Philip Merrill College of Journalism | University of Maryland

Fenton Places Fourth in Hearst Features Competition

For Immediate Release December 2, 2005

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Merrill College of Journalism alumnus Justin Fenton ('05) won fourth place in the feature-writing competition of the Hearst Journalism Awards Program, often called the Pulitzers of collegiate journalism.

Fenton won for "Finding Purpose in the Haze of Desert Warfare," his story on a week spent in the Mojave Desert with members of a National Guard unit, including five student-soldiers from the University, as they prepared to be deployed to Iraq. (Story is posted at here.)

The story, with photos from College junior Pouya Dianat, ran for four pages in a special spread in The Diamondback in April.

"This is not something college papers do. We really took an idea and ran with it," said Fenton, who credits Dianat for coming up with the idea and then-Editor Jonathan Cribbs and Maryland Media management for backing it.

The university students in Bravo Company of the Maryland National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 115th Infantry Regiment, had already spent three months at Fort Stewart, Ga., and a week at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert when Fenton and Dianat joined them in early April. For the next week, the Diamondback staffers were essentially embedded with the troops as they ran through training exercises in mock Iraqi villages.

"We slept in the dirt, we didn't shower for a week, we wore what they wore," said Fenton. He and Dianat became part of the exercise, with soldiers ordered to treat the Diamondback staffers as they would treat embedded reporters in Iraq.

Fenton said the men of Bravo Company asked him repeatedly to "tell it like it is." And he did, writing a story full of coarse humor, coarser language and a soldier's-eye view of the battlefield as is rocked from boredom to tension. Fenton said he thinks the soldiers and their families appreciated it.

"They were under the impression that because they were in the Guard they're not taken seriously," Fenton said. "I portrayed them as real soldiers who were getting ready to go over there. I really saw them getting ready and getting better."

"It was tough being there for a week," he said of the experience. "I couldn't imagine going back."

Fenton said he and Dianat flew back to College Park on a Friday and the story had to be filed by Sunday. They roughed out the story and the layout on the plane ride home.

Fenton's story was selected from 101 student entries from 47 journalism schools across the country. The fourth place finish comes with a $750 prize.

It was not the first Hearst prize for Fenton, who graduated in May and is now working at The (Baltimore) Sun under a two-year internship program. He earned a 10th-place finish last year in a Hearst profile-writing competition.

The feature-writing contest is the first of six news-writing competitions sponsored by Hearst during the academic year. Twenty winners are named in each monthly contest, which include scholarships for the top 10 finishers every month.

Hearst competitions are open to full-time undergraduate journalism students only, and this year will award more than $400,000 in scholarships and grants to winning schools and students. The top winners in each monthly contest will be flown to San Francisco to a national competition next June.

For more information contact: Steve Crane 301.405.2432 or Matthew C. Sheehan, 301.405.8320.