Senior Semester students provide extensive coverage of Jena Six

by Cecile S. Holmes

Students in The Carolina Reporter and two enterprising students from Carolina News covered what may become history-in-the-making this month with their live multimedia project on the Jena Six. (View full coverage>)

Students “moblogged,” sending photos and text messages via cell phones from the steps of the State House in Columbia where 800 people attended a prayer rally and from Jena, where 20,000 Americans converged Sept. 20 to seek justice for the Jena Six, the black teenagers who were charged with attempted murder and conspiracy for attacking a white classmate at Jena High School last December.

Three students – Chris Aleman, Justin Broome and Nick Steyn – drove 12 hours straight to cover the demonstrations in Jena, an old sawmill town in Louisiana’s LaSalle Parish. Their reporting brought them into contact with a demonstration that pundits speculated might one day become as influential as the civil rights soldiers who labored in the 1950s and 1960s under the leadership including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Read Justin's story>

Sarah Chakales (story) and Jewell Washington (story), both students in the broadcast senior semester, did enterprising local video stories related to the Jena Six.

Back home in Columbia, Carolina Reporter senior Christlo Jordan prayed and recited a poem in his leadership role at a Midlands area prayer rally for the Jena Six. He wrote a firsthand account of that experience. Senior Jillian Stephens asked area residents and community leaders, “Could what happened in Jena happen here?”

Seniors Stephen Fastenau and Emily Wardlaw “moblogged” gathering comments from the State House rally and on the USC campus the next day. Editing copy, designing graphics, uploading photos and determining the ins and outs of the unfamiliar software needed to make the project successful were seniors Jon Krolewicz, Jeremy Turnage and Ira Klein. Visit moblog >

The project on the Jena Six required students and The Carolina Reporter faculty to integrate traditional newspaper and online reporting with new multimedia technology. Combining those skills successfully is a major goal of the SJMC’s print sequence.

A Columbia native and veteran journalist, Cecile S. Holmes is lead instructor for the print senior semester at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Nominated seven times for a Pulitzer Prize, she has more than 20 years of experience in reporting and editing. Her second book, “Four Women, Three Faiths,” was published this spring by Harbor House Books of Augusta, Ga.