Q&A: Richard Watts on the power of students collaborating with journalists
Richard Watts is the director of the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, where he works to increase support and partnership between universities and local journalism outlets.
Watts also helps to lead and coordinate UVM’s own version of this collaborative model, the Community News Service, where students work and publish directly alongside professional journalists in communities across Vermont.
We spoke with Watts to hear about why this model is so promising, and why more universities and colleges should get their students working together with local journalists.
RW: How did you get involved in journalism?
WF: I was motivated by the accountability watchdog side of journalism. This was in the 1980s, when Watergate was still in the ethos. I thought of journalism as the way to hold the powerful accountable. That was exciting. I went to graduate school for journalism and got a job at a small newspaper in Vermont. But I’ve always loved politics, too, and after about a year I went to work for someone who was running for governor. After doing campaigns for a while, I became a communications consultant, and did a lot of work for state governments, especially around public meetings.
I’ve only come back to journalism recently as an academic. At UVM, I got a PhD examining how people try to influence media and reporters, and how those efforts can be measured. UVM had no journalism school, and then a few years ago, they asked me to see if we could start something here, and that’s how I’ve come full circle back into doing this work.
WF: When did you start to think more about collaborative journalism?
RW: When I came back to journalism in 2019, the media system had really collapsed, and we were inventing a program here from scratch. From the beginning, we thought, let’s be collaborative. We’re not just going to create another journalism school. We’re going to create something that’s aligned and in partnership with the media partners that exist in the state because they need our help, and our students can get this real, rich reporting experience.
It really is, as Stefanie Murray says, collaborate or die. Increasingly, that’s the environment in our media ecosystems — people need to get along. Sure, there’s some competitive fires, but there’s so many shared resources, shared investigations, and shared stories across platforms. That’s the system that we’re in now and I’m 100% behind it. As part of a university, we also have a unique niche. For us, the first thing we want is a good experience for our students. We don’t really care who takes the story, we just want to give the students a chance.
WF: What is the Community News Service? How did this collaborative journalism project come about, and how does it work?
RW: The Community News Service is a collaboration with our students writing for local papers. Traditionally, internships don’t really exist in the way they used to. Media, generally, does not have the resources or support to give the mentoring that young journalists need. So, the university hired an editor, Justin Trombly, who works with a group of students, and they are assigned to community papers in Vermont.
The editor does all the work of liasoning with the community papers, assigning and editing the students stories, so that by the time it gets to the community paper, it’s ready to publish. Each student is assigned to a community paper and we work with about 20 outlets across Vermont. We do require students to get into those communities and meet directly with the editor of the paper and hang out in the community. We also have broader issue areas that they focus on: politics/statehouse, environment, culture, and border/migration.
WF: Have you found this collaborative program to be successful? How so?
RW: The papers that we’re writing for really value the content and are using it. Everything we produce is published. They are telling us the stories that they want covered, and in total we publish a shared volume of about 300 to 400 stories each year. Most of these are written stories, but some are also audio or video. We’re never going to replace the core accountability of a reporter covering city hall on deadline, based on the deep knowledge of the ins-and-outs of city government. But nobody else is writing the stories that we write. They’re local stories and they help people in the community know what’s going on. That’s a real positive.
We have students that are so excited about the agency of seeing their byline, because they are writing real stories for real people, unlike just writing a paper for your class. There’s a student I just saw, Aubrey Weaver, who was the only student to go to a Republican fundraising in Vermont, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu was there. She went up to him and asked for an interview, and even though he declined, she did get a bunch of other people to speak with her, and when she came back, she was amazed with the access she had to actually be there.
WF: How does this help prepare the students for their careers? Do many of them go on to become journalists?
RW: Pretty much any job you have these days, you have to do some kind of storytelling or writing. So I always see that as helpful. Students go on to a whole range of things, whether it’s working for a nonprofit, advocacy group, business, or actually going on to journalism. We don’t necessarily think of them as always going on to be reporters, this is just one of the many things they get to try on that will give them good skills for whatever it is they do.
We have a few internship course instructors who teach the students journalism basics and also review and edit the students’ work that is being developed for our media partners. Carolyn Shapiro leads one of those sections. Brittany Patterson at Vermont Public leads another with an emphasis on audio stories.
WF: Do you see this collaborative model expanding in the future? Have you seen other universities doing this, too?
RW: We also have the Center for Community News, which is an attempt to try and encourage universities to do more to support local news. Universities have resources. Students want to do real things. More colleges and universities need to step up and do programs like this. It takes a little bit of re-thinking — take that class where students were writing artificial stories, and turn them into real stories that are published, because the local media platforms need the content, and we have talented, smart students and resources that make it a doable project.
We’ve identified 19 states where there are university-led student reporting programs, specifically for reporting on statehouses. That means 31 states are leftover, and in some cases, those states have multiple colleges or universities within a few miles of the statehouses. What a learning experience that would be for the students — and you get to write stories that people need to see.
The Center for Community News also organizes training for faculty. We have programs where faculty can get money to start something like this and we host monthly conversations where faculty can share ideas. Every way we can think about how to grow this, we are doing it. In total, we’ve found maybe 130 universities doing some version of this. But there are more than 2,500 four-year colleges or universities in this country. So, there’s a lot more potential.
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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with operational and project funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, NJ Civic Information Consortium, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and the Independence Public Media Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
