Strengthening State Media Ecosystems: Tools to build a culture of news advocacy

May 8, 1 PM EST

Expert Panels Series - Virtual

Increasing support for local news requires raising awareness of the value and contribution of local news to community vitality and civil society. As neutral third parties, universities are uniquely positioned to play this role. In this discussion, we will discuss how tools like media newsletters, shared office space, research partnerships, funding fellowships, Press Forward chapters and beyond can mobilize local support for news. 

Panelists will include Andrea Hickerson, Dean of the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi which recently created the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation; Andrew Conte, director of the Center for Media Innovations at Point Park University; and Corey Hutchins, manager of the Journalism Institute at Colorado College and the lead author on the new CCN study on media newsletters.

And as always, we hope to hear from all of you about what you're doing to cultivate a healthy news ecosystem in your region.

Watch Recording (Zoom, Passcode: Tp3&cFi3)

Read the report (pdf)

Expert Panels Series - Virtual

Data Visualization: Using Graphics, Mapping and Visual Journalism to Tell Compelling Stories

April 24, Noon EST

University-led reporting programs have access to extraordinary expertise and resources to do cutting edge journalism that tells complex stories with visual imagery. News-academic partnerships are also laboratories for innovation. How people access news is constantly changing, and while core journalism values remain the same, these programs are not about saving what once was but also finding what is next. What better place to do that than in a university? In this panel, Amanda Bright from the University of Georgia leads a conversation with CCN’s data visualization engineer Ben Cooley and several programs trying new forms of news storytelling. 

Watch Recording (Zoom, passcode: RH2Mjcv&)

Expert Panels Series - Virtual

The Local Sports Beat

March 20, Noon EST

News-academic programs of every size are finding success covering local sports beyond campus. In this discussion, we will hear about what’s working in community sports coverage and how it can strengthen university-led reporting programs. Panelists will include John Affleck, Knight Chair in Journalism at Penn State; Michael Bruce, department chair of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, and Molly Yanity, Director of Sports, Media and Communication at the University of Rhode Island.

Watch Recording (Zoom, Passcode: jC1#i=25)

Resource Panels Series - Virtual

Around the world, journalists are facing increasing legal threats and intimidation -- and student newsrooms are no exception. In this discussion, we will hear from our partners at the Student Press Law Center about the kinds of legal challenges student reporters are facing and what we can do about it. Panelists include CCN’s Meg Little Reilly and SPLC’s Gary Green, Mike Hiestand and Jonathan Gaston-Falk.

View Recording (Zoom)

Recording (YouTube)

Functional democracies rely on the presence of robust and independent news organizations to hold elected officials accountable and shine light on injustice and corruption. At the local level, trustworthy civic information is essential for establishing a baseline of verifiable truths and solving problems in public life. Vermont's Town Meeting Day has long been held up as a model for civic engagement, but Vermonters — like the rest of the nation — have sorted themselves into more homogenous digital spaces in recent years and we've shifted our media diets to more polarized national sources. How are these broader trends showing up in local problem-solving and what are the implications for our local democracy?  

Join Panelists Minh Ly, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UVM and author of the forthcoming Answering to Us: The Right to Democratic Accountability; Meg Little Reilly, Managing Director of the Center for Community News at UVM, a columnist at Forbes Magazine; and Daisy Benson, UVM Libraries Interim Director of Information and Instruction Services; moderated by Richard Watts, Director of the Center for Community News at UVM. 

Expert Panels Series - Virtual

Immigration and border reporting are a key area for reporting in 2025. Here we will hear from some of the programs, approaches they are using and some of the stories that are out there and are evolving. Panelists include Kate Gannon, University of El Paso who directs BorderZine; Luis Ferré-Sadurní, an immigration reporter at the New York Times; Lourdes Cardenas, from San Francisco State University and Mark Horvit, from the University of Missouri and former director of IRE. 

Expert Panel Series

Successful news-academic partnerships are fueled by strong collaborations. In this discussion, we will explore ambitious new approaches with leaders of innovative and high impact programs. 

Panelists include Nisha Atre, Director of the SUNY Impact Foundation; Chris Drew, director of the LSU Manship School's experiential journalism program; Kim Palmiero, Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University; Corey Hutchins and Jenny Fischer from the CoLab and Northern Colorado Deliberative Journalism Project; Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Collaborative Journalism; and Claire Linney of The Post and Courier in South Carolina.

