St. Bonaventure University students Jeffrey Uveino, ’21, and Layne Dowdall, ’20, have been selected for a prestigious summer fellowship with Carnegie-Knight News21.

This is the fifth year in a row St. Bonaventure students have been selected to participate, following Lian Bunny, ’16, Rachel Konieczny, ’17, and Bryce Spadafora, ’18, and Christian Gravius, ’19.

Carnegie-Knight News21 is a national reporting initiative headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. The program brings top journalism students from across the country to report and produce in-depth, multimedia projects for major media outlets.

“Jeff and Layne are talented and accomplished students in the Jandoli School and we are proud to support their participation in this dynamic program,” said Aaron Chimbel, dean of the Jandoli School of Communication. “News21 will not only change them, but will very likely change this country because of the important investigative journalism Jeff and Layne will do.”

Twenty-three students from 16 universities in the United States, Canada and Ireland and approximately a dozen Arizona State students will participate in the 2020 program.

In addition to several students from ASU’s Cronkite School to be named later this semester, Uveino and Dowdall will join students from Butler, DePauw, Dublin City (Ireland) University, Elon, Kent State, Morgan State, Syracuse, University of British Columbia, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, Mississippi, North Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

Only five of the 16 universities had more than one student selected.

This year, the team of student journalists will focus their efforts on investigating disparities in sentencing and jail time, conditions of juvenile detention facilities and the impact on families, communities and victims. Fellows will travel across the country to report stories, and their work will be published as a multimedia project online and shared with industry partners across the country.  

“We think we will find a country struggling with how to deal with youth violence, both on the preventative end and the punitive end,” said Jacquee Petchel, News21’s executive editor and professor of practice at the Cronkite School “It’s a topic critical to the future of children and teens, not to mention their families and their victims.”

This semester, Dowdall and Uveino will complete the spring News21 seminar, a weekly online class led by Petchel that concludes in late April. They will head to Arizona in late May for 10 weeks.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation joined forces in 2005 to launch News21 as a cornerstone of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.

More than 500 top journalism students in the U.S. have participated in the landmark national initiative, exploring topics such as gun rights, veterans’ issues, food safety, drinking water contamination, and hate in America. Work produced by News21 has appeared in major media outlets including The Washington Post, NBC News and USA Today.

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About the University: The nation’s first Franciscan university, St. Bonaventure University is a community committed to transforming the lives of our students inside and outside the classroom, inspiring in them a lifelong commitment to service and citizenship. In 2020, St. Bonaventure was named the #2 regional university value in New York and #3 in the North by U.S. News and World Report.