Multiple benefits from WA’s decision to support local news

Washington taxpayers are funding a great experiment in sustaining local journalism. It’s already off to a good start.

The state’s new biennial budget includes $2.4 million for “a journalism fellowship program focused on civic affairs.”

This will place eight graduating journalism students per year at local news outlets across the state. The gigs last two years so the roster will grow to 16 after the first year.

As I reported earlier this week, Washington, Oregon and California are all developing fellowship programs to help backfill their states’ news deserts and vacant newsrooms with early career journalists. I’ve got more details now from educators getting it started in Washington.

Far more jobs are needed to revive local news coverage but the fellowships are a promising start. They will provide jobs, training and valuable signals to journalism students, the public and other policymakers.

Around 70% of newspaper newsroom jobs were lost over the last two decades, including a 67% decline in Washington state from 2005 to 2020, according to a report by U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell.

In Washington, newsroom jobs fell from 1,587 to 520, the report said, and that was before additional layoffs during the pandemic.

A fifth of Americans now live in places with little to no local news, and hundreds of counties have no local news whatsoever, according to research by Northwestern University’s Medill School.

Washington state Sen. Karen Keiser, a Des Moines Democrat and former journalist, said she’s concerned about how this affects democracy and accountability, especially in smaller communities.

Keiser proposed the fellowship program and shepherded it through the budget finalized last weekend.

“Without that really serious problems can develop,” she said, noting the recent case of an Oklahoma county commission where officials who believed they were outside the view of reporters discussed killing journalists and lynching Black people.

“It’s really important to have an independent journalist in every public arena because … otherwise there’s no watchdog,” Keiser said. “I think the smaller the government the more dangerous it is because it’s more insular and provincial perhaps.”

While the fellowships won’t come close to putting reporters back in every county courthouse and city hall, Keiser suggested it’s a start of a broader effort.

“I just am thrilled that we’re going to have a new infrastructure to build off of, to create civic journalism at every level in our state,” she said.

I think the fellowships will have additional benefits.

They send the message that journalism remains a viable and important career. They also provide an incentive for students to consider jobs outside of large metro areas that still have a relative abundance of news coverage.

By supporting fellowships, states are reinforcing the message that local news is essential to an informed populace and self governance. That’s another reminder that the press in the U.S. has always been supported by the government without compromising its independence.

This comes as federal proposals to help sustain local journalism stalled over the last two years. Perhaps state leadership, with strong bipartisan support for journalism, will nudge Congress along.

Washington’s plan is for the fellows to be paid $55,000 yearly.

They’ll develop on-the-job skills and receive a certificate in digital media innovation from Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.

Details have yet to be finalized, but Murrow College leaders drafted a working plan for the program, which could see its first cohort going to work in early 2024. Half would be from WSU and the rest from other schools in the state.

The funding will also support a program manager, hired by WSU, and faculty working on the digital media certification. WSU expects its staff salaries and benefits to use about $146,000 per year of the funding.

WSU would also use $50,000 per year to fund research documenting the local news ecosystem in Washington state.

Further details will be sorted by an advisory board that will be created later this year.

Murrow College had already been considering ways to increase job and training opportunities for graduating journalism majors, according to Dean Bruce Pinkleton and Ben Shors, chair of the department of journalism and media production.

“It did happen quickly from a legislative perspective,” Shors said. “From our perspective, it’s been a problem we’ve been wrestling with and all of journalism I think has been wrestling with for the last decade.”

Shors said they had made several proposals for a fellowship program over the years but with different funding approaches.

“When Sen. Keiser called we were like, yeah, we’ve got a plan,” he said.

Current “experiential” learning programs at the school include its annual “Rural Plunge” program that sends students on a two-day reporting trip to rural areas that otherwise receive little news coverage.

“We built that experience because we knew there was not much knowledge of those communities by our students and many of these communities had never seen a journalist, at least not in the last decade,” Shors said. “It was a chance for them to meet aspiring journalists and see that maybe they weren’t so different and build some of those connections.”

WSU’s journalism program now has around 350 students in its program, including double majors with other programs. Enrollment in the program grew 2.5% this year as overall enrollment at WSU declined.

Although newspapers continue to provide most essential local news coverage, Shors and Pinkleton would like the fellowships to be platform agnostic, with broadcast and digital outlets invited to participate as well.

“My message is journalism is changing, it’s not dying,” Pinkleton said. “I think we’ve seen that borne out over the last several years.”

Pinkleton said 72 journalism majors will graduate in May, suggesting competition will be fierce for the fellowships and the relatively good salary they offer at rural and suburban news outlets.

I’m obviously biased but believe the program will be a good investment.

It should benefit Washingtonians by producing an exceptional corps of local reporters, more informed citizens, and more accountability for government and other institutions.