover the exploding and highly diverse Hispanic population.

And few schools are better positioned than FIU to meet that need. First, there's the university's location in the Latino stew that makes up so much of the population of Miami/Dade County, Fla. To local kids born abroad or to first-generation immigrants, the relatively inexpensive state university is a natural destination. Then there's the j-school's decades-old outreach to would-be or working journalists in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Its overall program, with more than 2,000 students, is now massive.

FIU's Spanish-language journalism master's program was the first in the nation, and it has continued to expand its Spanish-language j-school capabilities. The school offers a master's in business journalism, and this school year is introducing a master's in bilingual journalism.

Another factor that comes up again and again in the industry is the work ethic and street savvy of a typical FIU j-school grad. Once, FIU was South Florida's best-kept secret, with The Miami Herald and its closest competitors snapping up interns and graduates. But the word is getting out as FIU grads make names for themselves across the nation, and increasingly, abroad. This young program at a state-run university established as a commuter school for locals has already produced eight Pulitzer Prize winners.

It's no coincidence that The New York Times looked to the school in July when it announced it was expanding its weeklong Journalism Institute immersion training program to student members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. "We chose FIU because it's got a fabulous, fabulous program," says Don Hecker, the Times' training editor for copy editors and director of the Journalism Institute.

The Times has run the program for African-American student journalists since 2003 at the historically black Dillard University. The Hispanic program will start in January, and alternate each year between FIU and the department of journalism at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"FIU is ground zero for training a new generation of Hispanic journalists," says NPR reporter Lyn Millner, who just completed a stint as a visiting professor.

America's newsrooms desperately need a new generation of Hispanic journalists. Hispanics or Latinos are now the largest minority in the United States, or 14.1% of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2004 estimate. Yet the American Society of Newspaper Editors' census of daily newspapers this year found that just 4.5% of newsroom employees are Hispanic. Recruiting Latino journalists has only become more urgent as dailies create or acquire Spanish-language papers.

"The growth of Spanish-language journalism programs is quite heartening because for a long time, there was a sense that journalists just needed to speak Spanish. But just being able to speak doesn't mean you can write on deadline with the facility you need," says Javier J. Aldape, editor of Tribune Co.'s national Spanish-language daily Hoy. Like other emerging Spanish-language dailies, Hoy leans heavily on journalists educated not here at home, but in Latin America. Between its three city editions, Aldape says, the paper employs journalists from 15 or 16 different nations.

But that's not always a solution either, says Gilbert Bailon, editor and publisher of The Dallas Morning News' Al Dia, which counts journalists from four different Latin American nations and Puerto Rico in its newsroom. "Foreign journalists might not have the fluency in English to participate in a paper like ours, where you have to be fully bilingual because you may be interviewing people who do not know Spanish," he notes.

"One of the challenges we face is that there just aren't a lot of programs that are training people in journalism in Spanish," Bailon adds. "We're talking about a literal handful of programs."

One school that Al Dia recruits from is the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Department of Communication, which three years ago launched the Ruben Salazar Spanish-Language Media Program to prepare bilingual and "bicultural" undergrads for careers in Spanish-language media.

This spring, UTEP added master's-level courses in "border journalism," concentrating on issues along the U.S.-Mexican border. The coursework is funded by Publicaciones Paso del Norte -- publisher of El Diario, which has editions in Juarez and El Paso -- and so far is open only to Diario reporters.

Another leader in Spanish-language journalism is the New York Times Journalism Institute's other site for its Hispanic program: the University of Arizona in Tucson. Enrollment in the Department of Journalism, a pure news/editorial program with no advertising or public relations sequences, has doubled its enrollment in the past five years to 650 students - about 23% of them Hispanic.
"Small classes, no more than 20 students, taught by people with a Ph.D., and also a dozen years in the business, is very attractive to students," says professor/department head Jacqueline E. Sharkey.

One unique feature of Arizona is El Independiente, a bilingual monthly newspaper entirely produced by students that is the only local paper in the small city of South Tucson. "Because it comes out once a month, it's very issues-oriented journalism, and a wonderful opportunity to get experience with bilingual reporting and in-depth reporting in a multicultural environment," Sharkey adds.

