Alum
Ellen Hine
Senior audience engagement producer with PolitiFact
Ellen Hine, BAJ'20, senior audience engagement producer with PolitiFact.
“I originally thought I was going to be a math major when I started as a freshman. I liked math and school, and I was okay at it. I did well in English too, but I liked problem solving, and I thought that's what I was going to do in math.
When I got here (IU), I found out what I liked was problem solving puzzles. I didn't like high level proofs or anything of that nature. I figured that out early on. I knew that I could find what I wanted to do, and I ended up kind of narrowing on journalism.
My second semester of freshman year, I took Behind the Prize with Tom French. I signed up for his class because my advisor was like, ‘you should try a journalism class if you want to.’ And that's the class to fall in love with journalism because it’s getting to talk to journalists about their process and having really interesting discussions with them. I fell in love with it and have been on the journey ever since.
I felt a difference between maybe some of the people who had started in high school, knowing they wanted to be journalists, who were working on their student papers and yearbooks, and they came in ready to go.
That was not my journey. My high school didn't have a student paper, even if I had wanted to do it. But I think my journey to journalism offered a unique perspective. I joined the IDS and worked the front desk of the IDS for a long time, which was classified ads. So, I got a good, different side of working in journalism and studying journalism than maybe other people had. I think that has served me very well. There's the obvious route into things, and then there's other ways that we can all make the same journey.
There was such a wonderful emphasis on going out and doing the practical. The very cool thing about journalism classes is you can sit in a classroom all you want, but that is not going to be actually doing journalism in The Media School with its professors and teachers. They really emphasize going out in the community, doing your own reporting.”
Written By Emerson Elledge
Photos By Katherine Maners