For Immediate Release
October 21, 2024
Richard Watts, rwatts@uvm.edu
Sarah Gamard, scbgamard@gmail.com
BURLINGTON, Vt. —As newsrooms shrink across the U.S., student journalists have emerged in filling gaps in local news coverage – just in time for the 2024 election. The Center for Community News at UVM is working to harness the enthusiasm and expertise of university-led reporting programs to ensure that student coverage of the 2024 elections is the most ambitious in history.
The CCN Elections & Democracy Reporting Initiative, launched this summer, brings together news-academic partnerships at colleges across the country to facilitate reliable and impactful reporting of the 2024 election cycle and beyond through a suite of free resources for the faculty who lead these programs.
Roughly 125 colleges across 46 states are participating in the initiative, some of which already have robust student reporting operations, while many others are exploring ways to bring student election coverage to their schools. Together, they’re providing professional-level election reporting to community news organizations in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Northwest, West, Midwest and South.
“Partnerships between university reporting programs and local news outlets produce extraordinary benefits to communities that might not otherwise get comprehensive information about local races, candidates, and the voting process,” says CCN Managing Director Meg Little Reilly. “Under the guidance of faculty editors and journalists, student reporters are helping to rebuild our information ecosystem.”
The CCN Election and Democracy Initiative helps faculty at U.S. colleges and universities who are running student reporting programs and want to cover upcoming races, large and small. CCN connects program leaders to a community of peers, provides free teaching resources, facilitates collaborative reporting projects, and promotes the exceptional work of your students.
CCN is also for the first time collecting these student-reported election stories from across the country to provide a snapshot of their significant contribution to the news landscape. It’s not a comprehensive listing of all the student coverage in the U.S., but a representative sample of the ambition and sophistication of university-led reporting. Find election coverage and much more at CCN’s National Community Newswire.
This election cycle, misinformation is rampant, local newsrooms across the country are in financial crisis and students are stepping in to fill a critical role in reporting real news that their communities otherwise wouldn’t get. This effort is a clear solution to fill gaps in U.S. election coverage and sustain the democratic process.
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About CCN
The Center for Community News at UVM is a nonpartisan nonprofit that is working to grow and strengthen university-led reporting programs around the country, to create a more sustainable future for local news outlets and the communities they serve.