Most of the students who start out in Kathleen McElroy’s 2-year-old reporting capstone course at University of Texas at Austin have never been in a real newsroom, said Kevin Vu, a former student.
“I think this is a really great opportunity for them to get hands-on experience of reporting local journalism,” he said.
The School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin has published undergraduate and graduate student stories for a decade through their in-house digital outlet, , McElroy said. But the goal of her class is to get published beyond campus.
“The whole idea is for them to be professionalized,” she said.
And while Reporting Texas offers their stories to local outlets to republish with credit, the capstone course integrates students with professional newsrooms, outside of the university.
The course works like this: McElroy and another instructor, who also teaches the class, train students on reporting basics for the first few weeks. Then they pair them up with one of their partner news outlets and the student works directly for the organization they’re assigned to.
Last spring, they had 18 students in the class working with 17 news outlet partners, McElroy said. Student reporters are fully immersed in a professional newsroom without the backdrop of academia, she said.
“We rarely talk to the outlets,” McElroy said. “We don’t have to have any conversations once we pair them up with a student.”
The class still meets every week, and students share the stories they’re working on, Vu said. If problems arise, McElroy is there to help.
The Texas Legislature meets every two years, so the first year they offered the class, students covered the Legislature heavily, McElroy said. But this past year, they covered state agencies.
“One student focused on the foster care system in Texas, which truly sucks,” she said. That piece ended up in the .
Vu, who took the course this past spring during the last semester of his senior year, said he focused on the environment.
McElroy paired him with a reporter at the , a nonprofit newsroom which launched in 2021. Vu worked under Haley Samsel, an environmental reporter at the time, who was recently promoted to content editor at the outlet.
“I'm not from Dallas. I'm from Houston, so I had no clue who to talk to or reach out to,” he said. “But she was very helpful, and she knew who exactly to talk to, and got me along the way.”
To start McElroy’s class, Vu wrote down two of his preferred reporting subjects — crime and the environment. He then learned the basics of reporting for the first few weeks before she turned him over to one of their partners.
Some of their partners include the Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, the Gainesville Daily Register, San Antonio Express, El Paso Matters and Fort Worth Report.
And students are partnered based on their level of experience, she said.
“Someone who’s going to be working for the Chronicle or the San Antonio Express-News will have a little bit more experience than someone who's working for a different publication,” she said.
The whole point of the course is to get student bylines in the community. One of McElroy’s students from Corpus Christi, Texas, demonstrated that. He would head home on the weekends and find “really good stories,” she said.
“It was so great because he said his grandpa and his father got to see his byline,” she said. “They got to see their son and grandson's byline in the paper.”