'Reznetters' Net National Award, Internships

Eleven staff members of reznetnews.org have snagged summer internships this summer at eight organizations, including The Boston Globe, Denver Post and three bureaus of The Associated Press.

All are grads of the American Indian Journalism Institute, an intensive three-week program for college students sponsored by the Freedom Forum. AIJI is held each June at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.

Reznet reporter Sunnie Redhouse was recently was named as one of the nation’s 100 best student journalists by UWire, a news and career service for college students. Redhouse, a Navajo who graduated this month from the University of New Mexico and is a 2005 AIJI grad, will report at The Salt Lake Tribune.

“It’s validation of what we’re trying to do, both in terms of reznet and AIJI,” said Denny McAuliffe, who teaches reporting at AIJI and is the project director and creator of Reznet. The six-year-old Web site, a grantee of the McCormick Foundation, is a project of the University of Montana School of Journalism in Missoula.

For more information, click here: www.reznetnews.org.

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Reznet Delivers Powerful Multimedia Piece on Louisiana’s Houma

Kudos to Reznet - an online news source for Native Americans coordinated by the University of Montana - for posting a multimedia feature on the Houma Tribe of Houma, La.

With some 17,000 members living in southeastern Louisiana - nearly 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line - the Houma were hit particularly hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “Katrina, Rita and the Houma” explores how the Houma have struggled – and helped one another – following the aftermath of the hurricane. It goes much further, however, providing captivating photos and a brief history of the people.

The multimedia piece is the product of a new Reznet project in which journalism students – Mary Hudetz, a Crow reporter from the University of Montana, and Martina Rose Lee, a Navajo photojournalist from Arizona State University – are teamed up with veteran professional journalists (Victor Merina, a former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and multimedia journalist Steven Chin) to produce an in-depth story on a complex issue of importance in Indian Country.

To see this fascinating piece go to: http://www.reznetnews.org/article/feature-article/katrina%2C-rita-and-houma%3A-nation-recovery.

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