The old pipeline from journalism schools to rural weeklies is drying up, so it’s time to turn local residents into journalists

Graphic via Arkansas Press Association; click to enlarge

By Joey Young

The path into journalism has historically been fairly set in stone: university, J-school degree and then working your way up into the industry. In the past, many started at small community weeklies to get experience and then found their way up, eventually working for the best papers in the country.

For years, that system worked for all involved. The community weeklies got freshly trained college graduates to cut their teeth at their rural newsrooms, and the larger papers were able to weed out candidates and use the rural weeklies to train up basic skills you didn't get in college.

That system is dead. No longer do college students consider rural weekly newspapers as a part of their journalism path.

Much like everything else in our industry, the old ways are going away, and new ones are forging ahead. Not everyone is thrilled about it, but all of us are going to have to get used to it, regardless.

Simply put, a combination of low pay, high debt and minimal entertainment options are making it difficult for new college graduates to consider weekly newsrooms, even if they wanted to.

Many fresh faces aren't interested in working in a community of 2,500 people with no good bar while being six figures in debt to their university and making $25,000 a year with no benefits, if they are even lucky enough to make that.

We aren't a good value proposition anymore—not when you can go into any number of other fields and live in a larger city with more things to do and better pay and benefits.

This has left our industry with a huge problem and a need for a mindset shift with employment.

Joey and Lindsey Young

Lindsey and I think there is a better way, and we aren't just preaching this, we practice it as well.

In 2022, we developed a program for the Kansas Press Association called Earn Your Press Pass. This program was created to give basic concepts of journalism and training to people who already live in a community so they can help fill gaps in the newsroom.

No longer are you left praying a recent graduate will see your ad and view your community worthy. You can recruit people who already see your community as worthy and want to help make it better in your newsroom.

Earn Your Press Pass gives what amounts to high-school level journalism training in an on-demand video format that, in its first year, has been deployed by over 20 state press associations.

Shifting our focus to recruiting people who already live in town allows us to change the value proposition, like we did with Tammy, someone we recruited from a life of retail work and was super excited to change professions with training.

Tammy read the paper, was engaged in the community, and had both her kids already in the school system, so she knew the players in town and interacted with them. What she lacked in journalism training she had in knowledge about the community and connections within it.

We just filled in the gaps. Now, she is a fabulous reporter who is happy to no longer be in retail. She went from a path that did not—and could not—include a journalism degree to being a great community journalist.

This recruitment strategy could be used with baristas, bartenders, wait staff, and any number of people who live in your community but are looking for a career that is viewed as more professional.

Our newsroom suffers from very little turnover as a result of this strategy. Recruiting full-time, part-time, and freelance people from the community and offering on-demand training means you have people who already live in town and want to stay.

Journalism is important, and to maintain this incredibly important institution in rural and disadvantaged communities, we have to change the variables. Earn Your Press Pass and a willingness to see someone different as a solution to an opening in your newsroom is just one way we can maintain this incredibly important fixture in democracy.

Joey and Lindsey Young are the majority owners of Kansas Publishing Ventures, which publishes three weekly newspapers in south central Kansas. They also developed the Earn Your Press Pass training platform being used all over the country as a training and recruitment solution for the industry.