The young journalists in the Scripps Howard Foundation Emerging Journalists Program during their weeklong campus training where they hear from Mayborn faculty and mentors. Photo courtesy Dorothy Bland.

Engaging high school students in local reporting
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 do this because it's important to invest in the next generation of talent,” Bland said. “It really is a labor of love.”

A $300,000, three-year grant from the Scripps-Howard Foundation provides stipends to students’ mentors at the news outlets where they intern. And importantly, students receive $10 an hour for their approximately 160 hours of work completed through the summer, Bland said.

The University of North Texas is a minority-serving and Hispanic-serving institution. Bland and her colleagues were one of two programs selected by the Scripps Howard Foundation to serve as a launch pad for the Scripps Howard Foundation Emerging Journalists Program, Bland said.

Through this program, high school students participated “in a one-week total immersion camp here on campus, where they had to produce multimedia packages and teams,” Bland said, under the leadership of Dallas Morning News Equity Reporter Leah Waters.

From there, Bland said, the students “were placed in internships in their local markets and went back to their communities where they live.”

The program has run at UNT for two years, Bland said. During summer 2022, 18 students received paid internships at 13 media outlets across Texas. These placements ranged from the local community newspaper, the Denton Record-Chronicle, to the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle. Students interned at Texas news outlet Community Impact, the nonprofit San Antonio Report, Dallas NPR station KERA and at the Texas Metro News. The students produced over 90 stories this summer, Bland said.

The work the students do varies, Bland noted, and includes other pursuits in addition to writing news stories.

“They not only produce content, but it's also important to note that they're working on a podcast for the National News Publishers Association, which is a group representing more than 200 African-American owned publications across the nation,” Bland said. “And that's thanks to the partnership with Cheryl Smith, who's a publisher at Texas Metro News.”

Another piece of this collaboration with high school journalists, Bland said, is “working with the Texas Association of Journalism Educators.”

Bland noted, “We hosted a workshop for high school journalism advisors in mid-August,” adding that the program currently partners with 19 high school journalism “ambassadors” around Texas. Those ambassadors are also paid a stipend.


“I remember my first internship was when I was in college,” Bland said. “So it's amazing that these students are ready and prepared going into their summer, in some cases, of freshman year of college; in some cases, their senior year of high school.”

Bland, her colleagues and their students have found other ways to provide news coverage to their communities as well.  One example is the NTDaily, the University’s daily student newspaper, which is accessible each Thursday through the Denton Record-Chronicle. Student work produced during a course that Bland taught about crisis, trauma and recovery was also featured in a series about first responders in the Denton Record-Chronicle.

Bland also cited a number of her other colleagues leading experiential learning classess. For example, Randy Loftis is the NT Daily adviser and leading the charge for the Dallas Media Cooperative, Bland said. Carolyn Brown is overseeing Proyecto U, a Spanish-language broadcast/digital initiative, and Mayborn Endowed Chair Thorne Anderson is the adviser for Hatch Visuals, the student-run photo agency. SWOOP, is UNT’s student-run ad agency under the leadership of Larry Powell, and AGenZ is the student-run PR agency under the leadership of Rebecca Poynter.

For more information:

Fact Sheet

Dorothy.Bland@unt.eduDorothy Bland in portrait

 

UNT College students learning about reporting in class rooms and in the field. Photo courtesy Dorothy Bland.