By Carolyn Shapiro
Cronkite News, which produces the Monday-through-Friday evening news report for the Arizona PBS television station, operates two websites that carry digital versions of its stories.
One site is designated for the public to access those stories in readable format. The other is available only to partner news organizations across Arizona, which can pull content from that online menu to offer to their own readers, listeners and viewers.
About 120 newspapers, radio stations and television stations across the state subscribe to the daily Cronkite News digest as distribution partners, or “clients.” Students at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication report and produce all of the content for Cronkite News, and the university makes it available for free to clients.
“It's nice and clean,” said Christine Leonard, executive editor of Cronkite News and the professor who teaches the course that students take when they’re producing the newscasts. The clients “don't have to delete any weird code or anything like that. We have all the high-res photos available to them, links to videos, embed, links to graphics, things like that.”
Clients have unrestricted access to use Cronkite work however they choose, as long as they give the students credit.
“The whole point of that digest is to make people aware of what we’re covering,” said Heather Dunn, executive producer and managing editor of Cronkite News and an ASU journalism professor. “We want the content as many places as it can be, so we’re happy to share.”
Cronkite students get the benefit of exposing their work to a larger audience. Cronkite encourages them to set up Google alerts, so they can see when their bylines appear in other news outlets.
“The thinking has been, for us, that we want to provide news and information, and we’re proud of the work that the students are doing,” Leonard said. “And we, quite honestly, put a lot of thought and effort into their work, the work that they produce. And we want it shared and shared widely.”
The Cronkite News distribution service fills a coverage gap for small news organizations that lack the staff and resources to pursue the vast array of stories that the student reporters can, Dunn said. A paper like the Yuma Sun is a four-hour drive from the state capital, in Phoenix. Instead of spending that time on the road, it can adapt Cronkite’s legislative coverage of particular policy issues or bills.
Many of those smaller publications and stations can no longer justify the steep price for wire services such as the Associated Press to provide stories of widespread interest. “It’s kind of like the AP model,” Battinto Batts, dean of the Cronkite School, said of its content-sharing program.
Cronkite News uses Slack with a pick-up channel that shows where its stories go. One afternoon in November, Leonard pointed out the flow of content to clients including: the Roswell Daily Record; Verde Independent in Cottonwood, Ariz.; Arizona Capital Times, a site covering state polities; Phoenix Business Journal, AZ Big Media, a business and lifestyle news site; and TucsonSentinel.com, a nonprofit online newspaper.
Cronkite News’ original format is in video, but many of its clients are print publications adapting the digital stories. Even smaller TV stations use the digital option more than the video content, which is sometimes difficult for them to adapt to their own newscasts, Leonard said.
And not all the Cronkite News pick-ups are from smaller news entities, she added. PBS Newshour, the national daily news program, recently picked up a Cronkite report, which underwent 10 edits before it aired, Leonard said. “We worked very closely with them to get it in the shape that it needed to be.”
Any news organization can ask Cronkite News to join its listserv for access to the digest. Since Leonard joined the university in 2016, the number of clients has doubled, she said.
“I feel like we definitely fulfill a need in our communities.”