Professor Mei-Ling Hopgood at the Medill School at Northwestern U. wins 2020 Bingham Fellowship Award

Columbia, Mo. (Oct. 5, 2020) - Professor Mei-Ling Hopgood, a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, is the 2020 recipient of the Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship, awarded by the News Leaders Association.

The $1,000 award, given in recognition of an educator’s outstanding efforts to encourage students of color in the field of journalism, will be presented at a virtual News Leaders Association awards event.

A merger of the American Society of News Editors and the Association of Opinion Journalists, which originated the fellowship, was completed in 2016. The American Society of News Editors and the Associated Press Media Editors then joined forces to become NLA, the News Leaders Association.

The selection committee was particularly impressed by Hopgood's initiative as faculty adviser for the Northwestern chapters of both the Asian American Journalists Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

As Dean Charles Whitaker noted, "In the latter role, she helped create Medill’s Cecilia Vaisman Award, named for a late colleague, which honors professional NAHJ members who are doing exceptional work reporting on LatinX issues in audio or broadcast formats."

As for AAJA, student Irene Chang wrote, "She recommended me to attend the 2018 AAJA convention in Houston, where she personally walked through the job fair with me, introduced me to recruiters and coached me on my elevator pitch."

As part of her studies, Chang went to Shanghai, China, where Hopgood recommended she conduct all of her interviews in Mandarin to go beyond her comfort zone. The experience "helped me realize that I was fully capable of holding my own in China," Chang wrote.

Also among those nominating Hopgood was fellow professor Patti L. Wolter, who wrote, "I have been teaching at Medill for 18 years, and yes, diversity has always been a value. . . . But what Mei-Ling did upon arriving at Medill was to regularly engage real conversations about diversity in meetings, in classrooms. She models how to have difficult conversations, how to honor discomfort in order to facilitate growth. I have watched her volunteer to develop co-curricular programs and implement them, and face a room full of angry students … absorbing the confusion and hurt students express and helping them learn."  

Dean Whitaker called Hopgood "the beating heart of the school’s diversity efforts. A lot of people – at this institution and others – pay lip service to the notion of diversity. Prof. Hopgood is not of that ilk. She has truly made diversity central to her pedagogy . . .[and] is recognized throughout Northwestern as an evangelist for diversity. She has twice been honored with the university’s Daniel I. Linzer Award for the development of curricula and programs that promote inclusion. . . ."

The News Leaders Association is proud to award Prof. Hopgood with this year’s Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship Award, and look forward to seeing how she continues to encourage students of color to grow and develop in the field of journalism.