By Lauren Milideo
At the University of New Mexico Communication and Journalism Department, Michael Marcotte is the lone Professor of Practice. For the past ten years, he’s been finding and creating opportunities for students’ journalism to reach larger audiences in New Mexico, via a news website and internship and fellowship programs.
New Mexico News Port is, in Marcotte’s words, “a concept in collaboration.” The site was launched in 2014 as part of the Online News Association’s “Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education,” and features stories that students produce in department courses. It is “the default publishing outlet for the class work,” Marcotte said. The main goal of the site is to provide first-time publishing experience to students, “but it also aspires to experiment with multimedia storytelling and, in an ideal world, create collaborative opportunities with other news outlets,” Marcotte noted.
Students who are not in journalism classes may also contribute, Marcotte said, as happened when one student brought him a class project that became an environmental story, which fit nicely into News Port’s mission even though it had been produced in a different department for a different purpose.
New Mexico News Port frequently republishes content from other local outlets, Marcotte said, through a basic agreement: “No money changes hands. We credit each other. We do minimal editing to other people's content.” In turn, News Port offers its content for distribution by other local newsrooms (though this happens infrequently, he noted).
“Anything we put out there, you're free to take. Let us know, give us credit, but have at it,” Marcotte said.
Another avenue for student journalists to gain experience and serve audiences is through the Department’s statewide internship and fellowship programs, which, Marcotte noted, “were built and privately funded to help students make the leap from school to career, but also to help struggling local newsrooms provide entry-level positions.”
The New Mexico Local News Fellowship program is in its fifth year, Marcotte said, and is open to applications from any recent graduate of a New Mexico public university with an interest in a journalism career. The program pays $26,500 to each of four fellows to cover nine months of work in local newsrooms.
Similarly, the internship program is open to undergraduates at state schools and provides $3,000 to each of four interns, who spend eight weeks during the summer working in New Mexico newsrooms.
The newsrooms, fellows and interns are all recruited annually between November and January, after which the finalists are selected and matched by a review committee, Marcotte explained. The work phase starts in June, beginning with a one-week virtual “boot camp” to get students off to a running start in the world of professional journalism. From there, the fellows and interns spread out to their assigned newsrooms across the state, which, Marcotte noted, could be “in print, radio, television, or digital – urban or rural.”
“This training program started small with a pilot project of three fellows working for eight months. It then expanded to four fellows for nine months,” Marcotte said. “And in 2022, it grew to include the internship component.”
Applications have increased each year and are becoming more competitive. This year, the review committee has fielded requests from nearly three dozen newsrooms and two dozen applications for intern and fellow positions, Marcotte said. The goal is to select and encourage diverse students who will continue in a journalism career after the experience.
“That's definitely our metric of success – if we can keep them in local journalism in New Mexico – and the success rate currently is around 75%,” Marcotte said.
Current fellow Alika Medina noted that the program has been a critical piece of her growth as a journalist. Medina is currently working as an associate producer at KOB4, a television station in Albuquerque, and noted that the fellowship created learning opportunities she likely would not have had otherwise.
“If I wouldn’t have applied for the fellowship, I probably wouldn't be here, doing this work, and I probably wouldn't have gotten the chance to apply for any position in broadcast journalism,” Medina said.
She noted that she had long wanted to go into broadcasting and reporting, but “I didn't know how I was going to get there.” Another challenge was the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck just as she went into the semester that would have included the relevant coursework.
“This fellowship has taught me… everything about producing that I needed to know that I didn’t know before.” She later added, “this has been probably one of the best things that I could have possibly done for myself.”
Medina plans to continue in news production after the fellowship, she said.
The original funding for the fellowship program largely came from The Democracy Fund.
“In 2016, I was a consultant for Democracy Fund on an environmental scan of the ‘local news ecosystem’ in New Mexico to try to get at how well it's doing,” Marcotte recalled. He said he found that the news landscape in the state was “precarious.”
“We were definitely having our challenges like anywhere else,” he said, including the “loss of some traditional papers linked to a collapse of the advertising business.”
The work, Marcotte said, “led to further research and the eventual creation of The New Mexico Local News Fund (set up as a project of the Santa Fe Community Foundation).”
“We've done a pretty good job, I think, of collaborating in our local news ecosystem,” Marcotte noted.
Democracy Fund remains the most significant contributor to the fund, but the fund has grown to include more contributors. By 2023, the fellowship/internship program grant administered by Marcotte and UNM was funded at around $146,000.
The future of the fellowship program looks promising. The operators of the Local News Fund are currently turning to the New Mexico state legislature seeking another $200,000 in funding via the state’s workforce development department. If that happens, the 2024 program could double in size to eight fellows and 10 interns.