By Carolyn Shapiro
One of Lex Weaver’s proudest accomplishments as editor of the Scope, Northeastern University’s digital magazine covering underserved communities around Boston, was its coverage of candidates for mayor and city council last year.
That summer, Weaver and her staff of four students interviewed 47 of the 55 candidates running for the city’s open seats in the November 2021 election. Among the first interviews was one with Michelle Wu, who went on to become Boston’s mayor. Weaver even solicited foreign-language students at Northeastern to translate some of the interviews into Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish in exchange for buying them lunch.
The candidate profiles ran on the Scope website. It was a huge undertaking — and a vital public service for Boston residents. It was also the kind of extensive, comprehensive project that a traditional newspaper — even one as large as the Boston Globe — couldn’t easily accomplish with its strapped resources.
Weaver steered the Scope editor-in-chief until June 2022. Her goal was “to focus on what we can do for these communities,” she said.
The magazine, produced by Northeastern’s School of Journalism and Media Innovation, has a bent toward social justice and stories highlighting voices often missing from or sparsely covered by Boston’s traditional news outlets.
“It's our way of serving the community around campus through experiential education,” said Meg Heckman, Scope's founding advisor (2017) and a Northeastern assistant journalism professor. “And it's our way of giving back to the neighborhoods around campus where our students go to learn how to be journalists.”
The Scope’s top editor is paid with a $50,000 grant through a one-year fellowship from the Poynter Institute, a resource and training organization for journalists. Editors are usually former Northeastern graduate students, selected in collaboration between Poynter and Northeastern’s journalism faculty.
Money for a dedicated, full-time editor makes a crucial difference to the magazine, said Matthew Carroll, a member of the revered Boston Globe Spotlight team who is now a Northeastern journalism professor and the Scope’s faculty advisor. It means someone is reliably on the job, running the newsroom, directing reporters and keeping the ship afloat.
“They can take a lot more time to organize,” planning coverage for weeks, months or the whole year ahead, Carroll said. “Having that single person in charge is just a huge, huge luxury.”
Northeastern journalism students produce most of the Scope’s stories. Undergraduates contribute work they do for midterm or final class projects, including in a course Carroll teaches.
Each semester, between eight and 10 students typically staff the magazine. That includes four graduate students who write and edit during “assistantships.”
Over the summer — and to supplement the staff during the semester — some students volunteer to get clips to show they have journalism experience. Others get paid to write as a work-study. Particularly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when students’ summer internships fell through, grant money allowed the Scope to pay them, Heckman said.
The ability to juggle between the Scope’s two roles – as a public service and an educational entity – is key to an academic-news partnership’s success, Heckman emphasized.
“To make these entities sustainable, you're really managing relationships on at least two sides,” she said. “You're managing relationships in the community. And then, for a full-fledged community news organization like ours, we're also managing relationships within our institution.”
From the start, the intent was to spread the Scope workload across multiple classes, Heckman said. “We wanted this to be a shared effort,” she explained. “We have a really collaborative culture in our J-school, which is very nice, and a lot of faculty members feel very strongly about this work.”
Some professors channel a particular project to the Scope. Students in one reporting class produced a story about rising demand for Bluebikes, a bike-share program in Boston, during the pandemic. Student produced work in the ongoing video series Changemakers about people working to make change in their communities runs in the Scope in conjunction with written Q&As from the interviews.
“It’s the type of thing that even the most novice student reporter can feel empowered to do and do well,” Heckman said.
For the midterm elections in November, about 30 students from two classes hit the streets to interview voters as they exited the polls. Each student wrote up two or three interviews and posted quotes on Twitter. A team of students combined the interviews into a story.
“It gave them a little taste of election night coverage, and I think they all had a really fun time doing it,” Carroll said.
Weaver first worked for the Scope as a staff writer while in Northeastern’s graduate journalism program, where she was one of the only Black students, she said. Starting then, and particularly while she served as editor, she immersed herself in the communities she covered, spending time with people there — and told her reporters to do the same.
“To do local news, you really have to be hyper local,” Weaver said. “I feel like it makes your content stronger. And me, as an editor, it makes me more confident in what I'm saying when I am either assigning stories to students or reporters in general, or if I'm talking about a community. I can actually speak to it because I know it.”
For more information:
Matt Carroll, ma.carroll@northeastern.edu
Meg Heckman, m.heckman@northeastern.edu