This is an ambitious concept designed to push the most elite journalism students out of their comfort zones and into professional newsroom-like conditions. It should also inspire them to do their best work.
Over the course of the winter intersession and spring semester, we will assign these 10 to 12 students to report on extreme poverty along “The Road of Broken Dreams,” a collection of once bright, thriving Delta farm towns along Highway 3 that are now some of the poorest in America.
The consequences of poverty and the burden of race have been well-documented. But hope is stirring in the dust of places like Tutwiler, Rome, Sumner, Marks and Lambert. With no outside pressure, biracial alliances are being formed, old traditions purged and cooperation—however tentative—emerging on economic initiatives.
The nuns in Tutwiler are raising millions to give health care to the poorest of the poor; white plantation owners are helping Habitat for Humanity get rid of outhouses and crumbling shacks and replace them with more than 60 new, livable houses. In Sumner, the town where Emmett Till’s killers were acquitted, a biracial committee has apologized for the incident and started work to renovate the historic courtroom and create a civil rights museum. In Marks, a surprisingly vital, albeit small, downtown is hanging in there, drawing a new business or two and trying to resuscitate a place made infamous by Martin Luther King’s March Against Poverty.
Our students won’t just study the Delta from the comfortable confines of a classroom. They will spend day after day tromping the streets of these little places, absorbing the culture, researching the past and present, interviewing person after person. We will report frankly and honestly on the deeply ingrained problems of these towns but we will also explore glimmers of hope.
Something different is happening on this Road of Broken Dreams, this trail of towns once given up for dead. We hope to explain it and put it into context.
Our findings will be presented in a print magazine, a documentary suitable for educational television, and a Web site full of stories and videos. We will make our stories available to the state’s newspapers.
Former Miami Herald national correspondent Bill Rose, journalism school photo lab instructor Garreth Blackwell and video editor Mykki Newton will run the students as if they were reporters, photographers and videographers in a major metropolitan newsroom.
The students will get detailed instruction in depth reporting, use of statistics, interview techniques, dealing with reluctant subjects, mining public records, writing in the narrative form, how to structure a depth report, database reporting, photography, videography and much more. Outstanding academics and professional newsmen from around the country will come in to speak to the students and share their experiences and advice. On-campus experts will instruct on race relations, slavery, the sociology of poverty, history, demographics, health, statistics and the like.
We will instruct them in how to build a powerful story through the use of scenes to advance from point to point. We will introduce them to the effective use of detail, rhythm and pacing. They will analyze depth reports written in major newspapers and magazines and learn why they worked or didn’t work. They will have to meet firm deadlines, and they will learn what it is like to make a story better through extensive editing and rewriting.
We’ve never done anything quite like this at Ole Miss. It’s part and parcel of an effort to lift the quality of the journalism school and set a high standard for our students to reach for. If they do good work, if they excel, they stand a chance of being selected for a first class project that will give them a strong taste of what professional journalism is all about. It will also put their work before major newspaper and television editors throughout the land.
We are doing this because we want our students to stack up with the best in the land. And, frankly, journalism must survive. We’ve got to think that, if college kids can produce products like this, journalism, in whatever form, has got to not just survive, but thrive.
Coordinators of the Delta Project
The Delta Project is coordinated by Pat Thompson, Bill Rose, Garreth Blackwell, Mykki Newton and Traci Mitchell. We ran a brief item on Pat Thompson earlier in the semester, and will run items on Blackwell, Newton and Mitchell in a later issue of the Alumni News. Rose is teaching the Depth Reporting class.)
Bill Rose (69), a Mississippi native and Ole Miss Journalism grad retired to Oxford in August. He worked on The Daily Mississippian with Johnny Johnson and Charles Overby.
After graduation, he worked five years for the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, covering, at various times, politics, state government, city government, county government and federal court. He joined The Miami Herald in 1975, covering local government in West Palm Beach and Miami before being dispatched to Atlanta as a national correspondent.
His primary assignment was the South, but he often expanded that definition and covered stories in Chicago, Haiti, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He covered hurricanes, the death of Bear Bryant, the national hollering contest, the losing presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter, racial strife, the Atlanta child murders and the 25th anniversary of the integration of Ole Miss.
Rose won a Green Eyeshade Award for coverage of a deadly coal mine disaster in Tennessee and an FSNE award (Florida Society of Newspaper Editors) for the best work by a reporter for a Florida newspaper.
In 1984, The Herald brought him back to Miami to be an editor. He served as urban affairs editor, deputy city editor, national editor and the editor of Tropic, The Herald‘s Sunday magazine, which won two Pulitzer Prizes.
As national editor, Rose directed the paper’s coverage of the space shuttle Challenger disaster and directed political editor Tom Fiedler’s look at rumors of infidelity by Sen. Gary Hart, which eventually led to the sex scandal that chased Hart from the presidential race.
Rose moved on in 1999 to become managing editor of The Palm Beach Post, leading the paper’s coverage of the 2000 butterfly ballot meltdown in the presidential race and winning RFK Awards for an investigation into migrant slavery in Florida’s fields and pesticide abuses and birth defects in those same fields.
He is married to the former Susan Aycock of Rosedale. They have two children—James, a schoolteacher in Brooklyn, and Emily, who lives in Tampa.