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After a year and a half hiatus, the World Press Institute (WPI) will resume its annual journalism fellowship program and has chosen 10 journalists from Argentina, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China (Hong Kong), Finland, Germany, India, Iran, Kenya and Nigeria to participate in the program. The program will begin on March 18th, 2022, and conclude on May 21, 2022.
The fellows will spend nine weeks in the United States beginning March 18 examining the free press and media innovations and learning about America’s social and cultural diversity and its political system. They will spend the first three weeks in Minnesota, based at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and visit Grand Marais in the northern part of the state and farming communities in the southern part of the state. The fellows will then travel around the U.S. for five weeks, meeting with journalists, policy experts, and political, business and community leaders. They will visit New York City, Washington D.C., Miami, Austin (Texas), Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles before returning to Minnesota for the final week of the program.
The themes that the fellows of the 2022 program will investigate include issues of racial equity and police reform, nuclear threats and security, the upcoming U.S. Congressional elections, and new business models for journalism in the digital age.
The Executive Director of the World Press Institute is David McDonald. David said the World Press Institute (WPI), was started in 1961 to promote and strengthen press freedom throughout the world. No stranger to Cook County, David has been coming here his whole life and he owns a place on the North Shore.
Since 2008 David, a lawyer by background, has been the executive director of WPI.
As he explains, “WPI is a private, nonprofit educational organization founded in the early 1960s in St. Paul. WPI has been running an annual fellowship program for international journalists in the United States for almost 60 years now.
The Cook County New- Herald and Cook County Historical Society will work with WPI during the March visit. The change in timeline has stymied David a bit. He likes to canoe and worries March might be too cold to take to the water for a paddle. It might still be skating weather in March, or maybe he can find a canoe that can break ice, but nevertheless, the journalists will be here for a northland experience and share some of what they face in their countries when it comes to covering stories.
“We begin our program and spend the first three weeks of the fellowship in Minnesota. For the past 25 years or so, we have been traveling to Ely, Minnesota about week after the program begins for a three (3) day visit. This has been a great experience for the journalists, and I think for the community of Ely. Not only do they get to see the beauty of northern Minnesota, but they also get to experience, meet, and talk to residents of a smaller community. Much of our travel later in the program is to large cities and we want the journalists to meet people and understand America both big and small.
Unfortunately, said David, “our long-time host, sponsor, and organizer of the Ely visit (the publisher of the Ely Echo) has suffered some health issues and informed me last year that she could no longer take on the task of organizing our annual visit to Ely. With my connections to Grand Marais, I thought it might be an opportunity to try a visit to Grand Marais instead this coming year.”
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