The former White House Bureau chief for The Washington Post will be the speaker at this year’s Ann Devroy Memorial Forum, which will take place online at 7 p.m. next Thursday (Apr. 15).
Philip Rucker will discuss “Lessons from Reporting in the Age of Trump” at the UW-Eau Claire event. The program is free and open to the public, but the audience will be limited to 500 people. Since there will be no advance registration, early use of the link to the program is advisable on Apr. 15.
The link to the program is Uwec.ly/devroyforum.
The Forum will also feature the introduction of this year’s Ann Devroy Fellowship winner, who will receive a scholarship and a paid internship with a Wisconsin news outlet. Depending on public health and related concerns, the winner will also be awarded a three-week unpaid residency at The Post next January.
Rucker, now a senior correspondent at The Post, is the co-author with Carol Leonnig of “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” which reached the top spot on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, USA Today and Publishers Weekly. Thear, covers the first 30 months or so of Trump’s presidency and deals with some of its most controversial moments, including clashes with cabinet members and his senior advisers.
In 2018, Rucker and a team of Post reporters shared (with a New York Times team) the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and a special George Polk award, both awarded for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Pulitzers are considered to be the year’s top journalism honor and the Polk awards are given annually to honor special achievement in journalism on any news platform, particularly original investigative work that requires digging and resourcefulness.
Rucker joined The Post in 2005 as a local reporter. He has also covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the presidential campaigns of Trump in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
The Devroy Forum, established in 1998, honors Devroy, a 1970 UW-EC journalism graduate who went on to cover the White House for the Gannett media chain and The Post. She was often described by former colleagues and by the people she covered as one of the best journalists ever to occupy the White House beat.
After her death from cancer in 1997, her family and her Washington Post colleagues established the Forum and the Ann Devroy Fellowship at UW-EC, to honor her memory and help preserve her journalistic legacy.
NOTE: the home page photo shows Ann Devroy interviewing then-President Bill Clinton in 1996. (Photo by Robert Reeder, The Washington Post)