A Q&A with Barbara Allen of the Student Press Report

You launched the Student Press Report to shine a light on the challenges threatening student newsrooms across the U.S. What made you realize we needed this type of coverage and attention right now?

If there’s no media coverage of collegiate journalism, how can we expect the world to understand what’s happening with soon-to-be professional journalists? The national media typically doesn’t pay much attention until there’s a crisis, like what we saw at Indiana with the firing of adviser Jim Rodenbush, or at Tufts with the detainment of grad student Rümeysa Öztürk, whose only “crime” was writing an op-ed in The Tufts Daily. 

While the student media community appreciates all the national attention that those incidents and others like them rightfully got, there is so much happening each and every day at student newsrooms around the country. College media and student journalism is such an important part of the media ecosystem. It’s where students learn most of their skills, develop their ethics and learn lessons that they will apply through a lifetime in the industry. It’s important that there be storytelling about this critical developmental stage for our industry.

Press freedom and censorship are topics of concern for today’s professional journalists. Are you  surprised at the degree to which college journalists have to  confront these topics on their campuses? 

Yes and no. I think the Trump administration’s attitude toward the press has emboldened university administrators to listen to the darker angels of their nature — which is that student journalists are somehow enemies instead of tuition-paying, education-seeking students who are working to learn and improve. Instead of embracing opportunities to mentor and teach, administrators feel they’ve been given the green light to ignore, stonewall and even castigate student journalists.

Student publications are also, in many cases, facing financial hardships. What are some clever ways college newsrooms are setting themselves up for success in light of these challenges?

There are some really great ones! One of the best examples is the Rivalry Challenge between The Duke Chronicle and the University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel, which leverages each team’s fans to “beat” the amount of donations raised for each student newspaper before the schools’ basketball showdown. Some student media organizations have started creative agencies in which communications students provide website design, videography and photography services; a few have even found pretty great financial success with sponsored content. The trick is to devote some energy to innovation and figuring out what unique attributes your campus has that can be monetized or leveraged to help student media.

Could you share any advice or lessons learned for journalists and/or faculty who are feeling discouraged or downtrodden about the profession? 

The single best thing that faculty, adjuncts and working journalists can do is to individually mentor young journalists. It’s fulfilling for them as professionals, and it’s incredibly helpful to younger journalists, who tend to bring a certain light and levity to the day-to-day by virtue of their youthfulness and energy.

What gives you hope about the future of student media and journalism as a whole?

I’m really encouraged by journalism schools that are embracing the creator economy and are starting to teach their young journalists skills around revenue generation, entrepreneurship and marketing. A Muck Rack survey of 500 journalists found that about a third of them consider themselves creator journalists. I think we’re at a real turning point in the industry in terms of how journalism is made, distributed and profited from. It’s heartening to know that J-schools are listening — some of them, anyway.