The New York Times Student Journalism Institute helps to train a new generation of minority newsroom professionals.

NEW ORLEANS

Nigel Chiwaya’s pulse raced with adrenaline. He was careful not to miss a single detail. It was the first time Chiwaya, a 2008 graduate of the New York Institute of Technology, had ever covered a professional baseball game from a press box.

The rookie sports reporter’s excitement covering the minor league baseball game between the New Orleans Zephyrs and the Albuquerque Isotopes was later eclipsed by a trip to the Zephyrs’ locker room where he interviewed the team’s general manager Mike Schline and former New York Mets pitcher Tony Armas Jr.

“Access,” Chiwaya concludes, is one of the best perks of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.

When Chiwaya participated earlier this summer in the institute at Dillard University in New Orleans, he and 23 other Black students from across the country had access to in some cases professional athletes and highranking public officials. They even got the opportunity to meet First Lady Laura Bush.

During the intensive two-week internship offered every summer, the students cover local New Orleans news. Student journalists, photographers and graphic designers develop an interactive Web site under the instruction of journalists from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Times Company’s regional newspapers. Their work is posted on the institute’s Web site, (http://www.nytimes-institute.com) which is updated daily. The best work is published in a single-edition newspaper at the end of the program.

Averaging about 30 students a year, the institute has graduated nearly 150 Black students, mostly from historically Black colleges and universities, in its five-year existence.

Alumni of the program have gone on to hold jobs at newspapers around the country, including many major metropolitan dailies — The New York Times and The Boston Globe among them.