When the Daily News started its Urban Journalism Workshop in 1986, one in five Americans was an ethnic minority, but just one in 20 newsroom employees was a person of color.

That’s why the Daily News, in partnership with Dow Jones Newspaper Fund and Temple University, started this “boot camp” for high school students nearly 25 years ago. Our goal was to expose and engage more young people of color to the idea of journalism as a career.

Since then, Daily News staffers and, in the early years, Temple professors, have introduced hundreds of students to the business of journalism. (Temple is no longer officially involved in UJW.)

During the two-week workshop, teenagers with minimal or no experience with journalism get a crash course in reporting and writing stories. (Several students also learn photography.) The emphasis is on learning by doing….we try not to spend too much time lecturing the students. For example, after a reporter explains interview techniques, we have our students interview each other and write short biographies based on what they learn.

Usually by day two of the program, the students are on the street, researching and reporting, sometimes in “press conference” settings or in one-on-one interviews.

The program directors line up the interview subjects before the workshop begins, and we’ve been extremely fortunate in the cooperation we’ve gotten from our sports teams, our city officials, police and school district personnel. Students this year interviewed Philadelphia’s mayor, talked to the new coach of the region’s professional soccer team, met with the School District’s Chief Educational Officer, and talked to the marketing director of Roofscape, Inc., a local green roofing company that’s getting national attention.

At a time when many schools no longer teach journalism or have school newspapers, our experience is particularly valuable for students with an interest in the field.

While we don’t expect every student who participates to pursue journalism, our goal is that all of them will become more sophisticated consumers of media. And while the mission of our program has never changed, we welcome students of all races and ethnicities. Our current class is typical, in that they attend public, private, parochial and charter schools, in the city and in the suburbs. The chance to work with people with different backgrounds is one of the strengths of UJW.

The number of minority students who have been bitten by the news bug during their summer here is long and varied. Yvonne Dennis is one of them. She was in our first UJW class, then studied journalism at college. She began her journalism career as a copyeditor, eventually coming back to her home town and working at the Daily News.