The Students Making Local News
Meg Little Reilly on the convergences that begin when we stop arguing on our computers and step into our communities
Democracy runs on information, and information runs on trust. At their best, both journalism and higher education serve as pillars of American civic life and provide opportunities for accountability, constructive dialogue, and the expansion of knowledge.
Case in point: my hometown newspaper, the Daily American. With riveting updates on the county’s endless road work, morally dubious advice on how to best eradicate slugs from the garden, and a “letters to the editor” section that contained lines still quoted at family reunions, the Daily American served as a convergence point for a small, rural community. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation and preferred pest eradication method, read (and trusted) the Daily American.
Despite the widespread gutting of community newsrooms correlating with the rise of social media and extreme partisanship, local journalism remains broadly trusted. Higher education, in turn, has the invaluable opportunity both to contribute to the revitalization of local news and to learn from the many successes of community publications past and present.
The Center for Community News (CCN), a project housed at the University of Vermont, aims to expand the role of colleges and universities in deploying student journalists who bridge the divide between the ivory tower and their surrounding communities—addressing “news deserts,” fulfilling critical reporting functions on local issues, and contributing directly to community publications. I asked Meg Little Reilly, CCN’s managing director, to share her views on the intersections between trust, higher education, and local journalism, and on the necessity of breaking out of our often-siloed perspectives and institutions to become better neighbors, thinkers, and citizens.
What do you want our readers to know about the Center for Community News and the work you do?
CCN was founded about five years ago at the University of Vermont in response to a growing need and an opportunity that we recognized in the news landscape.
The U.S. has lost about thirty percent of its newspapers over the past 25 years, and most of those losses have been in local and hyperlocal news. We live in a world of abundant information—some of it credible, and much of it slush—but communities across the country are still starved for trustworthy reporting about what’s going on in their backyards. When local newspapers disappear or shrink, those regions are often left with no source of credible information on things like local governance, public health, environmental threats, electoral politics, culture, sports and people. This has catastrophic consequences for voter turnout, economic vitality, and social cohesion. Local news is civic infrastructure. Communities can’t thrive without it.
Many enterprising colleges were already beginning to address this problem when CCN was established. Like us, they were running local newsrooms powered by student reporters, producing professional-level journalism for local news outlets at no cost, and creating sustainable systems through these news-academic partnerships.
Our mission has been to harness the energy and lessons of this emerging field to get everyone working together, helping to seed and grow exponentially more of these news-academic partnerships, and making them durable in the long run. The response has been overwhelming, and we think there’s still lots of room to grow the field.
Your white paper argues that local news holds polarization in check and notes that when local papers close, split-ticket voting drops. Universities right now are accused of increasing polarization. What are the lessons that universities should take away from the civic function of local news?
The central reason that local news helps cultivate social cohesion is that it focuses on tangible things that affect our real lives. Local news isn’t well suited for esoteric arguments, but it’s great at keeping us informed about when the school budget vote is happening, who owns the new coffee shop, and when a community leader down the road turns 100. These are shared interests, things that transcend political loyalties.
The lesson for higher education is this: our interests begin to converge the moment we walk away from abstract arguments on our computers and into our communities.
In its quest to advance knowledge, higher education spends a lot of time in the abstract. That’s not a weakness or something to be corrected, but I think we can do a better job of drawing bright lines from those big, abstract ideas to the ways they can be applied to improve lives, cure illnesses, mitigate climate harms, and expand economic opportunity.
Our students are cleareyed about the world they are entering. They are hungry for work that fuses lofty ideals with material solutions they can hold in their hands. Leaving campus to report on the communities around them—and then graduating with a portfolio of professional bylines—is a beautiful example of how higher ed can work for the individual, the community and society at large.
While local news is comparatively trusted across the political spectrum (64% of Republicans and 78% of Democrats have at least some trust in local news), younger survey respondents (under the age of 29) exhibit somewhat less trust in local news (65% exhibit at least some trust) and increasing amounts of trust in social media (50% exhibit at least some trust). How has the Center for Community News seen this generational trust divide play out? How are student journalists working to increase their peers’ trust in local news?
