By Lauren Milideo

At North Carolina’s Elon University, student journalists are covering more than just the happenings on campus. Their reporting reaches into their own town, Elon, and neighboring Burlington, where local news coverage has taken a hit in recent years.

“Our students hyperfocus on Elon, the small town that we're in,” noted Elon Department of Journalism Chair and Professor Anthony Hatcher. “They go to the town council meeting. They cover local elections, but they also bleed over into Burlington.”

The students’ work appears on the Elon News Network, also known as ENN. The network is “two-pronged,” Hatcher said, with both live television broadcasts and a print newspaper. The website is also updated on an ongoing basis as news breaks, Hatcher noted.

The various pieces of ENN are housed in the shared Elon University Student Media space, Hatcher said. The outlets are student-run, with two faculty advisors (journalism professors, one specializing in broadcast news and the other an expert in print and online media. A University Media Board provides ethics guidance and allocates funds.

The students “make independent decisions on what we're going to cover,” Hatcher said. “So when you ask, ‘What's the news tonight? What’s the lineup?’ that was determined by a budget meeting among the students themselves.” Students pitch, select and report the stories themselves.

Hatcher noted that having all the student journalists working on different types of projects in a shared space creates opportunities for collaboration across platforms. “At any given time, you can walk in there and there might be 25 (students) at computers. And this group are working on (weekly student newspaper) The Pendulum stories, which will go on the website as well as in the print edition. And over here, everybody's working on the next TV show or shooting a short video for something that's happening on campus. And the way they work together is, (student journalists) cross back and forth.”

Following each news broadcast, Journalism Professor Richard Landesburg joins the student reporters to go over their work in detail. “Rich Landesburg will take them all into the studio and they'll have a postmortem, and he'll tell them everything they did wrong,” Hatcher said. He added, “It's not to rake them over the coals. It's just to train them so they do better next time.”

Likewise, Journalism Instructor Kelly Furnas “spends about two hours going story by story, paragraph by paragraph to seek out, ‘Okay, this could have been a stronger lead… why wasn't this on the front page? Why did you bury that?’”

Hatcher explained, “They get feedback on the back end, but they don't get directed on the front end.”

Their coverage ranges from municipal matters like zoning board activity to a new restaurant in town. They attend and report on town council meetings, and their work is available to the local community on the ENN site.

The students are also on top of up-to-the-minute breaking news, Hatcher said. “On election night, we had students constantly updating local races.”

Students have also, at times, worked for local newspapers for either internship credit or freelance pay, Hatcher noted.

The students’ work provides a detailed look at what’s happening in a changing community, Hatcher said. “You need to know what's happening in your town, not just, ‘What's the crime rate?’ but what's happening with gentrification? Is there a divide between rich and poor?”

And Hatcher sees more opportunities for their work to expand more into neighboring Burlington. “A few years ago, I think it had two restaurants and they were sort of old-fashioned, meat-and-three family restaurants,” Hatcher said. “Now you have a brewery with a restaurant. You have at least four coffee shops I can think of. There used to be a co-op down there and now, that’s being turned into a food hall. And that's the kind of stuff that makes a downtown more vibrant and it makes it better for our kids. Who's reporting on that? Who's putting all that into context?” He added, “I'd love to see a reliable central news outlet for that, for this region.”

Although the students work to provide ongoing reporting of campus and the community, there are challenges in having students step in to replace lost local news coverage, Hatcher said. One reason is the inherent turnover in a news team consisting entirely of reporters who will be leaving after the span of a semester or at most, a few years. Another is more unique to Elon: the university’s study abroad program is extremely popular, and 80% of students travel abroad, leading to further disruption in their ability to cover news around Elon, Hatcher said.

“You might lose three people from your news staff in one fall or one spring semester,” Hatcher said. “The lack of stability of a staff is a drawback not just for Elon, but for any college campus trying to consistently staff a news organization that provides local news. It requires commitment on the part of the students as well as on the part of the faculty.”

Hatcher does see another role for Elon’s campus (and others like it) to play in local news coverage: as a central hub and space for local news conferences. An example is the North Carolina Local News Workshop, which recently utilized Elon’s central location and campus facilities (housing, food, and meeting space) to host the NC Local News and Information Summit, which brought together journalists from across the state. Student journalists benefit as well, Hatcher noted, as they mingle with and learn from more experienced professionals at such meetings.

Hatcher noted that journalism is facing multiple challenges. “There's not only a crisis in local news, but I think there's a crisis in journalism majors – at least there is here. I think we have slipped by about 20 to 30 majors a year. it's a little concerning. I'd like to educate incoming students on what the possible career possibilities are…. there are so many things you could do with the journalism major.”