Philip Rucker, a senior Washington correspondent at The Washington Post, will present “Lessons from Reporting in the Age of Trump” during the virtual 2021 Ann Devroy Memorial Forum at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
The forum will begin at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 15, via Zoom. The event is free and open to the public.
Rucker previously served as White House bureau chief, leading the Post’s coverage of President Trump and his administration. He and a team of Post reporters won the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award for their reporting on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Rucker also was awarded the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for distinguished reporting on the presidency.
Rucker is co-author of “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and serves as an on-air political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
A graduate of Yale University, Rucker joined the Post in 2005 as a local news reporter and previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns.
About the Devroy event
Ann Devroy, who graduated from UW-Eau Claire in 1970 with a degree in journalism, often is described as one of the best journalists to ever cover the White House.
After she died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 49, her family and colleagues at The Washington Post wanted to honor her memory. Since she often served as a mentor to other journalists, those who knew her well decided the best way to do that was to give young journalists a chance to follow in her footsteps.
In 1998, they established the Ann Devroy Memorial Forum and Ann Devroy Memorial Fellowship program at UW-Eau Claire, where the Green Bay native got her start.
Every spring, the Devroy forum features a prominent national journalist. In the years before COVID-19, the journalist would come to UW-Eau Claire to interact with journalism students and to speak at the Devroy Forum. The 2020 forum was canceled because of the pandemic.
Rucker will interact with journalism students during the day on April 15 before speaking during the evening event.
Each year during the forum, the winner of the Ann Devroy Memorial Fellowship is announced. The fellowship, awarded to an outstanding UW-Eau Claire journalism student, includes a scholarship and a three-week fellowship at The Washington Post, and eligibility to apply for a paid summer internship at a Wisconsin daily newspaper.
