By Mark Glaser

Students have gone from being nice additions to newsrooms as summer interns to becoming key players in the local news ecosystem, providing important reporting in communities that badly need them. The Center for Community News at the University of Vermont has been tracking academic-newsroom partnerships and found that nearly 3,000 student reporters produced more than 11,000 for local news outlets around the United States in the 2024-25 school year. And that’s just college students. High school students have pitched in as well.

So it’s not a big surprise that students have become integral to a growing number of Tiny News publishers around the country. Students are launching classroom media, producing podcasts, reporting stories and getting on-the-ground experience that will help them succeed — and make them great candidates for TNC newsrooms to hire. Nurturing this talent is vital to the future of local news, but it doesn’t come easily. Here are some important readiness tips before you start working with students:

• Mentoring and hand-holding is an important part of the work. Most students, especially those in high school, don’t have a lot of experience and will need your oversight and feedback in a way that seasoned reporters don't. Some early-stage founders don’t have the bandwidth for providing this kind of support, especially those who haven’t worked with students before. Creating opportunities to work with students might be something to plan to do once operations are more stable. Work with advisers to map out the best time for this kind of capacity building.
• Partner with educational institutions to get their buy-in and support. It helps to have supportive high school and college administrators and teachers who can give you insights into the students you hire. They can also help with mentoring students, since that is such a big part of their jobs already. 
• Give clear instructions and ethical guidelines to student reporters. As this might be their first journalism job, you want to make sure they know the rules of the road at your outlet and in the community.
• Make sure you have adequate funding to pay students fairly. At the very least, they should get school credit for their work.

On that last point, TNC member Nancy Flores, editor and publisher of Austin Vida, has a lot to say. Last fall, she ran a specific fundraising appeal to support her important paid internship program. With the subject line, "I Don't Believe in Unpaid Internships," Nancy wrote about how as a student she could not have afforded to take on an unpaid internship. "Course credit" was not something that she could use to pay rent.

"So when building Austin Vida’s internship program, I knew that we had to operate differently. It's been important to us that these student journalists, who have ranged from single mothers to migrant farmworkers, receive paid internships," she wrote. "We realize that not every student can afford the opportunity to work for free."

I also talked with TNC members Scene in Boston, Black Belt News Network and Tucson Spotlight who work closely with students in very different ways. Here is more information about their programs along with key tips for other newsrooms who are curious about collaborating with students.

An arts high school with a podcasting studio

Laura Amico, founder and co-host of the Scene in Boston website and podcast, enjoyed working with students in her past jobs, including turning Homicide Watch in D.C. into a reporting lab. So it seemed natural for her to seek out a way to work with students in her new venture. She had a friend who was an administrator at the Boston Arts Academy high school, and told her she wanted to start a podcast about local theater, and was wondering if they might collaborate. Her friend was thrilled with the idea, and the school also happened to have a professional sound studio.

The collaboration worked well because Laura needed production help, and the students needed real-world experience and had been trained in audio engineering. 

“You have to find places where your needs align,” she said. “I would have a hole in my team without them doing the audio production, and the theaters would have a hole in their marketing without us. Figuring out what each group gets out of it — and what need it meets beyond ‘this is nice’ — is what makes the partnership work.”

One silver lining in the podcast’s first season was that guests on the show were excited to record at the Boston Arts Academy, and the students got to connect with professionals in the field. One downside was that the school’s schedule made a regular production tempo difficult, with vacations and students’ other schoolwork interrupting the flow.  

Despite the challenges, Laura sees real potential with the collaboration with the academy, including a future idea of live podcasts on stage at the theater there. 

Creating a school newspaper while training future reporters

Cindy Fisher takes her job seriously, covering “super-rural” Black communities in Alabama in authentic ways for Black Belt News Network. In one of those super-rural towns, Orrville (“no Home Depot, no Olive Garden”), they were starting a high school journalism program, and Cindy jumped at the chance to partner with them to create Keith High School’s very first print newspaper, Bear Nation News.

She found “lightning in a bottle” with a supportive teacher, Kiesela Foster. “She’s very structured, she has guardrails, and that makes the class work,” Cindy said. “She gives them a little leeway, then shuts it down when needed. Those guardrails are what make a project like this successful.”

Another key to the project was having the students focus on real-world, hands-on learning through interviewing, shooting photos and hitting deadlines. Although there were hiccups along the way, the point wasn’t to be perfect. The students learned how to produce something real that they could hold in their hands. “When we handed out the newspaper, one of them said, ‘Wow, we really did this,’ and that’s what it’s about,” she said.

Although Cindy’s funding fell through for the project, she still believes it was worth it to build journalism skills in the community and bring more awareness of the Black Belt News Network. Plus, she can hire some of the best students to help her cover football games and town council meetings in towns that are often an hour’s drive apart.

Putting students into the action from Day One

Caitlin Schmidt, the Tucson Spotlight’s co-founder, has close ties to the University of Arizona’s journalism school through her work as an adjunct instructor there. So it makes sense that the outlet would use paid student interns from U of A, Pima Community College and area high schools to help report on the community. 

What sets their program apart is just how quickly students get to report for the Spotlight, with meaningful assignments, deadlines and accountability. Plus, an important part about having student interns is that they bring a needed youthful perspective often missing from established publications. For example, Spotlight intern McKenna Loren Manzo was covering a festival that promised a large turnout and revenues for vendors and then didn’t deliver. McKenna made sure to include Instagram posts from vendors who were upset (pictured above).

“Our internship program is built around the idea that students should be doing real journalism, not shadowing,” Caitlin said. “We bring them into the newsroom as contributors from Day One — pitching, reporting and publishing stories that serve our community.”

Another important aspect about the Spotlight’s internship program is that mentorship and patience is built into the workflow. As Caitlin points out, “it takes real time; early on it can mean more editing, more check-ins and more hands-on guidance.” But eventually students become more independent, and that extra hand-holding time pays off for the student and the publication.

There’s been a clear shift in how local newsrooms can work with students: not as temporary help, but as meaningful collaborators. Whether it’s Nancy Flores fundraising specifically for student interns, Laura Amico building partnerships that meet real needs on all sides, Cindy Fisher creating hands-on opportunities in a rural classroom, or Caitlin Schmidt integrating interns directly into newsroom workflows, the common thread is intention. These programs require time, structure and flexibility but also produce real journalism, expand community connections and help build a more diverse source of future reporters. 

Mark Glaser is a communications consultant for The Lenfest Institute, Press Forward, Tiny News Collective and American Journalism Project, and was the founder and executive editor of MediaShift.org. He was formerly the director of business and program development for the New Mexico Local News Fund. He runs the Wind Power Media consultancy out of Santa Fe.