New Atwood Chair strives to part the ‘invisible veil of indifference’

This fall, UAA's Department of Journalism and Public Communications is excited to welcome longtime Anchorage Daily News ( ADN ) reporter Michelle Theriault Boots as its Atwood Chair of Journalism for the 2026-27 academic year.

Established in 1979 by Robert B. Atwood, publisher of the Anchorage Times , and his wife Evangeline Atwood, the Atwood Chair position helps advance the quality of journalism in Alaska by offering UAA students, faculty, media professionals and the public the opportunity to interact with and learn from journalists of national prominence.

"The legacy of the Atwood Chair is something I'm so proud to be part of," said Theriault Boots. "It couldn't be a more pivotal moment in the journalism industry. It's no longer about the medium - if you're a newspaper reporter, or in radio, broadcast, or a person who independently reports news and puts it out on TikTok or Instagram. But it's the fundamentals of verification, information gathering, interviewing, ethics, that are essential to any way you're a journalist. So I'm excited to teach students at this time when the old ways are being burned down and there's all this new coming."

In the fall, Theriault Boots will teach an introductory reporting course alongside a class on media literacy, in which students will reflect on the news they consume and learn to trace sources back to their original reporting. Then in the spring semester, she plans to offer a specialized curriculum she is designing around reporting on the criminal justice and court systems. This course aims to demystify judicial proceedings, teach document investigation and serve both students and working journalists seeking continuing education.

Theriault Boots is no stranger to teaching in higher education. She was first introduced to the job when UAA journalism professor Joy Chavez Mapaye, Ph.D., then a fellow graduate student at the University of Oregon, encouraged her to join UAA as an adjunct instructor in 2010. More recently, in 2024, she returned to the classroom to co-teach a course titled Learn the City with fellow Anchorage journalist and former Atwood Chair Julia O'Malley. That experience, which included getting students out of the classroom and into Anchorage to explore local storytelling opportunities, reignited her passion for mentoring aspiring reporters and influenced her decision to step into the role of Atwood Chair.

"I want to look for opportunities to get students out in the world, because that's what journalism is about," said Theriault Boots. "Students in Alaska, UAA students, have so many amazing opportunities to work as journalists. The industry is in a time of complete transformation, and they are so well-placed, because they can learn how to be part of the new media ecosystem that is being built right now."

In her teaching practice, Theriault Boots draws upon her decades of reporting experience. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, she knew that she wanted to become a journalist from a young age. As an only child, she spent countless hours reading periodicals, falling in love with narrative storytelling through copies of The New Yorker kept by her grandparents. She pursued her undergraduate education in politics at Willamette University, where working on the student newspaper and interning at the local news outlet cemented her career ambitions and led to her first professional reporting jobs. After gaining industry experience, she completed a graduate degree in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon.

Over the years, her journalism career spanned assignments for newspapers in Palm Springs, California; Bellingham, Washington; and Salem, Oregon, as well as international reporting in Ghana and as an Overseas Press Club fellow for the Associated Press in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2009, she moved to Anchorage, where her husband was born and raised. After freelancing, adjunct teaching and working for local television stations, she joined ADN in 2012.

Throughout her career, her approach to writing has focused on telling intimate human stories as a way to put a face to larger systemic issues. Rather than viewing policy as abstract, she uses individual experiences to illuminate how complex political and institutional systems affect everyday lives.

"I always wanted to tell human stories about how people live, their experiences and this concept of the small, tellable story that illuminates a larger issue," said Theriault Boots. "That naturally led me to tell stories about the way people are caught up in political systems and how those systems affect their lives. I have always found that the most effective way to tell a story is to focus on an individual experience and what that has to say about this much larger system. That's what I've always wanted to do and that's what still inspires me."

Applying this narrative lens, Theriault Boots published an extensive series examining fatal police shootings in Alaska, pulling public records and conducting family interviews to highlight systemic breakdowns in law enforcement actions. Her reporting on homelessness examined alcoholism among unhoused residents in Anchorage by following individuals over months to portray their full humanity. She also brought attention to psychiatric care, detailing failures at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute and within youth treatment facilities.

Perhaps most notably, Theriault Boots worked on the reporting team for " Lawless ," an investigative series examining rural Alaska's criminal justice system that earned a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2020. Following that success, she took a central role leading " Unheard ," a collaborative project with ProPublica that focused on survivors of sexual abuse and assault. Crafted through a trauma-informed approach that prioritized survivor agency, the project earned a National Magazine Award for Community Journalism in 2021, marking the first time the award was bestowed upon a community newspaper project.

Additionally, she has also garnered more than a dozen state, regional and national journalism awards in varied categories, including this spring earning a first-place A-Mark Foundation prize for investigative reporting for her work on the life and death of Alaska's longest institutionalized psychiatric patient, and a second-place national Society for Features Journalism Award for a story on the joyous Kwethluk canonization of Alaska's newest Orthodox saint, Matushka Olga .

Ultimately, by introducing every institutional story as an intimate one, and by passing on that approach to the next generation of journalists, Theriault Boots hopes to inspire people to look past their own point of view for a more complete view of the world. Quoting American novelist Eudora Welty: "My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight."

"To me, that is the core of what journalism can do," said Theriault Boots. "In this polarized society where we're all being fed our own algorithm and we are so dug in on our positions and feelings, a good piece of journalism can part that curtain. It can lift the veil of indifference we feel to each other's human experience, and I think that is just so powerful."