A budding student-driven journalism initiative based at Florida Atlantic University, known as MediaLab@FAU, is giving students the opportunity to produce community reporting published on the news site and made available to their media partners throughout the region, including , , and .
Bella Kubach, a student enrolled in MediaLab@FAU, said the class is designed like a newsroom which allows students to learn the ropes of the reporting process.
“It's really valuable because it's the closest you can get to real-world experience without being in a job or an internship, and I think that it gives you a good feel of what the field of journalism entails,” said Kubach. “I just learned a lot on how to interview people and how to get in touch with sources and exactly what you need to actually have a piece published and go beyond that.”
Professor Ilene Prusher, who teaches the course, said her main motivation revolves around “the interest of [her] students growing as writers and future journalists.”
Published clips are an essential way to ensure that her students have a good footing in the journalism world, according to Prusher, and Kubach values this opportunity to get her work published in reputable news outlets.
“I think being able to be enrolled in a course where you're getting college credit and also having an opportunity to get your clips published and help you in advance in the career field—I think that's really special, and I really appreciated that,” said Kubach.
Recalling her days at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she was a student reporter for the — a long running student-driven news wire for the New York City area — Prusher was inspired to create Medialab@FAU.
“I've had this idea in my mind for a long time,” said Prusher. “Then, a year ago, I became acquainted with the Center for Community News in Vermont and the whole national trend towards news academic partnerships as a way to fight news desertification going on in America.”
Finding support in CCN and other faculty leading news-academic partnerships around the country, Prusher took it upon herself to start her own program based on the needs of the region.
Prusher recognized that newsrooms in South Florida have shrunk and have had less capacity, especially since the pandemic. MediaLab@FAU was created to report on the vibrant communities around Florida Atlantic University including Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Boca Raton which may have been otherwise ignored.
“One of my biggest inspirations was that South Florida is so replete with fascinating stories, and not all of them were getting told,” said Prusher.
Sergio Bustos, the news director of WLRN Public Radio and Television, is also motivated by a riveting story. Routinely, Bustos pulls stories from the MediaLab@FAU website for WLRN to adapt it to audio content.
“At the end of the day, we're storytellers,” said Bustos, “Whether you're in college or getting into this like me for 40 years, you love a good story. And when I see one, we recognize it– and that's what we jump on. And, so I just hope we keep producing great content, great stories for the Palm Beach, South Florida area.”
Bustos recognizes that reworking print to audio can be a challenge, but it can also be an opportunity for students to grow as reporters and be acquainted with other mediums.
“I really do hope we can make [student-reported stories] flourish and add these other components to it in an audio version,” said Bustos. “If we get the story early enough, then we can help assign a producer or help work with the student to develop the audio, because that takes experience. It's getting actual sound—it's very key, but we're more than willing to work with them.”
This spring, students also have the opportunity to expand to the other side of the journalism profession through the Advanced Media Lab 2 course in which experienced students are empowered to edit their peers’ stories.
Funding is Prusher’s main focus for growing the program. She hopes that with a larger budget, a full-time editor of student stories could be hired and students could be reimbursed for transportation.
“If we can have some kind of a funding model so that the students are more supported with going out to do stories that are a little further afield from wherever they live— whether it's off campus or on campus— I think that could really only benefit what we're doing and what we're expecting the students to do,” said Prusher.
Dr. Carol Mills, the director of the school Communications and Multimedia at Florida Atlantic University, has been a champion of the MediaLab@FAU because the project offers a unique and valuable experience for students.
“This really allows faculty to help refine student journalistic practices in the most professional ways and ensure that when the stories go out, they're really top quality stories that speak to community issues,” said Mills.
Along with acquiring funding for the MediaLab@FAU, Mills advocated for an old theater on campus to be transformed into the Media Innovation and Creativity Center (MICC) for the MediaLab@FAU program, equipped with podcasting and broadcasting equipment. Mills hopes with the MICC, that the media lab will become “truly multimedia newsroom.”
“We're excited to now have that space because it did open up a lot of opportunities for us now to be able to have a much more engaging and interactive opportunity for our students to kind of build their own portfolios through their coursework and through this media lab,” said Mills.
MediaLab@FAU is advantageous for everyone involved, according to Prusher.
“It's exciting what we're doing because we are coming in and offering stories that maybe other reporters for local media either are not seeing or didn't get a chance to get to,” said Prusher. “So far, it just feels like, not even a win-win, but a win-win-win because it's great for our school, great for our students, and great for these local news organizations.”