New Reporting Program Trains Journalism Students to Cover US-Mexico Border Martin do Nascimento - Journalism in the Americas
go to original September 25, 2015

Arizona State University journalism students interview the head of the Mexican Consulate of Phoenix. (@cronkitenews)

A new journalism program at a U.S. university is seeking to train young reporters to cover that country’s border region with Mexico.

In August, long-time border-region journalists Alfredo Corchado and Angela Kocherga joined the faculty at the Arizona State University (ASU) Cronkite School of Journalism to train graduate and undergraduate students as part of the new program.

“I started and we hit the ground running,” Kocherga said. “We have a student looking at banking along the border, another student looking at issues of sex trafficking. We’re going to be doing some stories about the impact of the peso exchange rate on border communities and how it’s helping and hurting.”

Students in the program already have produced multimedia stories on a traditional piñata store in Phoenix and the impact of exchange rates on American consumers travelling to Mexico.

A Tweet by Corchado also revealed that students interviewed the head of the Mexican Consulate in Phoenix earlier this month.

Covering the border-region is different from other places, said Kocherga, and it’s important that students learn new ways of reporting.

“You can’t find a lot of sources online. You can’t Google someone if you’re doing an immigration story and you’re trying to find an immigrant. A lot of face-to-face contact is very important. People need to know you and trust you,” she said.

The announcement of the program comes at a time when transnational migration has become a hot-topic in international news as well as U.S. national politics, and as observers say that reporting on the border region is severely lacking.

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