By Lauren Milideo
Like many college towns, West Virginia University has a large footprint in Morgantown, where the campus of 28,000 is based. Employees, alumni, sports fans and students follow the news from WVU. And the student paper, the Daily Athenaeum, is well read, according to the paper’s faculty advisor, Madison Cook – with a 94% pick up rate from 84 bins distributed across campus and the city.
And the reach goes even further on Fridays, when the Daily Athenaeum and the local newspaper, the Dominion Post, join forces, Cook said. Every Friday the student paper is printed, in full, in the family-owned Dominion Post.
“Now we're actually getting distributed throughout multiple counties in rural areas, which is really great,” Cook said.
And the Dominion Post also gains from the arrangement as the student media program funds the insert – an addition its readers look forward to receiving each week, Cook said. Fridays are typically the second- or third-highest ranked day of the week in terms of daily web traffic on the paper’s website (the Daily Atheneum’s newsletter also goes out on Fridays), Cook said.
And while student journalists focus largely on WVU stories, community issues also enter the conversation; debates and votes by the Morgantown city council garner coverage, Cook said. Larger-scale stories also appear: “The West Virginia Legislature passed some pretty stringent bans on abortion. So students are covering that story and bringing a hyper-localized angle to that, too.”
Guiding the student journalists while remaining hands-off is a balancing act, Cook said, describing her work as “dancing that line of, you know, not telling them what they can and can't publish, but being there as a support system for them as they need help, advice. I give them feedback after they publish content and then I advocate for them throughout the university, making sure that they're seen, and that we're getting the resources that we need in order to make them successful.”
A future goal is finding more news outlets with whom to collaborate, Cook said. One such potential collaboration partner is Black By God, a Morgantown, West Virginia-based Black-run nonprofit quarterly newspaper with both online and print offerings.
“I also work with area statewide newspapers and radio stations to talk about opportunities for internships, jobs, making sure that those area partners let us know what skills are most important to them when they're hiring,” Cook noted. “So we make sure that we really do act as a learning lab for students and that they're learning skills that they are actually going to be using out in the field.”
Madison Fleck Cook is Director of Student Media at West Virginia University in Morgantown. She came to the position in May 2022 following positions teaching at the Missouri School of Journalism and as editorial director at the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors. Cook, herself a WVU alum, oversees the three-pronged WVU media operation including the student newspaper the Daily Athenaeum, radio station U92 The Moose, and student-run ad agency Prospect and Price Creative.
For more information:
Madison Cook madison.cook3@mail.wvu.edu