Program News

Alumni Highlight: Aria Heyneman (’25)

Posted on March 4, 2026

Since graduating in May 2025, Aria Heyneman, a Journalism minor and contributing writer for the Old Gold & Black, has been putting the skills she learned in her classes at WFU to good use in her work in local journalism in her home state of Wyoming. Professor Catanoso writes: Aria graduated last spring with a journalism minor. She took sports writing and editing with me, and did very well. After returning home to Wyoming after a summer as an outdoor guide inRead More→

Faculty Highlight: Professor Catanoso Reports on Sea Otters in the Gulf of Alaska for Mongabay

Posted on October 31, 2025

When Professor Justin Catanoso decided on an extended trip to Alaska in summer 2025, he made sure he would have a story to report along the way for Mongabay, the international environmental news organization for which he has been freelancing since 2015. After connecting with a marine ecologist with the National Park Service in Anchorage, he settled on sea otters — or rather the implications of a newly surging sea otter population throughout the sweeping Gulf of Alaska on both near-shoreRead More→

Phoebe Zerwick Retires from Wake Forest University

Posted on October 2, 2025

After 15 years at Wake, Phoebe Zerwick has retired as Director of Journalism. Professor Zerwick started here in 2010 and served as Journalism Director from 2016-2025. While many of us know her as a teacher, she is foremost a journalist and champion of free expression. She moved to Winston-Salem in the 1980s to work as a reporter for The Winston-Salem Journal, where she stayed for 21 years covering the criminal justice system, public health, City Hall and much else. SheRead More→

Editor of the Wake Forest Magazine and Journalism Faculty Member Maria Henson (’82) Retires

Posted on October 2, 2025

Maria Henson is many things – a twice Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a member of the WFU Writers Hall of Fame, the editor of Wake Forest Magazine, where she served for 15 years before retiring July 4, 2025, among other roles and a long list of prizes. Most important from our perspective – she was a core faculty member of the Journalism Program. One of her most important contributions was helping develop one of our two core courses – JOU 270Read More→

Prof. Yeoman Joins Collaborative Project on Katrina’s Legacy

Posted on September 25, 2025

This summer, adjunct professor Barry Yeoman traveled to Louisiana’s fragile coastline to interview the people who are holding the region together, both environmentally and culturally. The result is a multimedia collaboration with photographer John Noltner called “Still Here.” It’s being published in weekly installments by Noltner’s non-profit storytelling project, A Peace of My Mind. You can find it here. “During our nine days in South Louisiana, John and I heard a lot about disappearance,” Yeoman wrote. “Not only are wetlands vanishing, but soRead More→

Letter from the New Director of the Journalism Program, Ivan Weiss

Posted on September 11, 2025

I’m delighted to introduce myself as the new director of the Journalism Program. Since 2016, I’ve had the privilege of teaching multimedia journalism at Wake Forest, and I now look forward to helping guide a community that honors tradition while embracing curiosity and change. In many ways, our program remains what it has always been. Since its beginning, we have sought to prepare thoughtful, responsible journalists — people with the skills to tell powerful stories across media, the curiosity toRead More→

Wake Forest Junior Evan Harris (’26) Wins Pulitzer Fellowship

Posted on June 6, 2025

The Pulitzer Center has awarded a fellowship to Wake Forest University junior Evan Harris. The $3,000 award will support reporting on the impact of overtourism on Bali, Indonesia. A politics and international affairs major from Greensboro, Harris plans to use writing, photography and audio recording to tell the stories of the local business owners affected by the dramatic surge in tourism and related development on the island. “Last year, 6.3 million visited, outnumbering the island’s population of 4.4 million,” HarrisRead More→

60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley challenges 2025 graduates to uphold free speech

Posted on June 2, 2025

The below are 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley’s remarks from Wake Forest University’s 2025 Commencement, which were originally posted to the WFU Commencement News Archive. [Scott Pelley] Good morning, everybody. What a beautiful day. What a beautiful North Carolina day for a graduation. Incredible. Thank you, President Wente, Provost Gillespie, members of the Board of Trustees and Katy Harriger, my faculty sponsor, for this precious Wake Forest honorary degree. I am honored and grateful to be with you today. Good morning,Read More→

Class of 2025 Hope Zhu writes about refugee resettlement

Posted on June 2, 2025

A story about roadblocks for refugee resettlement in North Carolina, written by journalism minor Hope Zhu (’25), was recently published in The Assembly. To read or listen to Zhu’s article, “The Welcome That Wasn’t,” please click here.

Prof. Barry Yeoman Publishes Article in The Assembly on Durham’s Efforts To Protect Immigrant Community

Posted on May 13, 2025

The day before President Trump’s inauguration, adjunct professor Barry Yeoman sat inside a church fellowship hall in his hometown of Durham with about 60 people. “The crowd of mostly immigrants had arrived in winter pullovers and windbreakers, anxious about the news, wondering how much the coming years would disrupt their lives,” he later wrote in The Assembly, a digital magazine about North Carolina. Among those in the room were four community leaders: an organizer, a priest, an attorney, and aRead More→

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