UPDATE
March 21, 2018: The article on veteran suicide by Kayla Nunez and Lindsey Guimont won best Online In-Depth Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists Region 12 Mark of Excellence Awards.
Project Information
I worked with a dozen journalism students and three veteran professors at the University of Arkansas School of Journalism this semester to examine the state of veteran health care in Arkansas. Our question was this: in the wake of the 2014 VA health care scandal in Phoenix, what happened here? We looked at a variety of data sets and the students interviewed 30 veterans and spoke to a number of senior leaders of the Veteran Health System of the Ozarks, the Fayetteville VA medical center, who were very cooperative throughout our reporting.
The full series is published on the journalism department’s website.
Media Partners
We have two media partners for this series.
The first is KUAF, the NPR affiliate in Fayetteville. KUAF station manager Rick Stockdell alerted me to a nationwide data reporting project organized by National Public Radio, which wanted local stations to report on local VA health care. He put me in touch with NPR staff in Washington, DC, who provided a data set that served as the foundation for this project.
Kyle Kellams of KUAF interviewed students Kayla Nunez and Lindsey Guimont for the Ozarks at Large news magazine, which airs at noon today. Nunez and Guimont produced a compelling report about the tragedy of veteran suicide in Arkansas.
The second media partner is Arkansas Public Media, a statewide news service with four NPR stations. They posted this abbreviated version of a suicide-homeless story. Bobby Ampezzan, Arkansas Public Media managing editor, produced a 4-minute radio report on our project.
Takeaways
I am grateful for my partners at the journalism school who co-taught the Digital Media Lab course this semester, an immersive newsroom course. Prof. Gerald Jordan taught them writing and editing, Philadelphia Inquirer style. Prof. Ray Minor, a veteran of Texas and Arkansas newspapers, taught them social media. Dr. Patsy Watkins, the department’s former chair, schooled them on video and photography. I showed them how to examine data and find stories in numbers.
We plan to do more of this here.
— Rob