Student Journalists Tackle Local Beats

News Lab student Emily Morgan shares her thoughts at a Community News Lab meeting. URI photo by Leah Pisari.

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Students in URI’s Community News Lab are bringing back local news one byline at a time.

By Marybeth Reilly-McGreen

With the rise of the digital era came a promise: We would become more connected—on a global scale.

And, as far as news gathering and dissemination go, technology appeared to make good on that promise. Digital media breaks news as it’s happening. Search engines function like newsstands, delivering headlines from myriad news outlets in a moment. And why wait for a newspaper to post your letter to the editor when social media will do it instantly?

In another way, though, tech failed. In 2025, a poll conducted by the American Psychological Association revealed that America is a disconnected, stressed-out nation suffering from loneliness brought on by societal division. The Harris Poll, commissioned by the APA, found that of the 3,000 adults it surveyed, 1 in 2 reported feelings of isolation and exclusion.

So, what gives? One answer: Hyperconnectivity hastened the decline or demise of the hyperlocal coverage provided by community newspapers, and that, in turn, undermined community cohesion. Small daily and weekly hometown newspapers elevate town budget meetings and zoning board hearings to front-page news and find newsworthiness in the most modest milestones and events, like elementary school honor rolls, Little League sports scores, and where the Girl Scouts will be selling cookies come spring. Those hometown newspapers could be counted on for robust debate on their editorial pages, for profiles of people you knew or at least recognized, for notices about who got engaged or married, and for the details on when your neighbor’s grandmother’s wake would be held. But subscriptions fell off as readers of newspapers became consumers of online content. And worse, those consumers became divided across countless online platforms by algorithms intent on aggregating like-minded thinkers.

Put another way, without local newspapers, some, if not much, of what made a city or town a community was lost, experts say. Communities not regularly covered by remaining legacy media outlets and their newer, digital-first counterparts became what Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism calls “news deserts.”

A new course offered by URI’s Harrington School of Communication and Media is sending student journalists into those news deserts, and the students’ bylines are showing up in weekly and daily news publications and on other media platforms dedicated to covering local news. And it’s giving all involved a reason to hope that a new generation of journalists will revive community interest in local news.

Harrington launched the Community News Lab in the fall of 2025. The students, both journalism majors and nonmajors, have newsbeats and attend municipal meetings. The course is taught by URI journalism lecturer Betty J. Cotter, a 2021 Rhode Island Journalism Hall of Fame inductee, who has more than 30 years of experience in community journalism. Cotter’s own journalism career began when, as a high school student, she worked as a columnist for her local weekly, Southern Rhode Island’s Chariho Times.

Community News Lab lecturer Betty Cotter leads a discussion at a Community News Lab weekly story meeting. Photo by Seth Jacobson.

Higher Education and The Fourth Estate

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Cotter is thrilled that URI is partnering with local media to allow her students to do real-world reporting. For several years now, colleges and universities have been coming to the aid of struggling small news outlets, preserving print publications while also expanding their reach through digital products, such as newsletters and social media accounts.

In 2021, the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication acquired The Oglethorpe Echo and turned it into a nonprofit, the Oglethorpe Echo Legacy Inc. Journalism majors report the news, supervised by professors and journalism professionals. In addition to preserving the print publication, the nonprofit now offers subscribers a website, a weekly newsletter, and social media channels for Oglethorpe County, population 15,000. Subscriptions have doubled since the acquisition.

In 2024, The Daily Iowan, the independent student newspaper of the University of Iowa, purchased two local newspapers, the Solon Economist and the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.

URI’s Community News Lab is modeled after the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, which received a $7 million Knight Foundation/MacArthur Foundation grant to extend help to other universities and colleges interested in reproducing their model. According to the center’s website, 172 academic institutions nationwide have established partnerships with local news outlets, resulting in over 3,000 students publishing upward of 11,000 stories.

