Journalism

Education

• B.A. Journalism, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2007

Background

Ashley Poerstel has been an adjunct instructor in Journalism at VCU since 2019. 

Before VCU, she was a multimedia journalist for more than 10 years. 

Her first newsroom was KHNL8 in Honolulu, Hawaii where she worked the assignment desk, produced and was one of the station's first video journalists.  After Hawaii, she got a job at WHAG in Hagerstown, Maryland as a multimedia journalist and later became a fill-in anchor/producer. 

In 2012, Ashley was hired as a multimedia journalist for NBC12 in Richmond.  During her time at the station, she covered a wide-range of stories including two presidential inaugurations, the Navy Yard shooting, the WDBJ shooting and the violence in Charlottesville and Heather Heyer's murder.  She received a National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter Emmy award in 2015  for my role in covering a charter bus crash and in 2017 for her role in covering the chaos and violence in Charlottesville. She was nominated for a regional Emmy in the feature serious series category for her story that focused on the high rate of young gun violence victims in the city of Richmond.

Courses

JOUR 203- Journalism Writing
JOUR 363- Introduction to Broadcast Writing
JOUR 460 - Advanced Broadcast Writing
JOUR 465- Newscasting
JOUR 685- Multimedia Storytelling (graduate program)

Awards

• National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter Emmy award for reporter in the Newscast-Weekend-Medium Market (50+) for coverage “Charter Bus Crash”, 2015
• National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter Emmy award for reporter in the Newscast - Weekend - Medium Market (50+) for coverage of the “Chaos in Charlottesville”, 2017
• National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter for Feature News Reporter Serious Series “Surviving Richmond’s City of Violence”, 2017