About Us

The 2016 Young Scholars crew. Left to right, from back row: Wyatt Haversack, Jack Wagner, Caroline Kloster, Nancy Vu, Courtney Diggs, Danielle Tobb, Madison Akers, Colleen Neely, Riley Wal, Crystal Foretia, Kyra Ashlock, Emily Colby, Megan Gregoire and Nia Gates.

This website is a complement to a course being taught in summer session II at the University of Maryland at College Park, chiefly to immerse rising sophomores, juniors and seniors in high school in the craft, ethics and history of journalism. The course, An Introduction to Mass Communication for Young Scholars, includes a mixture of seminars and hands-on reporting, researching, tweeting and writing assignments. It's being taught by Chris Harvey, a former editor at American Journalism Review and washingtonpost.com and a long-time teacher at the college.

The blog is used in several ways: to allow students to comment on class discussions and coverage of the news, and to occasionally showcase stories reported by students during the class.

In summer 2016, one of the students' assignments was to fan out across campus to interview folks on their thoughts on the national political conventions. They collected interesting quotes and photos.

One big story the 2011 summer class covered as a team was a town hall meeting on campus scheduled by President Obama, to pitch his ideas for trimming the deficit before an August 2011 deadline for raising the debt ceiling. Students wrote text stories on the meeting and the wait to get in, and shot photos of that event.