And for the past three years, Arizona students have partnered with Tucson Citizen editors on such large reporting projects as the special section on the environmental degradation of the Colorado River that ran on June 20. "I think what students like [about Arizona's j-school] is that it's not theoretical, it's real," says Sharkey. "It's working in Spanish, going to the border with Mexico to do issue-oriented coverage that editors are interested in today."If Florida International University stands out from other Spanish-language and bilingual programs, one reason is that it has a sort of unfair advantage: With South Florida as its source of students, it has a demographic profile unmatched anywhere in the country.

Fully 69% of its j-students are Hispanic, and 11% are African-American. Cuban Americans no longer form the vast majority of its students, notes Allan Richards, an assistant professor who chairs the Journalism and Broadcasting Department: "We have students from Venezuela, Brazil, a lot of Argentineans in the last few years, Colombia -- I had one student who had been kidnapped [in Colombia] for four months."

For the most part, FIU students are the children of immigrants, and often were born outside the United States. They remind Jane Daugherty, the investigative reporter who was a 1994 Pulitzer finalist, of college kids in the Vietnam War era.

"There's almost that blue-collar mentality that was very present in the journalism schools in the 1960s and '70s when I was in college," says Daugherty, a visiting associate professor. "They really have a work ethic, and most of them got it directly from their parents who had to make a lot of sacrifices to get their families [into the U.S.] and get their families into the middle class quickly. These are pedal-to-the-metal kids, and they're ready to work."

They're kids like Tere Figueras, who got her journalism degree while working full-time at The Miami Herald. She held down police and municipal beats on the 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift, and went to school during the day.

"There was always that delicate balance of how much time I was spending in the newsroom versus spending time in class," says Figueras, now a Dade County reporter for the Herald. "But most of the FIU professors, because they too are working journalists, realize that in today's market you can't afford to deal with journalism as a purely academic world - that you have to be exercising those journalistic muscles even before you have [a diploma]."

Perhaps no journalism school these days emphasizes the practical and the professional over the academic more than FIU. Manny Garcia is an FIU graduate and Miami Herald metro editor who was part of the team that won the 2001 Pulitzer for breaking news on the seizure of Elian Gonzalez. He recalls professors who came through newsrooms, not the groves of academe. "Even though we had textbooks, classes were a lot of, 'OK, here's the courthouse, here's the police station, here's how you cover an election ... now come back with a compelling story," he says. Or else.

The grading, he says, could be brutal. When he proudly handed in his first story in a writing class, his instructor Kevin Hall, then an associate editor at the Herald's now-defunct Sunday magazine "Tropic," gave him an F. Garcia says he did much better the second time around: He got a D. "He was brutal in his editing and push for detail, but he told us the reason he was going to be tough on us was that when you get into the newsroom, nobody's going to be singing 'Kumbaya' -- everybody's going to have a hammer," says Garcia, who graduated in 1990.

The faculty is still tough on students, with high expectations, Daugherty says, "But once they get over their heart attacks, they do the work. Our kids can really run with the ball when they graduate."

FIU's tough love starts with the dreaded "grammar" test. "Everybody was always nervous about the grammar test, if you didn't pass it, you were doomed," says Aimee Juarez, a 2002 graduate. "They drilled you really hard, and it does come in handy."

Until recently, Juarez was at the Charlotte (Fla.) Observer. She's going back to the school in the fall to get her master's in business journalism. "I think Professor Richards brainwashed me," she says with a laugh.

The university definitely has something of a cult about its instructional program, and it all begins with an insistence on writing -- creative writing, fiction, essays, poetry.

Before the journalism students write a word in journalese, they go through rigorous coursework in plain old English Comp-type writing. "We have to make sure they can write in English, so we are constantly testing to make sure that language skills are strong," says Richards. "It's not enough to be Hispanic, you've got to be able to write."

And just being Hispanic is not enough to understand the great range of cultures encompassed by the "Hispanic" tag. Editors can't just send, say, a Mexican-American reporter into a community of Venezuelan immigrants and expect him to just naturally understand the social and political dynamics, Richards says.

"That's been a big challenge, how do you adapt to the many different students, and how do we understand our own student body?" he adds. "We've had to make certain adjustments teaching law and ethics, for instance, because you have people who don't understand what the First Amendment is." Many students, he notes, come from nations that still maintain so-called "insult" laws that make even truthful criticism of officials or government institutions a criminal offense.

