COM Students to Give Boost to Nonprofit News Organizations | BU Today

An ambitious initiative by BU’s College of Communication journalism department will bolster community news outlets across New England while giving students real-world reporting experience.

“There are really three goals for this program. One is to provide journalism to these outlets that desperately need it,” says Steve Greenlee, a COM professor of the practice of journalism. “Two is to get clips for students who need them in order to get jobs and internships. Three is to sharpen their skills even more.”

Greenlee, executive editor of the Portland Press Herald and before that an editor at the Boston Globe, was hired earlier this year to run the BU newsroom program. Beginning in January, he will pilot the program with 15 third- and fourth-year students in an application-only class, JO 400, called The Newsroom.

The students will be paired with a similar number of primarily nonprofit news outlets in the Greater Boston area, likely to include Brookline.News, The Concord Bridge, and the Dorchester Reporter. (Participation is still being finalized.) Students will report and write stories that will be edited by Greenlee before being sent to the partner outlets for publication online or in print.

“Our students are already doing work that’s getting published,” Greenlee says, through internships, class projects, and freelancing. “It’s just that it’s hit or miss, and I want it to all be hit.”

The newsroom program will be the subject of a panel discussion on Thursday when the journalism department hosts its second New England Newsrooms Meeting. The first conference, in January, drew more than 120 attendees from community news outlets, the majority of them nonprofits.

Amid the massive upheaval in the news industry—“the corporate-owned chains of the world have hollowed out journalism in so many places,” Greenlee says—one bright spot has been the emergence of grassroots efforts to provide citizens with reliable sources of news and information.

“Almost every community has one now or is trying to put one together, and they’re desperate for quality journalism,” says Brian McGrory, journalism department chair and a COM professor of the practice, who conceived the program.

“We’re sitting here in a building with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of kids who are willing to do this kind of journalism,” says McGrory, former editor of the Boston Globe. “It’s a matter of us helping our own students by putting them in a professional environment, while at the same time helping this huge rise of nonprofit newsrooms to get the journalism that they really need.”

“We hope to get some great energy and great stories,” says Ellen Clegg, cofounder, steering committee member, and editorial advisor for the nonprofit Brookline.News.

McGrory and Greenlee plan to expand the BU program to several classes next fall and an additional lecturer-level faculty member will be hired to help Greenlee run it. “Ultimately we hope to build the graduate program around the newsroom and possibly even launch a news site in an underserved Boston neighborhood or community,” Greenlee wrote in a vision statement for the project, honed in many conversations with McGrory.

Greenlee has met with many of the potential partner news organizations and says they have a variety of needs, from data-driven stories about public transportation or affordable housing to a feature on that new restaurant downtown or high school sports coverage. 

“It’s going to be everything from, you know, bread-and-butter daily meeting coverage to deeper enterprise stories,” he says. “One idea is to embed a student in a particular neighborhood and have them cover that neighborhood deeply.”

Many of these community news organizations consist of only one or two people who may wear several hats, from reporter to IT expert, and most publish stories by community members who don’t have formal journalism training. Editorial bandwidth tends to be in short supply, which is where Greenlee comes in.

“Work from even the best students needs to be edited, and they [the community news organizations] don’t have the time to do it,” he says. “The idea here is, I’m the editor of all of this work, so that by the time it gets to their inbox, it’s ready to publish. That doesn’t mean they can’t still work on it. Of course they can. It’s their newspaper or news site. But I’ll get that work to them in the shape that I would be proud to publish at the Globe or the Press Herald.”

Sea change in the industry

Brookline.News was founded by a group of residents in 2022 to “fill the information vacuum” after the Gannett chain shut down the weekly Brookline Tab, says Clegg, a former Globe opinion editor. It has two full-time employees and a part-timer who produce a website and a weekly newsletter, aided by with freelance writers and photographers. Brookline.News is funded by grants and local donations.

“You’re seeing communities across the country that are news deserts, where student-led newsrooms and student papers at colleges are stepping up to provide coverage,” says Clegg, who is also coauthor with Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University of What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate (Beacon Press, 2024). “Classroom efforts and news labs like this are a critical part of filling in the gaps in the news landscape left by digital disruption and corporate chain consolidation.”

The sea change in the industry has also interrupted the traditional way journalists learned their craft, she notes, which makes efforts like Brookline.News and the BU program important in another way.

The changes have “taken away the small weeklies, the small dailies, where many of us got our start as journalists, those first jobs, that first byline, that was all-important in the development of a pipeline of journalists,” Clegg says. “In those first jobs in local newsrooms, you learn how to cover a town meeting or a city council meeting, you learn how to talk to a local politician and then fact-check what they say. You learn how to develop sources and hopefully, you get some good editing that helps you develop as a reporter and a writer and a thinker.”

The COM journalism department is trying to help the community news outlets in other ways, too.

The agenda for Thursday’s Newsrooms Meeting includes a keynote address from Tom Rosenstiel, Eleanor Merrill Visiting Professor on the Future of Journalism at the University of Maryland, plus panels on revenue generation, access to public records and a discussion of the future of journalism with Joan Donovan, a COM assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies.

“The idea is that we’re going to do this on a regular basis. We’re going to have these convenings of local newsrooms, small local newsrooms, so that they can exchange ideas and hear from the best minds in the business,” Greenlee says. 

“Hopefully, BU can serve as sort of a clearing house for guidance and advice for these newsrooms,” he says, “because they all have the same questions.” What they don’t have, he says, is the budget to hire their own lawyers and design their own content management systems or to hire consultants to tell them what the best practices are. BU is well positioned to be that force for them, he says.

“One goal is to help the industry, and the other is to help our students,” McGrory says. “By helping one, it helps the other. And this is going to benefit regular everyday people all over this region, who will be getting more high-quality journalism in their local communities because of BU. So we’re really excited about that.”