Not all academic-news partnerships involve students reporting and writing for local news outlets. Some colleges and universities lend their expertise in other ways, often with research and data analysis.

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications launched the Local News Initiative in 2017 to offer two of the school’s specialized resources: The Spiegel Research Center, which does data mining and quantitative analysis of online readership; and the Knight Lab for Digital Innovation, which develops experimental technology for journalism outlets.

Read more about the Local News Initiative.

When Marcie Young Cancio founded Amplify Utah, a non-profit dedicated to boosting student journalism in local news, she had her pupils at the front of her mind.

“I started at Salt Lake Community College in the fall of 2018 and then launched this project about two years later,” said Young Cancio. “It was something that grew as a passion project and trying to offer more opportunities for students to be published.”

Keep reading about Amplify Utah.

When the newsroom of Memphis’s local newspaper shrunk from over 200 staffers to a couple dozen, Memphians had fewer options for reading local news. In summer 2018, then-president of the University of Memphis, David Rudd, initiated the Institute for Public Service Reporting, said Institute assistant director David Waters.

Keep reading about the University of Memphis.

Students from Ball State University, the University of Central Florida, the University of Georgia, and Mercer University share their experiences in local news-academic partnerships. 

Read more here.

Learning bits of conversational Spanish was part of journalist Charlotte Norsworthy's journey to building relationships with Spanish-speaking community members.

"I enjoyed helping people, working with people in the newsroom, and helping them achieve their goals when it came to storytelling," said Norsworthy. "I love the experimentation and the innovative side of (journalism) ... that higher-order thinking where I could encourage the newsroom to dream big, and then help them piece together all of those more granular tasks that have to happen to achieve something amazing."

Keep reading about The Red and Black.

Journalism professor Tsitsi D. Wakhisi comes from decades of experience in community reporting and editing as a former Miami Herald Neighbors editor who held various newsroom positions at several other newspapers before joining the University of Miami as a journalism professor.  Wakhisi said she thought it important to ground her students in community reporting.

“I think that we really need to help communities understand what's going on in their community,” Wakhisi said. “So, we're not just this ivory tower but we should be part of the community and letting the community know what's happening because nobody else really is as community coverage declines from understaffed newsrooms, technological and revenue challenges.”

Keep reading about the University of Miami.

Gary Jones, publisher of the Elberton Star newspaper, didn't think there would be enough stories to tell in his small, rural community of north Georgia. But Mark Johnson, University of Georgia lecturer, told Jones that he wasn't worried about his students finding stories to tell.

In 2010, 16 students from Johnson’s photojournalism class at the school’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication went into Elberton County, engaged with the community and  produced a story each in a partnership with the Elberton Star.

As the class worked, Jones "spent almost every minute looking over the shoulders of students,” said Johnson, adding, “He was just amazed at the stories that these students found."

Keep reading about the University of Georgia.

Students at Duke University have stepped in to write news as regular media sources have disappeared.

“We're in a community where the local news outlet is a shell of what it once was,” said Phil Napoli, the James R. Shepley Distinguished Professor of Public Policy. “In this situation you have to rethink, what is your mission? It's about educating our students and training our students, but it's bigger than that. You have to think at that community level within the university.”

The student coverage of Durham is published in the 9th Street Journal and made available for free to Indy Week, a local independent news outlet.

Keep reading about The 9th Street Journal.

When Mario A. Murillo, Professor and Vice Dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, was first hired at the university, the Herbert School was in its early stages of development. Due to his radio journalism background, Murillo was originally brought on to develop the university’s academic program in radio and audio production, but in his time at the school he has played a number of other roles, both in and out of the classroom. Most recently, in his administrative role, he has been collaborating closely with the team of faculty and student staff devoted to establishing and growing The Long Island Advocate, the school’s online hyperlocal news site.

Keep reading about Hofstra University.

At the University of New Mexico Communication and Journalism Department, Michael Marcotte is the lone Professor of Practice. For the past ten years, he’s been finding and creating opportunities for students’ journalism to reach larger audiences in New Mexico, via a news website and internship and fellowship programs.

New Mexico News Port is, in Marcotte’s words, “a concept in collaboration.” The site was launched in 2014 as part of the Online News Association’s “Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education,” and features stories that students produce in department courses. It is “the default publishing outlet for the class work,” Marcotte said. The main goal of the site is to provide first-time publishing experience to students, “but it also aspires to experiment with multimedia storytelling and, in an ideal world, create collaborative opportunities with other news outlets,” Marcotte noted.

