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Ida B. Wells Society

Inaugural Society Fellowship Class Shares Thoughts on Training

You are here: Home / News / Inaugural Society Fellowship Class Shares Thoughts on Training

August 4, 2025

Members of the inaugural class of the Ida B. Wells Society’s Investigative Reporting Fellowship are back home working on their investigative reporting projects. After a rigorous four-week program spanning six months, they shared thoughts on the experience.

The reporting fellows, who are professional journalists on various beats across the country, began their work at the start of the fellowship in February. During the work sessions in Atlanta, when the fellows weren’t in rigorous workshops, they spent time working on their projects with investigative journalists or helping each other understand new tools. 

Select Recaps and Learnings

Process and Development 

During the Process and Development session, the fellows dissected case studies on major investigative breakthroughs and learned about story-idea generation, pitching and managing projects, and strategically using artificial intelligence in their work.

“The experience was both rigorous and energizing,” said Zach Bynum, a fellow who is a producer at WTOC-TV in Savannah, Ga. 

Fellow Gaige Davilla, a freelance reporter for the Texas Observer, said he was pleased to learn about data analysis, open records, and open source information.

“I’ve been given a chance to learn (things) that I haven’t before, which are the skills investigative journalists all over the world are using,” he said. “I’m already using the skills I learned from the program’s first week on my first long-form investigative project.” 

Professor Sandeep Junniker, director of the Data Journalism Program at City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, led a two-day workshop on web scripting and scraping, opening the Fellows’ eyes to how they can manage large spreadsheets of information. As they practice these new skills, they know perfection will come over time.

The sessions “opened up a world of possibilities for what I can do with these tools,” said Daniella Parra, a fellow from City Limits News in New York. “Since then, my mind has been bursting with ideas for projects. Before the fellowship, I thought you had to be a hacker or something to scrape a website. These sessions expanded my toolkit and my curiosity. The AI workshop challenged my assumptions about how these tools could support—not replace—rigorous human reporting. For the first time, I saw how AI could be used to strengthen investigations and streamline tools to search for specific details.”

Investigative Reporting Mindset 

Investigative Reporting Mindset sessions during week two allowed the fellows to learn about security and secure communications, FOIA and public records, confrontations and timing, and more.

“Everything that we trained on, I put into effect right away with my daily beat reporting (and) my investigative project,” said Caroline Beck, who works as an education reporter at the Indianapolis Star. “I appreciated how everything was really practical, and that they were providing us with the actual tools to get this work done by walking us through in detail the processes of how they did their own investigations.” 

Toward the end of the week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) welcomed fellows to their newsroom for a meet-and-greet and tour. The AJC’s investigative reporting team spent a day helping the Fellows move further along in their projects.   

Though the Fellows absorbed a plethora of technical skills, some of their biggest takeaways included the personal connections made with the trainers.

“Getting to hear all of the different origin stories from all of the speakers was really helpful, especially as someone who never went to J-school and had an unconventional start into journalism,” Beck said. “I loved hearing about what motivated them to do this work and realizing I have felt a lot of the same feelings.”

Davilla, who also started his journalism career without attending journalism school, appreciates the skills obtained over the last few weeks.

“While this seems basic to seasoned journalists, for people like me who have not gone to journalism school, who have learned all of their skills in the field, it’s invaluable,” he said. This fall, Davilla will be enrolling in a graduate-level investigative reporting program.

“I’m confident this program will prime me into my master’s program later this fall at Arizona State University and beyond,” he said. 

Article by kpierre / Society News / fellowship, investigative reporting

     
Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting
Journalism in Sports, Culture, & Social Justice Department
Morehouse College
IBWS@morehouse.edu
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