Student reporters are filling gaps in statehouse coverage

Statehouse press corps have shriveled with the newspapers that mainly employed them, but "Under professional direction, student reporters are producing important state-government stories across the country," reports Richard Watts of the University of Vermont, who runs a program that places student reporters in small communities and is tracking university programs that provide local news.

"At the University of Missouri, student stories on lack of high-speed internet service in rural areas in 2018 built momentum for lawmakers to pass new legislation that has provided millions of additional dollars to increase access to broadband," Watts writes. "In early 2023, the University of Florida’s statehouse team broke the story of a $300,000 private swimming pool being built at the mansion occupied free of cost by the university president just before Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator, assumed that role."

Louisiana State University’s statehouse reporters have seen their stories in 92 publications, Watts reports. "In a companion effort, called the Cold Case Project, students dive deeply into racist murders from the state’s past. In late 2022, a series of stories about the police killing of two students at Southern University led to a public apology by Gov. John Bel Edwards," a Democrat.

A Montana student "wrote a probing story in early 2023 questioning spending in a state fund" for substance-abuse and behavioral-health programs, Watts reports. "The story was republished widely, including in small papers like the Ekalaka Eagle, serving a town of 400 people, as well as the statewide news outlet the Montana Free Press. A week later, [Republican] Gov. Greg Gianforte announced $2.1 million in new spending on universal mental-health screening from the fund."

Watts's Community News Service joined the statehouse beat this spring, with a program in which three students each receive six hours of course credit and a $1,000 stipend. They've published at least 23 stories on a wide range of issues. "Students get experience, media outlets get content and the university meets its public-service mission," Watts writes. Private colleges "are largely missing" from the movement, he reports, but in Indiana, "students at tiny Franklin College staff the Statehouse File, producing stories like a deep dive into the KKK’s effects on the state and an examination of pregnancy-related deaths due to new abortion laws."