Madison Miller, a junior at Rowan University, found her niche in business and sustainability reporting. For six months, she embarked on a documenting sustainable fashion initiatives at a textile reuse company in the Philadelphia area by following recycled fabrics’ transformation into garments that debuted on the runway.

“I think it was really valuable to work on something for a long period of time, collaborate with others, and just get out into the world and discover some new ways that sustainability is taking form in our everyday lives,” said Miller.

This endeavor was made possible through her involvement in an internship program called . It’s the passion project of Professor Mark Berkey-Gerard and Professor Dianne Garyantes at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. The professors recognized students could play a critical role in filling the dearth of reporting in southern New Jersey.

Person being filmed while talking next to stacked lobster traps on a dock. Two people listen; one holds a camera on a tripod. Houses are visible in the background.
South Jersey Climate News journalism students interview Scott Lennox, co-founder of Barnegat Oyster Collective, a sustainable shellfish growing organization.

South Jersey Climate News student journalist Edi Doh (left) and Rowan University professor Mark Berkey-Gerard (right) tour Barnegat Bay with Scott Lennox, co-founder of Barnegat Oyster Collective, a sustainable shellfish growing organization.

North Jersey’s news is disseminated from New York City and South Jersey’s news comes from the Philadelphia area, but the area surrounding Rowan University is lacking news that serves and is sourced from the local community.

Berkey-Gerard and Garyantes wanted to create a news-academic partnership that offered student journalists the opportunity to work on specialized reporting projects. They agreed on a climate focus because South Jersey offered a microcosm of environmental issues facing urban, suburban, and oceanfront regions.

“Where we're located there's an opportunity to cover urban issues that are near Philadelphia. There's a lot of areas of southern New Jersey that are suburban that used to be more agricultural [which are] becoming more developed. And, then there's a lot of environmental issues along the shore with sea level rise and flooding and hurricanes,” said Berkey-Gerard. “We felt like we could contribute something to the area and to people's understanding of how environmental issues are affecting us locally.”

Moreover, Garyantes said the New Jersey landscape is particularly vulnerable to climate change, which she called “the most important topic of our time.”

“There's a lot of issues that affect a lot of our region in distinct ways,” said Garyantes. “New Jersey is heating up faster than most of the rest of the country. The shoreline is actually sinking in New Jersey, so sea level rise is actually more pronounced here than most of the rest of the country.”

Since the internship started five years ago, in the spring of 2019, South Jersey Climate News has expanded its reach by forging partnerships with three news outlets — , , and .

At first, the program received a small internal grant from the College of Communication and Creative Arts at Rowan University for basic operational costs, but the internship functioned as an extracurricular internship. Berkey-Gerard and Garyantes volunteered their time to manage the program outside their professorial responsibilities because they were enthused by the prospect of providing opportunities for students to gain skills in the workforce, despite dwindling news outlets.

“One of the challenges we also found as educators is there used to be a lot of news organizations that would take undergraduate interns, and as those places have died out or scaled back. They just don't have the capacity to support student interns anymore,” said Berkey-Gerard. “We needed to do more to give our students a professional experience while they're students, but we couldn't depend on the news organizations to do that.”

In 2022, South Jersey Climate News received a grant from the . In 2023, the grant was renewed. Last fall, the program was formalized into a three-credit course at Rowan University.

Currently, Berkey-Gerard teaches the course and edits student written work while Garyantes is working behind the scenes applying for grants to sustain and grow the program. They plan to trade off roles in the fall. Garyantes said they play tag team because managing the program and working directly with students, while rewarding, is taxing.

“It's a lot of work, but it's a labor of love,” said Garyantes. “It is really important to us to report about this issue. We've been gaining an audience, a steady audience. We get a lot of great feedback on the work that the students produce. And, it's important for our students because our students get a chance to publish outside of the classroom, and they get a chance to publish about a really complex and important topic.”

South Jersey Climate News student journalist Madison Miller (right) interviews Haven DeAngelis, the Reuse Coordinator at FABScrap, a commercial textile recycling initiative in Philadelphia.

South Jersey Climate News student journalist Madison Miller (right) interviews Haven DeAngelis, the Reuse Coordinator at FABScrap, a commercial textile recycling initiative in Philadelphia.

Andrew Lewis, a working journalist on their team, helps with rough draft edits and mentoring students in the program. Lewis began working as a consultant in the beginning stages of the program, but now he regularly visits the class to workshop story ideas and edit with students before handing off the top-edit to Berkey-Gerard.

