You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Students working at University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, which supports similar programs at colleges and universities across the country.
Andy Duback/UVM
When an academic program provides students with skills to launch their careers while also meeting a community need, it’s a win-win. Or, in the case of the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News (CCN)’s expansion since its 2019 launch to become a national resource in providing local news groups with vital reporting on under-covered content beats, it’s even more than that.
“It’s a triple win, in a sense,” says Richard Watts, founder and executive director of the CCN. “It’s good for the students to have real stories that are published. It’s good for the universities, because many of us have a public service mission to give back. And it’s good for local news, the media ecosystem, which has really collapsed.”
Recent donations are allowing the CCN to partner with more colleges and news organizations across the country while also inspiring more students to pursue a career in local journalism.
What’s the need: In an era when social media and political polarization have opened the floodgates of misinformation and the traditional advertising-based business model of journalism has been shattered by big tech, newsrooms across the country have shuttered at an alarming rate.
Since 2005, the U.S. has lost almost 3,000 newspapers and 43,000 journalism jobs, and 1,766 counties have been declared “news deserts”—areas with one or zero local newspapers—according to a 2023 State of Local News Report by Northwestern University’s Medill School.
The center has mapped the landscape of news deserts, showing more than 1,316 campuses located in or adjacent to those “desert” counties. Officials have identified and conducted research on more than 130 higher education institutions that boast local news programs, and fostered collaboration among the faculty who lead them. But there are nearly 1,200 that remain untapped.
Building a foundation: Initially launched with funding from the university, the CCN was designed to be both a laboratory for students interested in journalism and a creative way to combat the shortage of local news coverage in parts of Vermont. It created a new minor that matches student reporters with faculty editors, enabling aspiring journalists to learn from experience while also providing local news groups with vital reporting on under-covered beats.
“When we started this teaching-hospital–type program at Vermont, we looked around the country to see who else was doing this and found some others, but nobody had connected them,” Watts explains. “The concept was, “Let’s enable these programs to build a community, learn from each other, and see if we can motivate more institutions to give this experience to their students, and contribute to local news.’”
Since 2022, the center has expanded beyond Vermont.
Gifts for growth: Now, with recent donations of $7 million—$5.5 million from the Knight and MacArthur Foundations and $1.5 million from UVM donors and the College of Arts and Sciences—the CCN hopes to grow further, not only by partnering with more colleges and news organizations but also by inspiring more students to pursue a career in local journalism.
Knight and MacArthur are part of the Press Forward Initiative, a group of 62 philanthropies aiming to invest a total of $500 million over the course of five years to local news outlets. The $5.5 million they donated is the largest known gift made to a university-led local news program so far.
Dale R. Anglin, director of Press Forward, hopes to see more donations like it moving forward.
“Right now, people often say, ‘I fund certain types of [news] outlets.’ In doing so, you’re funding at the end of the pipeline. The colleges are part of the people part of journalism,” she says. “I want to see foundations understanding that this should be one of the things you consider when you are funding in the journalism space.”
Faculty support: Teri Finneman, an associate journalism professor at the University of Kansas, publisher of The Eudora Times and coauthor of the upcoming case study book, News Desert U, says the CCN’s work is “incredibly important,” not only in the macro sense of protecting American democracy but also at the smaller-scale human level of supporting hardworking faculty.
“A lot of people think that at universities, we have all the resources we need, and that just simply isn’t true,” says Finneman, who previously sat on the center’s board of directors. “There’s a lot of help that is needed for faculty running these kinds of endeavors, because they are a next level kind of work, above and beyond what a professor does on a daily basis.”
But once faculty members have the CCN’s support and curricular guidance to get the program off the ground, many physical resources are already available to program leaders through their university.
“We have journalists in training, we have the equipment, we have the infrastructure,” Finneman said. “So it’s simply a matter of applying it outside of the campus grounds, putting it into practice in the real world and making a difference.”
The impact: For Christopher Drew, a 22-year New York Times reporter who now leads Louisiana State University’s statehouse news bureau, support from the CCN has been pivotal in guiding the development of a network in Louisiana to address coverage gaps beyond the capital of Baton Rouge.
“We had traditional, mainstream media for a couple of centuries. And we’ve had a whole second wave of nonprofit newsrooms. To me, the third wave is all these students at universities across the country,” Drew says. “There’s this army of journalism students out there and they’re our best hope.”
What the donation won’t be used for, Watts notes, is providing sub-grants to entirely fund the launch of new programs. “These programs have to be sustainable,” he says. “Ultimately, funding has to come from the university. We can help support it as it grows. But it has to be a college or university initiative.”
Researchers who have focused on local journalism, news deserts and rural media say it’s extremely helpful to have a clearinghouse center like the CCN, which is the first of its kind to quantify the phenomenon of university news partnerships.
What’s next: Nick Mathews, an assistant professor of journalism studies at the University of Missouri and coauthor of Reviving Rural News, believes that Vermont is inspiring new conversations and creative solutions to journalism challenges across the country.
“These are state institutions, right? Our job is essentially to continue to make our state better in any way that we can. And that’s what these organizations are doing,” Mathews says.
But small liberal arts institutions can play a role as well. “There are private institutions in small towns that have, frankly, no reporters, but they have a lot of passion. There is an enthusiasm here from people who see the need,” he says.
Regardless of whether students pursue journalism careers, the CCN’s Watts believes its work will always have value.
“We’re about educating students who will go on to be more active and engaged citizens in the world,” he says. “They may not be journalists, but the skills, the networks and the understanding of how the government works are going to be valuable to them with whatever they do.”
Tell us about how a student program at your college is expanding thanks to donor support and what actions have led to gifts to the program. Share via this link.
