Christian Ortega, who served as editor-in-chief of The Reporter during the 2018-19 academic year, has been selected to the Sports Journalism Institute class of 2021.
The SJI is an organization dedicated to training women and minorities to diversify the sports media landscape.
Ortega, 24, will attend a journalism boot camp focused on in-depth sports coverage with 15 other students in late May. He will then be partnered with USA Today to start his internship.
“It’s a great opportunity. I like that the amount of people involved in the boot camp is small,” Ortega said. “It will allow for it to be very one-on-one work when you get partnered with a newspaper.”
Ortega started his journalism career covering sports and news at The Reporter. In 2019, he was a finalist for the Associated Collegiate Press Reporter of the Year award in the two-year colleges’ category. That November, he earned four first-place awards from the Florida College System Publications Association.
For the past year, he has served in several roles at The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper at the University of Florida. He is currently the sports editor and served as the paper’s editor-chief this summer, leading the newsroom through its coronavirus coverage.
In addition, he has interned at the Florida Times Union and covered basketball and recruiting for the online newspaper Inside The Gators that covers UF sports.
Ortega, who earned an associate’s degree in journalism from Kendall Campus in 2019, is expected to graduate from UF this August with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
