Students plugging local news gaps isn’t sustainable for students, communities, or journalism

This piece is part of our Civic Media Series. Read the Civic Media Magazine and explore pieces from the series here.

Back in the early ‘90s, I was one of those kids whose daily commute for a good education took me from the back end of Queens to the front row of Manhattan. The 90-minute journey each way, from my poor, working- and lower-middle-class neighborhood to the wealthy Upper East Side, provided my other education: comparative wealth studies. Easy comparisons were things like quality of sanitation, policing, classroom size, or the presence of green space. 

When I found my profession, journalism, I started to compare news. What drew me as a student journalist in graduate school was news absence. Which neighborhoods had outlets or independent, original reporting? Which had new, verified information for — not about — the people living there? I covered neighborhoods that were commonly featured in crime stories but otherwise ignored by local TV news, and local leaders often said to me that if anyone came around asking questions, it was us journalism school students — not working journalists. That didn’t strike me as a good thing. 

So I paid attention when the bells began pealing from within philanthropy and academia for more undergraduate student journalists to “fill local news gaps,” particularly in so-called news deserts. Longstanding tensions aren’t being named. In the absence of explicit intention, it looks like journalism’s cheerleaders are advocating to replace working journalists with cheap student labor — doubling-down on race and class inequities in the journalism pipeline — without considering the implications for local information ecosystems. 

Journalism’s decades-long restructuring has checked its public power and legitimacy. Now, under the second Trump administration, it is under political attack. I believe that in journalism’s era of vulnerable transition, universities — particularly public schools — are essential partners for newsrooms and local communities. But just as Columbia University and its student population isn’t Harlem, the university and its student population aren’t necessarily “the community.” In an era of visible public distrust of nearly all social institutions, university and philanthropy press releases framing higher ed institutions as speaking for their local communities ignore the history of town-gown relations and present-day local realities.

I am a journalism professor. Due to my community-led work, other people ask me almost as often as I ask myself: Is it better to create change from outside an institution or from inside it? My initial response often surfaces long memory of deep frustration. For example, as a social justice reporter covering stories from stop-and-frisk policing to the Occupy movement and housing, I understood that if I wanted access to truth and complexity, I needed to perform extra labor. I worked daily to regain lost trust in “the media” among the low-income or working-class Black and Latino communities that I covered. 

And having immigrated as a child to New York City in the late 1980s, I’ve seen the throughline from Columbia University’s expanded real estate portfolio in Harlem to watching a cherry-red MAGA hat saunter across 118th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard on election night in 2024. Maybe the guy was just walking. But it hit me like a strut, because the idea of Harlem as the cultural mecca of African Americans is losing ground — and “the university” is partly responsible. 

“When students are out reporting, they’re seen as representing the school, not the college paper,” says Derrick Cain. “And you have to consider the university’s reputation may not be so great in the local community.” 

Cain was the director of community engagement at Resolve Philly, a nonprofit newsroom in Philadelphia. Last August, he joined me in a session exploring how the ivory tower slows and accelerates inequity in journalism during an “unconference” meant to put news practitioners and academics in the same room. At the “unconference,” hosted by Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, we brainstormed how universities could balance student training and sustainable support for local residents’ year-round information and cultural needs. 

If equity is a goal, naming institutional power is the bare minimum. Cain’s observation drew a bright line, to me, between the university’s central administration on one hand and its students, college paper, or journalism program on the other. The university holds material and narrative power in the proposed three-way relationship with the community and the newsroom. What’s often missing in this relationship are more questions, more analysis, and fewer assumptions that all higher education in all locales serves the public good. 

Local populations are squeezed by housing costs, the cost of health care and education, and aggressive policing. They’re also designated by university-employers and university-landlords as low-wage labor. They have legitimate grounds to ask, which public? Whose good? Newsrooms and universities should provide fora for communities to deliberate the use and purpose of information resources. Instead, I’m seeing done deals. 

With a green light from the Knight and MacArthur Foundations, the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont is leading an effort to nationalize so-called “university-led reporting.” Last October, Press Forward announced eight college newsrooms among their initial round of 205 grantees, most of which received $100,000. 

Signs indicate these partnerships may increase. Some schools even boast of students “filling the gap” in statehouse reporting — which, one journalist-turned-professor pointed out to me this past August, were typically senior reporters’ jobs in metro newsrooms. Can local communities reasonably expect 19-year-old cub journalists to perform a watchdog function when they enter the dens of older, experienced legislators, press aides, or lobbyists who manage billions in tax dollars?

We’ve always needed media that, as Victor Pickard argues, “embody the principles of participatory democracy and are dedicated to serving social needs, not private profits.” Without addressing institutional power, people expecting college students to “fill the gap” in local news are reifying a cascade of 20th-century inequities. 

Unpaid or poorly paid internships have long excluded the very students whom newsrooms need to attract. Nothing encourages practical thinking like looking ahead five years in a profession and seeing no on-ramp to a middle-class life. Annually, students see well-publicized newsroom layoffs. Unless university-newsroom partnerships glow up post-graduate possibilities, they will likely continue to pipeline wealthy trainees into journalism and low-income trainees into public relations.

Proponents of university-led reporting boast of their cost-effectiveness. But newsroom cost-cutting, which targets mid-career and senior journalists, means residents lose deep sourcing, editorial experience, and news judgment, while newsrooms likely lose race and class diversity. Mid-career is also an off-ramp for workers seeking living wages and stability. If the market itself is structured to not diversify journalism’s upper levels, how and where can higher education enter?

It’s exciting to see a creative partnership in Arizona State University’s NEWSWELL that goes beyond students filling news gaps and allows for “collaboration among different parts of the university.” To build community trust, partnerships should also preserve experience and news judgment. Universities can extend lifelines to mid-career and senior working journalists through residencies, where journalists receive support in producing critical coverage or experimenting with product, marketing, and distribution, in exchange for working with students.

Following models like Listening Post Collective or the UK-based Media Cymru-BBC’s News for All project, universities can mobilize participatory research and data science to regularly listen to local communities. Then newsrooms can use this data to frame and produce stories for local communities, producing a democracy feedback loop. 

Universities can use a promotoras (community health ambassador) model, training students and local residents in information, media, and news literacies. They can provide local freelancers, a labor force that may be more race- and class-diverse than newsroom staff, with free or low-cost access to databases, work space, or equipment. In exchange, freelancers can help faculty translate their research for non-academic audiences. 

With the second Trump administration, we have entered an undetermined period of assault on whatever remains of the free press. More than ever, geographic communities need to see their local institutions responding to and directly addressing their questions, their debates, and their lives in the spaces where the community already gathers. More than ever, communities need culturally relevant media literacy and civic education. If journalism and original reporting are to grow and do so with democratic legitimacy, then communities must be seen to demand it. And transient student labor is not the path to real relationships with communities, nor is it a shortcut around fairly compensating experienced, local journalists.

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Carla Murphy is a journalist, media organizer, and professor at Rutgers University-Newark.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Bettina Chang. Fact-checking by Bashirah Mack.