Keep reading about the New Mexico News Port.

Ball State University students see their pieces on Indiana sustainability issues in three local outlets as part of a capstone reporting class at the college.
“It's meant to be that last curricular stop before the students go out into their entry-level positions,” said professor Adam Kuban, who runs the class. “How can we build their depth of knowledge and have them produce content that allows them to immediately apply that newfound depth of knowledge?”
Kuban decided to base the course around the broad topic of sustainability, giving students the opportunity to write about issues spanning energy, food, water quality and more. They report out stories picked up by papers in the USA Today network.

Keep reading about Sustainability Stories at Ball State University.

Kennesaw State University’s digital news service, Fresh Take Georgia wanted to bring a new perspective to political reporting — by writing about oysters.  

The student-produced story, published last February, focused on Georgia's fledgling oyster industry and resulting legislation. The report opened new policy discussions.

"That story ran in over 220 news organizations in the country," said Gary Green, Fresh Take Georgia’s publisher. "Nobody in Georgia was writing that story because it was at a time when they were covering election stuff, so that fresh take was key for us."

Keep reading about Fresh Take Georgia.

When it comes time for journalism majors at Northwestern University to pick the news outlet where they want to work for one of their academic quarters, they often go for the big names: The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Univision, Vox, Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal.

Some of the smaller print publications, broadcast and digital news providers in what’s known as the Journalism Residency program, or JR, garner less attention. But Tracy Van Moorlehem, director of JR for the Medill School of Journalism, Media & Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern, tries to make sure students see the value of community news.

Keep reading about the Medill Journalism Residency.

Arizona State University considers Cronkite News a “teaching hospital” for journalism students. Like medical school students who do hospital rotations to treat real patients and get hands-on experience, students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication produce a daily newscast in their campus newsroom to air on the Arizona PBS.

The public TV station is based on the Cronkite campus, in downtown Phoenix, and the journalism school provides its half-hour news report at 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The students cover stories across the Phoenix metropolitan area, from public safety to city hall to the K-12 schools. Their stories run in written, digital form on www.cronkitenews.azpbs.org.

Keep reading about Cronkite News.

By spring 2021, some neighborhoods around Chicago were harder hit by the COVID-19 pandemic than others.

Courtney Kueppers joined a team of fellow journalism students at Northwestern University to report on possible reasons for higher infection rates for South Side Weekly, a nonprofit publication covering communities on the South Side of Chicago. They found that a variety of pre-existing factors increased COVID vulnerability. Their series of stories revealed the lack of greenspace in the Little Village neighborhood, obstacles to healthcare access in Englewood and food insecurity in South Shore.

Keep reading about social justice reporting at Northwestern. 

Cronkite News, which produces the Monday-through-Friday evening news report for the Arizona PBS television station, operates two websites that carry digital versions of its stories.
One site is designated for the public to access those stories in readable format. The other is available only to partner news organizations across Arizona, which can pull content from that online menu to offer to their own readers, listeners and viewers.

About 120 newspapers, radio stations and television stations across the state subscribe to the daily Cronkite News digest as distribution partners, or “clients.” Students at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication report and produce all of the content for Cronkite News, and the university makes it available for free to clients.

Keep reading about Cronkite News.

Mercer University students work closely with reporters producing stories for print and broadcast media partners via the college's Center for Collaborative Journalism, an academic-media partnership program going more than a decade strong. The center facilitates opportunities and partnerships among Mercer's journalism and media studies department, the Macon Telegraph newspaper, Georgia Public Broadcasting and 13WMAZ, an area TV station.

“Students get exposed to everything, and then, through their experiences with the partners or with other local media, they sort of figure out what it is they actually want to do," center director Debbie Blankenship said. "They get very practical experience."

Keep reading about the Center for Collaborative Journalism.

When President Joe Biden visited rural Licking County, Ohio for the ceremonial groundbreaking of a $20 billion Intel microchip plant, the major local newspapers sent a team of reporters and photographers to cover the event. But those papers — the Newark Advocate and Columbus Dispatch, both owned by corporate news giant Gannett — didn’t have anyone available to write about the neighbors of the nearly 1,000-acre development, people who weren’t invited to the presidential address. That’s where a small team of journalists from nearby Denison University stepped in.

Keep reading about Denison University.

