What is the Allbritton Journalism Institute?
The Allbritton Journalism Institute (AJI) is a one-of-a-kind institution in Washington: a nonprofit educational organization that is training the political journalists of the future — and has created a new publication to accomplish that goal. Every September, AJI welcomes a cohort of 10 early-career reporters to D.C. for a two-year fellowship. Fellows are paid $60,000 per year to take classes with some of the country’s best journalists and to write for AJI’s publication, NOTUS, where they work alongside a staff of established reporters and editors to cover politics, policy and government.
We created the AJI Reporting Fellowship because…
- Trust in the media is near an all-time low: Americans’ news consumption has become as divided as our politics. We rely on news outlets and social media feeds that reinforce our own opinions. And journalists are too stuck in legacy thinking to get the news to the people who need it most.
- Our newsrooms are too monolithic: You can’t report fairly on people you don’t understand. But we still have too few reporters with different backgrounds and beliefs.
- It’s still too hard to break in: Reporters used to get on-the-job training in local news, but those opportunities are disappearing fast. Graduate journalism programs don’t offer that practical experience — and they can be prohibitively expensive.
What is NOTUS?
Since the old training-ground publications are gone, we created our own. Local and regional papers were great places to start a career because they presented young journalists with the opportunity to work alongside, and learn from, seasoned professionals. Our publication, NOTUS, gives fellows those same opportunities — with one major improvement: Rather than serving as an eventual stepping-stone to D.C. reporting, this publication immediately puts fellows in the thick of covering the highest levels of American politics.
How can you participate?
At AJI, we’re not just starting a school. We’re building a non-profit digital news publication to give students the real-world experience, deep editing and sustained mentoring they can’t get anywhere else.
None of this comes cheap.
And because we want students from every background to be able to participate, we aren’t asking them to pay for it. Instead, we’re awarding the students a stipend that will allow them to give their full attention to the program — and to emerge from the program debt free.
