Carla Baranauckas spent the first four weeks of her Hawk News Service course at Montclair State University last fall describing for her students the differences between school work and professional work.
Some of her advice likely seemed obvious, Baranauckas acknowledged. But she wanted to emphasize certain points as the student reporters went out to cover stories in the field for news outlets across New Jersey. For example: They had to do as their editors instructed, she told them, no matter how strange those instructions sounded.
“You need to recognize that your editor is the one who has the experience,” Baranauckas explained. “Your editor is the one that knows what he or she wants, and so you're gonna have to work with that.”
That’s the real-world experience that students got during the first-ever semester for Hawk News Service in fall 2022. Named for Montclair State’s mascot, Rocky the Red Hawk, the course pairs eight to 10 students in the university’s School of Communication and Media with about the same number of publications that assign them stories and run them.
“We really wanted to have students that were going to be able to function in a news organization, as opposed to being in the classroom,” Baranauckas said, “because we wanted the news organizations to be very satisfied with the work that they were going to get from the students.”
Baranauckas also told her students that she’d have their backs every step of the way as they learned on the job. They could come to her with problems or questions, confusion about assignments, feedback on their stories or help with challenges.
“I didn't want them to feel like they were being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool without any swimming lessons,” she said. “I wanted them to be thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool with somebody standing on the shore with, like, a lifesaver.”
The three-credit course is not open enrollment. Montclair State journalism faculty — many of them professors of practice and working journalists — hand-pick the students they have seen excel in other reporting classes and offer them the chance to participate in Hawk News Service.
The program’s news partners include large publications such as the Newark Star-Ledger and Bergen Record and small community news outlets such as Morristown Green. One student paired with NJArts.net, a cultural news website. Another covered high school sports for NJ Urban News, which is focused on the Black community.
Hawk News Service grew out of the Center for Cooperative Media, which launched at Montclair State in 2012, the same year that the university created its School of Communication and Media. While it’s based at the university, the center operates mostly on private grant funding to bolster local news organizations in New Jersey. It provides media outlets of all sizes with training and coaching, professional support, and connections to legal, financial and other services.
Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media, came up with idea for Hawk News Service to not only support those local publications with eager reporters but give the students a chance to build their portfolios with published work.
“I want to do our best to try to at least get them a first job in the state, because so many have have had to go elsewhere,” Murray said. “So this is also a good pipeline, we see, to develop relationships with local news orgs, so hopefully they can get a job and stay here.”
Murray brought in Baranauckas, who had done some work for the center. Baranauckas spent 21 years at the New York Times as an editor in various sections, including the original web desk that operated separately from the print newsroom in its early years.
After taking a buyout at the Times in 2009, she went to the Bergen Record in northern New Jersey, which was purchased by media giant Gannett in 2016 and underwent multiple rounds of layoffs. Baranauckas then worked freelance until she was brought in as editor-in-chief for Montclair Local, a print and online publication covering that town. As of this month, Montclair Local merged with Baristanet, one of the longest-running hyper-local news outlets in the state.
Baranauckas, who is paid as adjunct faculty, edits the students’ stories for about half of the news partners, mostly the smaller outlets that have fewer paid staff and limited resources. The other half of the editors prefer to handle the editing themselves, she said.
After those first four weeks, Baranauckas abandons the structured class time and lets the students concentrate on their assignments. She offers regular office hours via Zoom and tells them they can connect with her any time as needed. In the fall, she helped a student prepare to cover the outcome of a trial, making sure he did enough early research and wrote some B-copy so he could turn the story around quickly when the verdict arrived.
“Sometimes I think they just need that little extra boost of confidence from somebody who says, ‘You can do this,’ ” Baranauckas said.
Some Hawk News students end up working as freelancers for their partner publications once the semester ends.
“They’re always looking for talented people,” Baranauckas said of the news outlets. “So the partners get the actual work that the student does, and the partners also get a peek at some people that may be of use to them either as a freelancer or a future staff person.”