Public radio station WAER dates to 1947 as an entity of Syracuse University, one of the oldest non-commercial radio stations still broadcasting in the United States — largely on the initiative and contributions of students. In summer 2021, WAER officially moved under the umbrella of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse. The change made sense: The station had long provided a hands-on training ground for about 100 Syracuse students — most in the Newhouse School — each semester.
“The station has always had a dual mission,” said Chris Bolt, WAER’s general manager. “We have a mission to entertain, enlighten and engage the community, like (any) radio station. And then we have a dual mission of professional development opportunities for students.”

Keep reading about WAER.

After editing at the Orlando Sentinel for 20 years, Richard Brunson decided to take a turn teaching University of Central Florida students how to cover local news in a hands-on way. Brunson, a senior lecturer at the university, heads a partnership with the newspaper and the college’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media that gives students the opportunity to write for the Sentinel. The partnership takes the form of a rigorous independent study course called the Joint Reporting Project, which allows students to see their bylines in the Sentinel and gain experience reporting in communities beyond campus.  Brunson said the project stems from a desire to protect local news in Central Florida.
"I love the place; I love local news," he said. "I don't want to see it go down."

Keep reading about the Orlando Sentinel.

Every time someone drives on a Los Angeles County freeway, electronic sensors record their car’s speed at various spots. The L.A. Metropolitan Transportation Authority collects all that data, every day, from every freeway in a region infamous for its troublesome traffic. Computer scientists at the University of Southern California crunch the numbers for the city. Five years ago, Gabriel Kahn, a professor in USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, learned that public officials had never asked the USC team questions about the data. And, certainly, no news media were reporting stories with it. That’s when Kahn got the idea for Crosstown, a website that aggregates the massive cache of public information government agencies collect — everything from law enforcement activity to parking tickets, construction permits to resident complaints — and makes it available for news outlets to tap into for stories.

Keep reading about Crosstown.

One of Lex Weaver’s proudest accomplishments as editor of the Scope, Northeastern University’s digital magazine covering underserved communities around Boston, was its coverage of candidates for mayor and city council last year. That summer, Weaver and her staff of four students interviewed 47 of the 55 candidates running for the city’s open seats in the November 2021 election. Among the first interviews was one with Michelle Wu, who went on to become Boston’s mayor. Weaver even solicited foreign-language students at Northeastern to translate some of the interviews into Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish in exchange for buying them lunch.

Keep reading about the Scope.

Madison Karas knew little football when she decided to write about a high school homecoming game in fall 2021. Then a Temple University senior, Karas was on assignment for Philadelphia Neighborhoods, an online news outlet for underserved areas of the city, and she covered southwest Philly. Karas entrenched herself in the community, though it was difficult to reach without public transportation, and spent time talking to its residents. She met the high school’s football coaches and players at a diner to go through her lengthy questions, according to Christopher Malo, Philadelphia Neighborhoods’ executive director and Temple University faculty member who teaches the journalism classes that feed the publication.

Keep reading about Philadelphia Neighborhoods.

By Lauren Milideo

In 2009, students and faculty at Louisiana State University joined a local newspaper editor in investigating racist and unsolved crimes from the state’s troubled past. The LSU Cold Case Project is now offered as a class every fall semester, under the direction of former New York Times reporter Christopher Drew. Read more

By Lauren Milideo

People with disabilities account for 26% of the American population, according to the CDC,  yet news stories rarely cover the community, said Christopher Roush, Dean of the Quinnipiac University School of Communications. In 2020, Roush decided to change that, launching Ability Media and hiring seven-time Emmy winner and former ESPN editor Dave Stevens to lead the team as a professional-in-residence. Read more

By Hannah Kirkpatrick
Some student media advisors and student editors are building partnerships with local media organizations to give student reporters a broader audience and contribute local news. And that is what student media advisor Michelle Day started two years ago, building a collaboration between the student media organization, The Northerner, and a regional media organization with a public service mission, LINK nky. Read more

By Carolyn Shapiro

Most months of the year, the Columbia Missourian newspaper operates with about 75 reporters and 11 editors. Other publications large and small can only dream of a staff of that size – or even a quarter of it.The reporters are journalism students at the University of Missouri, and the editors are faculty of the school, professional journalists who teach classes. By the time the journalism majors reach their junior year, they work regular shifts in the Missourian newsroom, which is considered one of the university’s “news labs” for hands-on experience. Read more

By Lauren Milideo
Like many college towns, West Virginia University has a large footprint in Morgantown, where the campus of 28,000 is based.  Employees, alumni, sports fans and students follow the news from WVU. And the student paper, the Daily Athenaeum, is well read, according to the paper’s faculty advisor, Madison Cook – with a 94% pick up rate from 84 bins distributed across campus and the city. And the reach goes even further on Fridays, when the Daily Athenaeum and the local newspaper, the Dominion Post, join forces, Cook said. Every Friday the student paper is printed, in full, in the family-owned Dominion Post. Read more

