James Madison College junior Alex Walters has received the 2025 David W. Miller Award for Young Journalists from The Chronicle of Higher Education. The $3,000 prize recognizes outstanding work by a Chronicle intern.
Walters, who serves as a senior reporter at The State News, is majoring in social relations and policy and journalism at MSU. He distinguished himself through his long-form investigative reporting during an internship with The Chronicle last summer.
“Alex’s journalistic chops were as sophisticated as many of The Chronicle’s professional reporters,” said editor Sarah Brown in a news release.
Chronicle staff encouraged Walters to apply for the publication’s annual summer internship program after reading his reporting online. The experience offered him the opportunity to build on previous work in higher education reporting and hone his skills in investigative journalism.
What began as a straightforward daily assignment evolved into a month-long investigative piece examining the complex case of a Louisiana State University at Shreveport professor who believed he was fired for calling out wrongdoing. Walters meticulously reviewed documents, emails and audio recordings to present a nuanced story that explored the boundaries between academic freedom and alleged faculty misconduct.
“Every day my editor was like, ‘okay just do more, do more, do more,’” Walters recalled. “I don’t know how many places would trust an intern to spend that much time on such an ambitious project.”
His feature story became one of The Chronicle’s most-read pieces of the year, generating significant reader engagement.
Walters credits his education at JMC for developing skills crucial to his reporting.
v“I think a lot of what you learn in JMC is reading something really complicated and dense and then trying to make sense of it in a way that’s conversational,” Walters explained. “That is very analogous to what I’ve done in reporting. Everything I do is trying to learn as much as I can about something really complicated and then distilling it into something that’s simple enough that anybody can read and understand.”
This approach served him well on another significant story about George Mason University’s Board of Visitors under Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. What began as a tip evolved into a revealing piece about gubernatorial interference in university governance that was later cited by national outlets including the Washington Post and Axios.
Walters, who has already received recognition as the Michigan Press Association’s top college journalist of 2023 and won the Education Writers Association’s student journalism award, continues to apply the lessons learned at The Chronicle to his work at The State News, where he focuses on longform stories and hosts a weekly podcast.