Today’s student journalists are acutely aware of how poorly they have been served by the current state of media and technology. Most of our students aren’t in the habit of consuming local news when they enroll in our reporting classes. They rely heavily on social media, but they are aware of its limitations.
Our primary goal is to imbue students with an understanding of how ethical journalism supports a thriving democracy. We aren’t interested in saving an outdated version of the news industry or training future reporters to look like their predecessors. We want to empower this generation to take these transferrable storytelling skills and ethical guardrails and reimagine a future for news that meets the moment.
This is where higher education can really shine. At their best, colleges can be laboratories for new ideas, a place to experiment with and refine new approaches. The marketplace has demonstrated that it alone can’t cure what ails our information ecosystem. The news industry in partnership with colleges and the next generation just might.
Colleges and universities often aspire to produce engaged, informed citizens—which sometimes requires students to grapple with uncomfortable topics. How has CCN empowered students to engage with challenging stories or questions to become better neighbors and community members? How can colleges and universities apply those strategies more broadly?
One of the most startling early lessons for our student reporters is that they have an obligation to include the perspectives of all parties covered in a news story. Sometimes that means going to ICE for a response to coverage of a raid, or approaching a business accused of discriminatory practices. For most college students, this is a muscle they’ve never had the opportunity to use before.
But this generation is primed to understand the value of journalistic ethics because they have a strong sense of justice and fairness. When we approach it in these terms, they appreciate the larger picture. They want to get these stories right by making them factually air-tight and ethically unimpeachable. We should give them more opportunities to apply that sense of justice in their intellectual discovery.
Community colleges and regional publics often have students that come from, live, and work in the communities they’re studying in rather than arriving from somewhere else. That’s a very different relationship to place than what can be found at many four-year universities that draw from a large national applicant pool. When CCN works with community college and regional public journalism programs, how does this rootedness show up in the reporting? Are their students covering stories that those from other kinds of four-year programs aren’t?
In general, community colleges are way ahead of the rest of higher education in their commitment to offering students hands-on opportunities. They’ve been doing this from the beginning.
And because their students often invested in the communities, they come in with more story ideas and an existing reverence for local culture. They usually stick around after graduation, so they have a meaningful interest in the civic fabric. All of this can make community college student-powered news uniquely strong.
The biggest challenge we see for community colleges here is that they tend to have fewer resources to test new ideas. They rely heavily on adjunct faculty, so it can be tougher to find a faculty champion with the capacity to start and grow a news-academic partnership. But it’s not impossible, and we are so grateful for the community colleges that are jumping in with us.
Your faculty champions represent 41 states, two Canadian provinces, 15 community colleges, 41 Minority-Serving Institutions, and more than 100 public universities. That range suggests this work is occurring in very different kinds of institutions with very different resources and very different relationships to their communities. What does journalistic innovation look like at a small community college versus a large state system? And what does it tell us that it still often takes an individual faculty member to make it happen?
Some of the most ambitious student reporting programs in the country are happening at colleges with tight budgets and thin resources. (Conversely, there are plenty of elite schools bursting with resources that are doing little to nothing in this area.)
The one causal association that remains consistent is that public, land-grant universities are stepping up to be positive forces in the civic infrastructure of their states. Not only that; many of them are thinking BIG. New York leads the pack with 34 news-academic partnerships across the state, thanks in large part to support from university leadership at the top and the creation of the SUNY Institute for Local News. And California is building a similar coalition of schools doing community reporting. These are going to be models for what’s possible in other states—and perhaps, what communities can expect from their public institutions.
The other clear trend is that Minority-Serving Institutions are rapidly increasing their outsized contributions to local news. The number of news-academic partnerships at MSIs increased from 40 to 66 between 2024 and 2025. Some of those programs are doing Spanish-Language reporting and many are finding creative multimedia ways to reach communities that have long been underserved by news media.
What message do you have for colleges and universities looking to expand public trust?
By embracing and clearly articulating their roles as pillars of local democracy, colleges and universities can emerge from this perilous moment stronger and more relevant.
