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| Cassidy McDonald photo from Notre Dame News |
Cassidy McDonald ’13, a junior at University of Notre Dame, will be going on assignment with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kristof from the
New York Times. As this year’s winner of Kristof’s annual “Win A Trip with Nick” contest, Cassidy’s prize is to travel this summer with the
NYT columnist to a
developing country to raise awareness about neglected global issues.
During the trip, she will report for a blog and may appear in videos
that will be published on the
Times website.
At Notre Dame, Cassidy is majoring in marketing, with a minor in the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics and Democracy. She is managing editor and writer for
Scholastic, the University’s monthly student news magazine. Cassidy also serves as a student video assistant and co-hosts the program
ND Top Ten for Fighting Irish Media (
FIM) in the University’s athletics department.
During the fall of 2015, Cassidy worked in Washington, D.C., as an intern for the
60 Minutes television program, creating research reports on Russian
military weapons, gun death statistics, nuclear capabilities of Middle
Eastern countries and more. She also managed a shoot in West Virginia
and worked to fact-check the show’s scripts.
Of this most recent honor, Cassidy says, “I’m incredibly honored by the opportunity to travel alongside Mr.
Kristof; his reporting is my favorite example of journalism as a force
for good. He reports on the world’s most marginalized people, but his
work doesn’t discourage—it inspires.”
Read the full
Notre Dame News story and view Cassidy’s
application video for the trip accompanied by her attention-grabbing written entry that opens:
I once went viral when I wrote a story about cheese.
…The assignment wasn’t the hardest-hitting piece I’d done, but I
decided to have fun with it: “Wisconsin cheesemakers found their whey
Friday at the American Cheese Society Competition in Providence, Rhode
Island, where they did better than gouda – they did grate.”
