Universities as Engines of Innovation in Journalism and Democracy

Notes and slides from a talk I gave at UMass Amherst, sponsored by the Journalism and Communication departments.

I grew up in a college town. Every year the population of the city would double when the students came back to town. As such, the life of the place was fundamentally connected to the local universities. And yet, the campuses always felt somehow separate from the local community. They were up on the hill, often literally behind a wall.

Where my life intersected with campus life was mostly in the realm of culture. We went to soccer games, theater and concerts. But more than anything else, I was connected to these campuses by radio signals.

College radio — both listening to it and making it — had a profound impact on me, but it is also a useful lens through which to think about our current media moment, the state of journalism, and the civic demands of higher education.

2015 marks the 75th anniversary of the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System, but today college radio is facing tough times. Around the country, streaming apps are taking over how we consume music and campuses are selling off their broadcast licenses.

Why does this matter? For me it is not about saving radio stations, it is about reclaiming universities’ role as laboratories for the future of media.

In his 2009 book “Radio’s Hidden Voice” historian Hugh Slotten wrote that:

College radio — and student media in general — is just one piece of the puzzle. Today students and universities are charting new paths towards connecting campuses and communities through powerful journalism and engaged learning.

Radio was once a cutting edge technology and campuses were pioneers in experimenting with how we could use that technology to serve the public.

Education and Journalism as Community Service

College radio is where my story began, but since then I have spent the last 15 years working to transform institutions to be more responsive to, and reflective of their communities. The idea that has animated all of my work, from universities to newsrooms, is that we are stronger when we build with, not for, our communities.

What do I mean by that? My friend, the civic technologist Laurenellen McCann, puts it this way:

“With” implies togetherness, a network. Acting “with” others implies certain degrees of collaboration, collective action, coordination. You run a three-legged race with your partner (or you’re going to fall on your face).

By contrast, she says, when we use the word “for” we center on the experience of individuals, with one acting on behalf of the other. In the “for” universe, there are actors and those acted upon.

So, with that in mind, how might we use universities as leverage points to build new kinds of journalism with communities?

When I graduated from college I spent a year serving with AmeriCorps and the Student Conservation Association. We were in the Adirondack park, so during the fall and winter months we taught environmental education and during the spring and summer we did trail work and conservation projects.

The education and the service felt separate, which didn’t make sense to me because I always learned better when I could role up my sleeves and learn by doing. When I finished my time in AmeriCorps I went to work for an organization called Campus Compact which was working to combine coursework with community work.

Campus Compact is a coalition of more than 1,000 college and university presidents who are committed to renewing the civic purposes of higher education. We challenged campuses to “become engaged, through actions and teaching, with their communities,” because we believed that higher education needed to “renew our role as agents of our democracy.”

Those words were from the presidents’ declaration of civic responsibility, which also stated:

While at Campus Compact, I worked with faculty across almost every discipline who were building longstanding partnerships with their communities.

However, almost entirely absent from that work, were journalism schools. Given the special place of journalism in American democracy, this absence was notable.

After Campus Compact I came to UMass Amherst to work in the Office of Civic Engagement and Service Learning while pursuing my Masters in American Studies. UMass was a fitting place to land because, in part, the work I was doing at Campus Compact was rooted in the land grant history of American public higher education.

Land grant colleges were established by The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 which gave federal land to states for them to establish and endow public universities focused on teaching agricultural and industrial skills.

That’s a big part of UMass’s early history — it was once known as the Massachusetts Agricultural College.

After the first Morrill Act, the Hatch Act was passed which established “agricultural experiment stations” at land grant campuses. Then, after the second Morrill Act, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act to create cooperative extension programs which paid for university staff to travel the country-side to bring the results of their research to farmers in rural communities.

So before universities were laboratories for new media — like radio in the early 1900s — they were laboratories for agriculture and technology — and in both cases the goal was to serve the public outside the boundaries of the university walls.

In fact, Hugh Slotten, who I mentioned earlier, wrote in his history of campus radio about the importance of radio stations at land-grant universities, which offered extension courses and home study courses over the airwaves as early as the 1920s.

