Colorado College’s Journalism Institute has been spotlighted as a case study in higher education by the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont.
As the nation faces a growing crisis in local news, students across the country are helping fill the gaps. Vermont’s community news center documents where such university-led programs exist and what the programs are doing.
The recent report about Colorado College highlighted the relatively new Crestone Eagle Internship in which journalism minors stay at the Baca campus for a block and intern at the nonprofit newspaper serving Saguache County and the San Luis Valley.
“The Crestone internship is one of many Journalism Institute programs that give students real-world experience while they support community news in Colorado,” the report found.
That internship emerged out of a class called “The Future and Sustainability of Local News,” taught by the Journalism Institute’s co-director, Corey Hutchins.
That class, in its third iteration currently being taught in Block 7, has led to the innovative Colorado News Mapping Project. The initiative seeks to identify where residents are getting their local news and information in all 64 counties, and includes the University of Denver, Colorado Media Project, the Colorado News Collaborative, and others as partners.
“A lot of the work that our students are doing at the Journalism Institute is really helping the local news ecosystem here,” Hutchins told UVM’s Center for Community News. “Local news organizations get something out of it. The students clearly get something meaningful out of that process.”
English Professor Steven Hayward, who founded the Journalism Institute in 2018, called it a “kind of plucky startup.”
The journalism program currently counts roughly 30 minors whose majors span the spectrum from STEM to international political economy and include at least two independently designed majors that incorporate journalism. Students must take “Introduction to Journalism,” three other journalism classes, and complete an internship and practicum.
“It was never a goal to have a major, and it still isn’t,” Hayward said. “The vision of Ruth Barton who first implemented the program years ago was for students with a rooting in a core discipline to see journalism as an avenue through which they might participate in a public conversation. I think we’ve stayed true to that.”
Find UVM’s recent case study, titled “Local News Sustainability at Colorado College.”