Students and their editors huddle around a small table, deep in the stacks on the second floor of Howe Library at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Close your eyes for a few minutes, and it sounds just like a professional newsroom as they fact-check, copy edit stories and workshop headlines.
“The headline needs to mention Lake Champlain,” insists assistant editor Anna Van Dine. “And possibly also the Maritime Museum, but definitely Lake Champlain is key there.”
“Mm-hmm,” responds Kyle Neece, a senior from San Francisco studying history and writing. “Let me think creatively for a second.”
Real clips with real bylines in local newspapers are thumb-tacked to a nearby bulletin board. Students open their laptops and flip through their notebooks, chasing their next stories. Then their editors set the agenda for the day.
“So I have the Gen Z birding, reclaimed wood guy, Nature Conservancy, alpaca farms, all being filed today at 5,” says editor Courtney Lamdin, exhaling and smiling.
“OK, that’s crazy!” says Van Dine.
“I don’t know how to prioritize them yet,” Lambdin responds.
Founded in 2023, this is UVM’s Center for Community News. It’s part of a growing effort to fill a widening gap in local journalism, with research showing an average of 10 regional newspapers are closing each month.
That means local newsroom staffs are shrinking, leaving communities with fewer reporters to cover local government, schools and the issues that shape daily life. Cities and towns are losing a critical source of information for a functioning democracy.
That’s where colleges are stepping in.
The nonprofit center at UVM prioritizes news deserts around the state by putting students to work covering their communities.
“I’ve always loved telling stories. Fictional and real,” said Neece, who joined the center last spring and immediately started covering local sports and writing about “all things historical.”
“I wrote various 250th anniversary articles,” he said. “I’ve written about the Battle of Hubbardton. I went to a reenactment event for that.”
And state officials are taking note.
“Having strong regional news outlets is especially important here in Vermont,” said Gov. Phil Scott at the statehouse in Montpelier in July, after signing an executive order directing state agencies to prioritize spending more of their advertising dollars with local media outlets.
“Local media face the same challenges as every other sector in Vermont: a shrinking workforce and an increasingly unaffordable cost of doing business in this state,” Scott added.
Rural areas hit hardest
What’s at stake when local news disappears? A new report released in September by researchers at George Washington University finds the decline of local news is leaving Americans less informed, more isolated, and even lonely, especially in rural communities.
Researchers Danny Hayes and Anusha Trivedi conclude that local news “promotes social well-being by informing residents about their communities, fostering attachment and a sense of belonging that can reduce loneliness.”
Vermont isn’t alone in trying to solve this crisis. In California, lawmakers in August passed a historic measure to support community news by providing tax credits for hiring and retaining journalists.
Meanwhile, at UVM and other colleges and universities across the country, student journalists are emerging as an unlikely part of the local-news infrastructure.
“I just think it’s a great opportunity to get involved in local journalism in a professional way,” said Erika Tally, 21, a UVM senior from Bristol, Rhode Island.
Kirk Carapezza
GBH News
Tally writes for the school newspaper, The Vermont Cynic, covering the campus during the school year. But this paid summer internship has taken her far beyond Burlington.
“I’ve been to corners of Vermont that I didn’t even know existed this summer,” Tally said, ticking off various assignments. “I went to a goat farm at the top of a hill in Bethel. I went to some old logging roads down in Greensboro where we were hunting for butterflies. It’s been really cool.”
Not only cool, but increasingly critical, says Richard Watts, former editor of the family-owned Addison Independent in Middlebury.
“People in communities need access to reliable, authentic, trustworthy information. And universities, of which there are almost 6,000, sit in these communities,” he said.
Today, Watts directs the Center at UVM, recruiting students wherever he can to join the staff.
Kirk Carapezza
GBH News
“They learn what it’s like to be a journalist,” he said, sitting in his makeshift office in a library conference room. “They learn about the communities that they live in. They learn about accessing information, and they learn how to turn all that into a story that’s accessible and available to people in the public.”
It’s not just serving Vermont. The center is building partnerships between colleges and local news outlets across the country.
In 2025 alone, according to the center’s latest annual report, more than 9,000 students produced about 32,000 stories through reporting programs at 200 colleges. That includes big public flagships like the University of Missouri and small private schools like Franklin College in Indiana, where students cover the statehouse and their professional editors make those stories available to papers across the state. At the University of Florida, students are producing a Spanish-language public radio program.
The stories were shared with community news outlets in 46 states.
This week, the Center at UVM announced it was committing an additional $100,000 to expand access to student reporting across the 22-campus California State University system.
Watts says this new emerging model gives local outlets struggling to compete with cable news and social media something they desperately need: professionally edited, community-focused journalism.
“The power of this model is that these aren’t papers turned into a teacher who grades them,” Watts explained. “These are actual stories that real people are going to read that make a real difference in communities.”
That’s because faculty editors vet the work before publication, with intense, one-on-one editing.
“At the end of the day, the decisions that are made on a local level are what impact people the most,” said Lamdin. “One of the things that we’re training our student journalists to do is be able to explain that to people and why these things matter.”
Assistant editor Van Dine said the center also teaches students to value democracy — and local news itself — “so that they will go on to become people who read their newspaper, who keep up with things.”
Perhaps, too, they’ll become citizens who help sustain trustworthy local news, at a time when many communities are becoming news deserts.
“A lot of stories that I cover are very in-depth,” said Indi Rose, a 20-year-old junior from Miami studying environmental science, plant biology, and journalism.
Rose recalls how Watts personally recruited her after he caught her eavesdropping on a conversation he was having with a professor in the campus coffee shop.
“They were talking about cultural politics and critiquing UVM’s homogenous culture,” she said. “It was fascinating.”
“I was playing solitaire on my computer,” she recalled. “I thought I was being slick. I was not.”
Rose says Watts told her “the most important thing for a journalist is being curious” and encouraged her to apply to the center’s summer internship program.
She says it paid off.
“I definitely find a sense of purpose in giving smaller stories my time and my effort when other people might not see it as pressing,” she said.
