Backed by Marquette University, the O'Brien Fellowship helps news professionals dig deep while mentoring student journalists.

The program honors Marquette alumni Alicia and Perry O'Brien. Their daughter, Patricia Frechette, and her husband, Peter, donated $8.3 million in 2012 to create the fellowship. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is a co-founder and partner. 

The O’Brien Fellowship accepts applications from journalists using print, digital, or visual mediums. Applicants may also produce news or opinion content. Journalists producing opinion content, however, including editorial writers and columnists, should inform, and support, their views and commentary with independent, in-depth investigative reporting.

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Remembering Untold Stories

In America today, the lights are going out. Many urgent stories go untold.

Practically all the record number of journalists – more than 60 – applying for O’Brien Fellowships this year proposed projects in the best tradition of public service journalism: exposing wrongful convictions, the impact of climate change on cities, a rise in homelessness, mass incarceration, government coverups of environmental hazards, the unseen victims of the opioid epidemic, to name just a few.

Truth be told, dozens of these projects, and the impressive journalists who proposed them, were worthy of a nine-month O’Brien fellowship at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Unhappily, O’Brien can fund only four fellowships a year.

That means not only a line of disappointed people who put in the serious work of applying for a national fellowship, but also an immeasurable loss for the nation. Without funding, without a platform, many of these stories may never be told. Nor will the nation benefit from the difference those investigations would make in exposing injustice; creating a more just, equitable, and healthy society; and making state, local, and federal governments more accountable to the people.   

There are fewer and fewer places for journalists to do this invaluable work. Since 2005, the country has lost one-third of its newspapers – more than 3,200 have closed – and two thirds of its newspaper journalists. The legacy media outlets still standing are, mostly, shadows, with stripped-down staffs unequipped for investigative work.

Fewer journalists have steady gigs and more independent ones are looking for a way, anyway, to stay on the grind. For local news, especially, the problem isn’t demand – it’s supply.

Journalists aren’t perfect. They make mistakes. They ignore stories they shouldn’t. Too many of them are punking out, trying to curry favor with the very people they should be holding to account. Still, as the distinction between truth and lies blurs beyond recognition, most journalists still respect the truth enough to shine a light into the darkness. What happens when the lights go out?    

Sincere thanks to everyone who applied for an O’Brien Fellowship this year. I wish we had many more to hand out. Now more than ever, the country needs to have their stories told.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffery Gerritt is director of the O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee. 

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