Guest instructor Bret Begun held up a piece of paper covered front and back in green ink. He told the class it was his roommate assignment from when he was a cherub in John Kupetz’s instructor group.
Hands immediately started going up in the audience as cherubs in Kupetz’s current group displayed their own roommate stories edited in the same green ink.
“It was a little shocking,” said Faith Jung of La Mirada, California. “I didn’t expect that much from him on the very first day for the first assignment, and I couldn’t read any of it because his handwriting is pretty messy. John gave me like a quarter of what he wrote on Bret’s paper.”
Despite all the ways the program has evolved over its 90-year history, this year’s cherubs shared many of the same core experiences with instructors and program staff who were once cherubs themselves.
“I’ve always used pen and paper, and I grade in the color green because it’s the color of hope,” Kupetz said.
When he started teaching at Medill cherub program, students wrote their trend story assignments on manual typewriters and called their sources on dial phones.
The trend story was still a key part of the curriculum in 2024, giving cherubs a chance to put together everything they learned about feature reporting and writing over the course of the first three weeks.
“The program has kept up with all the changes in the industry and the technology without losing the core values of journalism,” Kupetz said.
Instructor Mary Lou Song named some of those essential elements.
“There are timeless things that we will always need to learn — how to write things, how to make news judgments, how to interview people,” she said.
Community and academic associate Juliet Allan, who was a cherub in 2021, said that despite the program being online in her year, she grew “really, really close” with the people in her instructor group.
“There’s kind of an old legend that John Kupetz’s group tends to be one of the most bonded pretty much every year,” she said.
She said part of the reason she became a CAA was to experience the program in person.
“John Kupetz taught me journalism, and now he’s teaching me how to teach journalism,” she said.
Several of the program’s instructors and guest speakers are cherub alums — Song, Begun, Cynthia Wang, and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jonathan Eig all chose to come back to cherubs to teach.
Song said she became an instructor to give back to the cherub community.
“Everything good in my life, I can tie back to cherubs,” she said.
Allan agreed that the program can change lives.
“If I could come back every year, I would,” she said.
