Good News
All Things Considered has a story, Small Paper Uses Profits to Train New Reporters [text & audio], about the newspaper in the town of Anniston, Alabama that gives some hope for the future of journalism.
When his daughter decided she didn’t want to get involved in the newspaper business, the publisher of The Anniston Star decided to forgo multi-million dollar offers for the paper and change it into a “teaching newspaper”, along the lines of a teaching hospital. A non-profit foundation was created by the publisher, and the University of Alabama supplies the students as Knight Community Journalism Fellows.
I linked to the Star when they were fighting with the Department of Defense over the incineration of chemical weapons at the Anniston Army Deport.
This isn’t a glorified student newspaper, it continues its role as the local newspaper for Anniston, while the students learn their job by working as “residents” under the oversight of their professors and the professional staff.
3 comments
I think that was quite an amazing thing to do. The publisher has taken a thoughtful and helpful path!
Interesting…. The Columbia Missourian, the daily (well, 6 days/week) paper for Columbia, is staffed by Mizzou Journalism students. Mizzou owns KOMU-TV (the local NBC affiliate), and the J-School students staff the newsroom there, and Mizzou (like many other universities) owns the local NPR affilliate (KBIA) and sends J-School students through the newsroom there. In addition, the Mizzou J-School also runs its own, student staffed advertising agency (for the PR/advertising courses and majors) and also runs a number of other media outlets at which students pick up professional experience. See:
http://journalism.missouri.edu/about/media.html
for a rundown.
I wonder how many other J-schools do that kind of hands on training?
As far as I know, most of them use intern programs with local papers, which would be of little use. The apprenticeship model has worked for centuries, and it is a better way to learn a trade than a classroom.
One of the problems I noticed during my extremely short career in radio was the equipment in college was much older that the equipment used in commercial radio. I ran into the same problem in the computer science program.