By Cora Smith
Tri Duong did not expect to become a journalist when he first started college at Colorado State University. For two years he studied biochemistry and worked in a plant lab, but his career plans changed when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Three months after the pandemic started, Duong began traveling to witness first-hand the racial justice rallies and protests happening across the country. He even flew to Washington D.C. on Election Day in 2020 and interviewed protesters and locals. That’s when he decided he’d like to pursue journalism.
Back on campus, when Duong found Jenny Fischer’s class on deliberative journalism in the spring of 2023, it seemed like a perfect fit.
“For me, deliberative journalism is at a standpoint where it's just at a test phase and all those students that go in the class, what I've noticed is everyone has a different level of curiosity on how much are you reading, how much are you talking with the public outside?” said Duong. “And well, for me, since I was investigating propaganda, I needed somebody who has seen both sides of the narrative.”
Deliberative journalism is a type of reporting that seeks to start community conversations to address shared problems, according to the Deliberative Journalism Project’s website.
“A lot of the students this past semester came away describing deliberative journalism as creating a piece of journalism, telling a story in such a way that it's going to spark a conversation,” said Fischer, an instructor for Colorado State’s Department of Journalism and Media Communications. “It's going to bring a level of understanding to both sides of an argument or about a group that may be either misunderstood or not heard from very often, or maybe even completely unknown.”
Fischer’s students pitch their own story ideas and workshop them in class. Their stories are published on the website NoCo Convos, a collaborative project between the university and local media to cover issues that directly affect communities in Fort Collins and Northern Colorado.
Students take Fischer’s Advanced Reporting class for three credits. This past spring, nine students took the course, with a maximum enrollment of 18. Two students used independent study credits to work on projects for the class and two students in the class are in charge of editing stories before they are published, as well as managing the NoCo Convos website.
“The students can be charged with going to city council meetings, chasing down sources and finding information about a pertinent issue to the community, and they can do a good job of reporting it and find a good way to tell that story,” Fischer said.
The class is made up of mostly juniors and seniors. Some students will retake the class in the fall as teaching assistants or for independent study. Most of the students work on one longform story during the semester, but some produce multiple shorter stories. They meet once a week with Fischer for a few hours to work on their articles.
One of those students, Michael Stella, followed changes to Fort Collins’ land use code intended to address the lack of housing and growing population in the area. Throughout the semester, Stella published a weekly update on the issue, including an interview with a stakeholder or expert and the potential effects of the land-use changes on those stakeholders.
Stella also made it a goal to be transparent about his journalistic process along the way.
“There are a few lines of commentary that he included in there to that end, to make sure that the public knows, in addition to what he's explaining about the land use code and who the stakeholders are, what all the moving pieces are, how he's making his decisions and why,” said Fischer.
Duong also stood out in Fischer’s class, she said.
From a young age, Duong became fascinated with photography, which led to his interest in journalism.
“Why I'm really interested in photography is because I'm from Vietnam, and during the Vietnam War, a lot of the news got out because of the war responders and photojournalists that were out there,” Duong said.
Duong said the biggest lesson he took away from Fischer’s class was the importance of curiosity.
“How I find my stories is I actually go on the street and literally just wander and talk to people,” Duong said.
In Fischer’s class, Duong produced the “Art from the Heart Podcast,” for which he interviewed veterans about how they use art to cope with the aftermath of war.
Duong has had his work published in various news outlets around Colorado and hopes to continue covering stories about art and diversity in the world instead of covering breaking news.
“That’s why I wanted to go into the art beat and find all these hidden gems of an artist that are all around our town because they have a special message inside of them that they wish to share with the world,” Duong said.
Though the Deliberative Journalism class has only run for two semesters, Fischer is excited to see what comes next. She would like to start a deliberative journalism club to grow interest in the field.
“Deliberative journalism is a long game,” Fischer said. “So I think that having a club – in addition to giving them the opportunities for independent studies and coming on as a team and those other things – it just gives them a way to actively work on their stories and feel like they can still be a part of the project.”