Can journalism schools restore local news in places that lose it? That's the main question raised by The Eudora Times, a project of a University of Kansas professor and her students.
Eudora has a population of about 6,000 and its own school district. It had a weekly newspaper until 2009, when The Eudora News was closed by the company that owned the daily in the county. "In 2010, the Eudora Reporter launched online. It stopped publishing by 2015," Kristen Hare reports for The Poynter Institute. Assistant City Manager Leslie Herring "started issuing regular press releases with city updates, and sometimes they’d get picked up by newsrooms in the region. But not often." She quit that, and Eudora "lost even more news when the Lawrence Journal-World reporter who covered the city was moved to a different beat. In early January, between semesters, Herring got a call from an assistant professor at KU, Teri Finneman."
“I couldn’t believe that a city of over 6,000 people didn’t have its own newspaper,” Finneman told Hare. So she had a social-media class promote local events for the local tourism agency, "and people loved it," Hare writes. Hinneman told her, “It became evident that this was a town that really wanted to see coverage of what it was doing,” so she started the Times with two students who get class credit and $250 for travel. Eudora is about 15 minutes from the KU campus in Lawrence.
To cover expenses, the Times raised $1,400 from readers, exceeding its $1,250 goal. Now it will become part of Jayhawk Media Group, publisher of the university's Daily Kansan, "a home we hope will give us the stability we need and allow us to grow more quickly," Finnerman told readers this week. "The Eudora Times will immediately have access to critical tools for us to grow: accounting systems, website systems and – what I know many of you want most – access to a printing press that could allow us to have a printed product in the future. . . .We hope to hire an advertising representative to work with Eudora businesses to start advertising." But she warned readers that the move "is going to require – on an annual basis – 10 times the financial resources of our initial $1,400 seed money."
Randall Smith, the Donald W. Reynolds Endowed Chair in Business Journalism at the University of Missouri, who had worked with Finnerman at MU, went to Eudora with some of this students last summer, and they are working on ideas for the Times. "He thinks it could be one blueprint for how to rebuild news in places that need it," Hare reports.
“I do think if you look at what’s happening around the country, universities need to play and are playing a much larger role in news coverage,” Smith told her. “There is a demand out there for this coverage, and I think it’s just a matter of rethinking the content, rethinking the delivery and rethinking the revenue. And I think a university is the perfect place to do that.”
If the Times becomes a viable business, it will take the project beyond some similar, longstanding efforts at other universities. Washington and Lee University students and professors have been producing The Rockbridge Report for Lexington, Buena Vista and Rockbridge County, Virginia, since 1985, and the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (publisher of The Rural Blog) has been publishing the Midway Messenger for the town of 1,650 since 2008. (For a 2013 report on the Messenger, click here.) Rockbridge County has a weekly newspaper, The News-Gazette, but the Report also includes video reports. Midway lost its newspaper in 1942 and is served by The Woodford Sun, a weekly in the county seat of Versailles. The Messenger provides more in-depth coverage, including a print edition each semester, and the town is also served by a "secret" Facebook group, Midway Musings, that steers clear of politics and controversy but has a large following. For a recent report on news media and social media in Midway, click here.
Eudora has a population of about 6,000 and its own school district. It had a weekly newspaper until 2009, when The Eudora News was closed by the company that owned the daily in the county. "In 2010, the Eudora Reporter launched online. It stopped publishing by 2015," Kristen Hare reports for The Poynter Institute. Assistant City Manager Leslie Herring "started issuing regular press releases with city updates, and sometimes they’d get picked up by newsrooms in the region. But not often." She quit that, and Eudora "lost even more news when the Lawrence Journal-World reporter who covered the city was moved to a different beat. In early January, between semesters, Herring got a call from an assistant professor at KU, Teri Finneman."
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| Teri Finnerman |
To cover expenses, the Times raised $1,400 from readers, exceeding its $1,250 goal. Now it will become part of Jayhawk Media Group, publisher of the university's Daily Kansan, "a home we hope will give us the stability we need and allow us to grow more quickly," Finnerman told readers this week. "The Eudora Times will immediately have access to critical tools for us to grow: accounting systems, website systems and – what I know many of you want most – access to a printing press that could allow us to have a printed product in the future. . . .We hope to hire an advertising representative to work with Eudora businesses to start advertising." But she warned readers that the move "is going to require – on an annual basis – 10 times the financial resources of our initial $1,400 seed money."
Randall Smith, the Donald W. Reynolds Endowed Chair in Business Journalism at the University of Missouri, who had worked with Finnerman at MU, went to Eudora with some of this students last summer, and they are working on ideas for the Times. "He thinks it could be one blueprint for how to rebuild news in places that need it," Hare reports.
“I do think if you look at what’s happening around the country, universities need to play and are playing a much larger role in news coverage,” Smith told her. “There is a demand out there for this coverage, and I think it’s just a matter of rethinking the content, rethinking the delivery and rethinking the revenue. And I think a university is the perfect place to do that.”
If the Times becomes a viable business, it will take the project beyond some similar, longstanding efforts at other universities. Washington and Lee University students and professors have been producing The Rockbridge Report for Lexington, Buena Vista and Rockbridge County, Virginia, since 1985, and the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (publisher of The Rural Blog) has been publishing the Midway Messenger for the town of 1,650 since 2008. (For a 2013 report on the Messenger, click here.) Rockbridge County has a weekly newspaper, The News-Gazette, but the Report also includes video reports. Midway lost its newspaper in 1942 and is served by The Woodford Sun, a weekly in the county seat of Versailles. The Messenger provides more in-depth coverage, including a print edition each semester, and the town is also served by a "secret" Facebook group, Midway Musings, that steers clear of politics and controversy but has a large following. For a recent report on news media and social media in Midway, click here.
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