Award-Winning Journalist Visits UMD Campus

Rachel Piper speaking at the event Tuesday, Sept. 24. Photo courtesy UMD Journalism Department

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Rachel Piper, visited the UMD campus Tuesday, Sept. 24 to teach a Social Media in Journalism workshop. 

The workshop took place from 11 a.m. to 12:50 p.m. in a Labovitz School of Business and Economics classroom. During the workshop Piper discussed tools and techniques for using social media as a platform for journalism. She covered Facebook and Instagram, delving into topics that ranged from live streaming, to daily stories, to online safety. Students as well as members of the Duluth community were in attendance. 

Rachel Piper won the Pulitzer in 2017 for local reporting. Photo courtesy Creative Commons

Piper and her investigative team, Managing Editor Sheila McCann, Erin Alberty, Jessica Miller, and Alex Stuckey, won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2017 when they wrote a series of stories on sexual assault at a Utah college campus. At the time, Piper was working for The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah. She stated that upon hearing her team had won the Pulitzer, she felt “shock and disbelief.”

Piper currently resides as the senior director of digital news at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When asked what inspired her to choose journalism as a career, Piper said, “The idea that telling stories and finding true stories to help change the world or change people’s perceptions and give them a greater understanding is kind of what has kept me in journalism.”