If there’s one big takeaway from the past two decades of local news struggle — the often perilous, occasionally brilliant transition from dominant newspapers to online media — perhaps it’s this: Passion alone isn’t enough.
A newspaper newsroom filled with committed editors and brilliant reporters still stares into the same headwinds as its more middling peers. The devotion of those leading a nonprofit outlet can mean little if revenue can’t keep the doors open. And even when the money is less important — when journalism is somewhat protected from the demands of the market — passion is still a finite resource, and it’s not always renewable.
That truism came to mind when I was reading a recent article by Sima Bhowmik of the University of Vermont and Andrea Lorenz of Kent State. It looks at one specific corner of the contemporary news ecosystem: journalism schools that use their students to fill voids in local coverage.
J-schools, after all, have faculties full of experience and students who need it. A few decades ago, an early-career journalist might have spent a few years covering city council meetings and school board budgets before moving up the chain to a bigger outlet. That path barely exists these days, and journalism programs know their students need the chance to do real work. What if these reporters-in-training could handle some of the local stories that the city’s daily no longer can?
Bhowmik and Lorentz’s paper — published in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator — is the result of interviews with 118 faculty and staff at 101 of those colleges, and their major takeaway is one that will be familiar to many in local news: They’re exhausted.
Participants repeatedly used phrases such as “at capacity,” “don’t have the bandwidth,” “not enough hours of the day,” and “it’s just a lot” to describe the workload. Several described long workdays and exhaustion, with one participant saying the amount of editing “just about kills me every semester.” At many institutions, faculty workload was intensified by staffing shortages, retirements, hiring freezes, and budget cuts. This left faculty with little time to provide the one-on-one coaching necessary to elevate student stories to publishable quality…
“What’s happening in the academic ecosystem is so phenomenal, thanks to these really passionate founders on the faculty,” Bhowmik told me. “But the extra work they’re putting it isn’t always getting acknowledged within the system. A professor might be editing 10 or 20 stories a week, by students without much experience, on top of a full teaching load. There’s a lot of overwork and some dissatisfaction, even though they know how important the work is.”
(See above: Passion alone isn’t enough.)
Here’s how one faculty member described their situation:
Think about it: Like, how many reporters does the average assigning editor at a mid-sized newspaper supervise? Half a dozen? So try, like, 20 of them, and each of them is writing for a different outlet maybe, which has its own set of deadlines and editor. And they’re all at varying skill levels, and broadly, they’re all pretty new. Their copy requires a lot of work, their reporting often requires a lot of handholding.
Another talked about the responsibility of getting student work up to the level a news outlet expects. You can’t just give a meh student story a C- and be done with it if a local editor is expecting publishable copy.
It takes a lot of work to get student work up to the quality of professionally published work. And a lot of students start out with really good ideas, do some good reporting by the time they’re done in the semester, it needs work, and that tends to fall on the faculty person. And that’s a lot of work outside of uncompensated work…But bridging that gap between what a student produces at the end of a semester and what can actually be published is still a big gap that needs to be addressed.
And aside from the editing work, faculty described the administrative burden of being the connective tissue joining two distinct worlds. Negotiating pitches, coordinating deadlines, dealing with revisions, shepherding copy flows — all of it with students who are juggling other courses, work-study jobs, and the life of college student — can be “difficult to sustain without administrative support, dedicated staff, or funding for editors,” they write.
Just to save a few dozen proud Mizzou alums from emailing me: Yes, the “teaching hospital” model is not a new idea. The idea of giving journalism students real-world experience in public-facing outlets has been central to the Missouri Method for more than a century, and other major journalism schools have long done versions of this work. But Bhowmik notes that many of these new efforts are in smaller colleges with smaller journalism programs — places without the in-house infrastructure of a Columbia Missourian or KOMU, where media partnerships involve more ongoing negotiation. That can leave more of the pressure of sustainability on one or two overworked faculty members. As Bhowmik and Lorenz put it:
…faculty labor is not incidental to the model; it is the hidden infrastructure that allows student work to move from classroom assignment to public-facing journalism. We argue that passion may help launch these programs, but passion alone is not a sustainable staffing model. If universities treat these initiatives as ordinary courses while expecting faculty to function simultaneously as instructors, editors, partnership managers, and newsroom supervisors, the model remains vulnerable to burnout and institutional instability.
None of this, of course, is to say that these academic-publisher partnerships aren’t performing valuable roles in hundreds of communities. These programs have generated thousands of stories that otherwise might never have reached the public. But the sort of exhaustion Bhowmik and Lorenz describe reminds me a lot of what we saw in the first wave of local nonprofit news outlets in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Many of those were founded by idealistic journalists — often refugees from the local daily — who saw the opportunity to do something new and valuable for their communities. They put in long hours editing stories, selling ads, pitching foundations, and building audiences. And within a few years, a lot of them were burnt out, and their outlets suffered for it.
In the decade since, funders have gotten smarter about building institutional capacity — knowing that passion can only fuel so much. The world Bhowmik and Lorenz describe inside these journalism programs makes me think that department chairs and deans would be wise to consider a similar pivot to make these academic-publisher partnerships sustainable for the long term.
