Our Professional Labs
Saluki AdLab
The Saluki AdLab is a student-run advertising agency. The AdLab works with local, regional and national clients, as well as university departments and organizations. The AdLab attracts students from various majors: advertising, marketing, graphic design, cinema and production, photography, public relations and more. Students can join the AdLab for experience and for course credit. It is a required class for advertising majors. Over the years, the AdLab has created an empowering culture where students apply what they learn in the classroom. Guided by a faculty advisor, the students are responsible for all client work, as well as pitching new business. Students produce and run campaigns for real clients and build a professional portfolio before they graduate. Advertising is changing at the speed of technology, and our students get the opportunity to not just learn about these technologies but use them for real-world campaign development.
The AdLab students also create bonds with each other that last long after graduation. Our AdLab alumni are actively involved in mentoring and helping new graduates navigate the professional ad world. Each year, AdLab students travel to New York City to attend the AAF Student Career Conference, where they also get to connect with our alums who work at agencies and media companies in New York. And like all creative environments we have plenty of pizza, drinks and snacks to keep us going when the going gets tough.
The Daily Egyptian (DE)
The Daily Egyptian is a student-run, student produced newspaper, website and social media group. Students can start as early as their first year as reporters, photographers, designers, ad sales reps and social media producers.
The DE published its first newspaper in 1916 and began a digital version in 2018. The online version won the National Scholastic Press Association’s OnLine Pace Maker award three years in a row. The newspaper swept their division with 42 awards at the Illinois College Press Awards in 2024. The DE is one of the largest employers of student workers on campus with many staff members coming from outside of the journalism major.
Saluki Sportsview
A student produced television program that is broadcast on WSIU-TV.
The show is produced in JRNL 455 Producing the Sports Talk Show. The program has interviews with coaches, athletes and trainers.
Spring 2024 Saluki Sportsview took first place for Outstanding Sports Program in the Illinois Broadcast Association.
The Saluki Local Reporting Lab
The Saluki Local Reporting Lab, a special project of the SIU School of Journalism and Advertising headed by assistant professors Molly Parker-Stephens and Julia Rendleman, is designed to give students from diverse backgrounds practical reporting experience while providing news coverage to underserved communities, a service that directly aligns with SIU’s core mission.
The Lab has a threefold mission: 1) to provide critical journalism to communities that are news deserts, or at risk of becoming one, in downstate Illinois. 2) to elevate local issues to national prominence through powerful storytelling that illustrates the effects of state and federal policies on rural communities and small towns; and 3) to give students from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to engage in reporting and research alongside their professors, both accomplished media professionals, as well as other reporters and editors working for regional and national news outlets who will partner with the Lab.
Pulitizer Center
SIUC is a founding member of the Pulitzer Center's Campus Consortium of 40 universities that send students on reporting fellowships around the world.
Since 2010, SIUC students have traveled abroad and around the United States to produce stories about government feeding programs, women in the military in Ukraine, education on Native American reservations in the U.S., contested elections in Kenya, treatment of LGBTQ immigrants crossing the border from Mexico to Texas, the impact of the hurricane on Puerto Rico, education in El Salvador and Peru, a centuries-old village in Nepal threatened by a hydroelectric project, teen pregnancy in the Dominican Republic, skin-whitening in the Caribbean and Africa.
View Student Journalist Profiles and See Past Works
In addition to students reporting on stories abroad, the program brings well-known journalists to campus, including our own graduates Jackie Spinner and Evan Osnos. The students who have participated in the Pulitzer program are among the most successful that the school has produced. In recent years, the Pulitzer Center has helped fund two award-winning projects that involved students and faculty - The 1857 Project, a retelling of race, slavery and segregation in Missouri and Illinois, and Legal Roadblocks to Police Accountability.
Project
Steve Matzker and Jennifer Gonzalez
