Journalism students partner with alumnus to produce in-depth local reporting

Brandeis Stories

Journalism students partner with alumnus to produce in-depth local reporting

By Willow Bosworth '26
July 26, 2024

On Thursday evenings throughout the spring 2024 semester, a group of Brandeis University students piled into a van, battled evening rush hour along Route 9, and then fanned out in Brookline Village to cover the community. They put their classroom learning into practice while also helping to reimagine local journalism.

Enrolled in the Reinventing Journalism course, taught by Brandeis Journalism Program Director Neil Swidey, the students spent the semester participating in an innovative partnership between the Journalism Program and the independent, nonprofit digital startup Brookline.News.

"I wouldn't even necessarily consider this a class. It's almost like a workspace" said River Simard '26, who is majoring in international and global studies and minoring in journalism.

Class of 2015 alumnus Sam Mintz, the founding editor of Brookline.News, agreed. "It's somewhere between a class and an internship. It's really unique, it's like this hybrid model…I think Neil was brilliant for coming up with it."

Swidey, director of the Brandeis journalism program and professor of the Reinventing class, credits Ellen Clegg, co-founder of Brookline.News and co-chair of its steering committee. Former colleagues at the Boston Globe, Clegg and Swidey jointly hatched the idea of the partnership. Drawing on their Globe experience, they worked with Mintz to transform a meeting room in the Village Works co-working space in Brookline Village into a newsroom every Thursday night.

"Every person in a chair in the room where we do our workshop is learning," Swidey said. "I'm learning, Sam's learning, Ellen's learning, and all the students are learning because there's an exchange happening."

The breadth of student involvement extended well beyond that newsroom. In between the weekly workshops, students traveled from the Brandeis campus in Waltham to Brookline to report their stories. As Clegg sees it, what set the partnership apart from other experiences was that "you come to Brookline, you walk around, you get out and talk to people, you take pictures, you've done really fun social media takes, you're really immersing yourself in the culture of a town." Students produced a wide range of journalism - from serious news stories to lighter features - in a variety of formats, including humorous short videos.

"I've always referred to myself as a student journalist, but because of this class, I feel like I can call myself a journalist...we're writing stories that actually matter."

River Simard '26

Adetolani Odogiyon '24 said this hands-on style of reporting dramatically changed how she interacts with others. While most of her previous college courses "didn't require me to do too much communicating with people," she said she is now "a lot more confident speaking to people" she doesn't know. She appreciated how the experience has pushed her out of her comfort zone.

The course roster featured students from as nearby as West Roxbury and Somerville, and as far away as Nigeria, China, Northern Ireland, and Eswatini. Swidey marveled at the wonderful camaraderie that formed in a group "that was largely strangers at the beginning of the semester." Simard, one of two students in the class who drove the group to and from Brookline each week, pointed out that the van rides helped foster a sense of community. "It's forced bonding," he joked.

Saaya Daga '27 stressed that the hands-on nature of the Reinventing class paired nicely with the other course she took with Swidey last semester: Ethics in Journalism. In Ethics, she said, "you're talking about something that's happened or that might happen to you, but it's kind of in the world of 'if.'" Her work in Brookline has helped bring those hypothetical lessons to life, Daga said. "Everything you talk about in ethics feels very, very relevant when we're actually reporting."

On Tuesdays, the Reinventing class met on campus, with Swidey exposing students to a variety of cutting-edge storytelling approaches. He also invited to campus a number of journalists as guest speakers. These included Adrian Walker and Evan Allen, who led the Boston Globe's podcast and narrative series reexamining of the notorious Carol Stuart murder case; Matt Bai, the Washington Post political columnist who has moved into screenplays, cowriting the Hugh Jackman movie about Gary Hart called The Frontrunner; and Matt Shearer, the WBZ reporter who is adapting audio person-on-the-street reporting for the TikTok age.

Mintz said the partnership between Brandeis and Brookline.News has been transformative. "Thursdays have pretty much become my favorite day of the week because of this class," he said. "It really does make me happy and fill me with joy."

The partnership has also helped the one-year-old nonprofit Brookline.News continue to grow. A story about privacy and digital Soofa signs by students River Simard and Rebecca Bloome has quickly become one of the most-read pieces in the history of the news site.

Simard stressed that not all that growth can be measured with data. "I think I've always referred to myself as a student journalist, but because of this class, I feel like I can call myself a journalist," he said. "I'm writing stories that are being seen by thousands of people, and we're writing stories that actually matter to the Brookline community."

The partnership has continued past the end of the semester. Two members of the class, course assistant Willow Bosworth [author of this article] and student Jason Njoroge, are interning with Brookline.News over the summer. And Swidey, Clegg, and Mintz plan to expand on the partnership next year. This initiative received a grant from Brandeis' Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation, or COMPACT, to cover some of the costs, along with supplementary support from the Cummings Foundation.

Mintz said he hopes that the students have gotten as much out of the experience as he has. "If our class helped at all to encourage or influence any of them to actually think about journalism seriously as a career, that would be a huge victory for me," he said.