Celebrating Art, History, and Culture
The Center for Community News has launched its first student reporting initiative dedicated exclusively to covering art, history and culture in Vermont and across the country. The project provides new opportunities for student journalists to explore the under-covered stories of their communities and make them free to local news outlets. The initiative is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and other generous donors.
The CCN Arts & Life initiative expands the volume and depth of coverage of the beat, with an emphasis on stories that can be told using multimedia approaches. Coverage of music, dance, food, visual art and events presents opportunities to blend print, broadcast and digital media, and to reach news audiences across mediums.
“When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”
- President John F. Kennedy at Amherst College, October 26, 1963
“Strengthening cultural coverage is about more than just increasing community information. This storytelling cultivates social cohesion and trust among neighbors. It brings us together and serves as a bulwark against the threat of toxic polarization.”
Meg Little Reilly, CCN Managing Director
Local Impact Right Here in Vermont
CCN is not only a national organization; it’s also home to UVM’s Vermont-based newsroom, the Community News Service, which produces more than 400 student-reported multimedia stories each year for roughly twenty local news outlets. It’s local partners range from small newspapers in the Northeast Kingdom and southern valleys to statewide outlets like VTDigger and Vermont Public. The Community News Service has long covered arts and culture, but student interest in this area far exceeds current capacity. With this initiative, more students will have the opportunity to produce in-depth stories with the attention of a dedicated editor. In addition to serving Vermonters, the Community News Service is a laboratory for testing new ideas that are replicable for CCN’s national network of student reporting programs.
"Art is the daughter of freedom."
Friedrich Schiller, from Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794
Thank You for Making the Launch Possible
The launch phase of CCN’s Arts & Life Reporting Initiative is made possible by $300,000 in new funding from the Henry Luce Foundation; generous donors to the UVM College of Arts and Sciences; and donors to the Nicholas H. Muller fund including Robert Mello, Garrison Nelson, Brook and Charles Muller and Nick Ward. Muller was a leader on the UVM campus for decades, serving as a professor, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Director of the Living-Learning Center, and co-founder of the Center for Research on Vermont.
Strategy and support for the CCN Arts & Life Reporting Initiative is provided by the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub.
Reporting from the Community News Service
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