At the same time, many FIU students are comfortable flitting between their homeland and the United States. "Someone will call me and say, 'I can't come into class today, I'll see you tomorrow,'" says Richards. "So I'll say, where are you? 'Oh, I'm in Caracas.'"

With stereotypes abounding, every student takes a course in covering multi-ethnic communities. Faculty describe Anglo kids speaking Spanish, Cuban Americans learning about life in Venezuela, and Latin Americans gaining insight into U.S. culture. "It rubs off on everyone," Daugherty says.

Newspapers complain about the difficulty of recruiting Hispanic journalists, but FIU, like the few other schools with Spanish-language and bilingual programs, seems to have no difficulty at all.

One obvious reason, says Dr. Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is that FIU has a big pool from which to draw. Miami/Dade's school system is the fourth-largest in the nation, and nearby Broward County's school district is the fifth-largest.

But just as important, the school begins cultivating potential journalists very early. "We've recruited a lot of kids by getting them to attend Journalism Day at FIU when they're in the middle schools," she says. The university also works closely with advisors to middle school and high school newspapers, which, in contrast to many parts of the country, still flourish in South Florida.

"The numbers are consistently growing," says department chair Richards. About 2,000 students are in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, with the number of those pursuing careers as journalists about the same as those studying advertising or public relations.

"You'd think with all the bad news about the newspaper industry that kids would get dissuaded," he adds. Instead, students expect that if print declines, they'll simply continue reporting online or in multimedia ways.

And that, editors say, is what newspapers need. "It's not just words on paper now," says Palm Beach Post Editor John Bartosek. The paper has been impressed with FIU graduates, both as full-timers and interns, and wants to expand its recruiting from the school, he adds.

Another powerful draw is the Spanish-language and, now, bilingual master's program begun 13 years ago by Mario Diament, who at the time was editor of the Buenos Aires newspaper El Cronista. "I came here thinking I'd stay maybe nine months," Diament laughs.

One big attraction for foreign students is that, like the undergrad program, the master's coursework is much more professionally oriented than the typical Latin American school, which emphasizes the academic and research side. "We were a novelty in that sense," says Diament.

Novelty, of course, works both ways. FIU instructors have to realize that reporting in Latin America can be quite different from working beats in America. For one thing, he explains, "you very seldom get somebody on the record criticizing anything." Access, he adds, is often blocked to what inarguably would be public information in the U.S.: "It can be a challenge to find sources and know who is important and who is not."

And then there's Spanish itself. "English," Diament says, "is a very practical language, but there's no middle way with Spanish. It's either right or wrong. That's why it's easier to find good writers in an English class than it is to find in a Spanish-language class."

Also, there are many traps in the Spanish language; a word that might be innocuous slang to some Spanish-speakers may have pejorative -- and perhaps even obscene -- double meaning to other users of the language in other nations.

Foreign students at FIU can be almost heartbreaking in their love for the U.S. system, says Daugherty, the visiting assistant professor. In her media law and ethics class, she asks students to write what the First Amendment means to them. "A couple of the essays made me cry," she recalls. "Their families had to escape from oppressive governments. ... They have a different perspective, and in many ways a deeper appreciation of the opportunities of our press system."

FIU's journalism faculty is almost as diverse as its student population, evenly divided between men and women, and American and foreign-born. Students repeatedly mention the faculty as their reason for going into journalism. Cristela Guerra, for example, is a journalism major going into her senior year. But in high school, Guerra, who was born in Panama, not only resisted her mother's suggestion she take up journalism, she wasn't even sure she was going to attend the university. "It was my safety school," she says. "I didn't see myself going to FIU."

When she did select the school, she even declared the major reluctantly. Guerra says that changed when she started taking journalism courses. "The professors are very knowledgeable and very realistic when it comes to journalism," she says. "And if they think you can have a passion for reporting, I don't know, they'll somehow get it out of you."

Now professionals are seeing that passion. This summer Guerra interned at The News-Press in Fort Myers on Florida's Gulf Coast. Within a couple of weeks she had three above-the-fold Page One stories.

Ana Ribiero, who grew up in Brazil and graduated last May, had a similar experience. When she entered FIU, she was going to get her degree and hit the road as a singer. Then she started working on the school paper, followed by an internship at the Miami Herald. Interning at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, she saw firsthand the power of the press when one of her stories stirred a local controversy over an exhibition of preserved human bodies.

"My singing plans are on hold," Ribiero says. "I'm so in love with reporting."