Lynette clemetson biography of william

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Wallace House Journal. 

Not long after Lynette Clemetson was named director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship in 2016, I sat at a long wooden table, facing her and members of the selection committee, trying to convince them I had a great idea for a fellowship.

The truth is all I had were questions.

Since bluffing my way into my first reporting job at the Queens Tribune back in 2003, I’d been trying to figure out how to keep my head above water in the journalism world. Half the newsrooms on my résumé had collapsed or closed.

But I stayed employed, jumping from job to job, in part by getting clicks and traffic with whatever was the new way to communicate: blogging, listicles, slide shows, newsletters, tweeting.

For a while, I carried a camcorder and tripod and uploaded entire press conferences onto a new website called YouTube.

But by the time I was sitting at that wooden table in Ann Arbor, none of it made sense any