U of T is rethinking how journalists get trained
July 1/2015
When the remote threat of Ebola spreading in the United States became an all-consuming media spectacle last fall, CNN’s Anderson Cooper began regularly drawing on the commentary of a young Dallas Morning Newsreporter named Seema Yasmin, who also happens to be a physician and a part-time professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The Morning News, which has won nine Pulitzer Prizes over the last two decades, had hired her to cover public health issues on a part-time basis a few months earlier. Cambridge-educated, Yasmin arrived at the Morning News via the Munk School’s Fellowship in Global Journalism, which trains people who are experts in a subject – such as health, law or science – to become journalists, and then places them as interns at news organizations. Yasmin had worked with the paper on health features during her fellowship at the Munk School of Global Affairs, and was offered a job soon after graduating. “She was ‘fully loaded’ for Ebola,” says Morning Newseditor emeritus Bob Mong, noting that Yasmin’s media profile has skyrocketed in the past year. “Without Munk, we would have never known about her.”