Cortland helps lead way in SUNY-wide local news initiative

11/05/2024

SUNY Cortland's Community News project has joined the first statewide program in the United States aiming to address news deserts and struggling local news outlets with college student-produced content.

SUNY Chancellor John B. King last week named Cortland as one of 12 SUNY campuses participating in the launch of theSUNY Institute for Local News(ILN), which provide students with educational opportunities to report on their communities and contribute to the local news landscape.

As part of the launch, King announced the creation of up to 20 summer reporting internships, which will pair student journalists with their hometown news outlets.

"It's an opportunity for students to get potentially paid summer internships doing local news work," said Paul Arras, assistant professor in SUNY Cortland'sCommunication and Media Studies Department. "There's also potential for students to take an active role in this larger local news network as editors and help to organize the media platform that been building."

The ILN, in partnership with the nationalCenter for Community News, supports academic and news partnerships that allow students to provide content, vetted and edited by a faculty member, to local media outlets to give them the experience they need to succeed as journalists. For students with different career plans, it still teaches a valuable lesson.

"This is an opportunity to expand their civic awareness," Arras said. "To actually go and talk to people face-to-face that are not the usual people that they're interacting with on a daily basis. ... And I think that's a deeper mission that a lot of different classes do in different ways at Cortland. It's an important mission of the university to teach broader civic awareness."

It's also of value to the public. Between 2004 and 2018, New York state lost 40% of its operating newspapers and saw a 63% decrease in newspaper circulation. SUNY, with more than 95% of all New Yorkers living within 30 miles of one of its 64 colleges and universities, allows it to effectively reach audiences that have had other sources of news close.

Students in university-led student reporting programs provided more than 12,000 published local news stories to struggling media enterprises around the country last year, according to the Center for Community News.

"We're one of the best democracies in the world, and strong local news has been joined at our democracy's hip since the start," said Todd Franko, who serves as editor of the ILN. "That historic strength is gone due to the digital economy expansion in the last 20 years. If we are to have local news, we need new ways to create it. Universities have always been immense sources of community drive and service though students and faculty."

Arras is teaching a class this semester where students are tasked with interviewing local citizens off campus about the election and other general issues. Helping Cortland's efforts is its campus radio station WSUC - currently managed by Professor Caroline Kaltefleiter of the Communication and Media Studies Department - which already has a long history of local coverage.

The station has made a series of broadcasts and podcasts in the lead up to Election Day on Nov. 5. This included a special broadcast on Oct. 30 that brought a panel of student journalists together with Kaltefleiter to talk about the issues they found in their reporting that were most pressing to the 18-to-24-year-old demographic.

"It was really interesting to be a part of the special broadcast as it can be a bit hard and awkward to talk to fellow students about serious and sometimes uncomfortable topics, especially during an election year," said junior Mickey Corey, a media production major from Orlando, Florida. "It was nice to have a space to have those conversations judgement-free and talk about some of the issues that are important to me and many others."

WSUC will also follow up with a post-election broadcast with an in-studio audience at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 7.

"We are seeing the media landscape transform at an accelerated rate," said Kaltefleiter. "Our work with the Center for Community News continues to engage students in discussions of issues affecting our local community and links those issues to statewide and nationwide discussion platforms."

In 2023, SUNY Cortland hosted the first Upstate New York faculty training meeting for the Center for Community news, a nonprofit group based at the University of Vermont started by Cortland alum Richard Watts '85. Watts is also serving as the interim coordinator for the ILN.

Both Arras and Kaltefleiter have been named asfaculty championsin Watts' program for going above and beyond in the support of local news. Each award comes with an additional $1,000 to support their work.

Part of the funding for the ILN comes from the Lumina Foundation, a private group focused on higher education, which committed $150,000 to help the Institute's efforts. That support is itself part ofPress Forward, a national movement with a goal to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news.

SUNY has committed an additional $160,000 over the next two years toward up to 20 summer reporting internships, which will pair student journalists with their hometown news outlets.

As part of that effort, Arras will bring Todd McAdam, managing editor at the localCortland Standardnewspaper to campus in the spring. The paper is among the oldest family-owned news organizations in the country.

"There's good potential for this sort of partnership, and he's interested in working closely with the students as they develop their writing and reporting," Arras said. "Even sitting down with them and giving them the full editorial process beyond what or in addition to what we're doing in the classroom."

The goal by the end of next semester is to get students to produce work published in the newspaper.

"We're excited about theCortland Standard's collaboration with SUNY Cortland students," said Evan Geibel, publisher of thenewspaper. "They're members of this community, too, and I look forward to bringing their perspectives to our readers."

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