Alaska J-Students to be Embedded in Iraq

By: E&P Staff Three undergraduate journalism students and a professor will spend nearly a month embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq.

According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the students, from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF), will be embedded with the Alaska-based Army Stryker Brigade Combat Team while filing daily articles for various news outlets, as well as the university's student newspaper the Sun Star. They will also post first-person accounts of their experience to Facebook, and a blog, "Short Timers," specially created for the experience.

The students -- Tom Hewitt, Jessica Hoffman, and Jennifer Canfield -- were selected from a pool of 12 applicants by UAF journalism professors. The trip will be led by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue, chair of the journalism department at UAF.

"The trip will be very carefully managed," O'Donoghue told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I really thought long and carefully about this." The students reportedly signed liability forms showing they understood the risk of death, kidnapping, and injury. University lawyers also insisted the students read articles about journalists kidnapped in Iraq, as well as reports about the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed in Pakistan by members of Al-Qaeda. In terms of physical safety, the Army is provided the four embeds with free body armor.

It's a war zone -- it's going to be dangerous," Canfield, 25, told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "But I made a commitment to myself that I'd go out and get some kind of foreign-reporting gig, and this kind of came up, and I couldn't say no."

The trip was initiated by UAF President Mark R. Hamilton, a 31-year Army vet who approached some student journalists with the idea of sending students on a mission to Iraq. In the past, the university has embedded students with the 25th Infantry Division's 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team during training exercises. The prospect of Iraq was a completely different matter.

After the students presented the idea to O'Donoghue, he proposed sending himself and four students to Iraq at the cost of $35,000. Hamilton agreed.

If this had initiated within the department, it's likely we would have hit a lot more barriers than having it initiated by the president of the university," O'Donoghue stated. "Right from the beginning, everybody was in a problem-solving mode for this."