Flinn alumnus Jake Batsell ('92) was a member of a team of three journalists recently honored for their economic reporting by the Washington-based Institute on Political Journalism (IPJ).

Batsell, whose team won the IPJ's Award for Excellence in Economic Reporting, wrote the third installment of a four-part piece in the Seattle Times called, "Shifting Fortunes: Pain and Gain in the Global Economy." His segment, titled "Cup by Cup, Coffee Fuels World Market," focused on the economic effects of coffee production on the world market, and involved traveling to Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

"This was definitely the most consuming and rewarding project of my career so far," Batsell said of the award-winning piece, which ran in the Spring of 2004. "It was incredibly humbling to see first-hand how our everyday morning cup of coffee depends on the hard work of so many people in the developing world."

The three awardees will split the $10,000 prize.

Batsell said he was particularly honored that the recognition came from the Institute, housed at Georgetown University where he attended college 10 years earlier with support from the Flinn scholarship. Batsell graduated from Arizona State University in 1996 with a degree in journalism.

After ASU, Batsell interned at the Arizona Republic, the , the Chicago Tribune, as well as a three-year stint at the Seattle Times. Then he returned to graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin. In the course of his thesis field study on comparative government, Batsell returned to Zimbabwe, one of his original study abroad destinations as a Flinn scholar. After completing his Masters in government, Batsell resumed his post in the Times business section, where he wrote the award-winning article. He currently teaches journalism with his wife, who is a professor at the University of North Texas.

Having worked on many different desks in many different newsrooms, Batsell said his toughest moments as a journalist have been as a metro reporter assigned to interview the families of slain crime victims.

"But reporters have an important role to play in these situations," Batsell adds, saying that the stories he wrote from those assignments were "the definitive historical record of who this person was, the mark they left on the world, why their lives were worth more than a statistic from the police blotter."

For more information:

The Fund for American Studies