theconversation.com · 3 hours ago

Faculty and Students Show How Reporting Is Done When a University Partners with Local News

When Catherine Bilskie arrived at work one Friday morning expecting to lose her job at a small Iowa weekly, she instead met someone who wanted to keep her on - and give her a raise. That someone came not from the world of private equity but from a university, part of a quiet movement in which journalism schools are stepping in to rescue local newspapers from extinction. At the heart of these partnerships is a conviction that journalism professor Melissa Tully articulated plainly: the existing staff "know these communities," and that knowledge is "a moral and ethical imperative" worth protecting. In Oglethorpe County, Georgia, a newspaper changed hands for $10 - a check the seller never cashed and has since framed - and print subscriptions have since doubled. What these experiments reveal, beneath the logistics of deadlines and semester rotations, is that when institutions decide a community deserves to be seen, people will do the hard, unglamorous work of making that possible.