{"id":3374,"date":"2016-05-27T15:46:53","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T19:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/?p=3374"},"modified":"2016-05-27T15:46:53","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T19:46:53","slug":"wichelns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/sp2016\/wichelns\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Wichelns &#8211; Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>Ryan Wichelns<\/h1>\n<div class=\"profilepic\">\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1303\/Wichelns-1.jpg\" alt=\"Wichelns\" width=\"215\" height=\"205\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3382\" \/>\n<\/div>\n<ul class=\"wholist\">\n<li><strong>Hometown:<\/strong> Saratoga Springs, NY<\/li>\n<li><strong>Major:<\/strong> Journalism<\/li>\n<li><strong>Graduation Year:<\/strong> 2016<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>University of Rhode Island senior and mountain climber Ryan Wichelns plans to change the way longform journalism is delivered to the masses, an ambition matched in scale only by the mountains he\u2019s summited. However, like the first peaks he reached early in his mountaineering career, Wichelns\u2019 journalism career goals weren\u2019t always as lofty as they are now, as he\u2019s set to receive his Bachelor\u2019s degree in journalism at Commencement on May 22. <\/p>\n<p>Wichelns always knew he wanted to get into journalism, but it was his life-changing decision to join the staff of the University\u2019s student newspaper, The Good 5-Cent Cigar, that helped formulate his desire to not just join the industry, but to redefine it. At the end of his sophomore year, his friend and editor-in-chief of The Cigar, Alli Farrelly, encouraged him to join the staff, and he knew immediately what he wanted to accomplish at the newspaper. <\/p>\n<p>His first mission was to redesign The Cigar\u2019s website, which hadn\u2019t changed much from its initial launch in 2001. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI made that my summer project so that it would be ready by September,\u201d Wichelns said. \u201cWe had no control of the website, it was constantly down, it was impossible to find anything and links were a total mess. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think we rejuvenated the paper and increased the reach on campus. Even though we weren\u2019t printing as many copies of the print edition, readership and participation from the student body went up.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Of course, redesigning the website and working with the staff of The Cigar only whetted Wichelns\u2019 appetite to take on his own projects. Though he\u2019s written freelance pieces for Outside Magazine, Backpacker Magazine and various other blogs and websites, Wichelns, of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., sees an opportunity to innovate and transform the delivery of compelling stories. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s more difficult today to have as much success doing the same old traditional journalism,\u201d he said. \u201cWriting is my favorite part of journalism, but combining the writing with multimedia on the web is such a cool way to tell stories, and it\u2019s not really being done on a wide scale yet. That\u2019s the direction I\u2019d like to take my career.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Of course, to tell a compelling story in journalism, one must first find it or experience it. Wichelns opted for the latter when he and a couple of friends decided to become the first climbers to make the Brooks-Silverthrone Traverse, a journey across five peaks higher than 11,000 feet in Denali National Park, Alaska. Wichelns recruited middle school buddies and fellow climbers Gabe Messercola and Geoff Lyman, along with Greg Zegas (a college friend of Messercola\u2019s), to form a climbing team. Wichelns and Messercolas \u2014 who have both hiked all 46 peaks higher than 4,000 feet in the Adirondacks \u2014 led the Alaskan expedition, with Lyman running base camp and Zegas serving as medical officer. <\/p>\n<p>The group spent three weeks hiking the north ridge of Mount Silverthrone north over the Tripyramids to Mount Brooks; An excruciating, exhilarating and exhausting journey of endurance, fortitude and soul searching. <\/p>\n<p>Wichelns knew this trek was about more than pushing his own limits as a climber or experiencing the majesty of Alaska\u2019s glaciers. He turned it into a senior project with the intention of documenting the journey through a field journal, photography, video, maps, graphs and animation, which he later culled into a spectacular longform multimedia piece for his website, AdirondackSherpa.net. <\/p>\n<p>The piece now serves as the foundation for his future ambitions. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI tried to make it so that someone like my parents, with no climbing experience, can read it and enjoy it, while creating a resource for other climbers looking for information about what it was really like up there in this climbing hotspot for which there is very little documentation,\u201d he said. \u201cObviously, the writing is a big part of the project, and I learned a lot about it here in the URI Journalism Department. I had gotten a lot of training and experience in journalism, and I had taken some video and editing courses that played a big part in the project as well.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>From there, Wichelns was on his own, learning website design and how to organize and weave together the massive quantity of information into a cohesive digital multimedia presentation. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis was, first and foremost, an honors program senior project, so I knew I had to produce something incredible,\u201d he said. \u201cWe got back from Alaska in July and I immediately began writing and going through all of my multimedia. The bulk of my time was spent writing and sketching out how to lay all this out on the web. It took me more than four months. There was a lot of research and trial and error.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Wichelns hopes to build on that experience to make similar projects more viable for mass media consumption. He acknowledged the influence of a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece in The New York Times titled \u201cSnowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,\u201d which set the standard for longform multimedia journalism on the Web in 2012, but noted how difficult it is for any media organization to take on such projects with any sort of regularity. <\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2018Snowfall\u2019 took months and months and a massive in-house team from the Times staff, including the reporter, web people and graphic designers, to create it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe software I\u2019ve been using has been revolutionary, and made it much simpler to put a piece like this together. I\u2019d like to find a way to translate those skills to put projects like this in the freelance realm, so that media outlets don\u2019t have to devote so much manpower and so many resources to developing them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As an accomplished mountaineer, Wichelns knows every journey begins with the first step and, looking back, he\u2019s happy he stepped into the offices of The Good 5-Cent Cigar to begin his journalism career. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI regret not getting involved in The Cigar earlier,\u201d he said. \u201cProfessor John Pantalone used to always try to get people involved and he said it\u2019s the best thing you can do in URI journalism. He was 100 percent correct that it\u2019s the best thing you can do for your journalism career, regardless of the type of journalism you plan to go into. My goals and aspirations may not be for print, but my experience there was unbelievably helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pictured above: Senior Ryan Wichelns traverses a ridge at the summit of Mount Silverthrone \u2013 more than 13,000 feet above sea level &#8211; during his 2015 expedition to Denali National Park in Alaska. Wichelns turned his journey across five peaks higher than 11,000 feet into a piece of longform, multimedia Web journalism for an Honors Program senior project. (Photo courtesy of Gabe Messercola.)<\/p>\n<p>Media Contact: <a href=\"http:\/\/brian.pernicone@gmail.com\">Brian Pernicone<\/a>, 401-874-7245<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>University of Rhode Island senior and mountain climber Ryan Wichelns plans to change the way longform journalism is delivered to the masses, an ambition matched in scale only by the mountains he\u2019s summited. However, like the first peaks he reached early in his mountaineering career, Wichelns\u2019 journalism career goals weren\u2019t always as lofty as they are now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":727,"featured_media":3382,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sp2016"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/727"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}