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.”
Bryan-Campos’s students provide 50-100 stories a year to more than 100 news partners in Virginia – at no cost to the partners.
“The role of student journalists has become increasingly important with the obliteration of newsrooms,” Bryan-Campos said. “People are hungry for our content.”
The VCU program began in 1994 as an upper-level journalism course taught in the Spring semester, tracking with the legislative session. In 2019, VCU added the class to the fall semester – providing more background before students immerse themselves in the legislative session.
Bryan-Campos and co-director, fellow faculty member Veronica Garabelli, lead the classes and edit all student work before it is posted. During the session, students are assigned a beat to focus on and are responsible for coming up with story ideas. The focus helps hone their knowledge of the topic and develop sources, Bryan-Campos said.
Edited stories are submitted to an email list of more than 100 partner news organizations. Bryan-Campos estimates most stories get between 3,000 and 5,000 views, with many ending up in print also. About 25 of the news partner organizations regularly publish the student work, Bryan-Campos said. Student stories are almost always published, Bryan-Campos said, with the clips increasing students’ chances of getting hired after graduation.
VCU also has a collaborative partnership with the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s Capital News Service at the University of Maryland going back to 2013, to share and distribute one another’s stories of importance to Maryland, Virginia and D.C. residents.
“That's a wonderful thing about media trends that you're seeing now are collaborations and people saying, we need to get information out there,” Bryan-Campos said. “What's the best way we can do it?”
Moving forward Capital News Service will continue to provide student journalists the opportunity to write political news stories and fill the gaps left by traditional print news outlets that lack the resources to dedicate reporters to General Assembly coverage, Bryan-Campos said. They are also exploring merging the Capital News Service with upper-level broadcast news courses at VCU to increase multimedia content and build one newsroom to expand student skills and training and produce more high-quality journalism covering the stories that are no longer covered.
The challenge? As with many other news-academic partnerships. Bryan-Campos and her co-director teach multiple classes while balancing the Capital News Service.
“It's challenging to do breaking news in our program because I teach two to three other writing intensive classes along with this publication service,” Bryan-Campos said. “Student journalists require a lot of fact checking and editing before sending to a news publication. We try to have them fix the suggestions, versus doing it ourselves, and that editing process can be very time consuming given everyone's schedule.”
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