Sean Evans (BS ’08, journalism) was featured in the inaugural TIME100 Creators list: The Most Influential Digital Voices of 2025.
Evans is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated Hot Ones, the YouTube series launched in 2015 in which celebrities are interviewed while eating progressively spicy chicken wings.
The show, which is most known for Evans’s deep research on his guests and thought-provoking questions, has run for 27 seasons so far and includes interviews with a slew of famous celebrities such as Gordon Ramsay, Billie Eilish, Sydney Sweeney, and Key & Peele.
The 2025 TIME100 Creators recognizes those individuals who are shaping the future and changing the way people inform themselves.
Layli Nazarova won first place and a $10,000 scholarship award in Hearst’s National Audio Championship. Madison Holcomb was named a finalist and won a $1,500 scholarship award for Hearst’s National Writing Championship.
Both Nazarova and Holcomb advanced to the Hearst Championships, the culmination of the 2024-25 Hearst Journalism Awards Program, held May 31-June 5 in San Francisco, California, to complete assignments under deadlines that were judged by media professionals.
(Photo of Madison Holcomb by Jakub Mosur.)
Nazarova’s assignment was to produce a two-minute story on the following topic: “Demonstrate how one of President Trump’s executive orders is having an impact on life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Choose from one of the following subject areas: immigration, higher education, tariffs, the economy, DEI.” Listen to her story.
Holcomb’s assignment was to write two articles: a news story from an interview with Executive Chair and Director of TPG Inc. Jim Coulter, and an article about how one of President Trump’s executive orders is affecting the Bay Area. Read her stories.
The Hearst Championships, often referred to as the “Pulitzers of College Journalism,” included 29 student journalists from across the country. The finalists were selected from 1,260 entries submitted in 14 competitions held throughout the academic year.
Journalism students Maggie Knutte, Nathan Gonzalez, Piper Pascarella, Nour Longi, and Faith Lee, and agricultural communications student Elena Cleary earned first place and a $3,000 scholarship for a documentary on period poverty titled “Tailoring Hope,” which was one of 60 entries submitted from 35 schools in the multimedia competition.
Additional credit for the documentary goes to 2024 Illinois journalism alum Stephanie Wayda and Fourah Bay College students Amadu Lamrana Bah, Stella Fredricka Bangura, Ola Deen, Nuhu Jalloh, Alpha Janneh, Aminata Kamara, Kelfala Kargbo, Rose-Lyn Koroma, and Hanna Aba Yankson.
The project is the inaugural work of the Illinois Partnership for African Women’s Health Narratives, an interdisciplinary initiative that empowers early-career African and American journalism and media students to research, produce, and disseminate the true stories of grassroots innovations to women’s health challenges in Africa—leveraging the humanizing power of first-person, character-driven storytelling to raise awareness and drive meaningful change.
“Tailoring Hope” focuses on Uman Tok, a nongovernmental organization based in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa, which aims to alleviate period poverty and menstrual exclusion and educate girls and boys about sexual and reproductive health awareness. Read more about the making of the documentary.
Watch here:
Madison Holcomb, a senior in journalism, won first place in Explanatory Reporting and a $3,000 scholarship for her piece on livestock fatalities during transportation. The story was published in Investigate Midwest.
Layli Nazarova, a junior in journalism, won fourth place in Audio News and a $1,000 scholarship for her stories on campus accessibility and the designation of the Middle Eastern North African Census.
The Hearst Journalism Awards Program was founded in 1960 to provide support, encouragement, and assistance to journalism education at the college and university level.
Will Leitch (BS ’98, journalism), author, sportswriter, contributing editor for New York magazine, and podcast co-host, will serve as an executive producer of the movie adaptation of his latest novel Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.
Lionsgate purchased the rights to the novel, published by Harper in May, which focuses on Lloyd McNeil, a beat cop in Atlanta who only has months to live. When McNeil learns his teenage son would receive a higher pension if he died in the line of duty, he devises a plan.
“With audiences desperate for more original and authentic stories worthy of the big screen, we couldn’t be more excited to be the home for Will Leitch’s truly original tale following the indelible Lloyd McNeil,” said Erin Westerman, co-president of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group. “Through action, humor, and great pathos, his book serves at once as both a manual and an inspiration for how to live life to the fullest.”
Leitch, also the author of How Lucky (praised by Stephen King as “a fantastic novel”), is a former sports editor for TheDaily Illini and was inducted into the Illini Media Hall of Fame in 2022.
Students took their classwork to broadcast television with the opportunity to create documentaries this spring for Prairie Fire, WILL-TV’s magazine program offering cinematic documentaries, profiles, and performances from downstate Illinois.
