By Lauren Milideo

When the newsroom of Memphis’s local newspaper shrunk from over 200 staffers to a couple dozen, Memphians had fewer options for reading local news. In summer 2018, then-president of the University of Memphis, David Rudd, initiated the Institute for Public Service Reporting, said Institute assistant director David Waters.

Waters is one of three faculty members, along with director Marc Perrusquia and Americorps Report for America member Laura Faith Kebede. All three are former journalists-turned-faculty members. Their position as faculty was important, Waters said, because the role preserved their journalistic integrity. With university funding “controlled by the legislature… we were concerned that if we did report on some state legislative matters, we wanted to be able to maintain our independence.”  The role also provided university benefits to the team.

“We had academic freedom, and we were really concerned about our independence,” Waters noted. “I mean, it’s a state university, state-funded.”

The Institute kicked off with just Perrusquia at the helm, and Waters joined him six months in, Waters said. Perrusquia was the investigative journalist; Waters focused on explanatory reporting.

“But we wanted to also work with students,” Waters said. “We wanted to help prepare the next generation of journalists, of course, through the university and through the journalism department.”

The two initially brought on a graduate assistant, but soon realized that, as they did not focus on academic research, this role wasn’t quite filling the goals they had. Someone who was more focused on practicing journalism would be a better fit. This led to the creation of an internship at the Institute, Waters said.

Now, one or two interns join Waters, Perrusquia and Kebede at the Institute each semester, where they work 20 hours a week for $15 an hour. Seven interns have completed the experience (and one had to drop out for personal reasons), Waters said, and while anyone can apply, all of the interns thus far have been journalism students.

Interns can work in print or broadcast journalism, Waters said, with print/online-focused students producing material for the Institute’s own site, while broadcast interns work with local NPR station WKNO.

“We have a working relationship with… WKNO,” Waters said. The Institute pays an editor and producer at the station for part-time work with broadcast interns, including collaborating to create stories and podcasts.

The print/digital intern, meanwhile, works with Perrusquia and Waters, he said, and “all of our content is published here by the Daily Memphian.” Waters described the Daily Memphian as “itself another interesting startup.” The five-year-old online news outlet is a nonprofit, and “they get exclusive rights to our content,” Waters said. “They can decline to run it, but they haven’t done that yet.” Waters added that the Daily Memphian pays “a nominal fee” through this arrangement.

“Our interns do various things depending on their level of experience and competence,”
Waters said, later adding, “We've had a couple of interns who've been incredibly smart and have had some experience in journalism and have helped us through some pretty serious investigations.” Both 2020-21 interns pursued important stories during their tenures. Caleb Suggs was the first University of Memphis student ever to win a Randolph Hearst award, Waters said.

Suggs noted in an interview that he spent much of his internship time working at WKNO. Suggs said that although he did not work directly on the same stories that Perrusquia and Waters were, he did contribute to Perrusquia’s investigative stories about police brutality by editing police body cam footage, in some cases blurring a face to avoid incriminating someone, in some cases bleeping out curse words in footage that was to be released to the public. The videos Suggs worked on became visual accompaniments to Perrusquia’s investigative stories.

“Working with this really made me even more aware of what brutality looks like up-close,” Suggs said.

Suggs’ Hearst-award winning work was a look at Beale Street in the first days after people began to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Suggs went to Beale Street, recording music and conversations at B.B. King’s Blues Club, where he interviewed club owner Tommy Peters and some of the musicians who had spent decades performing there. Suggs worked to capture “the sights and sounds – hard to describe – like the music, because, you know, on Beale Street, just about every joint you go to has live music. So, by really captur(ing) some of that sound, some of the music, making it music-filled,” Suggs created an audio report that was “as traditionally Memphis as I could.”

Suggs credits the internship with opening doors for him even now, as WKNO has hired him to create a freelance documentary about Memphis HBCU Lemoyne-Owen College.

The other intern that year, Christopher Fulton, learned through investigation that a federal building in Memphis had been named for former Congressman Clifford Davis – and that Davis was also a former Klansman, Waters said. Fulton’s story led to Davis’s name being removed. The building was subsequently renamed for Odell Horton, Memphis’s first African-American federal judge.

Students in journalism classes are also working with Kebede on researching and reporting for Civil Wrongs, a podcast series looking at how historical racism in the South continues to have reverberating effects today.

The work is funded through a variety of donors, including foundations, individuals and the University itself.