We trained our college journalists to collaborate and it paid off big time when huge news broke on campus
For the last four years, the journalism faculty at Montclair State have been engineering opportunities for our media students to collaborate.
We’ve created a range of projects to support a guiding philosophy that journalists have more to gain by working together than apart. The School of Communication and Media building itself, unveiled in 2017, is designed to facilitate organic cross pollination on stories between members of our student media, with a second floor wing dedicated to the campus newspaper, The Montclarion, and the radio station, WMSC.
A weekly Coordination Desk meeting formalizes these connections, bringing together the students from radio, the newspaper, the Montclair News Lab TV show, the Red Hawk Sports Network, the public relations program and faculty to discuss ongoing stories and share ideas.
These efforts have paid off. Collaborations big and small have come and go. It’s been good, often great.
Then this year something really fantastic happened: a spontaneous student-led collaboration that elevated what we’ve been working on to a whole new level. It demonstrated that as educators we can lead our students only so far. At some point those proverbial light bulbs need to click on in their minds and they have to take what they’ve learned and run with it.
The catalyst for this “Aha!” moment was a big news story that was breaking on campus right around the time that we were all assembling on Zoom for our Coordination Desk meeting. It was Tuesday afternoon, mid-semester. We were going through the usual drill of discussing what coverage each platform had lined up for the week. The mood was social but perfunctory. The pandemic had taken its toll on our energy levels.
Then someone in the meeting mentioned a situation on campus that was gathering speed on social media: students in the dorms were indignant that campus tours had resumed and large tour groups of prospective students and their parents were walking through the residence halls.
The dormers had been living under increasingly restrictive conditions imposed by the university to keep COVID-19 levels at bay, the most offensive to the students evidently being a ban on all guests. Seeing large groups of visitors now traipsing through their living quarters, when they weren’t even allowed to have their friends and family come visit, seemed to the students to be deeply unfair and hypocritical.
When a student captured a grainy shot of a large tour group snaking past the residential areas and posted it on Instagram, the picture went viral among students and, now, as we were meeting, a social media flare-up was getting underway. A year’s worth of simmering pandemic-related discontent from student dormers had reached its tipping point. A digital petition was gaining signatures, social media was aflame and there was talk of protests being organized for that weekend.
Mention of this developing news situation ignited our meeting, particularly as a number of the student journalists in the group themselves were dormers. The fog of pandemic-induced lethargy that we had all been fighting against, evaporated.
And this is where the light bulbs started clicking on.
Students in the Zoom began excitedly pitching story ideas, thoughts, angles and people to interview. Voices grew animated. The radio reporters, the TV producers, the news editors were all sharing leads. Someone knew a student tour guide and offered to text her and report back. Someone else had heard about the petition and offered to check it out. They were in the heady grip of a big breaking story. The faculty in that Zoom room, many of us knowing little to nothing of what was going on in the dorms or on the students’ social media feeds, receded into the background. The students, as they say, were becoming the masters.
One of the students intuitively turned to technology, opening up the collaborative journalist’s most simple and useful tool: an iMessage group chat.
“We started adding more and more people,” recalls Michael Banovic, a Television and Digital Media major and junior, who is web editor for the paper and senior editor/producer for the TV show and a producer for the sports network. “It was like: ‘What’s Rosaria’s number? Who has Jenna’s number? Add them to the chat.’”
Their efforts continued as the meeting adjourned and the collaboration now took shape via text. Eventually, there were 16 names in the chat, which they named Student Journalists Montclair. An assortment of all the key players from all the media platforms was in there. No faculty. The iMessage chat became the spinal cord of their collaboration, their method for sharing content, sharing updates and working to get the story told.
“People were like: ‘Hey, I just shot a tour [walking on campus]. Let me send it to you guys to use for B-roll,’” recalls Banovic. “The entire time we kept giving each other updates about what was going on.”
Of course chats like these are used all the time within these student media organizations. What was different here was that the students were reaching out to work with journalists from other organizations, rapidly pulling together an informal working structure and effortlessly crossing those silos that can be notoriously so hard to breach in academia.
Carley Campbell, a senior journalism major, who reports for the radio station and also writes for the newspaper, went to a town hall meeting called by the university administrators, who diffused the situation by acknowledging immediately that the students’ complaints were being listened to and adapting their policies.
Campbell wrote up the meeting in a Google doc, converted it into a PDF, and shared it in the chat, including five pages of notes on what was being discussed in the meeting. Audio captured at the meeting by a radio colleague ran on WMSC and later went into a package produced by the TV show. (The audio file was shared via email.)
“Literally every bit of information that we learned was shared right away on the chat,” recalls Banovic. “It was as if we had eyes all over campus.”
The result was a rich array of multi-platform content that covered the story for about a week as it reared up and then died down. In the chat they made jokes, they bonded and they met each other’s journalistic needs. Collectively they were able to amplify the student concerns on campus, reach their audience on all the platforms they might use, and have an impact.
“It was such an incredible experience as student journalists to cover a story together as it was breaking,” says Carter Winner, a Television and Digital Media major with a minor in political science and a senior producer for News Lab. “This was in the moment, it was escalating…It felt awesome to be part of a team. We all had our different specialties. We were all helping each other. It felt really really cool to be working on a team where everyone was just as passionate to get the story.”
My colleague, Mark Effron, a journalism professor and leader of the Coordination Desk meetings, took great pleasure in watching the students burst into spontaneous collaboration. He noted later that the faculty in the group came up in the cutthroat world of New York City legacy media during a different era when instincts were honed to scoop rather than share.
“Our students to a great degree aren’t hampered by borders and silos,” said Effron, a veteran television news journalist and executive. “Digital tools have fostered collaboration in a generation that has grown up as digital natives who are sophisticated and ambidextrous in how they consume and create media.”
Sarah Stonbely from the Center for Cooperative Media, a grant-funded organization housed in our building, studies journalistic collaborations in professional media. In her 2017 report, “Comparing Models of Collaborative Journalism,” she identified common threads that she noticed in all the successful collaborations she examined:
- The partners trained themselves to think from the beginning about framing stories in a way that is useful to partner outlets
- They had someone who managed the nuts and bolts of the collaboration
- They had some level of trust and goodwill among participants
- They learned new practices through observation and sharing
In other words, it’s all about trust, familiarity and understanding. All that engineering that we had been doing as faculty had succeeded in creating an environment conducive to all the elements Stonbely identified.
The students knew each other’s processes, they knew each other’s requirements and perhaps most importantly, they knew each other. So when news broke on campus, they reflexively moved into collaboration mode, acting on well-trained instincts that doing the job together was going to be more effective, more efficient and more fun.
Tara George is Head of Journalism and Television/Digital Media at Montclair State’s School of Communication and Media. Tara can be reached at georgeta@montclair.edu.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a 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 funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
