About America’s Weed Rush

“America’s Weed Rush,” an investigation of marijuana legalization, is the 2015 project of the Carnegie-Knight News21 program, a national multimedia, investigative reporting project produced by the nation’s top journalism students and graduates. Each year, students selected into the program report in-depth on a topic of national importance.

This year, 28 journalism students from 19 universities are traveling nationwide to examine the political and cultural divide between those who support marijuana legalization, and those who oppose it.

The fellows are conducting hundreds of interviews, reviewing thousands of pages of state statutes and other records and are building databases and data visualizations documenting the issues surrounding marijuana legalization.

The student work began in January 2015 with a video-conferenced seminar that included reporting and research. In May, they began the 10-week investigative reporting fellowship based out of a newsroom at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University’s downtown Phoenix campus.

News21 is supported by grants from the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as well as The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Hearst Foundations, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, the Peter Kiewit Foundation of Omaha, Nebraska., and Women & Philanthropy, part of ASU’s Foundation for a New American University.

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