Kristen Lombardi ’95, Center for Public Integrity

I worked for a small community newspaper chain immediately after I graduated from the master's program at BU's College of Communication, in 1995, learning how to develop sources and cover government basics in the suburbs of Boston. From there, I worked for many years at the now (sadly) defunct Phoenix alternative newspaper (both for Worcester and Boston), and cut my chops as a beat and an investigative reporter. I moved onto the Village Voice and then, in 2007, landed at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to investigative reporting in the public interest. I have had an opportunity to do meaningful journalism all along the way. I can honestly say that, as an investigative reporter, there is no better profession.

I focused on print journalism — it was either print or broadcast journalism then and, for me, print has always been where it's at. I took as many narrative journalism and magazine writing classes as I could both semesters in my year at BU's graduate program to try to perfect the art of long-form narrative journalism. While people in our business talk a lot about new forms of story-telling, I still believe that some of the most powerful, moving and consequential pieces of journalism today are told via the written word.

I enrolled in COM's graduate journalism program back in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was almost a novelty. Certainly, there was no sense of the disruption the web would cause print journalism. I remember taking a class featuring Netscape as primarily a research tool. Because of this rapidly changing technological landscape, I am sure the program I experienced is very different today. So much of what I learned from the program that I still value today has to do with the intensive narrative-writing classes I took. There's no doubt in my mind I am a better writer and editor because of the grueling narrative-journalism classes I took from such professors as Mark Kramer, who I believe still runs the BU Narrative Conference. As a working journalist for 20 years now, I have yet to receive the kind of intense attention to improving my writing that I had the privilege receiving as a graduate student at BU.