Student journalists, filling local news gaps, step up to cover the 2024 election

The 2024 election is all hands on deck for American newsrooms. And student reporters are helping supply critical local news to communities across the country.

The Center for Community News at the University of Vermont is leading what it calls “the first nationally coordinated effort to strengthen university-led election coverage.” Around 145 colleges across 46 states are participants in CCN’s Elections Cohort, including reporting programs and single professors leading small classes. (It doesn’t include independent student media, which are certainly also breaking news in this election). Partner schools include SUNY, Howard University, and the University of Virginia.

In 2020, the United States had around 6,700 local newspapers. This year, Medill’s State of Local News report says just under 5,600 local newspapers remain. (There’s been promising growth in local digital news outlets in that interim, but it has not kept pace with the newspaper losses.) In that context, student journalists can help fill growing local news gaps; eight student newspapers aiming to serve the community beyond their campuses recently received funding from Press Forward. (In this election, about 1,000 students will serve as Vote Entry Operators for the Associated Press.)

The cohort focused on election reporting grew out of the Elections & Democracy Reporting Initiative CCN launched this summer, which provides educational resources like guides for assignments (such as “profiling voter attitudes in underserved communities off-campus” and “profiling election challenges post-election day”) and tips for getting student work published by local publications, as well as calls to troubleshoot student-specific reporting challenges like access to polls and candidates. Meg Little Reilly, the Center for Community News managing director, said around 145 faculty members have accessed the initiative’s resources, joined its calls, or participated in its collaborations.

CCN spotlights examples of student reporting serving local communities in its National Community News Wire. For instance, a story about the gender gap in early voting by Fresh Take Florida student journalists, based at the University of Florida, appeared in the Miami Herald. Another Fresh Take Florida story about Democratic candidates living hundreds of miles from their districts was published by NPR and PBS affiliate WUFT. Of interest to Massachusetts voters like me: a student journalist from the Boston University Statehouse Program reported a story about the financing on both sides of the MCAS ballot question in the Cape Cod Times.

A subset of the stories, like this piece by Michigan State University School of Journalism students published in the Detroit Free Press, focus explicitly on students and young voters — but most featured reporting is geared toward a broader community, whether the stories appear in local publications or outlets run by local journalism programs. (Caplin News, from Florida International University’s Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media, features a few stories in Spanish.)

To serve its own backyard, Vermont-based CCN students report local news via the Community News Service, which allows free republication of its stories by local news outlets. (News–academic partnerships generally encourage local outlets to republish their work — “it’s a fantastic opportunity for the student author and central to the premise of these programs,” Reilly said.) The Community News Service’s recent election-focused stories include an article documenting the decline in use of Vermont schools as polling places due to safety concerns and a feature on dueling yard signs by neighbors who remain friendly despite their political differences.

The Center for Community News intends to double down on the effort well after the election. It plans to continue its democracy cohort this spring, and will coordinate with the University of Missouri to facilitate collaboration on policy and statehouse stories.

Another priority: Getting more academic-news partnerships off the ground. CCN wants to help “faculty and administrators who want to bring student reporting to their schools to find funding, establish local news partners, get in the course catalog, and establish a sustainable path,” Reilly said.