August 28, 1998
Washington, D.C. — The Hispanic Link Journalism Foundation has awarded two $20,000 reporting fellowships for 1998-99. The recipients are Ronald Sal Panuco of Norwalk, Calif., and Vanessa Colón of Inglewood, Calif.
They will work for 12 months as capital and national correspondents at Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C., covering issues that impact the Hispanic community nationwide.
Both are May college graduates. They were selected in a national competition from a field of 20 finalists. Winners are chosen based on their writing potential, analytical abilities, need, and commitment to journalism as a career.
The Washington, D.C.-based Hispanic Link Journalism Foundation, established in 1995, was founded to develop innovative approaches for providing educational and professional opportunities for Hispanics desiring to pursue careers in communications.
"The Foundation established the reporting fellowship program as one way to help bring parity to the nation's newsrooms and ensure more balanced coverage of Hispanics," said HLJF executive director Héctor Ericksen-Mendoza.
Panuco, 27, a graduate of the University of Southern California with a major in East Asian Studies, was raised in multiracial neighborhoods in the Norwalk/Cerritos area of Southern California.
He began writing for his high school newspaper and, while attending Cerritos College, won a 1992 honorable mention award from the state's Journalism Association of Community Colleges for a first-person column he wrote on the South Los Angeles riots. It described how an Asian friend became involved in the disorder while accompanying him as an observer. Similarities Panuco found between the family-centered Asian and Latino cultures motivated him to travel to Korea on his own for several months during his college years to study the country's language and culture.
Vanessa Colón, 25, received her bachelor's degree in English in 1995 from the University of California at Los Angeles. She recently completed her course work for a master of arts degree in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, with a minor in Latin American studies.
Her initial interest in journalism came during her last year at UCLA, where she had served for three years as an officer with the Raza Women's Organization.
"My first interest was fiction writing. But when I saw that Latinas lacked a voice, I saw journalism as a vehicle to contribute something to the community," she says. She began writing for the student publication La Gente there, and at the University of Texas at Austin was a staff writer for the award-winning Tejas Magazine.
While Colón aspires to a career as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer, she also hopes to create programs to encourage and assist students to develop a love and skill for writing.
Hispanic Link News Service publishes the news-weekly Hispanic Link Weekly Report and provides opinion, editorial and feature columns to a national audience. The columns are syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and are carried by some 60 newspapers in English and/or Spanish.
Using Washington, D.C., as a "classroom," Hispanic Link Journalism Foundation provides educational and professional enhancement and training, with emphasis on using resources in the nation's capital and incorporating new technologies in journalistic pursuits. The Foundation also provides work-study fellowships.
Return
to Homepage