Jon Fortt | Alumni

A Good Fit

It was the Media Fellows Program that drew me to DePauw.  I also wanted to experience an environment different from the urban ones that had always been home for me – mostly Brooklyn and Washington D.C.

Summer internships at newspapers led to a post-college job at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. I was flailing that first year, and I thought I'd bail out of journalism because local news felt like a poor fit. But the paper’s technology reporter quit, and I was in the right place at the right time. At The DePauw, I’d been part of the early efforts to get online, as we built the paper’s first website. Reporting on technology was the right challenge.

I got to DePauw as a student interested in newspapers and a bunch of other things. DePauw was a great laboratory environment for life – socially, professionally. I learned how to talk to people, how to explore ideas. And that’s been at the center of everything I’ve done since.