SHS Oral History Program announces the release of the JSK Voices Oral History Project
The Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program is happy to announce that 18 interviews conducted for the JSK Voices Oral History Project are now available for public access on the society’s digital exhibits website. Clips from selected interviews can be viewed here.
The interviews capture the background, career highlights, and fellowship year experiences of journalists who came to Stanford as John S. Knight Journalism Fellows. The JSK Fellowships support journalists from around the world who are creating solutions to the field’s most urgent problems. During a 9-month residency at Stanford, fellows benefit from individual coaching, access to Stanford experts and resources, tailored workshops, and peer-to-peer learning opportunities that help them effectively lead and navigate change. Since the program’s beginning in 1966, through its endowment by the Knight Foundation in 1984, to today, over 1,000 journalists from more than 80 countries have been JSK fellows.
The collection features personal stories that range from the challenges and trauma of being a war correspondent to the joy of having a year to learn and discover new ideas as a fellow. Project coordinators Krista Almazan (JSK Fellow 2020) and Jim Colgan (JSK Fellow 2020), and JSK Director Dawn Garcia (JSK Fellow 1992) conceived of the project as a way to connect fellows across the generations and build community. At the JSK Alumni Reunion, held at Stanford in July 2023, selected fellows who didn’t know each other well were paired together based on shared fields or experiences. The pairs interviewed each other in a special constructed sound booth, making for fascinating, often cross-generational, conversations.
At a JSK fellow event and celebration of the project held in May 2025 at McClatchy Hall, current and former fellows listened to excerpts from the interviews and discussed them in small groups. Oral HIstory Program Manager was on hand to cheer on the group and celebrate the project’s community building possibilities. “I am a true believer in the power of listening to one another’s stories and the transformative possibilities for understanding that can reside in the special space of the oral history interview, a space of reflection and encounter that is perhaps different from other types of interviews,” she said in brief welcoming remarks. At OHP, “Our vision is a truly multi-perspectival oral history archive, built by the community, that documents the many lived experiences that play out at and connect to this amazing research university…To have a whole room full of journalists collaborating to make an oral history project happen was just a dream come true!”
