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A recent alumna whose undergraduate years were dominated by the pandemic has won the 2023 David W. Miller Award for Young Journalists. The $3,000 prize, which honors the top reporting intern in the Chronicle newsroom from the preceding year, was awarded to Grace Mayer, The Chronicle said on Thursday.
Mayer, who grew up in Wausau, Wis., and now lives in Overland Park, Kan., graduated from Boston College in 2022. She majored in management, with a concentration in marketing and a minor in journalism, during what she describes as a “really difficult” and “really changed” undergraduate career after the pandemic struck, in her sophomore year.
The challenges have continued since she graduated, amid the economic problems facing the news industry, she said in an interview. Still, she hailed her stint as a Chronicle intern as a “very motivating” experience in a “positive environment.” Her long-term goal is to stay in journalism.
Mayer won the Miller Award on the basis of three articles she wrote during her internship this past fall. One article described how the pandemic had worsened working conditions for food-service employees at two colleges, and how that had led them to unionize. Another article, reported and written on a two-day deadline with Carolyn Kuimelis, another Chronicle intern, covered the impact of a strike by 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, researchers, and others across the 10-campus University of California system. And a third article analyzed the impending collision of transgender students’ rights, conservative states’ backlash against them, and the Biden administration’s forthcoming Title IX regulations.
The panel of judges who chose Mayer for the award applauded her ambition in those articles and her eloquent writing. The article on transgender students, for example, showed her command of their history of struggle but was also forward-looking in its analysis of the likely impact of the federal regulations, the judges said. All of her stories humanized what might have been dry reports on federal, state, or campus policies by including a multitude of voices, captured by someone who is clearly a great listener.
Mayer said in the interview that getting people to talk with her for the dining-worker story was a challenge, but in the end she built trust and felt honored that they were “so open about their experiences.” She added to the drama of the article by reconstructing campus events from videos she had obtained.
The purpose of the award is to extend the legacy of David W. Miller, a Chronicle senior writer who was killed by a drunken driver on his way home from a reporting trip to the Allied Social Science Associations’ annual meeting in 2002. Miller, who was 35, left a wife and two young sons, including an infant. One son is a recent college graduate, and the other is a college junior.
The award’s goal is to recognize interns whose work follows Miller’s own, which demonstrated a powerful curiosity about people and ideas, dedication to fairness, and passion for great writing.
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