(DePaul University/Randall Spriggs)Rachel Hinton, a 2017 DePaul graduate, is joining the College of Communication’s Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence as its newest fellow. It is a full-circle moment for Hinton, a Joliet native, who was in the first Advanced Reporting class taught by center directors Carol Marin and Don Moseley.
Hinton now helps guide students entering the field of journalism and lends her expertise to the center’s activities outside the classroom, including the annual Freedom of Information Act two-day seminar.
Rachel Hinton, a 2017 DePaul University graduate, is joining the College of Communication’s Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence as its newest Fellow. (Courtesy of BGA)As a student, Hinton was the managing editor of The DePaulia newspaper. Upon graduation, she joined the Chicago Sun-Times, quickly becoming the paper’s chief political reporter. In January 2022, Hinton joined the Better Government Association as an enterprise reporter. She will continue in that role in addition to her work at DePaul.
“Rachel has a quiet relentlessness about her,” says Carol Marin, co-director of the center. “She studies, she listens, she digs for information and then reports on the things government often does not easily share. She is a fine, fine reporter.”
Hinton joins Dan Sinker and Ben Welsh as CJIE Fellows. A 2004 DePaul graduate, Welsh is on sabbatical from the Los Angeles Times, where he is the editor of the Data and Graphics Department. Welsh was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Times for the 2015 coverage of a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. He is currently finishing a fellowship at Stanford University.
Sinker is a nationally recognized writer, editor and thinker whose work is regularly published in The Atlantic, Esquire and The New York Times. All three fellows will participate in Marin and Moseley’s advanced reporting class.
“Our students -- and DePaul -- are so lucky to have Dan, Ben and now Rachel as guideposts in this turbulent time in journalism. They help chart the way as students become graduates and graduates become working journalists,” Moseley says.
The DePaul Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence was founded in 2016 and brings nationally recognized reporters, writers, producers and photojournalists to campus, most recently Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes who received CJIE’s 2022 Distinguished Journalist award. Other recipients include NBC’s Lester Holt, The New York Times’ Dean Baquet, CBS’s Jane Pauley and ABC7’s Ron Magers.