People

September 7, 2000

Zita Arocha to head journalism project

HispanicVista.com

ARLINGTON, Va. — Veteran journalist Zita Arocha has been named training coordinator for The Freedom Forums Chips Quinn Scholars Program, which provides training, financial assistance and mentoring to young minority journalists.

“The Chips Quinn Scholars Program is a key component of our efforts to help daily newspaper newsrooms diversify their staffs. So we are especially delighted to have Zita — with her experience as a bilingual journalist, as a teacher and as a leader of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists — focusing full time on the professional development of our scholars,” said Charles L. Overby, chairman and chief executive officer of The Freedom Forum.

In her new role, Arocha will develop training programs for three classes of Chips Quinn Scholars each year and work with the newspapers where scholars are interning. She also will coordinate professional development opportunities for alumni of the program, including online learning through the scholars’ Web site www.chipsquinn.org. The program, which began with six scholars in 1991, has trained more than 500 young minority journalists.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Arocha is a former reporter for The
Washington Post, Miami News, The Miami Herald and its
Spanish-language edition, El Nuevo Herald, and The Tampa Times. As a free-lance journalist, she specialized in education, immigration and Hispanic affairs, writing for such publications as HispanicVista.com, USA TODAY, The Los Angeles Times, Congressional Quarterly, Hispanic magazine and others.

She has won several awards for her writing, including a Public Service Award from the Florida Press Association for a five-part series on migrant labor in Florida. To develop the series, Arocha lived in a migrant labor camp and worked in the fields picking vegetables.

From 1994 to 1996, Arocha was executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For the 1999-2000 school year, she was a Freedom Forum Journalism Fellow at the University of Texas El Paso. While there, she taught and lectured on journalism and writing on border issues and organized a conference on media coverage of the U.S.-Mexico border. Arocha holds a masters degree in English and comparative literature from the University of South Florida.