“It was so cool to see something we made [included] on a professional show,” said Adrien Reetz, a rising junior in journalism and co-producer of one of the four segments that was chosen to air.
Journalism student Adrien Reetz makes his pitch for a short documentary to the Prairie Fire production team.
“Being able to say we created something that was good enough for Prairie Fire is a pretty big deal. It’s a confidence boost for sure,” Reetz added.
Reetz, along with 11 other students in the “Advanced Documentary Production” course taught by journalism lecturer Alison Davis this spring, pitched story ideas to the Prairie Fire team.
Producers selected the top four stories and then the students self-selected into groups to work on each one. After a final review, the Prairie Fire team decided to air all four segments on May 15.
The stories focused on the Idea Store, a unique business in Champaign; the Station Theatre, a local theater group as they get ready for a show; a K-pop dance group, a community created over a love of dance; and a profile of Toni Gist, a clinical assistant professor of food science and human nutrition in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, who is known as the “food professor.”
Davis, who says she’s always dreamed of having her students create stories for Prairie Fire, was extremely impressed with the work they did.
“This group of students are amazing and very self-motivated. They really have a passion for documentary filmmaking and are really excited about having their work on IPM,” she said. “They have really blown me away with how dedicated they have been this semester to creating some excellent pieces.”
It was was so cool to see something we made [included] on a professional show. Being able to say we created something that was good enough for “Prairie Fire” is a pretty big deal. It’s a confidence boost for sure.
Adrien Reetz
Rising Junior in Journalism and Documentary Co-Producer
Davis started out on the original Prairie Fire, which aired from 1992 to 2008, first as a production assistant then later as the show’s producer and host, earning eight regional Emmy Awards along the way.
In 2023, the show was relaunched, which gave Davis the chance to showcase her student’s work, making it available to a larger audience while also giving budding filmmakers real-world experience.
“We thought it would be a great way to be able to teach young filmmakers about our process and how documentaries are made, from the idea stage to execution to the final product,” said DJ Roach, video production manager at Illinois Public Media. “We also thought it would be a great way for Illinois Public Media and the College of Media to collaborate on a project that gives students an outlet to showcase their talents.”
Reetz, who co-produced a segment on a K-pop dance group, said it’s hard to know how much work goes into a project like this until you do it yourself.
“That’s why hands-on experience like this class is so valuable. We learned to organize our plethora of footage and comb through interviews for the best parts,” Reetz said. “Then we had to arrange everything to make a cohesive story, which involved a lot of revising.”
Reetz said he was grateful for Davis’s help and expertise throughout the process.
“Our [instructor] offered great guidance all the way through. We couldn’t have done it without her,” he said.
Mazie Gierat, a rising senior in journalism and co-producer of the Idea Store piece, was also thankful for the opportunity to learn from and work with Davis.
“She was extremely helpful through each and every step of creating this documentary, and I absolutely loved taking this class,” Gierat said.
Watch all four student segments below:
The Idea Store: Produced by Emily Stutzman, Mazie Gierat, and Nazala Salauddin
The Station Theatre: Produced by Layli Nazarova, Sam Rink, Dwayne Banks Jr., and Emily Richie
Stephanie Lulay’s (BS ’08, journalism) start-up venture, Block Club Chicago—whose mission is to deliver reliable, nonpartisan, and essential coverage of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods—has become a news staple for readers throughout the city since its founding in 2018.
Lulay serves as executive editor and co-founder of the award-winning newsroom, which has 18,000 paid subscribers, more than 130,000 newsletter subscribers, and an average of 2.3 million pageviews a month. Over seven years, the newsroom has grown from a staff of eight reporters and editors to a staff of 39. Lulay credits her journalism education at Illinois as a key to her success.
“The [University of Illinois] gave me the problem-solving skills and the confidence I needed to succeed in this industry,” she said.
In honor of her career accomplishments and her continued engagement as an alum, Lulay was chosen as the winner of the 2025 College of Media Emerging Leader Award.
“The College of Media is pleased to award Stephanie Lulay as our 2025 Emerging Leader for her innovative and entrepreneurial path in the journalism industry, along with her enthusiasm for sharing her experiences with our students and alumni,” said Dean Tracy Sulkin. “Stephanie is an alum who exemplifies, in an ever-changing media landscape, how to enhance the lives of people in our state.”
Lulay calls Block Club Chicago a “freemium site”—very few articles are paywalled and most stories are accessible for free, including breaking news, health, election coverage, and news from underserved South Side and West Side neighborhoods. They also produce twice-weekly Block Club Chicago podcasts, hosted by fellow Illinois journalism alum Jon Hansen (BS ’06).