“Colleges and universities are doing amazing work to bring news to citizens,” Cotter says. “They recognize the perils to democracy when the public lacks fair, objective reporting about how their government is operating.”

Community Coverage

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Nine students enrolled in URI’s Community News Lab course in fall 2025. The students were paired with local news outlets the Rhode Island Media Group and Ocean State Media, the latter a merging of the former Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio (NPR). Online news platforms, such as ecoRI News and The Providence Eye, are also partners. Students wrote stories about the towns of Charlestown, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond, and West Greenwich. Their stories appeared in print in the Kent County Daily Times, The Independent (R.I.), the Narragansett Times, The Standard- Pendulum, and The Westerly Sun.

In the spring of 2026, the Community News Lab expanded its coverage, adding the town of Westerly. In addition to municipal reporting, students collectively covered the environment, planning and development, fishing, and education across town lines.

Seth Bromley ’00 is executive editor at Rhode Island Suburban News-papers, publisher of the Narragansett Times, The Standard-Pendulum, and The Independent, all local weeklies. Community News Lab-generated stories have appeared in all of those weekly papers, and some in RISN’s daily papers: Blackstone Valley’s Call & Times and The Westerly Sun.

This is not a traditional shadowing or experiential learning scenario. The Community News Lab model assigns students to geographic areas where no professional journalists are working. The students take on the professional responsibilities of newspaper reporters.

Bromley says he occasionally gives Cotter and her students leads, but more often than not, Cotter and her students bring story ideas to him.

“Their work has been excellent,” Bromley says. “The impressive thing to me about what they’re doing right now is the consistently high quality of their newswriting. The stories are clear, balanced, well-researched, and engaging.

“In community journalism, finding someone to write news is not the only obstacle—often it’s finding someone who can do it with a clear eye and a high standard of professionalism. If we were printing stories that were inaccurate or incomplete, that’d be worse than having no coverage at all,” Bromley adds. “So, the News Lab collaboration has been great for renewing coverage of communities where we had previously pulled back and doing it at a level where we can be confident of the content that we’re publishing.”

Before coming to URI last year, Daniel S. Hunt, professor and chair of journalism and public relations at URI’s Harrington School, was chair of the communication department and the director of the Center for Community Media at Worcester State University in Massachusetts. He helped establish a news-academic partnership there as well. In addition to the benefits of the program enumerated by Cotter, Hunt argues that the lab provides students with experiences and transferable skills that not only distinguish them from peers without such experience but also prepare them for a workforce in flux. What journalism will look like in the future is unclear, but the theoretical and practical education students in the Community News Lab receive will serve them well in any communication career they choose, Hunt said.

“Community news labs provide students with experience in professional reporting, which absolutely will prepare them for careers in journalism and in other areas,” Hunt says.

Ellie Sennhenn ’26 is the former editor-in-chief of URI’s student newspaper, The Good Five-Cent Cigar, and a news intern at WPRI-TV in Providence. She reports on the environment for the Community News Lab. Sennhenn says the lab has allowed her to flex and expand skills she developed at The Cigar.

“Learning how to find my own pitch ideas has been so valuable. I enjoy the hunt of sifting through data, Facebook groups, and flyers to find a story,” she says.

Sennhenn says her proudest moment thus far was publishing a story about Green Hill Pond in The Westerly Sun: “$250K grant will help reduce toxins leaching into Green Hill Pond.”

“The piece is about a pond in Southern Rhode Island that is facing a growing pollution issue. Instead of discussing the new grant in full, I focused more on the experiences, past and present, of a homeowner on the pond,” Sennhenn says. “I allowed her description of the changing land to speak for itself. The homeowner I interviewed asked for a copy of the story to frame, which made me so happy.”

Sennhenn’s work on the story demonstrates the potential of the Community News Lab to uncover complex stories that might otherwise go unnoticed, Cotter says.

