It’s WJI season

WE’RE ENTERING THE TIME OF THE YEAR that we at WORLD News Group think of as “WJI season.” That way of thinking is a holdover from years past, when we focused nearly all of the World Journalism Institute’s resources on our spring course for aspiring journalists in college.

The college course remains WJI’s “core” offering. With the application deadline for that course just around the corner (Friday, March 29—there’s still time), and with the course itself coming up in several weeks, it still captures a good bit of our attention. As always, Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, hosts that course every May.

Add to that the mid-career course, WJI’s second-­biggest program, which is taking place at the beginning of March at our offices in Asheville, and it’s easy to understand why WJI is occupying our thoughts right now.

The reality is that WJI is no longer just a springtime phenomenon. It has recently become something of a year-round program. In addition to the college and mid-career courses, last year we held a course for Spanish-speaking journalists, an “early career” course for young professionals lately out of college, an international course (held in Europe for the past two years), a high school journalism “camp,” our second annual journalism professors’ retreat, and multiple gatherings of the WJI Network, our alumni program.

This expansion of our programs has resulted in more WJI-trained journalists placed at WORLD than ever before, and more WJI-trained journalists placed at outlets other than WORLD than ever before. By the way, placing well-trained Christian journalists both at WORLD and at other outlets—especially mainstream newsrooms—is the primary mission of WJI.

Did you know that WORLD readers have provided nearly 100 percent of WJI’s funding since Joel Belz and Bob Case founded the program in 1999? During that time, more than 700 journalists have been engaged, equipped, connected, and encouraged to pursue their callings. For many, that calling is professional journalism. We hope that WJI’s graduates will practice “sound journalism, grounded in facts and Biblical truth” no matter where—or in which language, or in which medium—they publish their work.