Biz journalism organization to fund Medill scholarship

The American Society of Business Publication Editors Foundation has launched a $5,000 annual college scholarship program to encourage graduate students to study business journalism.

The ASBPE Foundation will offer the scholarship to one student a year at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

ASBPE, a 2,000-member organization of trade-publication editors and others in the business-to-business publishing field, is based at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.

It intends the Medill scholarship to be the first in a planned series of ASBPE Foundation grants to students at other journalism schools as well.

The first $5,000 ASBPE Foundation Business Journalism Scholarship is expected to be awarded in the 2018-19 academic year to a Medill graduate student to be selected by the school.

Medill — one of the nation’s leading journalism schools — offers a one-year course of study that results in a Master of Science in Journalism degree. Courses are taught at Northwestern’s Evanston, Ill., and Chicago campuses, as well as in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Foundation president Amy Fischbach and immediate past president Roy Harris say that their organization had long supported the idea of business-journalism education. Together with two of ASBPE’s Lifetime Achievement Award winners, the foundation was finally able to turn its dream into a reality.

A generous donation from the awardees and ASBPE to Northwestern created the scholarship for the University to award to a Medill student.