The University of Vermont’s Center for Community News has received $7 million in funding to help the program expand nationwide.
In 2019, UVM created an internship program for students to learn local news reporting Vermont. It has now expanded and the Center for Community News’ new goal is to enhance local reporting in areas across the country lacking local news.
Center Managing Director Meg Little Reilly said the initial program began as an experiment. They then began researching what other schools were doing to get student reporters to cover local news and found an opportunity to create a national program.
“There seemed to be quite a few of them but they were all working in relative isolation,” noted Reilly. “As newsrooms have been hollowed out over the last 20 years in the United States student reporting is very quietly stepping up to cover really critical beats. Things like statehouse coverage and courthouses, things like that. So we recognized an opportunity here for coordination and collaboration and also to advocate for the entire field. And that’s how this nationally facing Center for Community News was born.”
Charlotte Oliver is about to start her senior year at UVM. The global studies major has been participating in the program since last September. She says not only does she get experience, she is helping local news outlets.
“I think it’s cool that we get to cover things that other statewide or local media sources don’t really have the resources to cover,” Said Oliver. “Like something that seems pretty important happens in a town and it gets no media coverage or if there’s like bigger statewide things that kind of go unnoticed or unreported on. It seems really rewarding to get to know the people in the community and it’s pretty fun.”
The UVM Center for Community News is getting $7 million from several sources, including the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, to be a part of its Press Forward Initiative, a national project to revitalize local news, saying it will strengthen democracy. Again, Reilly.
“There has definitely been a tide change in our awareness of the importance of local news,” Reilly said. “You know, local news is by definition serving most of us from a less political place, right, because it’s about what’s going on where you live. It’s about how the potholes are getting filled and which roads the plow is going to get to first. So it’s just more pragmatic. And one of the things we know from current media studies is that when local newspapers disappear people’s media diet shifts to more national news consumption which tends to be more partisan and local news is a counterweight to that.”
Oliver says the longer she participates in the program the clearer it becomes how big a problem the diminishment of local newsrooms has become.
“Talking to a couple editors of local papers it really shocked me to hear how small a lot of their newsrooms are and how they just don’t have a lot of resources. And it’s really frightening because news is really important and local news is really important for people to understand what’s going on in their community. Most of what affects people day-to-day is what’s happening in their community and what their local government is doing, things like that. The problem with local new being under-resourced is really a big problem that I think should scare more people,” Oliver asserted.
The Center for Community News is the first organization in the country working to create news and academic partnerships to fill voids in local news operations.
