Journalists Discuss Coverage of the Catholic Church Scandal

Michael Paulson, a 1986 Haverford graduate and religion writer for the Globe was part of the investigate team of journalists at the Boston paper who prepared a series of articles on the scandal. The series is this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for public service journalism. He joined the Globe in January 2000 after seven years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he worked as city hall reporter, state house bureau chief in Olympia, and correspondent in Washington, D.C. Before that he worked as a political reporter for the San Antonio Light in Texas and as a general assignment reporter at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy.

Paulson has been awarded a number of journalistic fellowships, including the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship in Germany in 1990 and the Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship in 1998-99. Since being named religion reporter at the Globe he has participated in fellowships for religion reporters at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland and the Gralla Fellows Program for Religion Journalists at Brandeis University.

This year, his work was singled out by the American Academy of Religion, which praised his "extremely informative and in-depth features," and he was a finalist for the Religion Newswriters Association's Templeton Award for excellence in enterprise reporting and versatility in the field of religion.

Joining Paulson in the panel discussion will be David O'Reilly, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer's“Faith Life” section and Ann Rodgers-Melnick, a religion reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The discussion will be moderated by Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College. A former editor and editorial writer for The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mark is the author of several books on religion and the media, including Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America.

The panel discussion program and stipends for Haverford and Bryn Mawr College summer journalism interns are supported by a fund established in 1983 in memory of Andrew Silk. Andrew attended Haverford in the early 1970s as a philosophy major. He also served as editor of the student newspaper, then called the Haverford College/Bryn Mawr News.

In his junior year, Andrew took a leave of absence to work for two newspapers in South Africa, The Pretoria and The Rand Daily Mail. In 1976, he returned to campus, and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He also was awarded a Watson Fellowship which allowed him to return to South Africa where he wrote about conditions of black migrant workers. The accounts of his investigations resulted in a book entitled, A Shantytown in South Africa: The Story of Motterdam.

In the summer of 1979, Andrew joined the staff of the Virginia Pilot-Ledger and later, Greenwich Time in Connecticut. After his death in 1981, his family and friends established the Andrew Silk'76 Journalism fund which has since offered opportunities for other Haverford and Bryn Mawr students to explore the field of journalism. Since the first panel in 1983, close to 60 journalists from news organizations around the country have participated in these discussions.

For more information, contact Pam Sheridan with the Office of Public Information at %20psherida [at] haverford.edu or 610-896-1037.