J-School students spend spring break working in Caribbean

Four FAMU journalism students are spending spring break in the Caribbean helping a group of teenagers improve a radio magazine program and produce multimedia websites and podcasts.

The students are being supervised by Professor Joe Ritchie, the Knight Chair in the School of Journalism and Graphic Communication, who visited the island a year.

The students were selected after meeting minimum academic performance criteria and submitting applications and writing essays outlining how they could contribute to the project.

The students on the project are:

• Alex Acosta, a senior photography student, is the project’s designated webmaster and still photo archivist. In addition to having been the photo editor and online editor for The Famuan, Alex has been a multimedia intern at the Palm Beach Post and the Tallahassee Democrat.

• Jermaine Fletcher is the lead broadcast production team member. A senior broadcast journalism student, Jermaine has interned at ESPN in Bristol, Conn., at Bloomberg News in New York and is currently working as a videographer at WCTV-TV in Tallahassee.

• Vanessa Lemaistre, a senior public relations student is the broadcast specialist and reporter for the team. She has worked with Cumulus Broadcasting in Tallahassee and has been a video jockey hosting a Caribbean music program for Video Mix television in Miami. She speaks Creole.

• Driadonna Roland, a senior broadcast journalism student, is designated lead broadcast specialist/reporter. Driadonna was an International Radio and Television Society summer fellow and production intern at GREY Worldwide in New York last summer. She has had a number of responsible positions with FAMU student media, including several editing positions with The Famuan, being the weather anchor/producer for the News 20 at Five live television newscast, and hosting a weekly gospel music show on WANM-FM. She also has several national and regional journalism awards to her credit.

The trip is sponsored through an endowment at FAMU by Knight Ridder Company, which funded the Knight Chair in Journalism. Ritchie is a former editor for The Washington Post and Detroit Free Press newspapers with extensive experience in international journalism. He has traveled widely, including previous visits to approximately 20 islands and other territories in the Caribbean region, among other places. The Knight-Ridder Company is the former parent company of the Tallahassee Democrat, the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press, before selling the newspapers last year.

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