The [University of Illinois] gave me the problem-solving skills and the confidence I needed to succeed in this industry.
Stephanie Lulay
Executive Editor and Co-Founder of Block Club Chicago
Their reporter model is different from traditional newspapers, too. Rather than having beats, reporters are assigned to neighborhoods, tasked with covering whatever news is most important that day.
Lulay says their “big bet” is when they put reporters on the ground every day, it will lead to a more accurate portrayal of the neighborhoods in Chicago and build reader trust.
“That’s what makes me so excited about working for a local newsroom in this time. I When you know who is serving you, and you see them all the time — at your kid’s school, at a community meeting —that is key to rebuilding trust between media and people,” Lulay said.
Lulay says she took what she learned at college with her into the workforce—including the hands-on experience she gained from writing and editing for The Daily Illini and the confidence she built from working closely with Brant Houston, Knight Chair Professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting in the Department of Journalism.
The staff of Block Club Chicago.
“Brant really encouraged me to dig into some big investigative stories and to not think of myself just as a student, but as an investigative journalist,” she said. “Because of that, I was able to get real-life professional experience.”
When Lulay and 115 reporters across the country lost their jobs after DNAinfo sites shuttered in November 2017, one of the first calls she made was to Houston.
Lulay describes Houston as “a godfather in the nonprofit news movement,” and said he gave her the right connections and insight to think through their plan at the start of Block Club Chicago.
Lulay has stayed engaged with College of Media students through educational webinars and classroom visits.
She hopes Block Club Chicago’s success might inspire others to start up similar newsrooms across the country, especially recent College of Media graduates.
“I would love to see some Illini students graduate, pop up in a news desert, and start a newsroom there,” Lulay said. “It’s hard work, but there is so much opportunity right now in nonprofit news and I’d love to see some students capitalizing on that.”
Leon Dash, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and Swanlund Chair Professor of Journalism, sat in his office chair on the third floor of Gregory Hall, appearing calm and collected on his last day of teaching at the College of Media.
Leon Dash at his retirement celebration on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Kelly Youngblood.)
With 27 years of classroom instruction soon to be behind him, and a 30-plus-year career as an investigative news reporter for The Washington Post in his rearview mirror, Dash was looking forward to his next step—retirement.
Dash has always tended to look ahead to the next step, the next chapter, the next story.
This inclination may have contributed to him becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1987 for a six-part series on teenage pregnancy, and eventually winning the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism in 1995 for an eight-part series, “Rosa Lee’s Story,” that shed light on an impoverished, urban family trapped in intergenerational cycles of crime and addiction.
Dash followed Rosa Lee Cunningham, her children, and her grandchildren for four years, chronicling their struggles and occasional victories for TheWashington Post series, which also won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for setting “the standard for reporting about poverty.”
The piece was also named to the “Top 100 Works of Journalism of the Century” by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
A year after winning the Pulitzer, Dash published a book based on the series, Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America. Dash didn’t know it yet but that book, along with another one he wrote about teen pregnancy—When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing—would become required reading for his journalism students one day.
Dash’s trailblazing efforts in immersion journalism opened many doors for him, including an opportunity to join the faculty at the College of Media. In Fall 1998, he stood in front of his first class of college students and began the next half of his journalism career—this time as an instructor.
Dash said he was intimidated at first but quickly found his footing thanks to his “self-appointed” faculty mentor and fellow professor of journalism, the late Bob Reid. With Reid’s guidance, Dash said his transition from the newsroom to classroom went very smoothly.
Throughout his extraordinary career, Dash has seen the journalism landscape undergo several changes. The most notable for him is a decline in assertive news reporting.
“So many of the publications are weak when it comes to standing up to power. That used to not be the case,” he said.
At the Post, Dash said he was expected to confront people in power, if necessary, to get answers to the tough questions.
But now more than ever, media outlets are fearful of economic and legal repercussions, he said.
“That was a big disappointment to me. It was painful to watch,” he said. “That kind of interference was unheard of in the past.”
Dash also believes social media has blurred the lines between what is considered news and what is considered opinion, which creates confusion; and people tend to look to a variety of political figures and social influencers for their news today, rather than trained journalists, which Dash views as “very dangerous.”
About 10 years ago, he ran into a former newspaper colleague who told him her job required her to produce two to three different ledes a day for the same story. Using the same facts, the reporter told Dash she had to create a new enticing hook to reel in more readers.
For Dash, who was accustomed to spending months on stories, the idea of churning out multiple ledes a day sounded like “a nightmare.”
Dash says he has no solutions for the many issues plaguing the journalism industry today but does encourage others to think for themselves.
