The 1992 Voices staff at the AAJA convention in Washington.

By Kiali Wong
Voices

AAJA’s Voices just got louder.

The 20th class of the annual journalism training program strode into Detroit on Sunday. Awaiting the college students and professionals was a weeklong news experience that has forged a network of alumni – journalists and former journalists alike – since 1991.

“Voices is certainly a good training ground, but a lot of it is based on what it is you’re looking to get out of it,” said Annabelle Udo-O’Malley, AAJA’s events and fundraising coordinator. She was a student reporter during Voices’ first year and again in 1992.

Students who are selected for the rigorous news training program, which is also the annual convention’s primary media outlet, are expected to work under daily deadlines and with the industry’s top talent. At the end, they have new relationships to build upon with their professional mentors and the other journalists they meet who might help them through their journalism careers and beyond.

Emily Tsao garnered lasting ties as one of AAJA’s student reporters for the UNITY 1994 convention. She had maintained great connections with the Oregonian’s Phil Manzano and The Dallas Morning News’ Tom Huang and Esther Wu, all of whom helped Tsao’s career in the ensuing years.

In 1998, the Yale University graduate moved from The Associated Press to the Oregonian, where Manzano became her editor. A stint with the Dallas Morning News followed.

“And I didn’t make my move to Dallas until ’05,” Tsao said. “That’s more than 10 years later, but I kept in touch with people from Voices. Those connections I made from Voices helped me basically get those jobs.”

Helen Kwong, a 2003 Voices alumna, said the program yielded a unique set of colleagues. Kwong had recently graduated from Michigan State University and finished a copy editing internship at The Detroit News when she traveled to AAJA’s conference in San Diego.

“The fact that I got to work with peers who looked just like me was totally different,” Kwong said. “So I think I got a lot out of that. I was like, ‘Oh, there are other Asian Americans who are interested in journalism like me.’”

Kwong, who is now studying to earn a master’s degree in library information science at Pratt Institute in New York, also recalled how Voices shifted her away from the copy desk to write an article about Gen. Eric Shinseki, the keynote speaker at the 2003 convention gala. The story required a tactful touch considering Shinseki’s conflict with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about U.S. troop numbers in Iraq.

It was a task that pushed Kwong to “be flexible.”

“I was not prepared for it because I thought I would just be copy editing,” Kwong later said in an email.

Jin Whang, a student reporter for 1998 Voices in Chicago, said Voices’ greatest trait was pairing students with professionals.

The program placed students “front and center with a lot of the working professionals,” Whang said. “They were so close in proximity that it just gave you really great exposure.”

Whang still keeps in touch with Lisa Song, a Voices professional that year who worked at the Chicago Tribune.

Whang struck on a different career path, jumping out of journalism and into entertainment and theatrical film trailers. But the former reporter for the Los Angeles Times Orange County Edition said she still feels like a journalist at heart.

“I still have a critical eye toward reading the news because of my background,” Whang said. “And that’s not to say if an opportunity came up in the future where I could do it again, I wouldn’t think twice about it. I wouldn’t say, ‘Oh no, I’m done. I left.’ Because it’s kind of my home base of where I learned so many things – where I learned to write.”

Increasingly, the Voices newsroom serves as fertile ground for developing newsroom leaders.

Tsao greeted new responsibilities when she became a professional mentor and staffer for Voices from 1997 to 2000, managing editor in 2002, executive editor in 2003 – when Kwong was a student reporter – and AAJA’s lead editor for the UNITY news project in 2004.

Tsao advanced from student reporter to editorial positions in the “safe environment” she shared with other Voices professionals such as Huang, she said.

“It was all these different levels of management and leadership that I was exposed to, that I wouldn’t have had just being a reporter in my newsroom,” Tsao said. “The lessons I learned running a Voices newsroom just provided me a huge amount of experience and knowledge that really helped me professionally.”

Tsao is now the national homepage editor for The Washington Post.

For students in Voices, Udo-O’Malley said the training transcends the newsroom. Students learn from beating deadlines, facing critiques and rewrites of their work, and having one-on-one instruction, Udo-O’Malley said. The networking that Voices students do on their own is paramount, she adds.

“All of these different components – you walk away with those things and can apply them anywhere,” Udo-O’Malley said.

To incoming Voices students, she advised, “Use the conference as a really good networking tool to keep you going after five years, even after 10 years. I’ve known lots of these guys since about 1988. And now that I’m here in AAJA, they’re really helping me out a lot.”

Follow Kiali Wong @kialiwong.