Episode 6: College Newsrooms Filling the Gap
University-based journalism programs are emerging as a powerful response to the shrinking of local news, filling critical gaps in underserved communities.
The University of Vermont’s Meg Little Riley is quite encouraged by the spread of university journalism and reporting programs across the country, which are stepping into the void left by the shrinking of the corps of community reporters and the loss of local news sources.
Riley is the managing director of the school’s Center for Community News, established in 2022 to support partnerships between college reporting programs and local news outlets. The center is a Vermont-based community news reporting operation and a national operation that other similar programs grow across the country, thanks to a grant from the MacArthur and Knight foundations.
Programs like Riley’s are a bright spot in what has been a bleak prognosis for news in many communities.
A 2023 study from the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications found that there were “204 counties that currently are news deserts, with no newspapers, local digital sites, public radio newsrooms or ethnic publications” and “another 228 counties at substantial risk of becoming news deserts in coming years.”
“Student Reporting Operations Are Emerging as a Viable Answer”
The same year of that report, the center issued a report that found that 1,316 colleges or universities were located in — or adjacent to — news desert counties. At the time, 136 of those schools had university-led reporting partnerships with local outlets. In 2025, that number had risen 27 percent to 227 total news-academic programs in existence or emerging.
And these schools are shaking up how student journalism is taught and practiced.
At Riley’s center, students sign up for classes that are hybrid-internship style, with applied learning and little theory under the guidance of professional journalists and faculty. “You just start reporting right from the very beginning,” Riley said.
This is similar to the approach some other schools are taking, like Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where covering local news is part of the curriculum. “We stress the experiential learning model: Students get off campus and learn by doing,” says the program’s dean, Battinto Batts.
“We stress the experiential learning model: Students get off campus and learn by doing.”
With this method, students get sustained, real-world, community reporting experience, and they begin to immediately produce journalism that can be published by local news partners through the university’s Community News Service , a student-powered partnership between the news service and community newspapers across Vermont.
One student who emerged from that program was Holly Sullivan, a recent graduate who was an intern reporter for Community News Service for two semesters. (She is now the editor of the Winooski News, a Community News Service program serving the community in the small town in the Burlington suburbs.)
She describes how community news also benefits from the injection of energy and enthusiasm from students. “They’re so excited to get started and so excited about talking to as many people as possible and covering every issue under the sun,” she said. “And there’s just such a passion for it that I’ve seen with the students at UVM.”
In fact, according to the Center for Community News, there is now an army of these eager students spreading out across the country and contributing to local news coverage.
According to a 2024 report from the center, between June 1, 2023, and May 31, 2024, students produced more than 17,228 pieces of journalism that appeared in more than 1,311 professional outlets. Furthermore, student stories were published more than 11,808 times. and their work garnered at least 13,654,700 page views and had a potential reach of 23,519,124 readers.
To distribute this journalism, some schools, often with large journalism programs, operate like a “teaching hospital,” becoming a comprehensive local news source. Others have followed the news service model that the University of Vermont employs.
In fact, there is more untapped potential in this area. Another report from the Center for Community News found that “there are more than 180 university-licensed public media radio stations,” but “most of those stations do not have reliable reporting partnerships with their host universities.”
Colleges and universities are wrestling with how to train students to publish in a modern, social media-rich environment. “A lot of student news outlets are trying to think creatively about how to deliver news in a way that their generation actually wants to consume it,” Riley says. “The big question is how do you do this while protecting the historical and ethical guardrails of journalism?” Riley believes that this can be done by sticking with standard procedures during the reporting.
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This approach offers the fascinating possibility that students could represent a long-term, relatively stable solution to some of the news-shrinking problems being faced by some communities.
As Riley put it, “It’s a clear trend right now that student reporting operations at colleges are emerging as a viable answer — one among others — to the growing news desert problem in the United States.”
An essay by Charles M. Blow
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