I don’t need to remind you how fantastic the work of student journalists is, right?
They’re breaking news.
They’re showing us history as it happens.
They’re shoring up local news.
And now, this work comes alongside what the Student Press Law Center’s recent student media alert called “threats to student speech posed by recent immigration enforcement actions on campuses across the country.”
Three recent articles from Poynter and other publications show the ongoing student work, and I want to make sure you’ve seen them.
The first was co-published with Poynter and Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. Mark Caro’s piece is headlined “Student journalists are doing the work many newsrooms can’t afford.”
He writes: “The old formula went like this: Journalism undergrads would learn in classes and maybe work on the school paper and then get professional experience via internships or summer jobs at news outlets. But with the local news industry reeling, this dynamic has flipped. Instead of news organizations giving boosts to students, students are supporting often-short-staffed outlets by providing coverage as part of their curricula. This shift is happening as an expanding network of universities step up to offer students real-world journalism experience while creating what they hope will be a viable business model to fill local news gaps in communities that lack robust reporting.”
Nieman Lab recently republished a piece by Chatwan Mongkol entitled “How student journalists are making national news local.” The piece was originally published in The Nutgraf, a weekly newsletter on student journalism.
That story begins with this:
When the U.S. Agency for International Development was gutted, student journalists at The Arkansas Traveler realized the impact wasn’t limited to foreign countries — it hit close to home in Northwest Arkansas.
USAID typically purchases about $2 billion worth of American crops to send overseas, and Arkansas, the largest rice-producing state, supplies roughly 40% of that grain. Without the program, many local farmers could struggle to find a market for their crops.
“A lot of us have family who have either farmed before,” said Sophia Nabours, the newspaper’s news editor. “So it was pretty easy, I think, to grasp onto that because of how real it was for a lot of us.”
As headlines from Washington continue to ripple outward, student journalists are proving that local relevance doesn’t require proximity — just perspective.
And one of the organizations leading the work of student journalists in local newsrooms, The Center For Community News at the University of Vermont, published a report recently on the student journalists filling the statehouse reporting beat.
That report includes these highlights:
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There are now 34 university- or college-led statehouse reporting initiatives in 30 states across the country.
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11 of those programs are newly launched, or about to start, since the last time CCN documented these programs in 2023.
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New additions to the college-led statehouse reporting field are located in Texas, Vermont, Tennessee, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, New Mexico, Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois. A program in Delaware will launch in 2026, while another in Colorado launched last year and is now on hold.
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The rapid growth of student statehouse reporting programs at U.S. colleges is a product of accelerating investment and coordination among higher education and legacy news, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.
Student journalists and journalism are also part of the fight for power at American universities. The Guardian wrote about what’s happening in some of those newsrooms, including takedown requests from American and international students who fear reprisals.
I’m not sure those student journalists are going dark, as the headline of that article says. For a first draft of history, look at the homepage of The Harvard Crimson, which on Tuesday was loaded with stories about the battle between that school and President Donald Trump.
It’s all work that’s critical right now. If you have other examples to share, I’d love to see them.
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