David Nyhan Journalism Award

June 3, 2005

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

This award, established in 2005 to honor political columnist David Nyhan, honors 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.

Kristen DeOliveira represents the best qualities that David Nyhan lived by and admired in others. Kristen was mentored by Nyhan on the MediaNation summer newspaper in 2004. In her job as news editor of the Mass Media in 2004, Kristen was ethical and professional, serving the UMass community well as she pursued such stories as the search for a permanent Chancellor at UMass Boston. She was especially generous in mentoring and working with her colleagues. She stepped in to take the news editor job when her predecessor left on short notice to take a semester in Washington. She worked under difficult circumstances to uphold the best standards of journalism practice, with verification of facts, fairness, comprehensiveness and proportionality. Because there were so few journalists working at the paper, she wrote most of the hard news stories. They were engaging, well reported, and well written under deadline pressure.

Even though she relied on her income from the Mass Media job, and was engrossed in pursuing the competitive news story of the Chancellor’s search, Kristen showed typical good judgment when she resigned on principle following the newspaper’s unfortunate April Fool’s parody issue. This personal sacrifice underscored her view that the pictures, which she did not know about in advance, were not funny, and ruined the opportunity to pursue real journalism there, as she had been doing.

Kristen DeOliveira, who started her journalism career in the agate Sports Dept. at the Cape Cod Times, has grown into a talented journalist, writer and newsroom leader. The Center on Media and Society salutes her and looks forward to celebrating her progress in the future.

2005 Award Winners: Gintautas Dumcius and Kristen DeOliveira

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