BuzzFeed reporter and Daily alum Hannah Allam was featured in a Columbia Journalism Review piece today on covering Muslim life in America.
Allam, Daily editor-in-chief in 1998-99 and an inaugural inductee in the OU Student Media Hall of Fame last fall, began at BuzzFeed in March. Before that she most recently worked as a Washington-based national correspondent for McClatchy, covering foreign affairs and the State Department.
An excerpt from her Q&A today:
This is such an important read. @HannahAllam on her new @BuzzFeedNews beat. https://t.co/NEMB5GLkEr pic.twitter.com/6NPABnZfIy
— Asma Khalid (@asmamk) July 24, 2017
That focus on accurate and nuanced coverage of communities was something she has lived out in her work tracing to her time at The Daily. In the run-up to her Hall of Fame induction, she shared these memories of her years working here in Copeland Hall.
“On my first day on campus, I walked into The Daily newsroom and became an intern,” Allam wrote to us last fall. “By my sophomore year, I’d been hired as a reporter – my first paying job in journalism. In junior year I was opinion editor, and then editor-in-chief my senior year. Only a couple of people of color had held the editor post and it was important to me that our paper reflect the diversity of the campus, so I canvassed student groups of all kinds and basically said: ‘Who’s your best writer? Send them to The Daily!’ Apart from the wonderful stories produced by The Daily in those years, I take pride in how inclusive our staff was: on the masthead, in the reporting ranks and throughout the opinion pages. Breaking these barriers is never easy – that’s why our nation’s newsrooms are still far from the goal of parity – but the work is worth it when you can point to coverage that’s truly by the students, for the students. All students.”