Stony Brook School of Communication and Journalism partners with SUNY on local news effort

The State University of New York this fall launched a statewide local news initiative to create a partnership between SUNY journalism programs and local news outlets. A dozen SUNY campuses will participate in the new SUNY Institute for Local News (ILN).

The program has been in a pilot phase for the past year at the Stony Brook University School of Communication and Journalism, among a handful of other programs. Stony Brook continues to be part of the program.

"Local news forms part of the backbone of a community by bringing people together and helping them understand what's going on with local organizations, government and school districts," said journalism instructor George Giokas, leader of the Stony Brook local news program, and member of the ILN advisory board. "Ideally, this program can help those communities come together while giving our students the vital professional experience they need to work in a competitive field."

In the partnership, college students are publishing their reporting in local media. The program allows students to build their professional portfolios and supports local media outlets, many of which are struggling.

"Journalism is the keystone of a healthy democracy, but as thousands of local news outlets have closed their doors or dramatically reduced staffing since the mid-2000s, that keystone is chipping away," said SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. "Higher education can help these 'news deserts' while providing our students with the hands-on learning experience of delivering local content to struggling platforms through academic collaborations."

Lumina has committed $150,000 over the next two years toward faculty champions and its impact award program. Giokas was named a faculty champion this past fall. Lumina support is part of Press Forward, a national movement to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news. SUNY has committed an additional $160,000 over the next two years toward up to 20 summer reporting internships, which will pair student journalists with their hometown news outlets.

The program was created in partnership with the Center for Community News, a project led by the University of Vermont to support local media with student reporting. Giokas has worked with that Center's director, Richard Watts, for two years to help create and pilot the SUNY effort.

Students in university-led student reporting programs provided more than 12,000 published local news stories to struggling media enterprises around the country last year, according to the Center for Community News. Often called news/academic partnerships, SUNY ILN allows students to provide content, vetted and edited by a faculty member, to local media outlets to give them the experience they need to succeed as journalists.

For three semesters, Giokas has taught a Working Newsroomcourse designed to give students a chance to cover local community events and business news. Their stories, under the name SBU Media Group, have been featured on a collection of local news sites, including Longislandrestaurants.com, the Long Island Advance, The Long Island Press, The Herald Newspapers, Huntington Now, Greaterlongisland.com and TBR News Media.

Another course, led by production supervisor Phil Altiere, and also part of the SBU Media Group, creates a Friday broadcast news show. The show is uploaded to a playliston the SoCJ's YouTube channel, and helps students interested in pursuing careers in television and media production build their professional portfolios.

The Institute for Local News identifies existing academic collaborations with local news outlets; works with individual campuses to develop new programs; hosts training sessions and meetings; develops templates and best practices specific to the SUNY system; seeks additional funding for strategic investments in state news deserts; shares and coordinate system-wide credit-earning experiential learning opportunities and build collaborations between colleges and universities.

The presence of local news contributes to higher civic engagement, government accountability and social cohesion. However approximately 80 million Americans live in news deserts according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. Northwestern researchers also found that since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists. New York State lost 40% of its operating newspapers and saw a 63% decrease in newspaper circulation. Researchers at the University of North Carolina identified 14 New York counties as being considered news deserts in 2020.

"We know that journalism and effective communication can bring communities together, and help build empathy and common understanding," said Laura Lindenfeld, dean of the School of Communication and Journalism and executive director of the Alda Center for Communicating Science. "These kinds of partnerships serve society and give our students exceptional real-world experience and academic credit. Such collaborations can help to build a fairer, more just, more rational world, and I'm thrilled that SUNY is helping to coalesce these different efforts."