Course offers students real-world experience and introduces small town to new style of reporting

Student Justin Wright interviews former Gov.
Brereton Jones, a Thoroughbred breeder in Midway.

Students in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky have covered the small town of Midway, about 15 miles from campus, through the Midway Messenger since 2008, instructor Al Cross writes for Grassroots Editor, a quarterly, refereed journal of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. Cross is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog.

The Midway project has several functions: It provides journalism students with the opportunity to gain real-world experience writing text, creating video packages and putting together photo galleries. The project also gives the town of 1,647—which lost its newspaper 75 years ago—access to news about local government and public issues and timely features.

The Messenger works in mild competition but also cooperation with The Woodford Sun, the countywide weekly, which does not provide news on its website; the Messenger has helped to encourage this weekly newspaper to broaden its horizons. Before starting the project, Cross talked about its potential with Sun Managing Editor Stephen Peterson to make it clear he wasn't trying to compete with the paper but to supplement it. Peterson occasionally publishes an article written by a student in the course.

Laura "Nini" Edwards covers the council.

Cross also discussed the the idea with Midway Mayor Tom Bozarth to pave the way for students to cover city government. The mayor suggested the city take over the Messenger website once Cross was finished with it, but Cross told him wouldn't "be a good idea to turn over an organ of mass communication to a unit of government." He wrote that that conversation was "a harbinger of the Midway Messenger's relations with Bozarth and other city officials which would be more adversarial than they had been accustomed to having with The Woodford Sun," Cross writes. "In that would be lessons about community journalism."

The project has shed light on a variety of other interesting issues such as "involvement of students in reporting and photography outside their normal ambit . . . avoiding conflicts between the need to publish the information in a timely, useful manner and the need to provide the best instruction, and building and maintaining community relationships that facilitate reporting and readership while upholding journalistic principles," Cross writes. Other projects of this nature do exist, but few serve rural areas, he notes. Cross was inspired by both his almost-daily commute through Midway and a University of North Carolinanews site, Carroboro Commons. 

Students in the class are required to attend at leats one meeting of the Midway City Council. After writing a story about the meeting, Cross combines them into a composite piece, and students discuss the differences in approach between their joint story and the Sun's coverage. Students have benefited from taking the class. Morgan Rhodes, a student from the county seat of Versailles, wrote, "I hear students in other majors complaining about how they feel ill-prepared for the real world after their college experience. By writing for the Midway Messenger, I felt extremely prepared."

Al Cross

"Professional news coverage often pleases one side more than another, and in this, it made our relationship with Mayor Bozarth more adversarial," Cross writes. In 2009, the Midway reported that Midway was "sitting on more than $1 million in cash though its non-utility budget was less than $1 million, but our initial report overstated the amount because the student reporter didn't fully understand the budget and didn't ask enough questions, and I was guilty of the latter omission," Cross writes. The next year, the mayor would not give the Messenger a copy of the proposed budget, so Cross and the Kentucky Press Association obtained a state attorney general's decision, with the force law, that the proposed budget was a public record.

Cross writes that he explained to Bozarth that the Messenger must be professional and provide students with real-world experience. The mayor requested more positive coverage. They discussed several specific articles in the Messenger and "left the meeting with a better understanding of each other," Cross writes. Later he provided the mayor with useful information regarding his concerns with the U.S. Postal Service and its plan to change some operations at the Midway post office. When the mayor was on his way to becoming president of the Kentucky League of Cities, he was pleased that the Messenger published a profile about him, and relations have continued to improve, Cross writes.

Cass Herrington

In 2012, Midway College sent a news release saying the college's president had resigned. The Sun published the news release verbatim and later published an article with only one source: the ex-president. Cross writes that he "knew that the Midway Messenger had to step into the breach and do the best job it could of telling the community what had caused the resignation of the chief executive of the city's largest employer and taxpayer." Cross and a student in his class, Cassidy Herrington, made some calls and conducted interviews with some reluctant sources, finally discovering that the president "had been asked to resign due to his mishandling" of a pharmacy-school project, Cross writes. The Sun published Herrington's story.

Asked to comment on the Messenger project, Peterson wrote that he has "come to realize that the relationship between The Woodford Sun and the Midway Messenger has been much more complementary than competitive . . . After visiting and speaking to Cross's class nearly every year since the project began, I often wish I'd had a similar innovative learning experience when I was in journalism school."

Cross is happy to be a part of the Midway community and tries to "publish with the interests of the town at heart," he writes. The Messenger won't always have the contributors available to cover everything that should be covered, he tells residents, so "You can't always rely on us, but you should always look to us." Cross, 59, hopes members of the community will become more involved to keep the Messenger going after he reduces or ends his involvement. (Read more)