Journalists Discuss Coverage
of the Catholic Church Scandal
This year’s Andrew Silk’76 Journalism
Panelists are three religion writers who will discuss coverage
of the Catholic Church scandal on Saturday, April 12 from 10
a.m. to noon in the Zubrow Commons of the Marian E. Koshland
Integrated Natural Sciences Center. The panel discussion is
open to the public.
Michael Paulson, a 1986 Haverford
graduate and religion writer for the Globe was part
of the investigate team of journalists at the Boston paper who
prepared a series of articles on the scandal. The series is
this year's Pulitzer Prize
winner for public service journalism. He joined the Globe
in January 2000 after seven years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
where he worked as city hall reporter, state house bureau chief
in Olympia, and correspondent in Washington, D.C. Before that
he worked as a political reporter for the San Antonio Light
in Texas and as a general assignment reporter at the Patriot
Ledger in Quincy.
Paulson has been awarded a
number of journalistic fellowships, including the Arthur F.
Burns Fellowship in Germany in 1990 and the Paul Miller Washington
Reporting Fellowship in 1998-99. Since being named religion
reporter at the Globe he has participated in fellowships for
religion reporters at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism
at the University of Maryland and the Gralla Fellows Program
for Religion Journalists at Brandeis University.
This year, his work was singled
out by the American Academy of Religion, which praised his "extremely
informative and in-depth features," and he was a finalist
for the Religion Newswriters Association's Templeton Award for
excellence in enterprise reporting and versatility in the field
of religion.
Joining Paulson in the panel
discussion will be David O’Reilly, a reporter for The
Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Faith Life”
section and Ann Rodgers-Melnick, a religion reporter for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The discussion will be moderated
by Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for
the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College. A former
editor and editorial writer for The Atlanta Journal Constitution,
Mark is the author of several books on religion and the media,
including Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America.
The panel discussion program
and stipends for Haverford and Bryn Mawr College summer journalism
interns are supported by a fund established in 1983 in memory
of Andrew Silk. Andrew attended Haverford in the early 1970s
as a philosophy major. He also served as editor of the student
newspaper, then called the Haverford College/Bryn Mawr News.
In his junior year, Andrew
took a leave of absence to work for two newspapers in South
Africa, The Pretoria and The Rand Daily Mail.
In 1976, he returned to campus, and graduated magna cum laude
and Phi Beta Kappa. He also was awarded a Watson Fellowship
which allowed him to return to South Africa where he wrote about
conditions of black migrant workers. The accounts of his investigations
resulted in a book entitled, A Shantytown in South Africa:
The Story of Motterdam.
In the summer of 1979, Andrew
joined the staff of the Virginia Pilot-Ledger and later,
Greenwich Time in Connecticut. After his death in 1981,
his family and friends established the Andrew Silk’76
Journalism fund which has since offered opportunities for other
Haverford and Bryn Mawr students to explore the field of journalism.
Since the first panel in 1983, close to 60
journalists from news organizations around the country have
participated in these discussions.
For more information, contact
Pam Sheridan with the Office of Public Information at psherida@haverford.edu
or 610-896-1037.