Passcode: wszu@5Eg

Recording (Zoom)

Partner Event

The Marshall Project is co-hosting a session for journalism educators and advisors to have a dialogue on how to share criminal justice datasets and reporting resources with student journalists, so they can hit the ground running on topics such as:

• Conditions in jails and prisons
• The political opinions of incarcerated people
• Correctional officer shortages
• Book bans behind bars

This event is brought to you in partnership with the Student Press Law Center and the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont. 

Public Media CCN Webinar Series

If you work in public media and want to grow strong student reporting partnerships at the college level, this webinar is for you. We’ll discuss our new program to provide coaching, peer support, training, and resources to public media professionals and college faculty, at no cost to them.

Recording (Zoom)

Speaker Series

November 13 | 12:00PM ET | Virtual

Join CCN Executive Director Richard Watts, Director of Sustainability at Knight Foundation Duc Luu, and Dean of the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State Marie Hardin for a discussion of all things funding. What opportunities are out there and how can you leverage them within your university or system?

Recording passcode: NZE=k24q

View recording (Zoom)

An event from our partners at the Student Press Law Center

Learn about your access rights when it comes to covering elections, including campaign events, polling places, voter records, and more.  Also, a primer on your rights and responsibilities when gathering news in high-stress situations, including the right to record, protest safety tips, and your legal rights when interacting with police.

Recording

Join CCN's Amanda Bright and Hannah Kirkpatrick for a conversation with two leaders of news-academic partnerships. How do you build a sustainable university-led student reporting program? What resources will you lean on for support? 

Panelists: John Tomasic, University of Washington; Lara Salahi, Endicott College

August 7th, 2024 from 12pm to 5pm: Center for Community News Pre-Conference Session

August 8th, 2024 from 10:30am to 12pm: New Research from the Center for Community News

August 8th, 2024 from 12:30pm to 2pm: Professional Roles and Resilience: Readying Young Journalists for the Work Refereed Paper Session. Hannah Kirkpatrick (CCN) and Colleen Steffen (Franklin) presented CCN research report News/Academic Partnerships: Assessing the Student Experience.

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The University Station Alliance discussed the importance of productive reporting partnerships between public media outlets and colleges, with a focus on student-led reporting programs and their impact on the community. The team also shared their experiences in covering various stories, emphasizing the value of diverse audio in storytelling, the need for balance and objectivity in journalism, and the importance of flexibility and adaptability in the storytelling process. Lastly, they highlighted the significance of sensory details in engaging the audience, the use of unique storytelling techniques, and the next steps in the webinar series.

Please join AEJMC and the Center for Community News for a special one-hour interactive discussion on student reporters and local news. Speakers will briefly cover election reporting, educational programming, public radio collaborations and statewide initiatives. Panelists include Amanda Bright (UGA), Meg Little Reilly (UVM), Chris Drew (LSU), Kathleen McElroy (UT Austin) and Scott Finn (CCN). The panel is moderated by Richard Watts, the Director of the Center for Community News.

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The University of Vermont's Center for Community News and the University Station Alliance hosted a webinar on collaboration between student journalists and public media stations, with a focus on the upcoming election and its potential for student journalists to make a difference. The panelists shared their experiences and insights on the benefits and challenges of involving students in radio station operations, the funding of internships, and the importance of media literacy and safe reporting. The webinar also explored the potential of using platforms like Twitch and Youtube for independent news and localized election coverage, and the need for managing students in journalism programs, particularly in regards to potential challenges.

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Public colleges and universities make up most of the Center for Community News data base of university led reporting programs. Yet three quarters of the 3,000 four-year colleges/universities in the country are private. Why is this? Are there steps that we can take to engage big and small private colleges and universities, providing high impact learning experiences AND bringing their students and resources to the local news crisis? In this session, we will hear from leaders at private schools where student reporting is making a difference in local news. The panel includes Jack Shuler (Denison University), Colleen Steffen (Franklin College), Alison Jones (Duke University), Gina Gayle (Boston University) and Susan Paterno (Chapman University). Following short presentations from our panel, we open the conversation to all of you. The panel is moderated by CCN Director Richard Watts.

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"How we did it: a deep dive into how one public media station grew its relationship with one university."

Students were rarely seen or heard at public radio station WILL, even though it’s part of the University of Illinois. Professor Chris Evans was hired to change that. He worked with station leaders to create the Illinois Student Newsroom, and greatly increased quality student storytelling on WILL’s platforms.

In this webinar, we dove deep with Chris to find out how WILL and University of Illinois did it, from curriculum to students to university/station relations. He also shared the pitfalls and challenges the program continues to face and offer a road map for anyone seeking to create a public media / student newsroom of their own.

