At the Eunson Awards Ceremony in the School of Communication on April 22, Los Angeles Times reporter Bettina Boxall explains her work as co-author of a five-part series that examined the impacts and causes of explosive growth in western wildfire over the past decade. Boxall won a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for her work in this series. - Jesse Kasten/ The Lumberjack

The School of Communication honored 2000 Summa Cum Laude graduate Jennifer McKnight with the 2009 Eunson Alumni Achievement Award. Bettina Boxall, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, was given the 2009 Eunson Distinguished Lecturer Award on April 22. 

The Robert R. Eunson Awards were created to honor the career and memory of Eunson, a 1936 graduate of NAU and a highly distinguished journalist. Receiving a Eunson Award is a high honor within the School of Communication and is awarded to those who have proved themselves outstanding in the journalistic or mass communication field.

Michelle Williams, Associated Press Bureau Chief of Arizona and New Mexico, gave the introduction to the awards ceremony.

“You want people to find what you write as meaningful,” Williams said. “That is what Eunson’s aim was throughout his life and we honor that through these awards.”

McKnight founded NAU’s student-run Society of Environmental Communicators, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this Earth Day. McKnight is now the news editor for Architectural Record and GreenSource magazine. 

Boxall covers environmental issues and co-authored a five-part series on wildfires, which won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

“The series that Boxall worked on with her LA Times colleague Julie Cart was a 15-month undertaking examining the problems of wildfires of the west,” said Peter Friederici, an NAU journalism assistant professor.

The “Big Burn” series also studied wildfires in Australia, which explained the parallels between the fire issues in Australia, California, Arizona and other places in the western United States.

Boxall took the floor animatedly, first stating she “really felt like a dinosaur” after McKnight’s video presentation consisting of Web pages, page spreads and videos she had edited with Architectural Recorder and GreenSource. 

Boxall spoke about her series, recalling the in-depth research and pestering she had to do to gain the information needed.

“Seven or eight months after bothering people, we walked into a conference room that held 42 plastic file cases containing every single detail of the fire, from the menus that the firefighters ate, the weather information, phone calls they got,” Boxall said. “It shows young journalists that in order to go against the norm to describe underlying forces affecting all of us, we have to go beyond the surface and develop an expertise to find the true information and the facts. That is our job as journalists.” 

McKnight accepted her award with a lecture on the effect of the internet and the evolution of newsprint to new media, explaining how she decided to attend graduate school at the Samuel Irving Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University to gain knowledge of electronic media.

“In 2000, the paper I worked for didn’t even have a Web site,” McKnight said. “No blogging, no Twitter and no videos. The local community really heard their news the old-fashioned way: the paper thudded down on the driveway, they walked out in their robes, picked it up and drank their morning coffee while flipping through it.”

The first paper McKnight worked for was The Herald Bulletin, which operated in the small town of Anderson, Ind. With her assignments of environmental stories, McKnight was “scattered among the cornfields” of Indiana, writing articles varying from topics on chocolate shop openings to investigations of fish mysteriously dying in rivers throughout several rural towns in the Anderson area. 

McKnight views journalism from an anthropological perspective. She sees it as studying the customs of the locals, being placed in different environments and cultures and accepting jobs that, initially, may seem unappealing.

“Journalism is a very competitive field,” McKnight said. “You can’t be afraid to take a job in the boonies. It won’t be forever and you’ll gain experience before moving on to a better place.” 

Whereas McKnight has adapted to “hybrid journalism,” using blogs, Web pages and other new media, Boxall claims the Internet is a “blessing and a curse,” and believes it remains important for journalism students to know how to write well in a newsprint format.

“One night, I got an e-mail from a younger journalism student at midnight asking to talk to me about what it was like to be a reporter,” Boxall said. “It was all lowercase and completely ungrammatical. It seemed like it was a text message. I didn’t even bother to answer. Unprofessionalism doesn’t cut it.”

At the Herald Bulletin in 2000, McKnight said she would have to go to school board meetings lasting until an hour before her deadline.

“I would have to zip back to the newsroom at 9, run upstairs, pound out my story, and make my deadline at 10,” McKnight said. “It was intense, it was exciting, it was hard, and I felt like that’s what journalism is.”

While she was writing for The Daily Record in New Jersey, McKnight saw the beginnings of what has been called the electronic media “revolution” and was asked to start writing blogs. Murmurs of reporters taking photos or video cameras to scenes while covering assignments also poured into McKnight’s newsroom, something she said was out of the ordinary. 

McKnight believes print journalism is a “dying field” and though she is sad to see it go, she is interested to see where journalism is going. 

“I wonder if the public will be able to have an attention span for more than 150 words in the future,” McKnight said.

Both Boxall and McKnight agreed a student needs the foundation skills to survive in journalism, which, according to Boxall, involves learning how to get information without help. According to McKnight, it involves being somewhat proficient in technology and being up-to-date on constantly changing techniques while maintaining the professionalism expected in the newsroom. 

“The fundamentals don’t change,” Boxall said. “You have to be able to do your job well and quick, no matter what the platform is. You have to have a passion for it, get out there and do it, or you won’t be able to make it in this extremely demanding profession.”