By Lauren Milideo
At the University of Minnesota-Duluth, journalism students are learning many approaches to community news, and reporting local stories along the way.
“We’re a small but mighty journalism program, and a lot of the courses we teach focus on community journalism,” said Associate Professor Jennifer Moore. Student reporting appears on the student-run LakeVoice News site, which Moore advises with two colleagues from the Department of Communication.
“LakeVoice News was designed to be something where students could publish online,” Moore said, and students in various journalism courses, taught be Moore and colleagues, publish their stories on the site. Moore added that the number of stories “ebbs and flows over the years, depending on how many classes are using it.”
Students gain hands-on experience through internships at area news organizations, as well as through the Department’s Newsroom Practicum course (Journalism 4102), in which students create and maintain their own newsroom for the semester, often reporting on specific issues such as housing challenges in the city. The work they complete appears on the LakeVoice News site.
“For our students, it's a work sample that they can put in their portfolio when they're looking for a job or an internship,” Moore noted.
Students typically peer-edit work for this course, although instructors who teach this course also do some editing where needed as well.
Completion of either an internship or the Newsroom Practicum course is required of journalism majors, Moore said, and many choose to complete both.
Moore also pointed to strong relationships between the Department and the Duluth News Tribune, in addition to local television news affiliates including ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox. Moore noted that students work as interns or part-time to report and produce news at these outlets.
“Individually as faculty, when we see standout student work and think we can help them pitch it to local media for publication, we do that, too,” Moore noted.
For example, Moore noted, “I teach a class called Digital Storytelling, and I've already had a couple of students who have published the video packages that they produced for that class on (local news blog) Perfect Duluth Day and the Duluth News Tribune.”
Moore noted that, in a lakeside city that’s a couple miles wide and 20 miles long, the long Lake Superior shoreline and Saint Louis River are main focal points of much of the news. Environmental reporting and outdoor-focused stories are common and important to the local community. The department is not large, Moore said, so approaches including environmental journalism and solutions-based journalism, while not the subject of individual classes, are modules incorporated into multiple courses.
“Duluth has a lot of unique communities. And there's been sort of a have and have-not feel to the community,” Moore said. She noted that life expectancy can vary significantly from one part of the city to another, and taking a solution-oriented journalistic approach to telling these communities’ stories also yielded opportunities for students to bring data reporting into their work, Moore said.
“And there's a big art and music scene here, too. For the size of the town, it's pretty significant,” Moore said.
In the future, Moore said, adding journalism faculty to the Department would be helpful. Right now, the journalism program has two tenure-track faculty members and one term employee, which Moore described as “just not enough.”
In the meantime, students are gaining experience through several channels, and alums often continue to report local news, Moore said. “It's typical that many of the students who graduate from this program go on to work at community newspapers in the region –Wisconsin, Minnesota primarily.”