The Chuck Stone Program for Diversity in Education and Media

by Karin Dryhurst

The Hussman School of Journalism and Media hosted a weeklong High School Diversity Workshop at the end of June as part of the Chuck Stone Program for Diversity in Education and Media. The weeklong program was sponsored by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and attracted 20 students from diverse backgrounds, including in religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender. 

Senior Associate Dean Jan Yopp, who helped complete the grant request for the project, said the program united students from different backgrounds and different parts of the country. 

“When you have a diverse group of students, they learn as much about one another and coexisting as they do about journalism,” 
she said. 

The foundation’s support covered student expenses, including travel, meals and lodging at Granville Towers in Chapel Hill, and other program costs. Faculty members in the school taught sessions focusing on issues related to stereotyping, media law and ethics, and the practice of journalism, such as how to conduct an interview and organize a story. Students also produced their own newspaper.

Assistant Professor Napoleon Byars directed the program, and Monica Hill, director of the N.C. Scholastic Media Association, served as assistant director. Members of the Carolina Association of Black Journalists were residence advisers and served as mentors.

“Many, many people helped make this workshop a success,” Yopp said. “We all learned and benefited from this experience.”

The program honors the legacy of Professor Chuck Stone, who retired from the school in 2005 after 14 years as the Walter Spearman Professor. He was the first black columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and an editor at Harlem’s New York Age, the Washington, D.C. Afro-American and the Chicago Daily Defender. He also was the first president of the National Association of Black Journalists.

The workshop is similar to the former Freedom Forum Rainbow Institute, a national program that selected high school students to study journalism for three weeks. The school had not held a similar workshop since the Rainbow Institute in the early 1990s. Yopp said that the timing was right to start planning another in honor of Stone. 

Karin Dryhurst is a senior in the school’s news-editorial sequence.