In 2017, during a wildfire in Redding, California, a group of sociology professors and students at Shasta College and community members started a podcast to report in real-time vital information about the fires to help their community. It was something the traditional local media couldn’t provide, as the town’s newspaper was recently acquired by a hedge fund and reduced to four reporters.
The group’s action to serve an information need caught the attention of the Journalism + Design (J+D) Lab at The New School, which supports new approaches to improve local news and information sharing.
“They ended up providing the community vital information during a crisis,” said Heather Chaplin, J+D founding director and faculty member. “For us, that was a real ‘Ah-ha’ moment, that we could partner and collaborate with community colleges in a way far beyond just providing journalism education. Through community colleges, we could tap into the abundance of resources in the community.”
J+D started as a major in The New School in New York City in 2014. In 2017, it started to receive grant funding to do work outside the institution. One of the first things the center did was create open education resources that journalism educators anywhere could use. It also started to partner with community colleges. The depth of those partnerships has evolved since then, from providing journalism training, to asking the colleges to tell them how their college could be a hub for local news and information.
“What we’ve realized the longer that we worked with community colleges is their unbelievable creativity, dedication, talent and that nobody knows the needs of the community better,” Chaplin said.
Community news network
Over the past few years, J+D has focused, in part, on developing local community news networks. With journalists and higher education currently facing similar challenges, including a general lack of trust by the public and an assault by the far right, it was a good opportunity to pair the two to better serve community needs and to inform the public about what they do.
“Both are necessary for any kind of functioning democracy. If people can’t make informed decisions, you don’t have much of a democracy,” Chaplin said.
She noted that it’s not just about training for journalism students and creating a pipeline for newsrooms.
“It’s much more expansive than that. It’s really about increasing community resilience through increased flow of news and information,” Chaplin said. “The infrastructure has just been smashed. So we have to find more creative ways and have a more expansive vision of what this looks like, and see it as a community endeavor.”
News deserts
The J+D Lab has launched several state and regional cohorts of community colleges – in New Jersey, New Mexico and the South – co-designing journalism programs based on proposals from faculty and staff that enable more people in their communities to participate in producing, sharing and acting on local news.
For example, Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) recently pitched a proposal that is based on the college’s collaboration with KSFR, a radio station at the college, noted Valerie Popp, program and sustainability lead at J+D. The idea is to raise awareness of SFCC’s non-credit certificate program among rural communities in northern New Mexico, and especially among Native American communities, through local schools.
Popp also cited the J Lab program at Mercer County Community College (MCCC) in New Jersey. The college is adjacent to Princeton University, with several local media outlets. However, because it is in the greater New York area, much of the news centers on city events and the greater region, so there is a lack of local news, which Popp called a “micro desert.” Too often, important local news about town council activity, environmental issues and more aren’t covered.
MCCC’s J Lab program integrates its journalism coursework with more expansive programs that marshal local media outlets and community partners — like the Trenton Journal and Mercer Me — and works with Mercer students and individuals from the community to generate their own content. Participants range from high school teenagers to people in their 70s.
Participating colleges also see the programs as recruitment opportunities to showcase what the colleges can do, Popp said.
“You’re inviting people to the campus, often for the first time. That’s an awfully persuasive way to bring them aboard, to show the campus and to show them what this kind of education can mean to their own career prospects and their communities — and to knit that together,” she said.
Additional funding
J+D this summer announced it received a $1.5 million grant from Press Forward, a coalition that strengthens communities by reinvigorating local news. It will allow J+D to delve deeper into communities and hire “weavers,” individuals who build trust and foster connections to more fully develop the network model.
New Jersey’s Middlesex College, which has worked with J+D since 2023, is among the four community colleges in New Jersey that J+D will continue collaborating with as part of the new grant.
“The real solution is to teach citizens — massive number of citizens — how to think journalistically, understand the journalistic ethics and standards, so if they wanted to put content up, they could simply get on a free YouTube channel and successfully do that,” said Melissa Edwards, who advises the college’s student newspaper, Quo Vadis.
Middlesex’s J+D project focuses on not just journalism students, but all students in the techniques of journalism. The noncredit course focuses on the basics of journalism as well as using technology such as using smart phones to take videos and posting on social media.
“We’re not just for people who want to go to college. We’re for people who went to community college, for people who went to Rutgers, we’re for people who have a doctorate, we’re for people who are still in high school — if they want to take the class, they still have access to a community college,” Edwards said.
Cristóbal Espinoza-Wulach, an associate professor of history at Middlesex, explained that the skills learned can be applied in other areas. For example, entrepreneurs can learn the basics of writing to help them promote their businesses. This summer, the group of 30 in the course included Middlesex students, high schoolers, healthcare professionals, stay-at-home moms and others.
Espinoza-Wulach said the course is useful for his class in teaching students how to explore and write about local historical sites. The idea is to create content from the work.
“It’s a beautiful learning experience,” he said.
Stories from the border
Doña Ana Community College in New Mexico is new to working with J+D. It hopes to launch its Community-Center Journalism Project in the spring, focusing on providing workshops to the community on how to become storytellers.
Denise LaFrance-Ojinaga, marketing communications specialist at Doña Ana and a former TV journalist, noted that students in different studies can learn journalistic techniques to use in their fields. For example, the college has a strong culinary arts program. For years, the program’s instructor has wanted to start a small cooking show. He’s been interested in incorporating journalism techniques for a while, LaFrance-Ojinaga said.
Laura De La Cruz, a professor at the college who chairs the departments of business and hospitality services, serves on the team for the project. She was drawn to its goal of developing journalists as vital to the community and economy. She observed that in other countries, where media are backed or controlled by the government, it’s common for “home-grown journalists” to report on crucial stories in the community.
Being a border state with Mexico makes sharing on-the-ground news even more important. De La Cruz said the national view of what’s happening in border states is often skewed by national media. She noted a client who came to Arizona a few weeks ago and was surprised to see the contrast to what was presented in the news.
“To have people on the border giving accurate news, both sides of it, is going to be so important as we go forward,” De La Cruz said.
She added: “A lot of people are interested in the voices of the border, to put a personal face on what has become a very impersonal thing. A lot of people in this area want to put a face to those communities.”
