BLACK HISTORY
- Great Events In African-American History
March 7, 2008
Tony Brown with Hampton University Journalism Students Make History At The New York Times
Harvard, Columbia, Syracuse Place Second In Competition
In 2008, The New York Times chose 18 college journalism students from across the country for its widely recognized summer internship class. But unlike any previous year, the most prestigious newspaper in the nation picked three students from the same journalism and communications school.
The Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University holds that honor: Austin Bogues, a Scripps Howard senior at that time, subsequently became The Times’ only Washington bureau reporting intern, among the 18 finalists. He was selected by The Times and the Washington Press Club Foundation for the David E. Rosenbaum Reporting Internship in Washington as an exceptional intern to report and write across a wide variety of subject areas. Of the other two Hampton journalism students, Angelica Rogers went on to become a design intern and Eba Hamid later appointed to the position of copy-editing intern for The Times.
“Particularly Impressive”
“In any given summer, it hasn’t been all that uncommon to have two interns from the same school – for example, this year we’ll have two each from Syracuse, Columbia and Harvard – but I don’t recall ever having three from the same school,” Sheila Rule, a Times senior editor, told an Internet source.
"Congrats to you and everyone at Hampton for placing all the summer interns at The Times," said
Don Hecker, Director of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute. "It's quite an accolade. Forget whether it's a record for an HBCU, it's probably a record for any school, including the traditional heavyweights like Harvard, Yale and the big schools with long-recognized journalism programs. And particularly impressive because we have one of the smallest internship programs among the big papers."
AWE and EGUMPP: Top College Writers
Dean Tony Brown, a veteran journalist and educator, attributes this competitive success mainly to the Scripps Howard School’s emphasis on grammar knowledge, writing and diversity through excellence under Dean Brown’s leadership. Specifically, the Scripps Howard School has established the Academy of Writing Excellence (AWE) to develop some of the nation’s top college writers. Dean Brown gives AWE’s director, Will Sutton, who is also the Scripps Howard Endowed Professor, credit for the development of the advanced journalism skills among the AWE members who are increasingly becoming competitive on a national scale.
To further strengthen the School’s potential and its writing center, Brown will launch a grammar program this fall that utilizes an interactive computer program called EGUMPP. This dean emeritus believes EGUMPP helped freshmen journalism and communications students achieve English fluency at the level of a high school English teacher – in one academic year – and created literate classroom communities throughout the Scripps Howard School itself.
EGUMPP is a four-module (soon to become online) interactive grammar, usage and mechanics course, accompanied by such assessment gathering data as mastery tests for each module, online pre-testing and post-testing and online certification testing that sets an on-the-job standard for English grammar/writing mechanics proficiency.