By Carolyn Shapiro
Missouri University journalism students start their shifts in the KBIA public radio newsroom at 8 a.m. Within eight hours, they produce 45-second-long news stories to air in the local evening newscasts during National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” or “Morning Edition” the next day. It’s an immersive, hands-on experience for the students in the Missouri School of Journalism. The “Missouri Method” of learning by doing takes place in multiple “labs” of working newsrooms that deliver coverage of the community. KBIA is one of those labs, available to journalism students who choose a concentration in audio reporting for their junior and senior years. Read more

By Emily Sheftman

In the rural state of Montana, providing legislative news to the states’ rural counties and small community papers can be a challenge. And over time, as statehouse reporter numbers have declined, legislative coverage has dropped. Student reporters in the University of Montana Legislative News are one part of the solution, according to Courtney Cowgill, a professor at the University of Montana and the director of the student staffed, faculty directed Legislative News Program. Read more

By Lauren Milideo

At the University of Washington, journalism students are required to take Media Responsibility in a Diverse Society, taught by Andrea Otáñez, Associate Teaching Professor in the University’s Department of Communication. The course is designed to “help students get outside the processes of journalism and examine them and think about them critically,” Otáñez said. And the course has a service focus, partnering with local non-profits. Read more

By Hannah Kirkpatrick

St. Bonaventure University journalism professors Rich and Anne Lee have always believed in giving their students a broader audience to provide real-world experience and added level of responsibility. “In most classes, two people read what you write: you and your professor. Here, potentially hundreds or more people can read it. That's good and it's bad. It means if you make a mistake, somebody is going to call you out on it,” said Rich Lee. Read more

By Emily Sheftman

In the 1970s newspaper publisher Paul Simon decided Illinois needed better trained public policy reporters. Simon, then the state’s lieutenant governor, had some time on his hands after losing the March 1972 race for the Democratic nomination for governor. So, as a faculty member at Sangamon State University in Illinois’ capital city of Springfield, he started the Public Affairs Reporting program in the fall of 1972. Read more about PAR.

By Emily Sheftman

The largest group of reporters covering New York’s capitol city is a team of students from New Paltz – a campus of the State University system. Learning about reporting and politics and legislative policy, the 20-something students work along-side seasoned reporters from the New York Times, New York Post, Albany Times Union and a score of other outlets. Read more about SUNY New Paltz and their program.

By Emily Sheftman

As regular reporters have disappeared from covering the Indiana Statehouse, Franklin College’s Statehouse File has taken on increased importance.

Every semester around three to seven students join veteran reporter and faculty leader Colleen Steffen for an immersive experience in the Statehouse news room. Students produce work year-round, Steffen said, with 35 news outlets around the state taking the copy. Read more about the Indiana program.

PHOTO:The Statehouse File group in the Indiana state capitol building.

By Richard Watts

 Former New York Times investigate reporter Chris Drew moved back to his native state to start teaching at Louisiana State University in 2015. And from the beginning Drew decided to engage his students in reporting projects.

“I didn't want a job where the students are doing stories to just turn in to class. Students know the stories are never going to see the light of day. So they're not, you know, necessarily motivated to do everything they need to do,” Drew said. Read more about LSU's Manship Program.

By Jack Rooney

The annual Idaho legislative session traditionally begins in January with the State of the State and budget addresses on the first Monday of the term. 

Since 2015, student journalists from the University of Idaho have been there to cover these tone-setting speeches, the start of their semester-long experience reporting from the state Capitol in Boise.  Read more about these student journalists.

PHOTO: Logan Finney makes his first on-camera appearance on Idaho Reports, the weekly public affairs show on Idaho Public Television where he worked while interning as a statehouse reporter and now works full-time as an associate producer.

By Carolyn Shapiro

News reporters once roamed the corridors of their state capitols in droves, covering their leaders’ and legislators’ activities for the state’s residents. About a decade ago, those statehouse journalists started to go extinct. Find out how one University worked to reverse that.

By Richard Watts

Last year, Illinois public radio broadcast more than 350 student stories – generated and mentored through the student news room at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The partnership dates back many decades but took a leap forward when the University hired it’s first “clinical” teaching professor, Chris Evans in the fall of 2020.

Read more about this partnership.

