The following reflection was composed by Journalism Program Adjunct Professor Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, who joined the Journalism faculty this fall to teach JOU 270: Introduction to Journalism.

It’s a hard class to teach but mostly because of timing. Two-and-a-half-hours at 9:30 on Tuesday mornings. For 19- and 20-year-old college freshmen and sophomores, that’s a marathon. Credit to the department, though, who took into consideration my long commute from Chapel Hill and respected the fact that I didn’t want to drive three round-trip hours twice a week to teach a shorter class. And so we pack it all into one morning grind, usually with a mid-way break to stretch our legs and refill our coffees. Two-and-a-half-hours at 9:30am on a Tuesday is rough for anyone. But it’s especially rough for college freshmen and sophomores. 

And there comes that time in each of my Intro to Journalism classes when I see by the looks on their faces that it’s time to move on to something else; usually some sort of group or partner work. Anything but me talking at them more. Anything to keep them engaged. It only took me a week or two to sort out that the students need that kind of attention. 

It’s my first semester in college since I graduated from college nearly twenty years ago, and so I’m learning just as much as the 16 students sat before me in a u-shape in a study room in a building that I think is mostly used for chemistry (at least that’s what the massive Periodic Table standing outside the building tells me. Also, did you know that they actually write their formulas on the windows in marker?! That’s not just something from the movies) as they are from me.

The students insist they like to hear my real-world stories, which means I have to overcome my default as a journalist of shining the spotlight away from myself, to tell them about what I’ve done and what I’m doing as a working journalist in the world of news writing and magazine stories. That’s usually when I can see their antennae pique with interest that I am a real person doing the real thing in the professional world; the thing that some of them might hope to do someday. We talk about pitches and editors, subjects and ideation, and some of the wild things all journalists are privy to seeing. We talk about how I get to do the work that I do. But still, we have to learn the book stuff, the rules, the dos and don’ts. Show don’t tell, which, I tell them, is a bad rule. After all, we tell stories. We don’t show them. 

I never thought I’d be back in college after I graduated from my own school nearly twenty years ago but here I am, every Tuesday morning, in front of a bunch of tired freshman and sophomores in a chemistry building, doing my best to assure them that if they listen, learn, engage, and try, they’ll become better writers, which really just means becoming better listeners, and eventually, better storytellers.

 

Professor Venutolo-Mantovani is a freelance writer who has contributed to The New York Times, National Geographic, WIRED, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, The Toronto Star, Travel + Leisure, Bicycling Magazine, Our State, Garden & Gun, The New Republic, GQ, and several others. Recently, he published a story for Business Insider on how last year, with the backing of the nonprofit Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and a chunk of a major donation by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Durham, North Carolina undertook a universal basic income (UBI) pilot. More than 100 Durham residents, all of them formerly incarcerated, were given $600 per month, no strings attached. The results, like so many other UBI programs, showed that guaranteed income works. To read the full story, please click here: https://www.businessinsider.com/universal-basic-income-works-red-state-blue-state-2023-10.