Dr. Chris Evans is an assistant professor of journalism at Howard University, where he teaches multimedia journalism and serves as editorial director of Howard University News Service. Before coming to Howard in 2023, Evans created the Illinois Student Newsroom at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a nationally recognized model for combining the efforts of student journalists and public media newsrooms.

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Passcode: e9e#y%r9

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What is the state of local news research? What are some of the latest findings? In this panel Phil Napoli, the James R. Shepley Distinguished Professor of Public Policy Professor and Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and Jessica Mahone, Research Director at the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the University of North Carolina summarize recent research in local news, building on a national local news research workshop hosted earlier that week. Moderated by Meg Little Reilly, CCN’s Managing Director.

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Connect with other leaders of news-academic partnerships to discuss best practices and key issues. Led by Amanda Bright (UGA) and Hannah Kirkpatrick (CCN). What resources can CCN provide to support you?

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Chat Transcript

On Friday, December 1 at noon EST, join Scott Finn, CEO of Vermont Public, and CCN researchers for a discussion of our recent research on collaborations between public media and universities. What are the next steps that your station or university might take to increase collaborations?

Recording

Four states now provide funding for local news through state appropriations: New Jersey, Washington, New Mexico and California. In this program, we hear from local news leaders in those states and the national organization Rebuild Local News. Speakers include Ayinde Merrill (New Jersey Civic Information Consortium), Steve Waldman (Rebuild Local News) and Christa Scharfenberg (UC Berkeley). This session will be moderated by Meg Little Reilly (CCN).

Faculty - wondering how to best protect your student journalists as they publish stories with local media outlets? Join us on Thursday, October 19 at 1pm EST for a special Q&A session with the Student Press Law Center. Senior legal counsel Mike Hiestand and executive director Gary Green will be on hand to answer your questions about legal issues in news-academic partnerships.

Check out our "Legal and Ethical Considerations" faculty resources page for a primer before the session. Come with your questions and ideas!

Recording available by request

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University led reporting programs distribute content to news partners in many ways. Some send out a weekly email with stories, others post them to a website with a republish button, others distribute directly to the public. In this discussion, Justin Trombly (Community News Service) is joined by Adam Giorgi (Center for Rural Strategies) and Marcie Young Cancio (Amplify Utah).

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Amanda Bright, leader of UGA’s news lab and the Oglethorpe Echo, reviews the faculty resources page she created with CCN Research Director Hannah Kirkpatrick. How can this page be better? How can it be helpful to you? Bring your ideas and suggestions.

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Chat Transcript

There are more than 200 university licensed public radio and public TV stations – often co-located on university campuses. What are the opportunities for collaboration? In this presentation we hear from some university programs that are partnering with their local public media outlets in a variety of ways. Chris Evans, a Clinical Professor of Journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, coordinates through his classes hundreds of students stories that air on Illinois Public Media. Courtney Cowgill, a professor at Montana State University who manages a student reported daily one-minute audio broadcast from the Montana Statehouse that is shared with radio stations across the state, Virginia Dambach, the Executive Director of the University Station Alliance that encourages these partnerships and Claudia Cruz, who is the managing editor of Noticiero Móvil, a bilingual faculty-run, student-produced news site that provides additional Spanish-language audio content to the local public radio station KUNR.

This panel will be moderated by Scott Finn, the President & CEO of Vermont Public.

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University led student reporting content is distributed in a variety of ways, from shared webpages to email lists to direct partnerships. Some programs are involving students beyond their journalism programs.  How do they recruit those students and why? And we also talk about raising money for your program, knowing that University funding often follows students. Here we hear from program leaders on some of these topics. Our panel includes Alva James- Johnson, a teacher at Southern Adventist University who works with students to increase coverage of the surrounding community; Marcie Young Cancio with Amplify Utah, an organization that works with a number of partners, Elizabeth Stephens at the University of Missouri, who distributes statehouse reporting content in partnership with the Missouri Press Association and David Squires at North Carolina A&T, where student reporters are covering the neighboring East Greensboro community, to fill reporting gaps at the hard-hit daily Greensboro News & Record and supply content to two local weeklies.

As always, we will also hear from all of you. How is it going? What challenges do you face? What questions or suggestions do you have. At the heart of all of these programs are creative and innovative faculty. Bring your questions and thoughts.

Listen here 

Chat transcript

Student reporters in University/local media collaborations are bringing local news to rural, urban and suburban areas. In this panel we hear from three programs; Amanda Bright of the University of Georgia, who oversees the ownership and operation of a community paper, Andrew Conte, who coordinates student reporting projects through Point Park University in Pittsburgh, and University of Miami professor Tsitsi D. Wakhisi (invited), who coordinates Communitywire.miami – a student staffed reporting initiative to produce local stories for city neighborhoods.

