Wednesday, September 16th, 2009...1:22 pm
University-newspaper partnerships can play role in reinventing journalism
When Greg Munno started CNYSpeaks in June 2008, he was the civic engagement editor for the Syracuse Post-Standard in Upstate New York. Inspired by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Great Expectations project, CNYSpeaks was aimed at rallying the Syracuse community around the idea of improving the city, and it included a blog, news stories and residents’ forums. The newspaper teamed up with the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University to make it happen.
In June 2009, Munno took a buyout from The Post-Standard. But he’s still running CNYSpeaks — paid as a consultant by a grant the Maxwell School obtained. The CNYSpeaks blog still appears on the newspaper’s Web site. Munno continues to pitches stories for the newspaper’s print edition, including this piece from last month that lead up to a forum for mayoral primary candidates.
To me, this is a great example of the type of collaboration between academia and media that needs to happen more and more as journalism re-invents itself.
Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
I'm Gina Chen, a 20-year veteran newspaper journalist who is studying for a communications Ph.D. I want to see journalism survive. I believe news organizations need to embrace new media, change their thinking, improve their content and innovate. Read more about me 
2 Comments
September 21st, 2009 at 8:55 am
There is a strong risk that relationships between Universities and Newspapers can descend into one of a highly incestuous nature.
Typically, here in Oz and I guess elsehwere as well, the paper runs on work-experience under-grads who work for nothing, while the Uni can assure its students that they will get a work-experince placement on a real live paper.
All sounds sweet and rosey – for the Uni and the paper at least.
What can then happen is much less conducive to Journalism in general and job-security in particular.
Once they leave Uni, graduates can have trouble getting a real, paying job because the paper doesn’t have to pay for staff anyway; they’ve got all these free work-experience people from the Uni.
The paper runs on peanuts wages, and the quality of its Journalism suffers, as fewer writers have the experience that only comes with years of work in the big wide world – not for a few weeks taken out of a Uni term.
Readers suffer as well, because the whole flavour of the paper changes thanks to the entire staff coming from a Uni background and looking through post-grad coloured glasses at everything.
There is really no substitute for training journalists on a working paper, in the area where they live and get them to report on matters they understand from their own local experiences.
Papers should be the voice and the mirror on the communities they are supoosed to serve; at the moment, it ain’t happening folks.
September 21st, 2009 at 3:53 pm
You raise some really good points that we should all keep in mind, but pretty much anything we can do can be abused. That’s not, in my mind, a reason not to try it.
But the bottom line is, as you say, that newspaper nees to be the voice and mirror of their communities. Can’t agree more with that.
Thanks for adding to the conversation.
– Gina
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