The University of Virginia’s student-run journal of public policy, the Virginia Policy Review, will host the first-ever national conference for such journals at universities around the country. Students from more than a dozen schools, including Cornell, Duke, Georgetown and New York universities, will be in Charlottesville this weekend for the inaugural National Journal Conference for Schools of Public Policy and Affairs.

The three-day conference, free and open to the public, begins Friday at 6 p.m. in the Great Hall of Garrett Hall – home of U.Va.’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy – with a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize winning author and U.Va. Miller Center forum chair Douglas Blackmon. Having spent 16 years reporting for the Wall Street Journal, including as senior national correspondent, Blackmon will speak on “Journalism that Impacts Policy,” the theme of the conference.

On Saturday, the conference will feature workshops, a lunch roundtable discussion of best practices in graduate student journals and a panel discussion on “Journalism in the 21st Century: Blogs and Social Media,” with David Freedlander, senior political correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast; Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine; and Michael Wolraich, a CNN contributor and co-founder of DagBlog.

Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and three-time winner of the National Press Club’s award for best foreign reporting, will lead a question-and-answer session on how to reach broad and diverse audiences when writing on international affairs, said conference organizer Addie Bryant, editor-in-chief of the Virginia Policy Review and a second-year student in the Batten School’s master’s of public policy program.

Lymari Morales, managing news editor of Gallup.com and editorial director for Gallup, will lead a workshop on “Making Data Newsworthy and Accessible to a Broad Audience.”

The full conference schedule is available here. To attend the conference, RSVP to Adelina.Bryant@virginia.edu.

The conference is co-sponsored by the Batten School and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.

The Virginia Policy Review “strives to publish work that will impact the wider policy debate,” Bryant said. The forthcoming issue, to be released Feb. 4, will feature an interview with former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a 2012 Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. Ambassador to China; and an op-ed by Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools, alongside student-authored articles and op-eds.