Editor’s note: Community News Service is part of the Center for Community News.
Hearing how students can buoy local news outlets, Marcus Funk posed what might’ve been the simplest question in a day flush with complicated ones.
How, asked the Sam Houston State University professor, could his institution start?
The University of Vermont has an answer.
So said members of a UVM panel presenting that day as part of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s annual conference. Hosted in Philadelphia early this month, the event drew about 2,000 people from across the nation to talk about the future of news and democracy — including staff of UVM’s new Center for Community News.
Backed by $7 million in grants, the center aims to study and grow partnerships between higher education and media that give student journalists the chance to ply their trade while bolstering local news. Center staff and researchers led a five-hour, pre-conference workshop attended by about 70 educators Aug. 7 — and delivered several presentations during the conference itself.
About 40 people listened Aug. 8 as Richard Watts and Meg Little Reilly, the center’s director and managing director, detailed a flight of new research from Vermont. The headline: Students nationwide produced more than 17,220 pieces of journalism between June 2023 and May 2024, according to a study of news-academic programs by researchers Dominic Minadeo and Jocelyn Rockhold. Pieces ran in outlets at least 11,800 times, the study showed.
“Our emphasis is on getting our students to have these high-impact learning experiences and to help local news,” said Watts at the panel.
The work is so polished, Little Reilly told attendees, most readers probably don’t realize it’s by students. “There’s no asterisk next to it,” she said.
Programs are succeeding if student stories “don’t stand out for any other reason other than that they’re good,” she added later.
Student stories exhibit deep reporting and fulfill community needs, Kent State University professor and panel member Andrea Lorenz told attendees. Lorenz recently finished a pilot study for the center examining 38 news-academic partnerships. Almost every story she studied focused on local or state issues and met at least one of eight critical information needs. Her findings suggested students are pursuing enterprise coverage, as opposed to stories on one-off meetings, and showed a small percentage of student pieces resembling watchdog coverage that holds power to account, she said.
But some of the most important student work often isn’t flashy, Little Reilly said. Programs should be “having them do the work of the day-to-day, local issues,” she said, like writing features, culture stories, obituaries — content that promotes cohesion in communities and thwarts political polarization.
“Big land-grant schools have kind of a civic mandate to step in,” she said, speaking about the decline of local news outlets.
Often it takes an intrepid faculty member to push programs into action, panelists emphasized.
Watts and Little Reilly discussed a study they did of faculty running or starting programs in the first half of 2024. More than 60% of programs launched via faculty initiative, and nearly every faculty member in the study said their program can expand. But institutional structures and policies often stood in the way of growth.
“These institutions are so complicated … and there are so many rules and obstacles to navigate, and you need somebody on the inside,” Watts said.
The importance of faculty leaders was a point made by Hannah Kirkpatrick, the center’s education and programs manager, and Colleen Steffen of Franklin College, who together led the second UVM presentation that day.
In a study, the pair found more than two-thirds of surveyed students said they feel anxious in their roles — but that their work in news-academic programs helped. “It is scary, and they are nervous about it, but they get better,” Kirkpatrick told the 20 or so attendees. She added later: “They’re going into this field feeling more self-confident.”
She said news-academic programs serve as career catalysts for a lot of students. And even those who forgo journalism as a career path are honing valuable skills in these programs, she said.
“They’re having experiences that will make them a better coworker, a better member of society. They’re having more civic engagement,” Kirkpatrick said.
That success hinges on a tough, fair and nurturing faculty member, Steffens said.