“Ellie had done all this crowdsourcing, and she asked people, ‘What are your environmental problems?’ People kept saying, ‘Wells,’” Cotter recalls. “People did private well testing, and there was something not right.”

Using Google Maps, Sennhenn and Cotter determined that some of the homeowners contending with well water issues lived near a dump site for barrels of trichloroethylene. Commonly called TCE, trichloroethylene is a powerful solvent used to clean metal. Sennhenn returned to the Community News Lab for a second semester this spring to see the story through.

“We just looked at each other like, ‘Oh my God,’” Cotter says. “I’ve basically given her carte blanche because it’s huge, you know?”

Does Cotter see Sennhenn successfully pursuing a career in journalism someday if she chooses? Cotter smiles and nods. Yes, but with a caveat.

“She will get a job. Absolutely. Environmental reporting is one area where people are still willing to hire,” Cotter says.

Learning the Trade

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Cotter operates the Community News Lab like she ran her newsroom. She holds a weekly story meeting where students share story ideas and updates on pieces in process. Students also meet one-on-one with Cotter weekly for in-depth discussions of what they’re working on. The students also spend time in the field, interviewing subjects, attending municipal meetings, and doing the kind of real-world research and reporting journalists routinely do.

Cotter challenges these digital-native students to go beyond the first three results a search engine tosses up. In a marketplace where breaking news is paramount, Cotter counsels students that while thoroughness and accuracy can be slow going, there’s no other path in responsible journalism. For Cotter’s students, this can mean combing through corporate records, tax records, and newspaper archives to support or refute what sources assert.

“I do a lot of coaching about how government works, and they’re learning how to find things,” Cotter says. “That takes time, and you’ve got to be patient.”

When stories are done, they’re first filed with Cotter, who edits with student copy editor and journalism major Maia Hembruff ’27. Stories are returned to the students for revision. As editors are awaiting these stories, they have to be ready for publication, Cotter explains. “So, I’ve got my editor hat on, and I’m like, ‘Wait, you might have gotten an A- on this in a class because it met the [assignment] criteria, but I can’t send it out yet,’” Cotter says.

Returning copy for reworking isn’t a failure, Cotter says. It’s more of a low-risk-but-essential part of the process. “It’s great to do that work in a classroom where someone’s going to catch it, and you’ve eliminated public humiliation—because it is humiliating to make mistakes,” Cotter says. “And we’ve all made those mistakes.”

Bromley says he appreciates Cotter’s approach. News writing is something you train for, much like a person studying a trade, he says.

“You need to learn how to build stories—what the building blocks are, how they’re put together, how to sand off the rough edges,” Bromley says. “You can really only do that if you have tangible feedback from a good editor. You need an editor to tell you that the story is missing a piece, or that it’s slanted, or that it needs more polishing. That’s what Betty is doing with the project—she’s giving the students a laboratory where they can do real journalism, while having that essential back-and-forth with an experienced editor.

“Their stories will be read by people in the community, who won’t be shy about speaking up if the stories aren’t accurate,” Bromley adds. “The way they’re learning the trade is much closer to actual working conditions than any classroom setting, and they’ll be ready to contribute anywhere they go.”

“I’m much more interested that they learn from their mistakes in the lab. I don’t want them to ever feel shamed or discouraged,” Cotter says, and laughs. “There’ll be enough time for that in their professional lives.”

Lessons in Asking Questions and Building Trust

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And then there are the soft skills students acquire from their work in the lab, such as when to ask the difficult questions and how to earn your subjects’ trust. In this, the Community News Lab offers a practical education not possible in a typical classroom, says Caroline McCullough ’27.

McCullough, a fourth-year student, recently declared a journalism major. She’s already majoring in anthropology and has completed two minors in film/ media and sustainable agriculture and food systems. Such an array of interests and disciplines primes a person for community journalism, McCullough says.

