Community News Service Partnership plan
Through Community News Service, students produce journalism for people across our state, guided by faculty and editors at UVM. Partnering news organizations help students find stories in their community and then agree to publish/air stories from those students.
Each semester we’ll lay out what being a partner means and ask folks to more formally commit to a shared set of expectations.
What partners can expect from CNS
CNS trains student reporters, guides their work and edits their pieces. For our newspaper partners, the point people are instructor Scott Finn and editor Holly Sullivan. For audio stories, it’s instructor Kelsey Kupferer.
You can expect CNS to deliver content relevant to your community. You’ll receive drafts that prize accuracy and clean copy — each workshopped by Scott, Kelsey or Holly. Our goal is to produce work that looks right at home in your outlet.
You can also expect first dibs on stories your outlet assigned. If you request a story, we will upload password-protected posts to our site that will go to you first. They’ll be set to publish on our end a week after you receive them.
What we expect of partners
As a partner, you understand that student reporters have limited time to make calls, attend meetings or travel. Many also work jobs on top of their studies or are involved in a host of extracurriculars. Most are relatively new to interviewing strangers, writing for news audiences and corralling sources. Being a partner means patience with the process.
We ask partners to suggest a mix of ideas for students to fulfill their assignments. Assignments can be tailored to each student’s strengths and schedule. Evergreen stories with flexible deadlines are especially helpful.
Partners will review drafts as Google documents ahead of publishing. We rely on you to catch any mistakes we missed, especially when it comes to knowledge of your community. Factual fixes or contextual add-ins are welcome, as well as grammar and style tweaks.
We want to make sure this is still the student’s story and not ours, so we try to be thoughtful about large-scale changes. If needed, give the student a chance to rework stories.
We strive to make sure that every story we send, you can publish. We ask that you work with us and the student to meet your standards for publication. When published, partners share a link to the intern’s story with Scott, Holly or Kelsey. You can read specifics on publishing policies below.
General republishing policies
Work by CNS students is published on our website and available for republishing by anyone.
Starting January 2025, stories done on assignment for an outlet will first be published here privately. Outlets will receive a link and password to the private post, where they’ll be able to see and take the copy and photos.
Outlets can easily pick up a story online by clicking the “REPUBLISH” button at the top of an article. When you click the button, you’ll be taken to a page that contains two text boxes: one with an HTML version of the story, one with a plain text version. You can copy the text from either box to paste into your content management system or print page layout.
When you upload stories online, we ask that you use the HTML versions if possible because they contain a small line of code called a tracking pixel, which allows CNS to see basic web traffic analytics for our stories. This will make it much easier for us to see where our students’ work is picked up and how many people it reaches, important metrics for showing the growth of our program.
Make sure the reporter has a byline and make clear the work is from Community News Service. Most news outlets use this format: John Smith | Community News Service;
A version of this note will appear at the top of every story. Please include it: “Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship.” When a story has been written on assignment for an outlet, the note reads: “Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, on assignment for [OUTLET NAME].”
If an outlet plans to incorporate work from CNS into its own story, it should credit the CNS reporter, either with a byline or a contributor line, whichever is most appropriate.