Illinois, Missouri college students fill reporting gaps in statehouse coverage

By Elizabeth Tharakan >>

The number of full-time statehouse reporters who cover capital cities has declined 34% since 2014. To fill this gap, college students are providing a substantial amount of statehouse coverage, including in Illinois and Missouri.

There are now 34 university- or college-led statehouse reporting initiatives in 30 states across the country, according to the University of Vermont Center for Community News. 

“Either students are doing reporting on the broader community beyond the bounds of the campus for an outlet that services the community but is managed by the college or the students are doing community reporting for local news outlets in the regions,” Meg Reilly, managing director of the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, told GJR.

All of the student reporters take a course in community reporting and do reporting for the news outlet with whom they’re partnered. They get assignments from a professor in their class and in the near final stages it goes to an editor that they’re partnered with. 

Across all of these programs are professional journalism faculty practitioners who are highly trained, experienced in both journalism in theory and skilled in statehouse reporting in practice. Most programs also have media partnerships where content is made available and shared widely across the state. 

Students in the public affairs reporting graduate program at the University of Illinois Springfield work as state house correspondents covering House and Senate floor committees, news conferences “ and everything else that goes on in the state capitol building,” said Jason Piscia, director of the 10-month master’s program.

“They report on pretty much any bill making its way through the legislature, the state budget, protests happening in Springfield to the federal administration, pieces of state legislation, or the bill of the day,” he said.  

The University of Illinois Springfield is the oldest academic statehouse journalism program in the country. Political reporting is the focus of the curriculum, but students come from all different backgrounds, Piscia said.

“I have students who have been sports editors, psychology majors with a passing interest in politics, a theater major,” he said. UIS has partnerships with the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ public radio, for a total of nine outlets altogether. 

“Our students’ stories are getting read all throughout the state. They double the population of our regular press room at the state house. Their ability as a whole to cover more of what’s going on in Illinois politics serves the state well,” Piscia said.

The professors at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism feel similarly about covering state policy in Springfield.

Bob Rowley, senior lecturer and director of Medill Illinois News Bureau, was sitting in the press room at the Springfield capital when GJR caught up with him. “A lot of the press room offices are empty or dark because of cutbacks in funding,” he observed. 

The Medill News Bureau is largely composed of students doing their master’s degree in a different specialization. Some are politics, policy, health and environments, investigations, broadcast, but all are doing the program with Capitol News Illinois, the nonprofit news service of the Illinois Press Foundation covering government at the statehouse.

What factors are critical to student success? “There’s an Advanced Reporting class that I teach twice a week, and we go down to Springfield in between, and the fellows all have to apply to get in,” Rowley said. “They brainstorm and pitch story ideas. I send them off to committee meetings where they can go sit and watch the floor of the House and the Senate and see what laws are being passed, and they can interview state lawmakers. We’re working with Capital News Illinois as a partner and, once I get them through class, orientation, and brainstorming, I work with them to sharpen those stories into better news stories.”

It is not just Illinois journalism schools that cover state government, but also Missouri schools. For more than 40 years, University of Missouri School of Journalism has had a presence at the state capital covering what’s going on. Mizzou has an office in Jefferson City, the capital city of Missouri, and that office has for years distributed stories to the Missouri Press Association. University of Missouri also has distribution set up through Missouri Broadcasters Association. University of Missouri covers the Senate, the House, the governors’ office, the administrative branch. The legislative session runs from January to May. 

“Every year one of the big things we cover is the state budget, which will be adopted in the beginning of May,” said Mark Horvit, the director of the Jefferson City statehouse beat at the University of Missouri. 

The students have covered childcare, construction projects, immigrant-related legislation, abortion and a new utilities law that just got signed into law by the governor.

“The goal of our service is to cover the issues of the day in addition to providing some enterprise coverage,” Horvit said. “The Post Dispatch and the Kansas City Star still have a presence in Jeff City, and it’s mostly the smaller papers that rely on our coverage to have a presence for everything. Our audio is picked up all over the state. We’re covering the most important stories in real time.”

In both Springfield, through Medill and University of Illinois Springfield, and Jefferson City through the University of Missouri, students meet needs for political reporting while preparing themselves for ambitious careers. The University of Missouri just started a two-year pilot project this January where they are building a network with other journalism schools to do national coverage of stories that cross state borders. This prepares journalism students who want to work for large national outlets after graduation.

“The main thing that we hope people take away from this research is that students provide critical civic information, so we’re excited to work with colleges and local news outlets in the coming years to forge more of these relationships. We think this is a viable solution to the cratering of a lot of local civic coverage,” said Reilly, of the Center for Community News.

Elizabeth Tharakan is an attorney and holds a doctorate from Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

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