We also will hear from all of you. How is it going? What challenges do you face? What questions or suggestions do you have. The Center has identified more than 140 of these programs and there are more – but at the heart of all of them are creative and innovative faculty. Bring your questions and thoughts!

This panel will be moderated by CCN Director Richard Watts.

Listen here

Chat transcript and resources

Join us for a panel discussion of the latest research  on local news, moderated by Dr. Mimi Perreault, drawing from the 2023 Local Journalism Researchers Workshop (Feb 16, 17) co-sponsored by University of North Carolina and Duke University. More than 50 presentations focused on local news research, from pink slime to civic engagement were featured at the workshop. In this brown bag, session organizers Philip Napoli of Duke and Jessica Mahone from the University of North Carolina will highlight some of the top papers and findings. Phil Napoli is the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy and Jessica Mahone is the Research Director Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the University of North Carolina.

Dr. Mimi Perreault’s research and teaching expertise are in community-media relations and media writing, specifically helping local non-profits develop strategic communication plans and she serves as the advisor to the student led regional publication, Overlooked in Appalachia.

Listen here

Chat transcript and resources

More than 100 colleges and universities are coordinating programs to provide local reporting. In this panel, Lara Salahi, of Endicott College, and Christina Smith, of Georgia College will discuss their research on these collaborations. Salahi, an award-winning journalist, started a partnership at Endicott College and Smith worked for 13 years as a community newspaper reporter and is now a weekly newspaper scholar. Also joining Salahi and Smith is Meg Heckman, from Northeastern University, the founder of a local media initative and a fellow scholar and Mark Berkey-Gerard, from Rowan University, who has identified more than a hundred news-academic collaborations partnerships in the U.S. and conducted surveys and interviews on key benefits and challenges. Christina Smith will moderate.

Listen here

Chat transcript and resources

CCN Report

As the number of fulltime statehouse reporters have decreased, student reporters in University/College led programs are stepping in to fill the gap and provide high-quality experiential learning for the students. Here we hear from four of those programs; Colleen Steffen with Indiana's Statehouse Files, Alix Bryan-Campos with VCUs Capital News Service, Chris Drew with LSU's statehouse news bureau and Rafael Lorente with Maryland's Capitol News Service. For more details see our case studies here. The panel is moderated by Kathleen McElroy of UT's Moody School of Communication in Austin. 

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Many of the local media partnerships utilize some mix of faculty-led university fundraising.  In this virtual brown bag we focus on university/faculty fundraising, exploring some of the different approaches and sources. Our panel includes Kevin Morgenstein Fuerst, Executive Director of Annual Giving at the University of Vermont Foundation; Susan Paterno, chair of the journalism program at Chapman University and Laura Simoes, Executive Director of the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications. The panel is moderated by Richard Watts, the Director of CNS. Each of the panelists has had extensive experience raising many thousands of dollars in university settings. Bring your own ideas and thoughts.

Read our Faculty Fundraising Report here

Community Foundation Locator

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A lack of local news undercuts democracy, reduces citizen engagement and leads to greater polarization. One recent report finds we are losing two community newspapers a week. What is the role of philanthropy in addressing the crisis? What is the role of public funding? Moderated by Meg Little Reilly, the Communications Director at the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution.  In this panel we hear from Karen Rundlet, a Director of the Journalism program at the Knight Foundation, Todd Franko, the director of local sustainability and development for Report for America and Michelle Srbinovich, the Vice-President for Portfolio Success at the American Journalism Project.

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A conversation with Andrea Wenzel, the author of “Community Centered Journalism” and Nikki Usher, the author of “News for the Rich, White and Blue.” A discussion of what we mean by community journalism, who it is for and who is involved in the production and dissemination of news.  This conversation is moderated by Traci Griffith, professor emeritus of Media Studies at St. Micheal’s College and the current racial justice director for ACLU Massachusetts.

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What are some of the innovative for-profit and public funding models? Moderated by Erica Beshears Perel, Director, Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Here we explore some private and public funding approaches. Mike Rispoli is the Senior Director of Journalism Policy at the Free Press/Free Press Action Fund that recently helped win $3 million in public funding for news outlets in New Jersey and Michael Shapiro, the founder of TAPinto, a for-profit franchise model for local news, that presently has a network of 86 local news sites in New Jersey (as well as sites in PA, Fl and NY).