Jordan Spends Summer Teaching Investigative Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School

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Gerald Jordan

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Gerald Jordan, associate professor in the Walter J. Lemke department of journalism in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, spent the summer as a visiting professor coaching student journalists and editing stories for News21. This national project is designed to produce in-depth, innovative and interactive investigative journalism on issues of national importance.

"I'm very proud to have been chosen to work on this national, investigative reporting project,” said Jordan. “It was quite an honor to work with such a talented array of editors and reporters who produced excellent work across media platforms."

The national, student-staffed investigative reporting project, headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, recently completed an in-depth look at voting rights across the country. One of News21’s major findings was that in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, an issue that prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider more stringent voter photo identification laws, is virtually non-existent.

Two dozen students from 11 universities conducted the research, reporting and writing under the direction of Jordan and other journalism professionals. The students’ work can be found at the “Who Can Vote?” website, which includes more than 20 reports, interactive databases, data visualizations and photo/video galleries from their investigations of all reported cases of election fraud in the U.S. since 2000.

News21 is funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation. The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation provided a grant to support the work of six of the students and the Hearst Foundations supported another three fellows.