According to a study by the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, students produced more than 10,000 local news stories appearing in more than 1,500 news outlets across the U.S. over the past year, generating more than 14 million page views. CCN has identified 120 university-led student reporting programs providing local news.
In a myriad of ways, using a myriad of models, college journalists are already filling the gaps in news coverage across the country.
With those questions as our guide, we set out to explore research on the current state of local news, the ways college journalism programs are meeting the challenge of covering communities and the methods that could amplify and support those efforts.
We interviewed more than 35 stakeholders, pored through the significant body of research on college journalism conducted by the Center for Community News and talked with the leading researcher on news deserts at Northwestern University. We spoke with journalism deans and directors from programs at public and private universities, at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and across a broad range of geography and program size.
Efforts to expand statehouse coverage and build a supportive network of programs doing that work are well underway. This provides a foundation for other efforts to build upon.
There are promising ideas for cooperation across universities, including collaborations between public universities and HBCUs, that bear exploration.
To that point: Distribution and community engagement are real issues to be addressed. Creating more news content is an empty gesture if we can’t get it into the hands of those who need it.
Models for serving as news services providing coverage for multiple media outlets are well-established at a number of larger programs. These models hold lessons not only in how best to do that work but in the very real challenges of building relationships with local news organizations that are deeply stressed and subject to constant staff turnover.
Programs are actively filling coverage gaps by establishing or running community sites in news deserts and deeply underserved communities. While there are challenges to continuity in that model, there are also benefits that come in the form of deepening community engagement and not being at the mercy of legacy platforms
College programs face their own internal challenges that must be acknowledged and addressed: Maintaining enrollment levels among journalism majors, lack of student interest in covering local news and maintaining continuity of coverage across semesters and breaks with an ever-changing student staff. There are programs experimenting with ways to address these issues; those efforts could provide opportunities for sharing and collaborative support.
Penny Muse Abernathy, currently visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing and Communications, is the acknowledged and oft-quoted expert on the decline of local news and the associated rise of news deserts. In “The State of Local News 2023” report, Abernathy and her colleagues continue painting an ever-darker picture of what’s happening to local news:
Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers and is on track to lose a third by the end of 2025. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement.
Citizens in more than half of the nation’s 3,100 counties live in news deserts – with very limited access to local news – or in communities at risk of becoming news deserts. Two million Americans live in counties the report has on a “Watch List” — those areas at heightened risk of losing their last remaining newspaper.
Despite the recent increase in both corporate and philanthropic funds, the footprint of digital-only news sites is small, and predominantly a big-city phenomenon. In 2023, there were just over 550 digital-only state and local sites.
“We’re dividing into a nation of journalism haves and have nots,” said Abernathy.
So what does all that mean for college journalism programs?
Journalism programs are already leveraging the proximity of their universities to state capitals to provide learning experiences for their students. Efforts are already underway to expand those numbers and create a support system through which to share approaches and other resources. These efforts could provide a framework for collaboration that helps inform local coverage around particular topics or events, such as elections, as well as help with the transfer of skills and best practices.
HBCUs have a significant footprint in state capitals, particularly in the South. Every Southern state has an HBCU located in the capital, presenting opportunities for expanding their role in statehouse coverage. Not all of those institutions offer journalism degrees, but there are existing models to draw from that recruit students from other majors to try their hand at reporting. The proximity of state schools with large journalism programs to HBCUs presents an opportunity for collaboration.
Public media is already the backbone of journalism programs practicing the “teaching hospital” model of student immersion, but a huge opportunity remains untapped. Public media broadcast signals reach 99% of the population, providing a distribution channel that reaches into even the driest news deserts. More than 180 public media stations are licensed to universities. Yet a study by the Center for Community News found a serious lack of collaboration between those stations and the journalism programs at their universities. In a survey of 95 public media stations across 38 states, CCN found that only 1 in 10 partnered regularly with journalism classes. Some 91% said they’d like to collaborate more.
“The plain truth is that no one in our coverage area has more journalistic boots on the ground than we do,” said Hub Brown, dean of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. “The news environment in North Central Florida is certainly concerning, but it is also an opportunity.”
The low technological barrier to entry for creating local and hyperlocal news sites has led to an entire ecosystem of both for-profit and nonprofit startups. A number of journalism programs are partnering with these startups, whose public service mission generally aligns with that of journalism education. Some of those programs already are members of organizations that support these local news sites, such as the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). There are programs that are going one step further and starting their own local news sites, staffed almost entirely by students.
Are there ways to create a more systematic approach to this work, at the very least by building a network to share experiences and best practices?
Our research points us to three areas for consideration when we think about bolstering the role of college journalism in providing local news:
Providing more local news
Identifying news gaps and creating mechanisms to fill them
Collaborating across programs and news organizations
Efforts such as statehouse coverage, investigative reporting publication partnerships and distributed content models lay a foundation for deeper collaboration. Some programs are taking the initial steps toward testing more collaborative approaches. Because deep collaboration is still uncommon, there are opportunities to learn from experiments as they blossom.
This is a rare opportunity to gain insight into the benefits and pitfalls in close to real time and could lead to a better understanding of the value these efforts could have in local news.
Our reporting suggests that there are three potential models for increased collaboration among college journalism programs
This is a rare opportunity to gain insight into the benefits and pitfalls in close to real time and could lead to a better understanding of the value these efforts could have in local news.
Our reporting suggests that there are three potential models for increased collaboration among college journalism programs
“There are a lot of programs out there with a lot of history of students doing really good journalism.
Now there are a lot of smaller schools and newer players joining in. A lot of those places are starting from scratch, but they don’t have to. Can we help each other out so we are not all reinventing
the wheel?”
It is no exaggeration to say that the threat to local news is a threat to democracy and the kind of pluralistic society that enables productive, civil dialogue. As Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach put it in “The Element of Journalism:” “The purpose of journalism is ... to provide citizens with information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies and their government.”
Journalism educators teach that idea to the next generation of reporters every day, in the classroom, the newsroom, and the community.
Local newsrooms and journalism educators are mission-aligned. They naturally form a mutual support system. The opportunity at this critical moment in the trajectory of local news is to engage that mission with more intention by building sustainable structures to amplify what’s working and identify new possibilities to try.
“I think we have at colleges and universities this ready group of young people who are eager to have a voice and eager to engage and have an impact,” said Geeta Anand, dean and professor at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “I feel like if we can create some structures that are funded to enable us to channel these students responsibly into covering local news … that would be a great service to the communities and a great service to young people.”
To learn more about the research that has been done in this area, download and read the full report below.
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