Many journalism students dream about reporting for a national newspaper like The New York Times. For Ithaca College student Danielle Allentuck ’19, that dream has become a reality — she’ll spend the next year covering sports for the paper of record as a New York Times Fellow.
The New York Times Fellowship is a yearlong, paid program for recent college and graduate school graduates that will replace the newspaper’s newsroom summer internship. The 2019 class features 22 fellows selected from more than 5,000 applications.
Growing up as a competitive swimmer in a “sports obsessed” family, Allentuck wanted to be a sports reporter since the third grade.
“It still doesn’t feel real,” Allentuck said. “It’s like, you dream of it, and then it actually happens. I didn’t know what to feel like when your dream comes true. It was so cool.”
A journalism major in the Roy H. Park School of Communications, Allentuck has been actively involved in sports journalism on campus. As a first-year student, she rose from a staff reporter to sports editor of IC’s student-run newspaper, The Ithacan. She later joined the college’s radio station, WICB. This year, she covered IC football as part of the WICB Football Crew. Allentuck is also the founder and president of the Ithaca College Chapter of the Association of Women in Sports Media, an organization that supports the advancement of women in sports media.
In 2018, Allentuck was part of a group of Park School students who helped NBC Sports broadcast the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, Korea. She has also held internships at USA Today and Buffalo News, covering everything from professional baseball to college sports.
Before Allentuck begins at The New York Times, she has one more stop: covering the World University Games for the International Sports Federation. Allentuck will travel to Russia for two and a half weeks in March to cover the games, known as the largest multi-sport event in the world apart from the Olympics.