By Carolyn Shapiro
Arizona State University considers Cronkite News a “teaching hospital” for journalism students. Like medical school students who do hospital rotations to treat real patients and get hands-on experience, students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication produce a daily newscast in their campus newsroom to air on the Arizona PBS.
The public TV station is based on the Cronkite campus, in downtown Phoenix, and the journalism school provides its half-hour news report at 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The students cover stories across the Phoenix metropolitan area, from public safety to city hall to the K-12 schools. Their stories run in written, digital form on www.cronkitenews.azpbs.org.
The operating costs of Cronkite News total about $2 million every year, but the value of the experience justifies the investment, said Battinto Batts, dean of the Cronkite School.
“It's an expensive enterprise doing this,” he said, “but we believe that it serves the public and ... it prepares the students to go and succeed in this industry.”
About 130 students each semester work for Cronkite News or one of its divisions. Those include a program dedicated to sports reporting, and a satellite campus in Los Angeles where students cover a variety of stories, heavily focused on major league sports, for an Arizona audience.
Cronkite News also includes a team of reporters in Washington, D.C., led by veteran journalist Steve Crane, who cover Congress and federal government for readers back home. Eight to 10 students per semester work near the U.S. Capitol in an ASU-owned building and receive a housing stipend.
Back in Phoenix, Cronkite News student reporters not only write breaking and major news stories, such as the state’s extensive vote count and certification process of the recent general election, but also look for untold stories in often overlooked communities. While large dailies such as the Arizona Republic, owned by newspaper conglomerate Gannett Co., still cover the state and greater Phoenix area extensively, staff cuts in recent years have forced them to scale back in certain areas.
“What we are doing is providing some coverage where it may not exist,” Batts said of Cronkite News. “My belief is that this is really what collegiate programs should be doing as part of service to communities and covering these stories, not just for an education purpose, but as a community service purpose.”
Cronkite News has an executive editor, managing editor, producers and news directors – all ASU faculty – overseeing the students’ work. Some of those editors also teach classes as professors of practice. The university also pays the salaries for a Cronkite News web developer and staff copy editor, and a couple of adjunct professors edit copy for the sports unit.
“Students are in the control room,” said Heather Dunn, managing editor and executive producer of Cronkite News and an ASU journalism professor. “Students are the reporters, the anchors.”
Journalism students take the Cronkite News class to work in the field and receive course credit based on the number of days they work. Two full days usually count for three credits. Students also receive reimbursement for travel expenses.
They apply for their desired jobs as audio or video reporters, digital or broadcast producers. The semester starts with two weeks of training. “They learn how to work a beat, how to contact sources, how to mine government data,” said Christina Leonard, executive editor of Cronkite News, who teaches the class.
The students have beats and work under a specific faculty director, who will both assign them and encourage them to find their own stories. “Whether they’re assigned or not, they are required to pitch stories, because we feel like that is something all students need to get better at doing,” Leonard said.
They can enroll in the course up to three times and progress to more enterprise stories or special projects, for example meteorology students may work on multimedia weather reports, Dunn said.
Cronkite News pauses publishing during summer and winter breaks. It’s one of the benefits for academic news programs, which don’t have an obligation to a publishing schedule as traditional news organizations do. They can use that down time to reassess and change their programs.
“We’re always thinking about what worked, what didn’t work, what can we do better,” Dunn said. “We’re always trying to figure out what’s next, how do we sustain it.”