Fifty years after Bloody Sunday, a team of journalism students from Morgan State University – an urban, historically black university – joined with peers from West Virginia University – a predominantly white university in a rural state – traveled to Selma, Alabama together to create Bridging Selma, a collaborative social justice reporting project. Guided by faculty from both schools, the students used text, photos and video and an early experiment in 360° storytelling to tell stories of Selma’s past and present and to probe the community’s current economic hardships and hopes for revitalization.
The collaborative project between two journalism programs represented an experimental classroom designed to advance a dialogue on race and justice with students working across divides, and to create an immersive environment where students can learn from each other as they accelerate their journalistic and reporting skills using new technologies.
