A UW student will be one of eight students across the country to attend the National Newspaper Association Foundation’s Community Newspaper Leadership Summit.
Nikipohors Vlastos, a Journalism student and Branding Iron reporter, will attend the summit virtually on March 15. The summit will focus on climate change reporting and will offer students the opportunity to interview national government officials.
“It’s obviously really cool and I think it’ll be a great opportunity,” Vlastos said. “I know that there are plenty of great students who are journalism majors or journalists that probably deserve to be there just as much as me, but I’m grateful that I get the opportunity to do this.”
Vlastos was inspired to pursue journalism from a young age when his family often read his hometown paper, the Casper Star-Tribune, and national news like the New York Times and the Atlantic.
“It made me realize how important journalism can be to society in terms of the spread of information, and hopefully it can be pretty objective,” Vlastos said. “I think getting to be a part of that even to the little extent that we get to be a part of it at the Branding Iron is really cool.”
The focus of the summit this year will be on the topic of climate change, which relates closely to Vlastos’ second major of environmental systems science.
Vlastos will get to hear from different journalists and government officials, including the United States Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
“I think that’ll be really cool because obviously [Granholm] is one of the people that will be making these huge decisions about climate change,” Vlastos said.
“Even with all the societal problems we have, to me the most urgent one that needs to be addressed is climate change.”
For Vlastos, journalism has a unique importance in tackling climate change.
“there’s still this huge inconsistency in people’s beliefs- I think a lot of people don’t even think that climate change is real, even though the scientific community has no doubts about it,” Vlastos said.
“Through good journalism, it is a way to communicate with the average person: One, this is real and two, we need to find a way to curb it right now we don’t have time to wait.”
Vlastos said that the summit will be an opportunity to listen to different ideas in order to improve his own work as a journalist.
“Getting to meet with these people is a good way to network obviously,” Vlastos said. “But then also just hearing what they have to say and what they think is important can help me kind of frame the articles that I am writing to better inform the general population as far as where we currently sit in the issue of climate change.”
After the summit, Vlastos will write an article focusing on an aspect of climate change.
“I think what I want to write about is how we can have this energy transition in Wyoming occur and not have some of the side effects that some of the people in the state are scared of,” Vlastos said.