I think those two histories have something profoundly useful to teach us today.

Universities and Media in a Time of Transformation

In the last decade we have seen enormous change in the journalism, media and technology landscape. You are all well aware of those changes, so I won’t dwell on them all here. I think Chris Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky summed it up fairly well when they wrote that we have entered a “post-industrial age” in journalism.

They argue that you can’t look at the wildly diverse apps, websites, nonprofits, platforms and publishers doing journalism today and find anything like coherence. This age is full of profound opportunities and enormous challenges.

A number of people have tried to answer that question.

In 2009, during the height of recent newspaper closures and layoffs, Leonard Downie, former executive editor of The Washington Post and Michael Schudson a professor of communication at Columbia University wrote:

The next year, in 2010, The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities invoked America’s land grant history to argue that:

“No longer does ‘extension’ signify a lonely agent driving an aging station wagon out to share crop information with area farmers. […] From the largest research universities to America’s more than a thousand community colleges, the best of the higher education sector is translating faculty teaching and research into practical resources for individuals and communities.”

Finally, in 2014, Anderson, Bell and Shirky who I mentioned above argue that universities will need to be increasingly dynamic and responsive to external changes:

“The careers students head into will be more variable, and more dependent on their ability to create their own structure, as opposed to simply fitting into a position in a well-known collection of rich and stable institutions. […] The fate of journalism in the United States is now far more squarely in the hands of individual journalists than it is of the institutions that support them.”

An Ecosystem Approach in New Jersey

In New Jersey we are working with a number of universities who are testing out these and other roles. I direct the journalism and sustainability project at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Through this program we are experimenting with new revenue models and community engagement strategies for local news. I work closely with six small newsrooms, coaching them on business development, outreach and collaboration. We are documenting everything at LocalNewsLab.org.

Local news in New Jersey has always been a bit of an oddity. Caught between two of the nation’s biggest media markets — New York and Philly — NJ had almost no local radio and TV news. It is all focused on the big cities to the north and south, with occasional stories about New Jersey. It is so bad that communities in New Jersey filed complaints to the FCC about the lack of local news. To complicate that, about five years ago — amidst dramatic lay offs at local newspapers across the state — the Governor of NJ leased and sold off the state’s public broadcasting licenses to NPR and PBS stations in New York and Philly.

Many New Jersey communities were becoming news deserts. All around us the institutions we relied on to bring us the news were struggling, and in response we began to see a flowering of small independent journalism efforts emerging. Concerned citizens, freelance writers, journalists who had taken buy-outs, open government advocates, all began launching hyperlocal news sites to fill in the gaps and cover their communities.

At the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation we looked out over these diverse efforts — large and small, new and old, on and offline — and decided that if local news was going to thrive here (and we believe in many other communities across the US) it would not be in any one-sized fits all approach. We embraced what we call “an ecosystem approach.”

Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY — and a board member of our foundation — described the ecosystem this way:

“New Jersey — like most every market — now has a growing and disorganized hodgepodge of sites, services, communities, and individuals that operate on various platforms with different motives, with more or fewer resources, and with business models from none to not-for-profit to hoping-for-profit to profitable. They all contribute to a larger ecosystem of information in the state and its communities.”

This approach recognizes that longstanding newsrooms and new startups, beat coverage and citizen journalism, watchdog reporting and neighborhood news all have a role to play in informing communities.

But media ecosystems, like natural ecosystems can be healthy or unhealthy. For a long time, the New Jersey ecosystem has been unhealthy, with little coordination, inadequate resources, mixed quality and huge gaps in coverage. When natural ecosystems are healthy they are interdependent, each of the pieces loosely joined by systems and networks.

In New Jersey, we are working to create a more connected, collaborative and inclusive statewide ecosystem for local news in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And we see universities as one of the key nodes (or anchor institutions), in helping build these networks.

We are currently partnering with six departments across four universities on projects that are designed to build an infrastructure for local news. Each of these projects highlight different roles that campuses can play.

