Student project connects residents, government to foster civic engagement
Local news organizations are often the lead source of information for smaller urban and rural communities. These smaller outlets have journalists that report on local city councils, school boards and drainage districts. A discussion between Lamar University journalism students and faculty led to the development of an engagement campaign to create a sustainable and effective plan for a local newspaper to communicate better with its citizens.
Civic knowledge and engagement affect resident’s ability to know and understand local issues that impact their daily lives and to have agency to make decisions. The discussions among student editors at the University Press, Lamar University’s award-winning campus newspaper, led to the students and faculty advisers looking for a way to apply a workable concept to create a local news and civic engagement initiative.
“The footprint of local news coverage in the United States declining should be a concern to all citizens,” Stephan Malick, Lamar University journalism professor, and one of the project’s faculty advisers. “Community journalism is a foundational component of a free and democratic society — it is responsible for informing residents about the things that most likely will impact their quality of life on a day-today basis.”
Malick said residents and journalist have the responsibility of civic engagement.
“Each has a role to fulfill,” he said. “If citizens want an open and transparent government, they have to engage with civic organizations. Journalists need to foster leadership by providing accurate and credible information and, they also have the responsibility to stand up and advocate for freedom of information in their communities.”
The Student Innovation Competition at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, headquartered at the Missouri School of Journalism, was discovered by the group and became the mechanism to implement the initiative.
The Lamar student team is one of ten student journalism finalist teams from colleges across the country selected as finalists in the competition.
Teams worked with their selected newsrooms on new ideas to engage and connect with audiences. The competition is organizers to help newsrooms reconnect with audiences, particularly now during a season of isolation. Teams had the opportunity to win up to $10,000 during the final project judging, which took place in February after they implement their ideas at the organizations.
At least 50 students submitted ideas to the competition said Kat Duncan, director of the RJI innovation program.
Finalists will be given three months to implement their ideas with their chosen news outlet. They shared their ideas and results virtually in front of the public and a panel of judges from organizations including The New York Times, KQED and the Axios on Feb. 26, 2021.
“This project was created with students as an opportunity for community members to hear from representatives of a city’s government to better understand issues, what they mean and the costs,” Lamar University Department of Communication and Media Chair and project co-founder Natalie T.J. Tindall said. “We encourage our students to create real world solutions for news-oriented workspaces. This isn’t just a theoretical approach, but a practical approach to what they’ll face once they leave college.”
Co-developers included Lamar University journalism professors Awais Saleem and Stephan Malick, who with Tindall, recognize the challenges community news outlets are facing — and those communities losing their sources of local news coverage.
“Big, national stories will always get coverage from large media outlets like the New York Times or CBS News, but the local city council discussing property tax increases or school bonds in some small town or rural area, won’t,” Malick said. “Citizens take for granted how much impact local news outlets can provide in informing their communities, and the outlets have a civic responsibility to engage with its readers.”
The competition required students to seek out a local, professional news outlet to partner with and implement the project and chose the Port Arthur News and the city of Port Arthur. The innovation was met with positive responses to implement and would focus on creating live streamed forums, called Listening Events, for residents and city officials to discuss and explain an issue or issues that affect their quality of life.
Port Arthur, Texas is a community under significant stress of multiple disaster recoveries, economic hardships and the universal impacts COVID. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019 caused significant property and infrastructure damage to the city and region. Those storms, along with lesser hurricanes and several other lesser tropical weather events over the last 20 years, have added to the challenges of maintaining news operations for the Port Arthur News, the city’s only daily paper and one of only two in Jefferson County — an area roughly the size of Delaware.
The Southeast Texas region has been beset by many damaging weather-related events over the last decade-and-a-half and in the aftermath of other compounding challenges. The University Press student newspaper at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas and the Port Arthur News newspaper embarked on a project to engage with residents the agency the press has in publishing information that impacts their daily life.
The news business’ state of disruption has diminished the footprint of coverage in many smaller communities leaving some areas with no local news source at all. In parallel to the economic difficulties caused by online ecosystems of social media and other websites decimating classifieds revenue and general advertising, newspapers have been especially hard hit and stressed to operate.
In addition, misinformation and attacks on the credibility of the free press have negatively altered the public’s perception and acceptance of accuracy and fostered a hostile environment to journalists based on polarized emotion instead of fact.
Communities have suffered this fate in subtle and incremental ways over the last two decades — the singular cause of these local outlets is the inability to create and maintain new revenue streams to replace the older advertising business models.
The student team, Comm Cardinals, of UP Managing Editor Timothy Cohrs, and Editor-in-Chief Olivia Malick and their project were selected as one of ten finalist teams, out of more than 50 applicants.
“Civic Engagement in a Small City Newspaper,” was the project that took shape by the students, with feedback from faculty advisers Stephan Malick, Natalie Tindall and Awais Saleem.
“The purpose of journalism,” writes Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism, “is not defined by technology, nor by journalists or the techniques they employ.” Rather, “the principles and purpose of journalism are defined by something more basic: the function news plays in the lives of people.”
News is that part of communication that keeps us informed of the changing events, issues, and characters in the world outside. Though it may be interesting or even entertaining, the foremost value of news is as a utility to empower the informed.
The purpose of journalism is thus to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.
“That value flows from its purpose, to provide people with verified information they can use to make better decisions, and its practices, the most important of which is a systematic process – a discipline of verification – that journalists use to find not just the facts, but also the “truth about the facts,’” Kovach and Rosenstiel write.
The Listening Events seek to improve knowledge, but also answer “how does this information affect me” to Port Arthur residents. There is a responsibility of the press to ask these questions — but the press also needs to explain to audiences the ingredients of how stories come together — the process.
This absence of explanation is where the loss civic leadership of the press has festered. The media ecosystem of today has created a need for affirmation on deconstructing everything — including how the story came to be.
The affirmation of confidence in telling how stories are covered is important to building trust and credibility in any community and may be just as important as the story itself.
