Cecil Hannibal had a whirlwind few days at the “journalism bootcamp” at the 2017 National Association of Black Journalists convention. Then a student at Georgia State University, he auditioned to be the sports anchor for the program’s TV news show, but he nervously fumbled reading the teleprompter and wasn’t sure which camera to look at. He was ready to give up his dreams until he filled in for the sports anchor during the convention’s final broadcast. Reading the prompter came much easier this time, and his peers and mentors complimented him on his work.
“That was the moment where I decided, ‘OK, you love this. Go do this on-air thing,’” said Hannibal, now an Emmy-winning anchor and reporter at the NBC affiliate KCRA in Sacramento, California. “I just fell in love with it from there.”
Student projects at journalism conferences like NABJ and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, as well as the Asian American Journalists Association’s Voices fellowship, have been crucial in shaping many journalists’ careers. These programs not only offer college students the opportunity to work on deadline-driven stories with professional editors, but students also receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the convention.
Alumni from these programs have gone on to work at outlets like NBC News, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Politico and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others. Many have returned to the student programs to become mentors.
“Having that past experience in the program really helps me know where the students are at and what they can achieve, because I’ve been in their shoes,” said Jason Gonzalez, a 2010 NAHJ student project alum who is co-leading this year’s group. “That’s something that I tell them all the time: ‘This is where I got my start, and I know you’re going to do great things in this industry. I want to help you achieve that.’”
I caught up with more alums from NAHJ’s, NABJ’s and AAJA’s projects to see how the experience has affected their careers.
The multiplatform intensive: NABJ’s student project
For over 30 years, NABJ’s Student Project program has covered the organization’s national convention across platforms — producing three daily TV news broadcasts, three newspapers, numerous web and audio stories and a newsletter during the conference.
“We run this program to give them real-life experiences of what it’s actually like in the newsroom,” said Carol Gantt, the student project co-chair for nearly a decade. “We tell them when they first start, we’re literally preparing y’all for battle. We’re preparing y’all to be, in some places, the only person of color in the newsroom.”
Before the conference, the students go through a five-month bootcamp to prepare for a jam-packed reporting schedule once they get to NABJ.
“I’m definitely using those news judgment skills from the student project,” said alum Grant Hines, who is now a desk assistant at NBC News in Washington, D.C., and serves as the NABJ student representative. “Even though I may not be using the technical skills every day, it gave me a fantastic, solid foundation to be where I am at today.”
The program was also a confidence booster for Hannibal, whose experience inspired him to transfer to USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he earned competitive anchor roles at the college’s TV news and sports shows. His NABJ connections have also come full circle — from mentors helping him land an internship to him now helping current NABJ students get jobs.
“Once you’re in the student project, they call us NABJ babies,” Hannibal said. “And we look out for the next NABJ babies. The people who came before me helped me, and now I’m helping the next generation of students find their way in this business.”
The close-knit mentorship: NAHJ’s student project
Gonzalez remembers his first day as part of the NAHJ’s student project experience in 2010. Students were separated into print, audio and broadcast teams to cover the association’s convention, and he was paired with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s David Plazas and Chalkbeat’s Mónica Rhor, who have continued to mentor him throughout his career.
“It gave me a lot of reinforcement and confidence that I could do this work and I could be in this industry,” said Gonzalez, who now works as the higher education reporter at Chalkbeat Colorado, an online news site covering schools and school policy in the state. “And my mentors really worked with me on that.”
Since then, Gonzalez has served as a mentor for the student project and has co-led the program five times. He said it’s important for him to foster the sense of community he felt when he was in the program and to encourage students to try new mediums.
“I try to give the students the same thing that it gave me: a network and family to lean on,” he said. ”I want them to be successful in a newsroom wherever they go and have a diverse set of skills.”
Diego Pineda Davila said his NAHJ student project experience taught him how to pitch himself to employers and to have thicker skin. While he now sees his mentors’ advice as constructive feedback, “when I was a student, I was taken aback by it,” said Davila, now an editor at Independent en Español. “But sometimes you gotta get that tough professional love. It was a good learning experience for me.”
The longform community project: AAJA’s Voices fellowship
Over the past few decades, the AAJA Voices program has gone from a daily newspaper covering the association’s convention to a multimedia fellowship in which college students work on influential longform stories about Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
“It was run like a real newsroom,” said Leezel Tanglao, who was a Voices fellow in 2003 and is now a newsroom leader in Texas. “And I think just having that shared experience with other people in my peer group, you cannot underestimate that. These are the people that you end up becoming colleagues with, potentially hiring or they hire you.”
Tanglao now serves on the national AAJA board of directors as vice president of journalism programs, acting as a liaison between the board and Voices. She still keeps in touch with her Voices cohort, attending their weddings and working with them in media.
“This organization, that project, brought us together, and it’s just really comforting to know wherever they end up, I can call them up,” she said. “We all found this work very meaningful.”
When I was a Voices editor in 2023, I mentored then-Harvard University student Ryan Doan-Nguyen, then primarily a print reporter who embraced a new medium, hosting and writing two podcast episodes. He later used those skills on a Harvard Crimson podcast. This fall, he will follow his passion for storytelling and pursue two master’s degrees at Oxford University through a Marshall Scholarship.
“More than anything, Voices taught me that my path can be interdisciplinary,” he said.” It doesn’t have to be so far removed from the community, but at the same time, it can also be really heavy into research. As I move on, I always want to be centering the people whose issues I’m researching and writing about.”
