By Judy Berthiaume, Integrated Marketing and Communications, UW-Eau Claire
Terence Samuel, Washington politics editor at The Washington Post, will be the featured speaker at this year’s Ann Devroy Memorial Forum on Apr. 21 at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Samuel, an award-winning journalist and author, will speak on “Responsible Reporting in a Social Media Age” at 7 p.m. in Schofield auditorium. He will spend that day in UW-Eau Claire classrooms talking with journalism students and will meet with members of the local news media before his evening presentation,
The Forum event is free and open to the public.
Devroy, who graduated from UW-Eau Claire in 1970 with a journalism degree, went on to cover the White House for both USA Today and The Washington Post. She often is described by former colleagues and by the people she covered as one of the best journalists ever to occupy the White House beat.
After she died from cancer in 1997 at the age of 49, her family and colleagues at The Post wanted to honor her memory. They decided that, since Devroy had often served as a mentor to other journalists, the most appropriate way to do that was to give young journalists a chance to follow in her footsteps.
In 1998, the Ann Devroy Memorial Forum and Ann Devroy Fellows program were established at UW-Eau Claire, where the Green Bay native got her start.
Every spring, a prominent national journalist comes to UW-Eau Claire to interact with journalism students and to speak at the Devroy Forum. The speaker at the first Forum in 1998 was the late David Broder, The Post‘s acclaimed national political columnist.
During the Forum program, the winner of the Ann Devroy Fellowship is introduced. This fellowship, awarded to an outstanding UW-EC journalism student, includes an unpaid three-week fellowship at The Washington Post and a paid summer internship at a Wisconsin daily newspaper.
More on Terence Samuel
In his position at The Washington Post, Samuel directs coverage of the White House, Congress and the 2016 congressional elections. He spent more than two decades writing about some of the most contested political campaigns and contentious political issues in American life, including the 2000 presidential recount, the 50-50 Senate of the 107th Congress (2001-03) and the politics of the Iraq War.
He is the author of The Upper House: A Journey Behind the Closed Doors of the U.S. Senate, and was among the writers included in the anthology Best American Political Writing 2009.
In his review of The Upper House for The Washington Post, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey wrote:
“I think The Upper House will help Americans understand how the Senate works — and why it often doesn’t. The book’s portraits of senators at work should spread the word that they are just people like all the rest of us. But the book’s greatest value may be in giving guidance to those who aspire to serve in what is still the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
Before joining The Washington Post Samuel worked as a national correspondent with The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and as chief congressional correspondent at U.S. News & World Report.
A graduate of the City College of New York, he was a research fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Read more about Ann Devroy here in an account written by the 2004 Ann Devroy Fellow, Gina Duwe.