This shouldn’t be a departure from higher ed’s longstanding commitment to teaching, research and service. It should be an affirmation of it; a chance to invest in programs that educate the next generation and strengthen our communities. It’s not enough to talk about these values in classrooms; colleges need to embody them and make them an active practice. Then, like democracy itself, we must continuously reaffirm this commitment and protect it.
ess road work, morally dubious advice on how to best eradicate slugs from the garden, and a “letters to the editor” section that contained lines still quoted at family reunions, the Daily American served as a convergence point for a small, rural community. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation and preferred pest eradication method, read (and trusted) the Daily American.
Despite the widespread gutting of community newsrooms correlating with the rise of social media and extreme partisanship, local journalism remains broadly trusted. Higher education, in turn, has the invaluable opportunity both to contribute to the revitalization of local news and to learn from the many successes of community publications past and present.
The Center for Community News (CCN), a project housed at the University of Vermont, aims to expand the role of colleges and universities in deploying student journalists who bridge the divide between the ivory tower and their surrounding communities—addressing “news deserts,” fulfilling critical reporting functions on local issues, and contributing directly to community publications. I asked Meg Little Reilly, CCN’s managing director, to share her views on the intersections between trust, higher education, and local journalism, and on the necessity of breaking out of our often-siloed perspectives and institutions to become better neighbors, thinkers, and citizens.
What do you want our readers to know about the Center for Community News and the work you do?
CCN was founded about five years ago at the University of Vermont in response to a growing need and an opportunity that we recognized in the news landscape.
The U.S. has lost about thirty percent of its newspapers over the past 25 years, and most of those losses have been in local and hyperlocal news. We live in a world of abundant information—some of it credible, and much of it slush—but communities across the country are still starved for trustworthy reporting about what’s going on in their backyards. When local newspapers disappear or shrink, those regions are often left with no source of credible information on things like local governance, public health, environmental threats, electoral politics, culture, sports and people. This has catastrophic consequences for voter turnout, economic vitality, and social cohesion. Local news is civic infrastructure. Communities can’t thrive without it.
Many enterprising colleges were already beginning to address this problem when CCN was established. Like us, they were running local newsrooms powered by student reporters, producing professional-level journalism for local news outlets at no cost, and creating sustainable systems through these news-academic partnerships.
Our mission has been to harness the energy and lessons of this emerging field to get everyone working together, helping to seed and grow exponentially more of these news-academic partnerships, and making them durable in the long run. The response has been overwhelming, and we think there’s still lots of room to grow the field.
Your white paper argues that local news holds polarization in check and notes that when local papers close, split-ticket voting drops. Universities right now are accused of increasing polarization. What are the lessons that universities should take away from the civic function of local news?
The central reason that local news helps cultivate social cohesion is that it focuses on tangible things that affect our real lives. Local news isn’t well suited for esoteric arguments, but it’s great at keeping us informed about when the school budget vote is happening, who owns the new coffee shop, and when a community leader down the road turns 100. These are shared interests, things that transcend political loyalties.
The lesson for higher education is this: our interests begin to converge the moment we walk away from abstract arguments on our computers and into our communities.
In its quest to advance knowledge, higher education spends a lot of time in the abstract. That’s not a weakness or something to be corrected, but I think we can do a better job of drawing bright lines from those big, abstract ideas to the ways they can be applied to improve lives, cure illnesses, mitigate climate harms, and expand economic opportunity.
Our students are cleareyed about the world they are entering. They are hungry for work that fuses lofty ideals with material solutions they can hold in their hands. Leaving campus to report on the communities around them—and then graduating with a portfolio of professional bylines—is a beautiful example of how higher ed can work for the individual, the community and society at large.
While local news is comparatively trusted across the political spectrum (64% of Republicans and 78% of Democrats have at least some trust in local news), younger survey respondents (under the age of 29) exhibit somewhat less trust in local news (65% exhibit at least some trust) and increasing amounts of trust in social media (50% exhibit at least some trust). How has the Center for Community News seen this generational trust divide play out? How are student journalists working to increase their peers’ trust in local news?
Today’s student journalists are acutely aware of how poorly they have been served by the current state of media and technology. Most of our students aren’t in the habit of consuming local news when they enroll in our reporting classes. They rely heavily on social media, but they are aware of its limitations.
