U.S.-Mexico Border Journalism Project Continues To Train Hispanics in Writing and Reporting: ...As an aspiring multimedia journalist, Perez was thrust from the classroom and into the larger El Paso community covering the sometimes violent, always exciting life of people on both sides of the United States-Mexico border.
“I really liked the fact that it (Borderzine) gave students the opportunity to go out there and write about what they had been learning,” says Perez, 33, now a staff reporter for the Statesman-Journal, the daily newspaper in Salem, Ore.
With an initial $15,000 seed grant from the Ford Foundation and soon afterward a four-year $400,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Borderzine is approaching its fifth anniversary with much to celebrate about its efforts to train aspiring Hispanic journalists using the populations on both sides of the nation’s 2,000-mile border with Mexico as its practical classroom.