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At twenty-one, just after her graduation from the University of Vermont, Holly Sullivan became the editor of the Winooski News, the sole paper in Vermont’s smallest city—spanning a mile and a half, with about eight thousand residents who speak more than thirty languages. In the course of a few months, Sullivan went from being a student to editing articles and a newsletter that serve the area at large, written entirely by university students. “The whole community is very engaged and also really seems to enjoy it,” Sullivan said. The Winooski News has around thirteen hundred subscribers.

“The whole community is very engaged and also really seems to enjoy it,” Sullivan said. She added that the Winooski News has around thirteen hundred subscribers.

The Winooski News is published in partnership with the University of Vermont’s Community News Service (CNS) initiative. CNS recruits UVM students to report and write articles about community news that are then picked up by local outlets across the state. It was started in 2019 by Richard Watts, a former journalist and political campaign manager, who wanted to provide opportunities for UVM students to gain experience in journalism, given the lack of a major at the school and dwindling internship opportunities. Watts and his team played a foundational role in starting two small local papers, the Waterbury Roundabout and the Winooski News, to prevent those towns from becoming news deserts. 

CNS is one of many such collaborations between universities and outlets across the country that train students to fill in gaps in local news coverage. In recent years, as local newsrooms have struggled to survive, and the number of news deserts across the country has reached a new high, according to the Medill School of Journalism’s State of Local News Report, initiatives like these have multiplied. 

According to Zach Metzger, the director of Medill’s State of Local News Project, newspapers have vanished at an alarming rate. “Close to forty percent have disappeared in the past twenty years, and there’s been tremendous consolidation among the ones that remained, as well as steep declines in employment within the newspaper industry,” he said. “I think that this is the place where student journalists are really important, because even in local newspapers that remain, those newsrooms might have shrunk so drastically that you lose a lot of the traditional beats of a local paper.”

This model has long existed on a large scale at a few universities—in the case of the University of Missouri, since 1908. But in 2021, with funding from the Knight Foundation, Watts created a network to connect the roughly one hundred existing programs and dramatically increased their reach by helping to start more than a hundred more. The total number of student news programs in the country that distribute work to local outlets is now roughly two hundred and fifty. 

In some places, the addition of a student-run paper is a lifeline for community news. At the Missourian, in Columbia, University of Missouri students work under the supervision of professional editors who are faculty members at the school. It is one of two newspapers in the town, but actually the more important source of news—at least in the view of Elizabeth Stephens, the executive editor of the Missourian. The other paper, the Columbia Daily Tribune, was sold in 2017 to GateHouse Media, now USAToday Co. The Daily Tribune eventually downsized to one news reporter and one sports reporter. 

“Ten years ago, when there were two newspapers in this town, I think that we made each other better,” Stephens said. “It was good for my students to be around reporters from the Tribune and be in the same rooms and share their questions and see what they were doing. But now that the Tribune is much less of what it was, it’s really upped the importance of what we’re doing.”

The university also owns KOMU, an NBC affiliate; KBIA, an NPR affiliate; a monthly magazine; a statewide digital business news service; and a weekly newspaper. And it works with the Missouri Press Association, which supports a scholarship for juniors and seniors who commit to working at a rural Missouri newspaper after graduation.

In other places, students step in to take over existing media outlets and prevent those areas from becoming deserts. In 2021, the Oglethorpe Echo, in Lexington, Georgia, planned to print its own obit and shut down. Within weeks, Dink NeSmith, an alumnus of the University of Georgia, and Charles Davis, the dean of the university’s journalism school, had hatched a plan to keep the newspaper alive by getting students involved. The Oglethorpe Echo is now a nonprofit partnered with UGA and is staffed by the twenty students who enroll in a class to do so every fall and spring. 

“We take a lot of pride in developing the students as they go through the semester, and then some of them sign on to become interns for either the winter break or summer break,” Andy Johnston, the paper’s editor and a clinical assistant professor at the journalism school, told CJR. “They continue that growth, and hopefully it pays off for them in their future jobs.”

At Louisiana State University, with grants from the MacArthur and Henry Luce Foundations, Chris Drew, a professor of mass communication, and his team have been able to start a program with seven other universities in the state in which they pay professors to train students and edit stories for local news publications’ websites, and pay students twelve dollars an hour to report, run social media, and generally “help the news sites survive.” Drew said that many of these publications, which have served their community for generations, are now down to one to two reporters.

The professors disseminate students’ stories and photos via email to local outlets in the area. “If I have a statehouse story, I just email it to two hundred and fifty people,” Drew said. “That’s multiple editors at all the sites around the state.” So far, they’ve run stories on almost a hundred sites. 

“While there’s been a great push and great growth in nonprofit newsrooms, nobody’s going to put nonprofit newsrooms scattered around rural Louisiana, Mississippi, or so many states where there’s just not enough people,” Drew said. “This is kind of the third wave of journalism in the last few decades, trying to get news in front of people, because there doesn’t seem to be any other solution.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the initialisms of the University of Missouri-owned affiliates KOMU and KBIA, and clarify that its statewide business service is a digital news outlet.

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