Student journalists are having a banner year. In just the last six months, the efforts of college-based reporters led to the ouster of Stanford University’s president and Northwestern’s head football coach; produced searing coverage of a campus shooting at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and provided dogged documentation of the transformation of the New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees — appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis — and its elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Whether they’re filing stories for college newspapers or for short-staffed local news outlets, student reporters are churning out some of the nation’s most consequential journalism. Many are participating in university-led journalism programs that give students experience reporting for news outlets in the community, while also filling gaps created by the decline in local coverage.
The Pew Research Center found that an increasing share of statehouse reporters across the country are college students. Last year, university journalists contributed more than 10,000 original news stories to more than 1,550 local news outlets, according to the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, where I serve as managing director.
Despite the rising prominence of college journalists, the programs that make their reporting possible are in jeopardy — presenting a largely untapped opportunity for the growing number of donors interested in bolstering local media. At public universities in particular, reporting budgets, staffing, and coverage topics are subject to shifting political battles among state legislatures and trustees. Student reporters are also increasingly caught up in broader fights over abortion access, gender diversity, and American history that are reshaping college life.
For example, after celebrated journalist Kathleen McElroy was tapped this summer to lead the revival of Texas A&M University’s journalism program, a vocal group of constituents, empowered by a new state law banning DEI programs, objected to her early work on race and diversity. McElroy, who also serves on the advisory board at the Center for Community News, eventually rejected the job offer after the university drastically reduced the length of her contract and removed tenure.
Facing Harassment
Assaults on student reporting are both institutional and personal, including growing accounts of online harassment, doxing, and abuse as politically charged campaigns turn these young journalists into national targets. In most cases, they endure such attacks without any legal guidance or protection.
Harassment of this kind may be driving future journalists from the field before they have a chance to enter the work force. It also has the potential to narrow the range of journalistic perspectives since these attacks most often target female, queer, and Black, brown, and Indigenous reporters.
Fortunately, philanthropic support can serve as a bulwark against on- and off-campus threats to university-led reporting programs and campus newspapers by protecting student journalists and the service they provide.
Donors can have the most impact with well-targeted grants that inoculate these programs from fickle political winds. Such gifts should be designated specifically for student news outlets or university-led reporting programs so they can’t be moved to a general fund at the whim of an administrator. For colleges that don’t have such programs, donors can also help establish courses that include reporting experience at local news outlets — a superior alternative to often unreliable and less structured independent internships.
Successful models to fund or emulate exist throughout the country. The Open Campus HBCU reporting fellowship provides professional development and training for students at historically Black colleges and universities. The Student Press Law Center offers legal advice and a free hotline for young journalists navigating First Amendment issues. And the Solutions Journalism Network’s Student Media Challenge gives grants to university newsrooms for innovative student projects. Funds have been used to launch a podcast on the food industry and to address news deserts in rural Missouri, among other things.
Funding provided to my organization by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has allowed us to bring together students across the country with local news outlets where they work with professional editors and report on community issues at no cost to the publication.
College journalism can be part of any philanthropic strategy to support local news. For instance, the new Press Forward initiative’s $500 million commitment to address the crisis facing local news should also set its sights on campus newspapers and reporters.
Universities are smart investments because they have significant physical resources and the limitless energy of students who want to do meaningful work. Students also have a vested interest in being a positive force in the community’s civic life. Supporting college journalism should be a natural step for the 22 grant makers participating in the Press Forward initiative.
Student journalists are essential to a functional, just, and equitable democracy. Their perspectives don’t always fit into tidy left-right binaries, often challenging our comfort with free speech in a deeply polarized society. As they witness and document shifts in American life, these demographically and ideologically diverse young reporters provide the best defense against future assaults on historical truth.
As many of the most critical fights in public life unfold on the nation’s college campuses, the need for quality student journalism will only increase. These programs represent higher education at its best: nurturing engaged citizens, serving as a platform to experiment with difficult ideas, and learning from the lessons of the past to defend against authoritarianism.
But colleges and universities will only fully realize this ideal if philanthropy demands it — and supports them with resources, attention, and advocacy.
