After being on a seven-year hiatus, the Creighton Backpack Journalism Program is officially returning in the summer of 2026. This traveling undergraduate student program, centered around the creation of a student-faculty collaborated documentary, is currently in the process of planning with a few alterations and a brand-new destination.
“It’ll definitely be different…But what we hope is similar is that we’re able to tell a story that’s unique and powerful, if we’re lucky, and informative about an issue that hasn’t really gotten enough attention or maybe is getting attention that way,” Tim Guthrie, MFA, a professor in design and film and the Joella Cohen Endowed Chair, said.
Prior to the pandemic, the original faculty team was comprised of three professors. Guthrie was joined by John O’Keefe, Ph.D., who served as the Chair of Creighton University’s Theology Department and Carol Zuegner, Ph.D., who served as the associate professor of journalism and the previous Joella Cohen Endowed Chair. However, with O’Keefe joining Xavier University’s faculty in 2023 and Zuegner retiring in 2024, Guthrie aimed to restructure the team in a manner that would no longer become dependent on a select few but become adaptable with a larger group of educators. Associate Professor of History Adam Sundberg, Ph.D., is one of the newest Creighton professors that have joined the team.
“The main change will be that it’s not so tied to a few people that it will grow in a way that more departments, more faculty members, more areas of expertise will be involved in it,” Guthrie said. “So, it’ll be one or two people that are kind of the backbone of it. And then other people that are rotating in and out of it. That’s a very different structure than what we were doing before.”
Another prospected change to the program is the angle of the documentary. According to Creighton University’s Department of Computer Science, Design and Journalism (CSDJ), the goal of the program was to create documentaries that showcased communities that were living on the margins in other countries with some also connecting their topics to theological concepts. However, according to Guthrie, the program will now be looking at the possibility of exploring other topics of justice as well.
“Now we don’t have somebody in theology there, so…we’re still going to think environmental justice and social justice and all of those things. But the stories might be slightly more varied, because we’ll be using so many different…professors and their expertise,” Guthrie said.
Additionally, topics are not solidified prior to meeting prospective students during the planning process due to the importance of student collaboration and input highlighted within the program.
“We’re trying to make sure we’ve got a good location, a good story and everything for the students. But once we start meeting with students, we want to make sure they have input on what the story is. So, we’re not going to just hand a story to them and say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing.’ We’re going to say, ‘Here’s our options,’” Guthrie said.
Faculty members project the documentary to be conducted in Hawaii. There were many factors that made the 50th state the ideal destination to conduct the documentary for the return of the program, from the ease of travel and its unique culture and history, to the connections Creighton has cultivated with the community of Hawaii.
“As a Creighton community we have so many connections to Hawaii. And that can, in my view, only be a benefit because there’s plenty of faculty and lots and lots of students who we might be able to turn to. Also, there’s so much familiarity that might aid with logistics,” Sundberg said.
Participants of the program have traveled domestically to Alaska and Arizona and internationally to Uganda and the Dominican Republic with each reporting on a different topic unique to their location. However, according to Scott Prewitt, who graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and participated in the Backpack Journalism Program in the summer of 2014, his experience with traveling domestically rather than internationally did not pose a disadvantage towards his experiences in the program.
“I think no matter where you go, I trust the faculty to find good stories and find meaningful stories. And that’s really the more impactful thing than the destination, I think, is the experience and the storytelling and the community and all of that stuff,” Prewitt said.
Prewitt traveled with other students and faculty to Bethel Alaska where they documented the effects of climate change on the indigenous community that inhabited the area and how that traversed into a theological component.
“Out in far rural Alaska, especially out in western Alaska, it’s about 70% Indigenous population out there, and they still lead a very subsistence-based lifestyle. But at the time, the state of Alaska was enforcing pretty strict limits on salmon fishing. And salmon fishing was an integral part of their society and their culture and their subsistence lifestyle, going back generations and generations. And we wanted to kind of cover that story…and see what happened. But what we ended up really exploring…the effects of climate change on vulnerable populations and indigenous populations and how that intersects with faith-based worldviews and kind of cosmic universal ideology,” Prewitt said.
In tangent, according to Guthrie, one of the greatest takeaways from the program is the students experience, specifically the changed perspectives they may acquire when indulging in the documentary’s topic. For Prewitt, his participation in the program changed his perspective on climate change compared to when he left the continental United States.
“I was raised in a household that told me that climate change was a hoax made up to destroy the American economy…And so [it was important] breaking out of that bubble and seeing it firsthand and seeing what was happening,” Prewitt said. “And even part of the trip was we hiked up to a glacier and on the drive into the National Park, you would see markers where the glacier was every year…And as you got closer and closer, the shrinking of the glacier you could see by each signpost got faster and faster and faster. So, we had to hike up and got up to see where the glacier actually was. And it looked like a dying organism. It didn’t look like just a hunk of ice. It looked like a living thing that was dying. And that really, really kind of sent it home for me how important this issue is.”
So, with the program projected to be officially announced in the coming months, Prewitt recommends for undergraduate students to take advantage of this opportunity.
“I did so many cool things. And I can say confidently, without question, that backpack journalism was my favorite and the most impactful thing that I did in my entire four years there,” Prewitt said. “So, no matter your degree program interest, whatever you’re doing, I think it’s just a very meaningful and profound experience that anybody can get something out of. And I cannot recommend it enough. It’s amazing.”