Photo courtesy of St. Bonaventure University Delaney Chase has been selected to participate in a 10-week Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowship that will allow her to work with top journalism students from across the country.

An Eisenhower graduate currently studying at St. Bonaventure University has been awarded a summer fellowship where she will spend 10 weeks working with top journalism students from across the country.

Delaney Chase was awarded the Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowship where she’ll be reporting on “Democracy in Crisis.”

The program will run 10 weeks and is headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

“My idea of a successful internship is taking advantage of every possible opportunity and learning as much as possible,” Chase told the Times Observer. “I am so grateful that I will spend the summer not only working with a diverse group of professors, professionals and students but also doing the thing that I am passionate about.

“In the News21 program, students are working in print, photography and audio. My main focus will be on writing and reporting but I would love to learn about all media forms available to me. Maybe I will find myself really enjoying a new form of journalism I had not considered before or at the very least I will learn something that could possibly be beneficial to my future career.”

This marks the ninth year in a row that a St. Bonaventure student has been chosen.

“Delaney follows a long line of star Jandoli School students in the News21 program,” Aaron Chimbel, dean of the Jandoli School of Communication at SBU, said. “I am confident she will thrive doing this important journalism and come back to St. Bonaventure with a wealth of experiences to share with her classmates.”

Chase has been writing as a reporter for the TAPinto Greater Olean news site and is co-campus coordinator for the SBU chapter of the online magazine Her Campus.

“I really like reporting and talking with people. I’m getting a lot of experience talking to local people and telling their stories,” she said. “Before I thought a small town was a disadvantage, but it has ended up being an advantage.”

Her work with Her Campus has also provided an “avenue with women who love to write” which “is really good.”

Situated amid a presidential election cycle, Chase expects they’ll be talking with election officials and volunteers and also investigate the use of artificial intelligence in the elections process.

They’ve discussed the reaction and reception they might get as the cultural temperature around the election increases throughout the summer.

“Through our weekly classes, we have discussed the possible mood we may receive with expert panels of both the political and journalistic variety,” Chase said. “The optimistic outlook would be that people are open and willing to engage in conversation and interviews and be as helpful as possible.

“However, we have also discussed the possibility that this may not be the case. The best we can simply do is tell the truth, speak with facts and do so in an articulate manner.”

She’s not sure whether this will be the start of a career in the political reporting space.

“Political reporting is something I recently started to consider after deciding on a political science minor and being accepted into the News21 program,” Chase said. “So far, I have enjoyed the process of working on such a long-form type of journalism and diving into something as expansive but also as important as the 2024 election.

“I don’t have an exact vision yet of what I see myself doing in the future, but I am hoping this experience will help me decide if a career in political reporting is right for me.”