Just because we are in a post-industrial age for journalism doesn’t mean we don’t need the strength, resilience and power of news institutions. Many of the functions described above have traditionally lived inside of newsrooms in the marketing department, the technology department, the legal department, etc… But it is increasingly hard for small community media organizations to access this kind of support.

Limited resources and tight staffing mean it is also hard for many local newsrooms to adapt to the media landscape changing around them while they balance the demands of daily reporting.

Reimagining the Role of Journalism School

Universities can help meet this challenge and be vital partners in strengthening local news. Here are some of the creative experiments I’m seeing across the country. (For every example offered above and below there were many others I didn’t have time to discuss.)

News Providers

Journalism schools are increasingly becoming news providers, embracing a sort of “teaching hospital” model of education. In Milwaukee, the Journal Sentinel has developed a fellowship programs with Marquette University where a seasoned reporter spends nine-months on campus working with students on an investigative project which is published in the paper. In California, USC Annenberg built a multi-lingual local news site to cover the neighboring community of Alhambra with local teens, college students and faculty.

Training and Consulting

Universities can also provide training and consulting for local newsrooms. Boston University offers a great data storytelling workshop and Stanford, Missouri and Harvard offer fellowships. What if business school faculty and MBAs consulted with local media on business plans? What if computer science or IT staff were rewarded for helping local journalists with data journalism or technology challenges?

R&D Labs

Campuses can serve as research and development labs for journalism too. Journalism and communication departments can connect their faculty’s research to immediate needs in local newsrooms and help incubate innovative projects that serve the entire field. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia is a great example of this model. Also, the Reese News Lab at the University of North Carolina works with teams of students to prototype new technologies and products for newsrooms. The Knight Media Lab at Northwestern has developed a toolset of open source, simple to use mapping, timeline and engagement tools. Jay Rosen’s NYU’s Studio 20 is partnering with Fusion and the Parsons School of Design to come up with new approaches for covering the presidential election.

Revenue and Sustainability

Finally, Universities can subsidize local news in a number of ways. The most simple way is by spending advertising dollars from athletics departments, arts centers and others on local media. But there are other, more creative ways too. For example, as more and more newsrooms pursue events as revenue and community engagement strategies, campuses could be powerful partners. The Texas Tribune made more than 1.5 million dollars on events in 2015 and many of those were hosted at Universities.

This work isn’t just a charitable activity. Each of these examples are rich opportunities for student learning and potentially faculty research. And I know how tight budgets are, especially at public universities — but there are revenue sharing opportunities and grant dollars available too. For example, the Online News Association has partnered with five national foundations to create a $1 million dollar challenge fund for innovation in journalism education, focused specifically on projects that “partner with news organizations, and explore new ways of providing information to their local communities.” The projects they have funded are inspiring examples of fresh thinking that connects classrooms, communities and newsrooms.

Innovation Starts Here

I get so excited thinking about what is possible when we connect classrooms, newsrooms and communities around innovation and civic engagement.

Before joining the Dodge Foundation I spent seven years running national campaigns on press freedom, media diversity and digital rights with Free Press. Through that work I saw local people hungry for meaningful local news.

Too often when we talk about innovation in journalism we focus on the biggest tech companies partnering with the biggest media companies in the biggest American cities. This is a troublingly narrow view of what innovation looks like.

We face a unique moment in time today. We should embrace the history of universities as spaces for experimentation in media and places dedicated to serving the communities out side their walls. If we seize this moment, this moment of profound challenge and opportunity, this moment of discovery and collaboration, I think we can create something amazing.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he looked to the future and said:

Remember, that was 1976. We are living in the age of the Johnson’s great network of knowledge, and universities and newsrooms are two of the most important nodes in that network.

The reality is, that while journalism and education have long existed as two separate industries, we have always shared common cause in our role supporting civic life and democracy.

It is critical that we embrace that cause today.

You can see the full video of my talk here — recorded and edited by Easthampton Community TV.