Duquesne University’s student-run newspaper, The Duke, is celebrating its 100th year of existence.
Today’s journalism students have more layers of journalism to consider than in the inaugural publication year — from social media platforms to the ethics surrounding artificial intelligence. That’s not to mention a press that can print in color. The television wasn’t yet invented when The Duke first launched.
The professors and instructors at the Pittsburgh Catholic institution give the students all the tools to “do the thing,” as Associate Professor of Multiplatform Journalism Pamela Walck puts it. However, many of the old-school principles are just as vital today as they were in 1925.
It starts with engagement and observation within a community.
Duquesne University was founded to educate migrants moving into Pittsburgh during the turn of the 19th century, Walck explained. The makeup of neighborhoods around the city and university is diverse and storied.
“Sometimes it is easy for students to dismiss the people walking the streets around them, because they don’t know them,” Walck said. “I came up in an era in journalism where that community engagement was critical to the coverage that I did as a reporter. Just understanding that talking to the everyday man or woman about what’s going on in a community gives you a lot of insight as to how people feel about things.”
Part of Walck’s focus for her Ph.D. was on journalism history. Her dissertation looked at how the Black press and the mainstream press reported race riots among U.S. troops from World War II. Through that process, she researched the history of the Pittsburgh Courier, which was one of the largest Black newspapers in the U.S. It had millions of readers every week and 24 editions in cities across the United States, Walck said.
“Men and women were telling the story of Black Pittsburgh and Black American life in ways that the mainstream papers were not,” she said. “So, when I’m teaching Newsroom 1, in particular, we talk a lot about the importance of reflecting the community that you work for and report in. The idea that your story should reflect the demographics of the communities that you work in. And one of the reasons why Black newspapers existed was that, for the longest time, they were not represented at the U.S. presses. Their social lives, their academic careers, their births, their deaths — none of it was recorded.”
Many of those themes continue to play out in today’s national discourse, but in different ways. The press is under scrutiny from various sources, including the highest echelons of the country’s political power structure. This type of rhetoric has eroded trust in journalism.
“It’s been a slow decline, but it doesn’t help when you’ve got people calling the media and the press ‘Public Enemy #1.’ And it also doesn’t help when the press focuses on or gets tunnel vision on one particular thing and then misses some of the bigger things that are happening — and how those things impact the communities that they serve. So that’s one of the reasons why I really stress community engagement with my students, because I want them to be able to go out and do the best they can at representing the community that they serve and to stay connected to that community.”
Duquesne offers a well-rounded experience in its multiplatform journalism media, building an education with community in mind.
“I think that, like a lot of programs, one way we stand out is that balance from the foundational core of media literacy, design, ethics and law and then all of the wonderful things that the City of Pittsburgh has to offer in terms of applying it,” said Dean of Liberal Arts Kristine Blair.
One of the fastest-growing areas of the department is sports information and media, for which the sports-crazy city of Pittsburgh offers many learning opportunities.
The department also houses the Patricia Doherty Yoder Institute for Ethics and Integrity in Journalism and Media. The Institute offers special programming, guest lectures, networking opportunities and unique courses. It also produces a podcast, “Ethically Speaking,” a project created in collaboration with the University’s Center for Emerging and Innovative Media.
Last year, the Yoder Institute and Duquesne University teamed up with other Pennsylvania schools to create The Keystone News Summit, which is a convening of media-minded professionals and educators. It was an effort to build community across the state of Pennsylvania.
The summit drew 100 people, 38 speakers and 12 sessions in two days at the state capital. The purpose was to find solutions to growing news deserts in Pennsylvania and beyond. Some of the topics discussed were philanthropy in the newsroom, university partnerships, diversified business models and government and legislative programs and initiatives. Another summit is scheduled in 2026.
“I think one of the biggest challenges is just wanting to make sure that there are newsrooms for these talented students to go to,” Walck said. “A part of the solution is how business models can be part of the solution, how legislative initiatives can support those small and mid-sized papers in the state. These students need to be part of the discussions because they’re the ones who will be operating and building careers in those environments.
“And the challenges are high. I believe there have been instances where the media has failed to meet public expectations in its approach, coverage of stories, and inclusion of voices, leading to complete distrust. These are the barriers that our students will have to tackle. We’re working with the same partners for a summit in April of 2026 to further that discussion. I think we all understand that our students need places to go when they graduate. It’s a pretty practical kind of thing.”
The trust factor extends into the classroom as well, where Walck and her students spend considerable time discussing artificial intelligence in today’s media landscape. They discuss how readers expect a certain level of transparency and ethics in artificial intelligence (AI), which may not be the case for developers or designers.
Another area of practice that Duquesne focuses on is providing hands-on lab opportunities.
“I think one of the wonderful things about the program is just the variety of lab spaces where the students can work,” Dean Blair said. “They have various media hubs and broadcast studios, so they’re always working on something fun.”
The university provides a prototyping lab, which gives students inside and outside of a journalism major to build and test products, especially homing in on user experience design.
“That’s kind of an exciting project for us, because it does involve external parties outside of Liberal Arts,” Blair said. “It helps those faculty and students with their research. And I think that whole notion of user experience — whether it falls in a media department or another school — is on the rise.”
The stalwart of the offerings at Duquesne is The Duquesne Duke, which turned 100 this year. Its first editor would later be appointed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
The university produced a 41-minute documentary video on the newspaper, “The Duquesne Duke: A Century on the Bluff,” which included interviews of 15 surviving former editors-in-chief, ranging in service from 1968 through 2018.
The student-run publication is a community in and of itself.
“One of my favorite parts was definitely the people I worked with,” said Raymond Arke in the documentary. Arke was editor of the publication in 2018. His roles include a news associate with CNN. “Some of my closest friends and strongest relationships I’ve built were all with The Duke.”
Some 50 years before Arke led the newspaper, George Heidekat, editor-in-chief in the spring and fall of 1968, described how his team at The Duke covered the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“It was a pretty uproarious time in U.S. history,” he said. “There was tension, going back to King’s assassination. There were six weeks of rioting across the United States, including the Hill District, located just across the street. We were intensely aware of what was going on, so we had our student reporters and photographers going out to cover what was happening in our backyard. It wasn’t just ‘somewhere out there’ that civil unrest was happening. It was right here. That was vivid. That was one of the key events during my tenure.”
Ben Garletts said in the documentary that he got a thrill from learning and sharing knowledge with others.
“I learned so much about different perspectives and different heritages, and all this beautiful diversity,” he said.
In addition to The Duke, Duquesne University students also produce a magazine called “Off the Bluff.” The media department publication focuses heavily on photography and design.
The magazine, like The Duke and Walck’s vision, focuses on community.
In her letter from the editor at the beginning of the publication, Ember Duke, editor-in-chief, wrote that the magazine’s goal is “always to tell a compelling story about aspects of Pittsburgh which might be missed in the hustle and bustle, and where to do so than a dense city with rich creative history and an evolving present?”
In the publication, reporters wrote features on the city’s creatives, published a gallery of renowned museums and hidden gems, and published photos of the faces that forged Pittsburgh’s culture.
The journalists who work on the magazine and The Duke are among the roughly 200 journalism or other media majors at the university.
“From a journalism perspective, everyone in the department that I work with … it is beyond just journalism, really,” Walck said. “Everyone that I work with has some experience in the industry, and I think because of that, we have an efficient approach to our education. We understand that you need to know the theories, the agenda-setting, and related concepts. But then you also need to know how to ‘do the thing.’ And so we try to create opportunities for our students to learn the skills that they need to be successful in their future careers.”
Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.
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