He knows social media is here to stay and engages on a few platforms, sometimes connecting with former students.
Leon Dash with students in his Great Books of Journalism course in Fall 2019.
He even joined a Facebook Group, which is now inactive, called “Dash Survivors,” created by former students to playfully discuss Dash’s more rigorous coursework.
Dash’s current news diet includes online subscriptions to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The News-Gazette. He never thought he’d make the transition from reading print news to digital news but now he says it’s more convenient.
“I no longer have ink stains on my fingers from reading the newspaper,” he said.
Dash will miss a lot about teaching, especially working with students who have the ability and genuine interest to become a successful journalist one day.
“Those kinds of revelations are always pleasant, and I’ll miss that,” he said.
But Dash is already looking ahead to his next piece of work. Namely, he said: “A book I need to write.”
He said his forthcoming book “entails lengthy interviews with Black and white Americans focusing on what, when, and under what circumstances did they have a defining ethnic experience on the American landscape.”
Stories of the past might be whitewashed, rewritten, or replaced in official spaces, but people’s consciousness of the past can’t be stripped away.
Melita Garza, Associate Professor and Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism
Melita Garza’s mother, Linda Rosa Caballero Hinojosa de Garza, circa 1940s.
In this Newsweek opinion piece, Melita Garza, associate professor and Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism, combines a Mother’s Day remembrance with a call to use oral history to preserve the lived experiences of events that some want to see removed from museums, books, and other official histories.
“In drawing on these personal recollections, I hope to make the case that listening to our mothers and recording their stories is a way to honor them that will endure long after the flowers have wilted, the perfume faded, and the chocolate box recycled. I say this not just as a daughter, but also as a media historian who spent more than 20 years as a reporter telling the stories of others in the Milwaukee Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Bloomberg News,” Garza said.
Former Page 1 and planning editor for Milwaukee Journal, creator and publisher of American Journalism Review / NewsLink website and independent strategic planning consultant to more than 350 news organizations worldwide. Current editor and publisher of three weekly newspapers in Kansas, including Marion County Record, which won a record 45 awards and was named the state’s best mid-size non-daily for both news and advertising in 2018. Former Pulitzer nominee for coverage of computer hackers. Five times honored for directing teams of students in producing multimedia projects named best in the nation.
Member and subcommittee chair for Senate Committee on Educational Policy and campus Council on Learning Outcome Assessment. Member, Senate Admissions Committee. Chair, College of Media Courses and Curricula Committee. Former associate dean for academic affairs and administration.
Research and Creative Endeavor
Continued work as a professional journalist focuses on exploring and showcasing enterprising content selection and presentation strategies that increase rates of audience engagement and habituation and, therefore, marketability of news.
Get to know some of our College of Media students! Aaron Anastos is a Class of 2026 dual degree student majoring in journalism and anthropology.
What made you choose journalism at Illinois? My older siblings went to Illinois, so I was already familiar with the campus. I started off as an undeclared major but by getting involved in The Daily Illini and UI7 Newsroom, I started to realize how much I enjoyed storytelling. Illinois has such a strong journalism program that I ended up declaring my major in journalism.
What student organizations have you joined? Since my freshman year, I’ve been an opinions writer for The Daily Illini and a feature reporter for UI7 Newsroom. During my time at The Daily Illini, I served as assistant opinions editor from 2023-2024. In the UI7 Newsroom, I have my own segment called, “Aaron Anywhere.” If you get involved, you slowly start to get to know everybody and build connections.
What classes have you enjoyed the most? I was lucky enough to take JOUR 205: History of American Journalism with Stephanie Craft, professor of journalism and associate dean for academic affairs, my freshman year. Dr. Craft is a very passionate professor and has a great knowledge of journalism. It gave me a really deep appreciation for the course. Another class that stands out is JOUR 217: Content Producing for UI7. It was like a boot camp for broadcasters and in that class, I learned I wanted to get involved with journalism. It also helped me make friendships that I still have today.
You were awarded the Ebert Fellow role for 2024-2025. What has this experience been like? I get the opportunity to work with Michael Phillips, a film critic for the Chicago Tribune. He mentors us on writing different pieces, such as film reviews and film criticisms. We get feedback from him and get different experiences within the film industry. We recently went to the True/False Film Festival to cover the event, and it was a really cool experience. We also hold screenings every month, curating certain films through the Ebert Center. The most recent one we did was Dog Day Afternoon.
Do you have any advice for incoming College of Media students? Do not be afraid to get involved and get out of your comfort zone. Some of the most impactful experiences I’ve had in journalism have been ones that have gotten me completely out of my comfort zone. Also, know that we have a very tight-knit community in journalism. We all have each other’s backs.