“I’ve always been a people person. I love hearing where people come from and what makes them who they are. Anthropology is literally the study of that—of humans and culture,” McCullough says, adding, “I also grew up wanting to tell people’s stories.”

In the lab, McCullough covered agriculture, for which her minor in sustainable agriculture and food systems came in handy. But interviewing farmers contending with global warming puts a face on the issue and gets to the experience of what is, for many, only a concept. Or, for some, a fabrication, McCullough says.

“For a lot of the farmers I talked to, climate change isn’t this abstract thing,” McCullough explains. “Climate change is, ‘My crops didn’t grow this year because it was too dry’ or ‘The frost came too early.’”

Another lesson learned: It takes reporters time to build trust with subjects. And trust is measured in part by preparedness, McCullough says. That and faithfully representing people and their views in print.

“You have to prove that you’re not there just to get a sound bite and leave. You have to show you care about the industry,” McCullough says. “I think being a student helps. People are more willing to talk to you because they want to help you learn.

“But you still have to show them you’ve done your homework.”

Mistrust, Media Literacy, and Polarization

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Mistrust has been the death by a thousand cuts for print journalism. For many news publications, pivoting to online platforms wasn’t enough to save them. The Associated Press reports that 136 newspapers closed in 2025 and that the number of newspapers published in the United States dropped to 4,490, down from 7,325 in 2005.

Reasons for the declines in newspaper readership are myriad, but mistrust of journalists and journalism in general poses a formidable and, perhaps, insurmountable challenge to the news outlets that remain.

Carol McCarthy ’84 is the senior director of editorial content at the nonprofit News Literacy Project, which provides free resources and tools for educators to teach media literacy. “Understanding how journalism works is a key part of that,” she says.

Programs like the Community News Lab are exciting to McCarthy, herself a former journalist and media specialist.

A 2024 News Literacy Project research report, “News Literacy in America: A survey of teen information habits, attitudes and skills,” paints a grim picture: Of 756 teens (aged 13–18) surveyed, 45% said journalists do more harm to democracy than good, and just a little over half (56%) think journalists report the news fairly and accurately. Eighty percent of teens surveyed also said they didn’t think professional journalists’ work was any more impartial than that of other online content creators, and 69% think news organizations are biased.

As McCarthy sees it, the Community News Lab provides everyone—the students, as well as the communities they cover—a powerful lesson in news literacy.

“You really need to be able to find information that’s credible and to know the difference between opinion and news: These are life skills,” McCarthy says.

Moreover, research indicates local news could be an antidote for polarization. Put simply: Local news builds community, McCarthy says. “It helps people have conversations around the news.”

Bromley agrees.

“The things that most affect people’s day-to-day lives are usually happening at the local level, and community news organizations are still the only real source for reliable, accurate reporting on those things,” he says. “This collaboration is a huge win because we’re not only getting more of the coverage we need right now, but the lab is also training journalists who will be ready to hit the ground running when they get hired.”

Hunt points to another benefit of local reporting. With its emphasis on balanced reporting, community journalism eliminates the “spiral of silence” effect that social media can have for those holding unpopular views.

“The spiral of silence essentially says that if people feel like their opinion is in the minority, they’re less likely to speak out because they fear social isolation,” Hunt explains.

The Next Generation of Journalists

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But is this more of a generational thing? It’s impossible to say. What is apparent, though, is that the journalism industry stands to benefit from its association with digital-native generations, whose education in online media started when they were still in grade school.

“My generation knows how to discern what’s real from what’s not; I’ve had lessons on that since I was 8,” McCullough says. “We’ve harnessed social media—and that’s not a bad thing. We’re autodidacts who are passionate and curious, and who want to learn and talk about what we’ve learned.” Reasons, she says, to have faith in the next generation of journalists.

“We go into our work with an open mind, we’re ready to come up with questions on the fly, and we’re willing to ask questions that people may not like,” says McCullough.

“We’re getting our communities’ stories out and heard.”