Stepping into an editor role has been gratifying for Lewis because he can shop out story ideas that he doesn’t have time for as a working journalist, and watch students bring them to life. Lewis also said working with student journalists regularly makes him encouraged for the future of journalism.

“It just makes me excited to know that there are young people out there excited about journalism. Certainly right now, it's a rough place for working journalists,” said Lewis.  “On a personal level, it gives me energy to do what I do because I see other people interested in it and benefiting from it.”

Lewis’ journalistic and community contacts have also been valuable for organizing reporting field trips. This real-world professional experience was a draw of the program, according to Miller.

“We wanted to have the students get out and interview people in the field and experience what it was like to do a reporting trip,” said Lewis. “I talked to all these people that are on the ground involved in all types of environmental efforts in southern New Jersey. I can easily sort of tap into that resource that I have as a journalist, and get the students out there to meet these people and learn what it's like to report out a story in the field, not just from the desk over the phone.”

Eliminating Obstacles

South Jersey Climate News students tour an artificial reef in the Delaware Bay, that protects residents and wildlife from storms and beach erosion.

South Jersey Climate News students tour an artificial reef in the Delaware Bay, that protects residents and wildlife from storms and beach erosion.

Diversity and equity has been a main factor for Berkey-Gerard and Garyantes when designing the internship. To eliminate economic obstacles to participation, they offer a stipend to student interns along with credit during the school year and the summer.

The South Jersey Climate News program also works with students at Atlantic Cape Community College to give students outside of the Rowan University community a professional opportunity in journalism. Atlantic Cape Community College in Hamilton, New Jersey is also located by the shore, tapping into the knowledge student reporters have on environmental issues facing South Jersey's coastal communities.

“It was a purposeful thing to try to diversify the students who are covering issues [and] where they're covering them,” said Berkey-Gerard. “It was a way for us to expand what we could cover, but also try to train and mentor students from earlier in their career.”

Garyantes also spearheaded an effort to host an annual high school student journalism contest to provide a platform to young people to discuss environmental issues facing their community and attract prospective students to Rowan University. Winners are awarded a cash prize and have their work published on the South Jersey Climate News website.

After examining other models of news-academic partnerships around the country, Berkey-Gerard and Garyantes shaped their program towards the capacity of the program and the needs of their students and community by focusing on long-form content.

“We tend to do more feature stories and more explainers because they have a longer shelf life and we just don't have the people power to be a regular, constant news service,” said Berkey-Gerard. “But if we can take a big issue and make people look at it differently in a feature style or do an explainer and get that then published outside, I think that's the best way we can have an impact.”

Future Goals

Berkey-Gerard hopes the program will become more student-driven. As students gain more experience in the program, he said he wants to encourage students to take on leadership roles, including having designated peer-editors.

Lewis said his main aspirations for the program is to have academic infrastructure that encourages students to regularly take on multimedia reporting projects and investigative journalism.

Garyantes’ short-term objectives for the program are to ensure more consistent student-written content during the summer and breaks, as well as expand their social media presence.

“Long-term, we want to keep it going and keep expanding in terms of our media partners and what our students are doing,” said Garyantes.

The three all aim to improve the program and create valuable opportunities for students despite limited academic resources.

“Rowan is a small regional school,” said Lewis. “I just hope that there's there's more resources for more schools like Rowan to do programs like this because it's important to give students as much connection to working professionals and get them out into the field as much as possible.”

'Outside and in the Field'

Miller currently serves as the news editor for her school paper, The Whit, and will be taking the helm as executive editor next semester. Miller appreciates that working for the South Jersey Climate News provides the opportunity to report on issues affecting people off campus and has opened her eyes to different types of reporting.

“I think the coolest thing about this program is that it actually gets students outside and in the field,” said Miller. “The most valuable thing has been just making connections and learning about the community that I live in.

Miller is among the journalism students who were inspired to create their own solutions-based journalism magazine, The Lotus Review, which is launching soon.

“I feel like working for South Jersey Climate has introduced me to a whole new side of journalism doing these features and explainers,” said Miller. “Without my experience outside of Rowan, I wouldn't have had that idea and I wouldn't have had the confidence to pursue my own type of media.”

Christian Oberly, the editor of Follow South Jersey, one of South Jersey Climate News' media partners, is a former journalism student at Rowan University and said the program has a positive impact on students’ futures. The South Jersey Climate News helps break down barriers to entry into journalism, as well as gain life skills, he said.

“A lot of the value comes from giving local journalists experience that they can then take with them when they start applying for jobs,” said Oberly. “We want to equip them with the tools to use their unique voice to make a difference in their community.”