Local news is in a crisis — there is no question about it. The revenue model has blown up, and national chains have eviscerated local news organizations, firing reporters and sucking out any last bit of the profit.
I always thought Vermont was immune to this trend. But then a few years ago a venture capitalist came to town — the Arizona-based O’Rourke Group — and bought up a once proud daily, the St. Albans Messenger, and three community papers. The firm eliminated editors and reporters, and today the content at those papers lacks substance and is largely irrelevant.
When we started up our Community News Service program at the University of Vermont, which provides student-reported stories for local outlets, we worked briefly with the O’Rourke group, but it quickly became obvious to me the company had no interest in community reporting. (For his part, O’Rourke CEO Jim O’Rourke praised his teams’ work in an email and said the company has plans to expand in the area this summer. He declined to say whether the papers have fewer reporters and editors than they did before the purchase). Between their out-of-town management and my unhappiness with how they handled one of our stories, we ended our relationship in short order.
But our Community News Service continues to thrive. Down the road from the O’Rourke newspaper group is another group of five papers, run by folks with a commitment to local journalism who pay professional reporters to cover local government, community events and regional stories. But they can’t possibly cover all the stories out there. And that is where university-run, student reporting services like ours can step in.
Here is how it works: We pay a professional editor to work directly with students and classes and act as liaison with our media partners around the state. Our editor, Justin Trombly, is in touch with our 14 media partners — mostly weekly community papers — to identify the topics they want covered and to check on the stories we are producing. Justin edits and vets the stories and reviews his edits line by line with the students, sending drafts back to them as needed, ultimately producing professional-grade reporting. All of the students’ work is published, giving them bylines and the real experience of producing stories that people read, view and hear. (These are multi-media stories, digital, audio and video.)
Today we co-publish 300 print, audio and video pieces a year with local media outlets, at no cost to them. We are helping to fill gaps in reporting and forging a more financially sustainable model for these struggling newsrooms. We’re teaching and inspiring the next generation of journalists. And we are also introducing our mostly suburban students to rural communities.
UVM is not alone in this work. The Center for Community News, which I direct, has identified more than 120 programs around the country in which students are providing critical local news coverage, under the direction of professional editors and reporters, standing in where substantive media internships have largely disappeared — giving students the individual attention, networks and clips they need. The Knight Foundation recently named the role of universities as central to its strategy to address the sustainability of local news.
“Books and lectures will only get you so far,” Steban Rondon, a student at Florida International University, told me. “Journalism is a profession where you need to start practicing your abilities from the moment you write your first story, and that cannot be achieved in a classroom. In my first semester, I was already out in the street asking people questions, practicing my ice-breaking skills and stressing about deadlines.”
“I’ve learned so much from taking a class styled like this because it forces me to go out and learn what I’m talking about,” Vincent Martorano, a student at Ball State University in Indiana, said. “Like this isn’t just something I type up and my professor reads and gives me a grade. I think that makes me not only a better journalist, but a better writer.”
Some of these are well-known programs at flagship public universities, like the University of Missouri, where students staff five separate newsrooms, providing news to tens of thousands of state residents every day. Some are smaller, innovative programs that hold their own. For example, Franklin College, with a student population of 1,000, has a full-time faculty member leading a two-semester course that embeds students in the Indiana Statehouse providing legislative coverage to residents across the state.
Nearly all partnerships and university-run newsrooms are run by former reporters and editors. Fresh Take Florida, a class of investigative reporters at the University of Florida, is led by Ted Bridis, who worked decades as an investigative reporter with The Associated Press; his students broke the story about incoming president Ben Sasse’s private new $300,000 swimming pool.
Chris Drew, who edits the student statehouse reporting program and the cold case student reporting project at Louisiana State University, was a top investigative reporter at The New York Times.
“I’m a stickler for accuracy, fairness,” Drew said about the LSU student reporting programs. “Anything I see that raises any questions at all in my mind, I’m sending back to the student reporter to talk to people again. And I just think that putting them on the high wire where they’ve got to come through is the best way to prepare them for jobs.”
This is high-impact student reporting, assigned, edited, and vetted by experienced editors and reporters. It is also community-level reporting, telling stories that no one else is.
When the local paper closed in Oxford, Ohio, Miami University faculty created the Oxford Observer, the only source of local news in town. When the Oglethorpe Echo teetered on the brink of closing, the University of Georgia stepped in and now runs the paper through a reporting class, giving students hands-on experience in community journalism and ensuring the 150-year-old paper has never missed a week. At Chapman University, the journalism program has been remade from top to bottom so that everything students do is in partnership with the Voice of OC – a digital nonprofit focused on county news deserts. See many more examples here.
The surprising thing is not how many universities are running these programs but how few. University caution, bureaucracy, inability to adapt to the changing media landscape are some of the obstacles that stand in the way. Too many universities run inward-facing newsrooms, giving students artificial experiences writing for non-audiences.
If you count all the students in communications and journalism programs around the nation, the number tops 340,000, according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System at the National Center for Education Statistics. Imagine if universities engaged just a small fraction of those students in local news under the direction of professionals already on staff, using existing revenue systems.
And there is no reason to limit this to journalism/communication students. At UVM we have no journalism major, and our student reporters come from history, English, political science, environmental science and more. They may not go on to be reporters but they will know more about how to be engaged citizens.
As a foundational pillar of civic life, institutions of higher learning have an obligation to lead. We no longer have the luxury of offering cloistered, low-stakes reporting experiences to our students; they deserve better and so does our news ecosystem.
The alternative is to leave local news to companies like the O’Rourke Group.
This article was updated to correct the location of the Oxford Observer.
