"Politics at 30,000 Feet: A Reporter's View of the 2004 Election from the Back of the Campaign Plane" will be the topic of a presentation by Jodi Wilgoren (pictured at left), Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 9 at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

The event in the University Center Alumni Room is open to the public without charge. It is sponsored by the American Democracy Project (ADP), a civic engagement collaboration between The New York Times and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). More than 1,000 UWSP students and faculty are participating in this project and related civic engagement activities. Undergraduates enrolled at AASCU institutions, of which UWSP is one, take part in a myriad of programs through ADP to increase rates of civic participation at all levels of society.

Wilgoren was one of the newspaper's principal reporters covering the 2004 presidential election, traveling with Howard Dean through the Democratic primaries and then with the Democratic nominee, John Kerry. She wrote profiles of Dean's wife and Kerry's aide-de-camp, covered both parties' conventions, and wrote more than 200 news and feature stories from the campaign trail.

Wilgoren came to The Times in 1998 as a general assignment reporter for the Metropolitan section, then spent two years as National Education Correspondent, based in New York, before taking the post in Chicago in 2001.

As bureau chief, Wilgoren leads the paper's coverage of 11 Midwestern states, and has recently written front-page articles about a 10-year-old girl in small-town Indiana who was abducted and killed, apparently because she saw people making methamphetamine; states grappling with the question of whether free poker tournaments are legal; and Americans' search for relatives lost in the tsunami. Before the campaign, she wrote about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, particularly in the Arab-American community; the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church; political campaigns in several states; and a wide range of feature stories including pieces on the rise in small-town bank robberies and the shortage of dentists in rural areas.

An award-winning reporter with The Los Angeles Times (LAT) from 1992 until 1998, Wilgoren worked in its Washington, D.C. bureau, in its Los Angeles City Hall bureau, and for its Orange County Edition, where she covered Newport Beach, education and the Orange County bankruptcy. Wilgoren was previously an intern at The Chicago Tribune in 1991, a stringer at The Boston Globe from 1990 until 1991 and an intern at The Middlesex News in 1990.

Wilgoren received the LAT editorial award for deadline writing, the Orange County Press Club award for investigative reporting, the California Teachers Association Award and the International Reading Association print media award. Born in 1970, she received a B.A. from Yale University in history in 1992. She also serves on the board of the Oldest College Daily Foundation, which publishes the Yale Daily News, and as a mentor to recipients of The New York Times College Scholarships.

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sclanton/vc/NYT reporter