Andrew Fowler of St. Louis won the highest graduate award from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the 2016 Harrington Award, in the category of Videography/Broadcast.
Named for the late Harry Franklin Harrington, who was the first director of Medill, the awards are given to outstanding graduate students “based on journalistic promise and high scholastic achievement.”
The industry already has agreed with his former professors regarding Fowler’s “journalistic promise,” as he learned about the award as a working professional in New York. He is a video producer for Insider, an online lifestyle journalism venue in the Business Insider brand family.
“It’s my job to find human interest stories, people that will go viral in some way,” Fowler said. “On a typical day I’m looking for stories, anything with a human interest angle, contacting people, and finding a way to get their footage or shoot footage if needed.”
Unusual for a first full-time staff position, he is a one-man shop for his stories.
“I have a couple of editors I report to,” Fowler said. “They approve a project before I get too far into it, and look at it when it’s done and make suggestions, but a lot of it happens in my head.”
The place to view his current work is the Insider People page on Facebook.
For someone with a graduate degree from a prestigious journalism school and a job at Business Insider, Fowler was surprised to find that his high school and college internships with The St. Louis American, a community weekly in his hometown, prepared him well.
“The parallels are obvious,” Fowler said. “I learned my basic reporting skills doing human interest stories at The American, which is essentially what I focus on solely now. Knowing what questions to ask in an interview to reveal how people feel is something I learned at The St. Louis American before I went to journalism school.”
Though Fowler did considerable business reporting in graduate school, as well as a major investigative piece on train derailments, his capstone project was a human interest feature, a short documentary produced and directed with his fellow Medill students Yining Zhou and Avinash Chak.
Shot completely in Chicago, “My Muthaland” follows the journey of actress Minita Gandhi. In early 2015 Minita decided to write her first-ever play, a one-woman show about her family, culture and being stuck between two worlds as a second-generation, Indian-American woman. Because she had been sexually assaulted during a family visit to India and addresses this on camera, it becomes a documentary about the importance of talking about sexual violence.
“It was a passion project,” Fowler said. “At the initial screening, it was cool to see the reaction. Some people were even brought to tears. I had never worked on something that elicited such an emotional response.”
Fowler was corrected on this point. In fact, he wrote a story from The St. Louis American that reduced some readers to tears. When an 18-year-old student on winter break following his first semester as a college freshman, Fowler spent the day after Christmas 2009 with exoneree Darryl Burton and his grown daughter, Tynesha Lee. Burton had been released from prison after being incarcerated for 24 years for a murder he did not commit.
Fowler was there when Burton had the first opportunity to give his 26-year-old daughter a Barbie doll for Christmas. His story about their bond was so powerful that it went on to win a national journalism award. The National Newspaper Association, a trade group for community newspapers, awarded it as the Best Feature Story for all large weeklies in the nation published in 2009.
Fowler remembered.
“That was the first time,” he said. “I was shocked that anything I had a hand in – my story was heavily edited – affected readers and an audience, and that’s something I grabbed a hold of. And I am doing emotional stories now. It’s something I’d like to continue to do.”
Follow this reporter on Twitter @chriskingstl.
