Sorry for the delay in recapping. You can tell that the semester has reached the frenzy point here at the School of Journalism. My crew in the Pollner seminar (aka this class) is spread so thin that you can hear the knives clanking in their mayonnaise jars; just being around them makes me vicariously exhausted. I remember this part of college quite well: all the term papers coming due at once, the looming finals, the registration (and graduation) deadlines for next semester, and the inescapable realization that the student newspaper still has to come out. A good number of my students went to Helena on Tuesday to cover election night for their advanced reporting classes, but managed to return, bleary-eyed, in time for our Wednesday Skype session with the multi-Pulitzered Gene Weingarten. (Depicted above, as he is every Sunday in the Washington Post Magazine, by illustrator Eric Shansby.)
Author
Montana!
Let me bring you up to speed and then slow it way down:
I’ve left D.C. behind for the next four months and driven 2,500 miles to beautiful Missoula, Mont., to be the 2012 T. Anthony Pollner Professor at the University of Montana’s excellent School of Journalism. The professorship is the gift of the Pollner family, in memory of their son and brother, who graduated from Montana in 1999 and was — like so many of us — a committed (and talented) journalism junkie. Since 2001, the School of Journalism has invited a professional working journalist/author to come live here each fall and teach a seminar course of his or her own design. The Pollner professor is also on hand to help advise (in a casual way) the staff of the student-run paper, the Kaimin, which publishes four days a week. I’ll also be giving a public lecture on Oct. 22.