Our primary goal is to imbue students with an understanding of how ethical journalism supports a thriving democracy. We aren’t interested in saving an outdated version of the news industry or training future reporters to look like their predecessors. We want to empower this generation to take these transferrable storytelling skills and ethical guardrails and reimagine a future for news that meets the moment.
This is where higher education can really shine. At their best, colleges can be laboratories for new ideas, a place to experiment with and refine new approaches. The marketplace has demonstrated that it alone can’t cure what ails our information ecosystem. The news industry in partnership with colleges and the next generation just might.
Colleges and universities often aspire to produce engaged, informed citizens—which sometimes requires students to grapple with uncomfortable topics. How has CCN empowered students to engage with challenging stories or questions to become better neighbors and community members? How can colleges and universities apply those strategies more broadly?
One of the most startling early lessons for our student reporters is that they have an obligation to include the perspectives of all parties covered in a news story. Sometimes that means going to ICE for a response to coverage of a raid, or approaching a business accused of discriminatory practices. For most college students, this is a muscle they’ve never had the opportunity to use before.
But this generation is primed to understand the value of journalistic ethics because they have a strong sense of justice and fairness. When we approach it in these terms, they appreciate the larger picture. They want to get these stories right by making them factually air-tight and ethically unimpeachable. We should give them more opportunities to apply that sense of justice in their intellectual discovery.
Community colleges and regional publics often have students that come from, live, and work in the communities they’re studying in rather than arriving from somewhere else. That’s a very different relationship to place than what can be found at many four-year universities that draw from a large national applicant pool. When CCN works with community college and regional public journalism programs, how does this rootedness show up in the reporting? Are their students covering stories that those from other kinds of four-year programs aren’t?
In general, community colleges are way ahead of the rest of higher education in their commitment to offering students hands-on opportunities. They’ve been doing this from the beginning.
And because their students often invested in the communities, they come in with more story ideas and an existing reverence for local culture. They usually stick around after graduation, so they have a meaningful interest in the civic fabric. All of this can make community college student-powered news uniquely strong.
The biggest challenge we see for community colleges here is that they tend to have fewer resources to test new ideas. They rely heavily on adjunct faculty, so it can be tougher to find a faculty champion with the capacity to start and grow a news-academic partnership. But it’s not impossible, and we are so grateful for the community colleges that are jumping in with us.
Your faculty champions represent 41 states, two Canadian provinces, 15 community colleges, 41 Minority-Serving Institutions, and more than 100 public universities. That range suggests this work is occurring in very different kinds of institutions with very different resources and very different relationships to their communities. What does journalistic innovation look like at a small community college versus a large state system? And what does it tell us that it still often takes an individual faculty member to make it happen?
Some of the most ambitious student reporting programs in the country are happening at colleges with tight budgets and thin resources. (Conversely, there are plenty of elite schools bursting with resources that are doing little to nothing in this area.)
The one causal association that remains consistent is that public, land-grant universities are stepping up to be positive forces in the civic infrastructure of their states. Not only that; many of them are thinking BIG. New York leads the pack with 34 news-academic partnerships across the state, thanks in large part to support from university leadership at the top and the creation of the SUNY Institute for Local News. And California is building a similar coalition of schools doing community reporting. These are going to be models for what’s possible in other states—and perhaps, what communities can expect from their public institutions.
The other clear trend is that Minority-Serving Institutions are rapidly increasing their outsized contributions to local news. The number of news-academic partnerships at MSIs increased from 40 to 66 between 2024 and 2025. Some of those programs are doing Spanish-Language reporting and many are finding creative multimedia ways to reach communities that have long been underserved by news media.
What message do you have for colleges and universities looking to expand public trust?
By embracing and clearly articulating their roles as pillars of local democracy, colleges and universities can emerge from this perilous moment stronger and more relevant.
This shouldn’t be a departure from higher ed’s longstanding commitment to teaching, research and service. It should be an affirmation of it; a chance to invest in programs that educate the next generation and strengthen our communities. It’s not enough to talk about these values in classrooms; colleges need to embody them and make them an active practice. Then, like democracy itself, we must continuously reaffirm this commitment and protect it.