By Lauren Milideo

A new program at North Texas University funds high school students writing stories for their local papers. The brainchild of Professor Dorothy Bland and colleagues at the Mayborn School of Journalism – the program builds on Bland’s experience as a reporter and a former intern. 

“We don't do it for the money,” Bland said. “We do it because it's important to invest in the next generation of talent. It really is a labor of love.” Find out more about Dorothy, her students and her program.

By Lauren Milideo

A new curriculum starts students working with local media from day one at Chapman University in southern California.

“The concept is predicated on the teaching hospital model of journalism education. We’re building MASH units on the frontlines of democracy,” said Professor Susan Paterno, Journalism Program Director at California’s Chapman University. Called the Collegiate News Service – the program collaborates with the local nonprofit news organization the Voice of OC, serving Orange County, California – in almost every class, filling local news gaps.

Find out more about this inovative service.

By Emily Sheftman

News coverage declines have decimated state house reporting staffs. Into those gaps student reporters, faculty and universities have stepped, providing students essential reporting skills and needed coverage of state legislatures.

“The opportunities are incredible,” said Alix Bryan-Campos, co-director of the Capital News Service course coordinated through Virginia Commonwealth University. “There are newsrooms who can't send a dedicated reporter to the state Capitol to cover the General Assembly, so students provide a community service. Students also learn about politics, and become more invested by the end of the semester. And the best opportunity is that they understand the pressure and responsibility of a newsroom and are prepared for that environment when graduating.”

Read more about how students are making a difference in journalism and state politics.

PHOTO:Capital News Service students start most semesters with a tour of the Virginia State Capitol and pick up press credentials. Photo by Alix Bryan-Campos.

By Lauren Milideo

American University Professor Sherri Williams partners with national media outlets in a course she teaches each spring called Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting which includes graduate and undergraduate students in the School of Communication.

Read more about Dr. William’s partnerships with the Nation and Teen Vogue.

PHOTO: The Black on Campus student writers cohort at The Nation's national student journalism conference in New York City, June 2018.

By Emily Sheftman

In the early 2000s, the two major news outlets in Honolulu merged, leaving residents with a single major news source. The consolidation inspired billionaire Hawaii resident Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and longtime philanthropist, to help fund an alternative: Civil Beat, a government and policy–focused news site created in 2010. Twelve years later, the online outlet is innovating again partnering with the University of Hawaii to help journalism students with professional reporting experience AND provide more statehouse news coverage.  Read more about student coverage of the Hawaii Statehouse

PHOTO: Blaze Lovell, a reporter at Civil Beat, mentored the students.

Within the small city of Oxford, Ohio, students in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University had few opportunities for hands-on news reporting experience. They could travel about an hour in either direction, to newspapers in Cincinnati or Dayton, but their community had limited local news coverage. So, in fall 2018, the journalism department started its own publication, the Oxford Observer, to provide not only a training ground for its students but also a crucial community news source for neighboring residents.

Read more about how a college brought news back to a local community

SCREENSHOT: Student run Oxford Observer brings news back to Oxford

By Hannah Kirkpatrick

Professor Adrienne Garvey started a student media club at Southeastern University in 2020 to offer her journalism students more real-world experience. While there is no student newspaper, the NextGen Journalism Club works with local and online news outlets to publish students’ stories on local news. 

“I was trying to figure out how we could best serve our students and serve our community as well,” said Garvey. Garvey is an associate professor of broadcasting and journalism in Southeastern’s Department of Communication.

Read more about how a student club provides local news

By Richard Watts

Winooski is Vermont’s youngest and most diverse community. Next door to the state’s largest city, Burlington, the city of 8,000 has lacked a local news source for more than a decade. In the summer of 2020, UVM’s Community News Service launched the Winooski News, a bi-monthly newsletter and website to cover the events and people of Winooski. Read the details about this joint effort on the Community News site.

By Richard Watts

Editors note: Two journalism professors at Kent State, Jacqueline Marino, and Susan Kirkman Zake, have been the driving force behind several initiatives that provide student-generated content directly to local media outlets.

Read Richard's interview with Kent State's Susan Zake to find out more about the project.

By Carolyn Shapiro

Dink NeSmith wrote a column for The Oglethorpe Echo for about a decade after he and his wife moved to a farm in the Georgia county that the weekly newspaper had served for 148 years. One day in late September, the Echo’s owner told NeSmith he planned to shut the paper down. Ralph Maxwell, whose family founded the Echo, had exhausted his energy and resources to keep it going, NeSmith said.

Read how the lifelong newspaperman and community newspaper co-owner created a place for journalism students to thrive. 

6/10/22