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The CCSU Journalism students at the February 2024 Common Council meeting in New Britain.

The Connecticut Student Journalism Collaborative (CTSJC) has taken the idea of a news-academic partnership to the next level. Instead of being based at a single university, journalism education leaders in Connecticut have formed a coalition of universities to produce student-reported stories to fill the gaps in local coverage.

The collaborative formed after Richard Watts, executive director of the Center for Community News at ����̽̽, gathered journalism leaders from around Connecticut to consider how to make a student reporting initiative work most effectively.

“We just all realized … our problems are aligned, and this particular solution really seems to solve all of our problems,” said Harriet Jones, project manager of CTSJC and an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut.

Newspapers have been consolidated and internships are now scarce. Julie Serkosky, associate professor-in-residence at UConn hopes this collaborative will offer students the professional experience needed to succeed in journalism.

“[CTSJC] was the perfect opportunity for us to give our students that edge,” said Serkosky. “This gives us that ability to give them an additional avenue to explore, to get the experience that they need.”

Jones said this past spring semester was a “proof of concept,” and they are still tinkering with the format. All the collaborative members agreed that it was important to offer the student reporting experience through the classroom to ensure equity in access.

In order to ensure stories are to publication standards, students' class work must go through three rounds of editing before being sent to the collaborative’s news partners, CT Public, WSHU Public Radio, CT Mirror and the New England News Collaborative.

This past semester, the collaborative focused the student reporting project on issues related to the minimum wage. Jodie Gil, an associate professor of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University, who is working with the Collaborative, said she found it interesting to see how everyone at different schools around the state interpreted the assignment.

Using minimum wage as a jumping off point, Madison Musco, a student at Central Connecticut State University, decided to write a documenting the reality of homelessness in the state.

"Seeing my story about Billy (Cichon) and homelessness in New Britain published by a statewide news outlet is gratifying and exciting,” said Musco. “The early mornings sitting on the bench with Billy before class, going to Common Council meetings after work and the hours spent researching and synthesizing information and quotes until it looked like alphabet soup were all worth it. And the work I put in feels validated by seeing this published. Words really can't express how much this means to me.”

Jones worked to design an to consolidate the student reporting generated from the collaborative. The platform is fast becoming a vehicle for the republication of student work. Stories produced by the Collaborative in the spring semester garnered more than 35,000 page views when they were republished by media partners.

“It was important to us to bring all those stories together to showcase them,” said
Jones. “It's very evident what we're doing and the standard of work that the students are producing.”

Marie Shanahan, journalism department head at the University of Connecticut, said the power of CTSJC is collective spirit and power in numbers that can be harnessed to produce community news.

“Once we do have more media partners and the editors know that we do have this army of journalism students who may be able to help them,” said Shanahan. “We could really investigate something that is being overlooked, and definitely gather more data points that you couldn't do as a single reporter or a single newsroom.”

Eric Aasen, the executive editor at Connecticut Public said that the collaborative is boon not only for students and the news outlets, but for the greater community in Connecticut.

“We’re getting stories that we wouldn’t be able to cover all the time. It’s just things that we wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about. It’s really a plus for everyone, including those communities that probably aren’t getting this kind of coverage on a regular basis now,” said Aasen

J.D. Allen, Managing Editor of WSHU Public Radio, reiterated the importance of students stepping up to cover underreported issues in Connecticut, and thinks that the partnership with the student journalism collaborative is aligned with their work as a university licensed station.

“Collaborations are the only way for smaller stations like us to survive, " said Allen. “Our approach has always been to teach journalism to students with clear learning outcomes.”

Jones expressed a hope that the collaborative would build a professional pipeline of young journalists who are dedicated to community information in Connecticut.

“This is a sustainable way to find those really talented people who are committed to Connecticut, who know the state and who can be great leaders … and actually rise to be really significant people in the industry,” said Jones.

The collaborative met for a retreat in mid July to establish goals for the coming academic year. With a stipend grant from , CTSJC plans to marshall student journalists to report on municipal elections and first-time voter registration. For the 50th anniversary of Connecticut’s Freedom of Information (FOI) law next year, the collaborative is preparing a FOI compliance check project, documenting the governmental observance of the law in Connecticut and educating student reporters on record request procedure in the process.

Gil said that she hopes to expand on the momentum built in the past year to grow the program and continue offering journalism learning opportunities for students.

“I think Connecticut has a really unique opportunity to really touch all corners of the state and have tons of different kinds of stories and different viewpoints coming in from our students' own perspectives and their lived experiences. I think that's a real strength of our group,” said Gil.