by Ellen Hirst
At the end of my internship at the Omaha World-Herald, I asked six mentors two important questions: What do you love about journalism? As you scan the journalism horizon, what challenges exist and what does that mean for rising reporters?
Their answers are truly inspiring and offer great advice for any aspiring journalist. Here [...]

Moving on:
Perry Bacon Jr. (Summer 1999) is political editor of NBC’s theGrio.com and a contributor to MSNBC. Previously he was national political reporter for The Washington Post.

Andrew Tran (Spring 2006) is online producer for Boston.com/The Boston Globe’s Your Town hyper local site. Previously he was an online news producer at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk.

Virgil Dickson [...]

by Colleen Fitzpatrick
The essays, slide shows and videos commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Chips Quinn Scholars program have all been published.

From the first contribution by Lori Price (Summer 1992) to the last by Jaz Gray (Summer 2009), not a single CQS class went unrepresented in the effort to honor the program. Chipsters everywhere shared [...]

by Jamie Klein
His signature is what got me. On every dotted line of every form, his signature was perfectly written—as if he had stamped it down. Compared to the lazy scribble that is my John Hancock, I could only imagine this young man taking time to pen his name again and again. I wondered if he was [...]

by Devo’n Williams
I did not just diversify the newsroom when I became a Chips Quinn Scholar at The Bulletin in Bend, Ore., last spring; I brought a little color to the entire region of Central Oregon.

When I arrived at the paper in February after a three-day road trip from Alabama, a snowstorm and some of [...]

by Moin Salahuddin, M.D.
It was the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and I was on a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to attend a one-week journalism orientation sponsored by the Freedom Forum.

I had just finished my undergraduate studies at UCLA and was taking the next step in my life, pursuing [...]

Happy 20th birthday to the Chips Quinn Scholars program! We’re celebrating this milestone year by publishing special contributions from each class of Scholars throughout 2011. We invite Chipsters everywhere to share their thoughts on what the program has meant to them. E-mail Michelle Hedenskoog for guidelines.
John Quinn, co-founder of the Chips Quinn Scholars [...]

Special to CQS
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Recipients of the 2011 Chips Achievement Prize (CAP) awards were announced this week, with eight Chips Quinn Scholars from the 2011 Spring and Summer classes recognized for outstanding examples of journalism. Eight additional Scholars received honorable mentions for their submissions.
“I was pleased with the overall quality of this year’s entries,” said [...]

by Alejandra Matos
Charles (Charlie) Ericksen is not your typical Hispanic. In fact, by blood, he isn’t Hispanic at all. Yet his love and dedication for the Hispanic community run deep within him. While in his 20s, he married a Mexican woman, Sebastiana Mendoza, after meeting her in Oaxaca. They moved to East Los Angeles with [...]