A $150,000 endowment to strengthen understanding of international reporting has been received by the Michigan Journalism Fellows Program, a gift from the Pryor Foundation of Ann Arbor.
Income from the gift will be used to bring in seminar speakers, sponsor travel and provide material for the fellows, who come to the University for sabbatical study from news organizations across the country.
“The Pryor Foundation gift will let us focus on world reporting in new ways,” says program director Charles R. Eisendrath. “It will add a major dimension to the fellows’ experience here.”
The Mary S. Pryor Fund for Foreign Correspondence honors the late Mrs. Millard Pryor, a pioneer woman journalist who, fresh out of the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1929, worked her way around the world as a reporter and editor. Beginning with the Honolulu Advertiser, her odyssey included the Shanghai Evening Post and the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Earnings from those jobs supplemented her freelance income from such papers as the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Sun, enabling her to complete her trip in 1931.
Mrs. Pryor, a lifelong avid follower of foreign news, visited the Journalism Fellows Program regularly with her husband, a retired manufacturer.
