Small Town Emmaus PA, Home Of The PA Student Journalist Of The Year
Ayaan Shah has gotten some great opportunities, including coverage of presidential and governor visits.
It seems like a lot of important people want to visit the borough of Emmaus, PA, population ~12,0000. Emmaus has a nice small-town feel to it with a board game store among the family businesses and a 100-plus year old movie theatre. I've been there and I can vouch for it.
President Biden made a stop there during his re-election campaign and governor Josh Shapiro had a press conference at the local high school to sign the state education budget.
Emmaus is also the home of this year's Pennsylvania student journalist of the year, Ayaan Shah, who just graduated from high school and is headed to the University of Pennsylvania.
Ayaan is my guest on the current episode of The Journalism Salute. He's Pakistani-American, one of a few interviews we have coming up with South Asian journalists, and defies the stereotype that students of that heritage are most interested in STEM careers.
 "I've been really lucky through my journalism work and through the support of my parents and family that I've been able to meet so many other South Asians and other Asian Americans who are just as passionate about journalism as I am," Ayaan said during our interview. " Especially in the younger generation in Gen Z, we're seeing more South Asians and more Asian Americans that aren't typically represented in journalism going into that field."
While it may be an advantage for some in big cities to have access to certain opportunities, Ayaan has gotten to do some things that his scholastic journalism peers haven't, such as to cover both the Biden and Shapiro visits.
For President Biden, Ayaan and his leadership team at the school paper, The Stinger (also more than 100 years old), organized coverage of how the community responded. He covered the protests of Biden's appearance, stood tall as some people made comments criticizing immigrants and cried 'fake news,' and interviewed one woman who tried to stare him down.
" I think that at some point you have to acknowledge that as a journalist and as a brown man, you will face those kinds of prejudices," Ayaan said. "But I think it's important that we continue in spite of them, because the world needs us now more than ever to tell our story."
Ayaan and company produced a very thorough story.
" It was really, really important to me to get every single angle in order to not appear biased," Ayaan said.
When Governor Shapiro came to the school he treated the student journalists with the same respect as the other reporters in attendance and offered them the first questions. Both Ayaan and managing editor Carina McCallum asked questions worthy of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Ayaan's was about teacher shortages in the state. Carina's was about mental health. As one person on Instagram noted, the exchange Ayaan, Carina, and the governor had would be unthinkable in a place like Texas. But in Emmaus, such things are possible and such things happen.
So check out the interview I did with Ayaan to learn more about his love of language, his enjoyment of opinion writing, his coverage of Pro-Palestinian protests, and much more.
We'll have another interview with a top student journalist in a couple of weeks but next week you’ll hear from a Pulitzer winner!