The Center on Media and Society is pleased to award the David Nyhan Journalism Award to Gintautas Dumcius, for his principled and professional work as a student journalist.

This award, established in 2005 to honor political columnist David Nyhan, recognizes a student each year who displays the skills, tenacity, ethics and temperament to serve the public well as a journalist. It rewards character as well as talent; potential as well as performance to date.

Gintautas Dumcius represents the best qualities that David Nyhan lived by and admired in others. Gin was mentored by Nyhan on the Media Nation summer newspaper in 2004. In journalism boot camp and subsequent work on the Media Nation project, Gin was easily the most impressive student reporter on the staff, which included Harvard, UMass and professional journalists. Working as news editor of the Mass Media in 2004-5, Gin was successful and showed good judgment in pursuing such difficult stories as the selection of a permanent Chancellor at UMass Boston. Gin proved to be a genius at beat reporting, winning the respect of powerful sources throughout the university even as he wrote things they preferred he had not discovered.

Gin’s talent was spotted not only by David Nyhan, but by Bill Forry of the Dorchester Reporter, who hired him as a part-timer even though he was only an undergraduate. Gin also earned the admiration of Terry Michael, head of the Washington Journalism and Politics semester program, who placed him in an internship at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau for the spring semester of 2005. There, working with the best in the business, Gin earned bylines on stories about stem cell research, economic indicators, and other arcane topics.

The Center on Media and Society salutes Gin and looks forward to celebrating his progress in the future.

2005 Award Winners: Gintautas Dumcius and Kristen DeOliveira

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