Putting the Stories Together - GW’s Prime Movers Media Program

In its fifth year, The George Washington University's Prime Movers Media Program pairs veteran and retired journalists from leading news media companies with students in elective media classes at Washington, D.C., high schools to help them create or strengthen student-run media.

High school journalism and English classes are often a student's first glimpse at what a career in writing, broadcast, or the media entails. The experiences they have in and out of the classroom can have a profound effect on their future careers. In its fifth year, The George Washington University's Prime Movers Media Program pairs veteran and retired journalists from leading news media companies with students in elective media classes at Washington, D.C., high schools to help them create or strengthen student-run media. Students and GW Prime Movers Media Program interns meet during school hours over the course of the academic year – several weeks of which are complemented with the expertise of professional journalists.

"The Prime Movers program gave me hands-on experience of what it is like to work as a broadcast journalist," said Chiron Hunt, a 2007 graduate of Ballou High School in Washington, D.C., and a three-year student participant in the program. "The professional mentors who came into my classroom brought real life experience that you can't get in a normal class."

Sam Ford, general assignment reporter with WJLA-TV (ABC-7) in Washington, D.C., and two-time professional mentor with the program, said, "The Prime Movers Program is not only good for journalists because it gets you back into the schools but helps you to get in touch with the lives of these students who live in Washington, D.C. The rewarding part is to see the switch turn on when these students put together their stories and really see how to do it."

Hunt added, "At first, I just took the course as an elective. After a while, I got a feel for what I was doing and started to feel comfortable on screen and was enjoying it. Now, I'm majoring in broadcast journalism at the University of Nebraska and hope to someday work for ESPN as a sports broadcaster."

"Prime Movers Media is opening an ever-widening pathway for diverse high school students to work in the expanding ‘information highway' and creating a pipeline for ensuring racial diversity in the new media era," said Dorothy Gilliam, founder and director of GW's Prime Movers Media Program. "In addition to preparing the best and brightest for media careers, participating high school students also benefit from this program through enhancing their reading comprehension, graphic design skills, critical thinking, problem solving, leadership abilities, teamwork, and writing and oral communications. These skills will contribute to their development as media savvy news consumers and will better prepare them for competition in the global marketplace." Gilliam is a prize-winning journalist who retired from The Washington Post after 33 years to start the program at GW in 2003.

Undergraduates at The George Washington University also complete internships and work in the local high schools and, in turn, learn from the professional mentors and the students. Marie Zisa, a GW sophomore majoring in political communication and former two-time intern with the program, said, "The first semester I interned with Prime Movers, I was helping an advanced class, and I had had no prior camera experience. At times, the students were the ones teaching me, and we were able to work together and find a solution to the problem. What I most learned from Prime Movers is how rewarding stepping out of your comfort zone can be."

Former professional mentors with GW's Prime Movers Media Program include Bruce Horowitz, USA Today; Felix Contreras, National Public Radio; Seth Stern, Congressional Quarterly; and Pat Wingert, Newsweek. Current professional mentors include Don Hecker, The New York Times, and Tamara Jones, Yvonne Lamb and Sylvia Moreno, The Washington Post (retired).

For more information about The George Washington University's Prime Movers
Media Program, visit http://www.gwu.edu/~primemovers.