There’s no shortage of news coverage in Houston.
But, “what kind of sets Community Impact apart is our hyperlocal focus,” said Kelly Schafler, the South Houston managing editor for the outlet, which covers the Austin, Texas, and Dallas, Houston and San Antonio metro areas.
Community Impact’s mission is to serve local neighborhoods with city council and school board coverage, according to their . And recently they’ve started to bring students into the fold.
Six students in Lindita Camaj’s data journalism class at the University of Houston published three articles with Community Impact this past spring semester. Each story was angled around local news and data.
“The idea was to get my students in data journalism to use some local data, so they can report on issues that are important to different communities — especially neighborhoods around Houston,” Camaj said.
Students in the class learned how to scrape data, how to format it and how to use Microsoft Excel and data visualization tools, she said.
Then students paired up in twos and threes to write articles. Throughout the semester, editors at Community Impact visited the class to talk with students about their pitches and how to shape their reporting.
Schafler referred to herself and the other editors at Community Impact, “just the checkpoints in between,” as students reported their stories and met in Camaj’s class.
Most in the class are journalism students, Camaj said, but a lot of them come into the first day with no data or statistical knowledge.
“It’s a lot to cover,” she said.
But the toughest challenge, she said, was to steer students away from the big stories they wanted to cover, and get them to sink their teeth into stories just off campus.
“That was the biggest challenge, to get students to realize that not all politics is national, you know?” she said. “Look at what's happening in your neighborhood.”
So they did.
Students pursued a slew of topics around Houston: Valerie Olivares and Gwyneth Mosbeck covered the city’s plan to increase the number of electrical vehicle ; Valeria Arrieta and Edna Gonzales covered the link between ; David Mercado and Georgia Faust tackled since the pandemic.
Camaj paid each student who worked on a story with money from a University of Houston grant she’d won. She incentivized students to try to get them published by offering extra money to those that ran in Community Impact.
The students wrote 10 stories in all, three of which were published in the outlet. The rest weren’t quite there, Schafler said. But perhaps with a little more time, they could’ve been.
“All the stories, with some reforming, a little extra work, could’ve been published,” she said.
Since Camaj is moving to take a job at the University of Florida as an associate professor, she’ll no longer teach her data journalism course at the University of Houston. Schafler said the partnership won’t be available this fall semester, but she hopes to help ramp it back up come spring.