ASU grad receives Bolles fellowship

Gardner is part of team investigating hate crime

Kianna Gardner, a graduate of Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, received the 2018 Don Bolles/Arizona News21 Fellowship.

In its second year, the fellowship was created in honor of Bolles, a

investigative reporter who was mortally wounded in a car explosion more than 40 years ago.

Bolles was meeting a source at the Hotel Clarendon in Phoenix on June 2, 1976. When the source didn’t show, Bolles headed back to his white Datsun parked outside. As he backed out, six sticks of dynamite placed under the car exploded.

He died 11 days later. He was 47. At the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the distended Datsun is the centerpiece of an exhibit exploring violence against journalists around the world.

Bolles’ investigative spirit lives on with the fellowship.

provides a $12,500-ayear stipend to cover travel and other expenses for a senior or graduate student to participate in the full-time fellowship.

Gardner, 25, is a Spokane, Washington, native who studied at the University of Arizona before earning her master’s from ASU.

After graduating in December, she decided to stay in Phoenix for the News21 fellowship, which brings together a few dozen young journalists from across the country to create an investigative, multimedia reporting project on a national issue. This year’s project covers hate crime in America.

Some fellows get scholarships from their schools; some are supported by newspapers and other organizations.

We caught up with Gardner to talk about her reporting this summer, what the Don Bolles Fellowship means to her and what the future looks like.

Question: Tell us about the News21 project. When did you begin working on it, and where has your reporting been focused?

Answer: Our fellowship began in January of this year. The topic we’ve chosen is basically taking a look at hate groups and hate crimes in the U.S. and how that has led to a far-right, farleft, very obvious divide. We’re doing investigative work all over the country. From January through April, it was primarily us meeting with our editors a couple times a week and we were doing a lot of the legwork, the research and so forth. Come April, when we were all finished with our semester, everyone gathered here in Phoenix, and we began doing the traveling and reporting portion, which is what we’ve now been doing for the last two months. We’re scheduled to finish this in the first week of August.

Q: Do you split off into groups, or are you each doing your own story?

A: In January, we were split into individual states to research. And based on memos we’d turn in to our editors, we were then split off into groups. For example, if a lot of your research revolved around anti-Latino or anti-Hispanic incidents in Arizona, then you’d probably be put on a team that focused on antiLatino sentiment across the U.S.

Q: You are traveling the country for this project; where did your reporting take you and your team?

A: I’m a part of a couple of groups. I’m on a team doing a lot of research into indigenous hate crimes, and that group spent a lot of time up in North Dakota and Montana. And then I’m on another group looking at how far-right individuals were part of the hate movement in the U.S. and how they operate online. I went to Nebraska, and then I went to Charlottesville, Virginia — it’s coming up on the one-year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” rally.

Q: What does it mean for you to be working in the memory of Don Bolles?

A: It’s huge. Jacquee Petchel, who was with for a while, is now my editor, and to hear that I’m working as a Don Bolles fellow, someone who even inspired her to get into investigative journalism, it’s huge. We all want to be a part of something big early on in our careers, and this has been an opportunity for that.

Q: Where do you hope your career takes you?

A: Prior to News21, a lot of my work involved environmental stories, so at Cronkite News, I produced a lot of enterprise pieces on sustainability. I was able to go on trips to do reporting in other countries on environmental issues. So I’d like to get back to that. Much of my work right now for News21 is datadriven. I think data is sort of the backbone of journalism, and I think I’d like to continue doing a lot of work within that realm, whether it’s data-gathering, data-scraping or research or visualization.