By Kathryn DeHart
For Texas Southern journalism student Erin Slaughter, student media is more than a way to hone her professional skills and prepare for a future in the field — it’s a way to serve her university community with news and information.
Slaughter, the multimedia content director at KTSU2, recently spent two days in Washington learning how to improve her newsroom’s election coverage and how to strategically plan to make the newsroom sustainable in terms of audience, revenue and staff development.
“So I wanted to give back to my college what my college gave to me, and that was how to tell not only to go out and tell the story, but tell the stories correctly, and be able to meet somebody and they confidently know that you’re going to tell their story how they want it told,” she said. “And that’s why, when it came to student media, I said, Yeah, I can find other internships, but I want to give back to the school that has taught me so much.”
Slaughter and her colleagues joined nine other student newsroom teams from historically Black colleges and universities for the INDABA: Student Press Leadership and Innovation Conference on Oct. 7. It was held the day before the third annual Democracy Summit at Howard University, hosted by the Center for Journalism & Democracy.
The newsrooms included The Hilltop and HU News Service at Howard University; The Campus Echo at NC Central University; Aggie News and A&T Register at NC A&T University; The FAMUAN at Florida A&M University; The Spokesman at Morgan State University; KTSU2 at Texas Southern University; Trilogy at the University of DC; The Tiger’s Roar at Savannah State University; and The Maroon Tiger at Morehouse College.
Marisa Porto, UNC Hussman’s Knight Chair in Local News and Sustainability, and Erica Beshears Perel, director of the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, led the student newsrooms through the strategic planning process.
“At this stage in the news business, we have to make value judgments about what’s important to do, and we have to do that so we can keep doing the great journalism that we want to do,” Porto said.
The original partnership between UNC and Howard’s centers dates back to 2021, said Kali-Ahset Amen, executive director of the Center for Journalism & Democracy at Howard. She went on a tour of journalism schools across the country to explore the existing work to support local newsrooms.
Last year, Perel and Porto, as well as Cierra Hinton, then-publisher of Scalawag Magazine, held a day-long workshop with the HBCU student media cohort on audience strategy, change management and staff development. After the workshop, they were invited to apply for grants to achieve their goals. At this year’s workshop, the newsrooms needed help operationalizing the grants they had received.
“Student media faces the same audience fragmentation and revenue declines that all local news is facing,” Perel said. “Student journalists need to understand their role in serving communities with essential information that helps people live better lives,” Perel said.
For example, during the workshop, the Hilltop team at Howard identified its strategic vision as becoming “the public square for the Howard community,” which speaks to the role it wants to play, she said.
Amen said the students who attended the workshops benefited tremendously.
“I was just really, really excited that we now have two years under our belt of partnering with UNC to support HBCU newsrooms, and I’m excited about what will come next,” Amen said.
Porto said in college media, where turnover rates are naturally high, understanding the business structure and operations is essential to continue telling stories to continue providing high-quality journalism.
“You need to be able to articulate why you’re doing what you’re doing, and then explain it to the group that you happen to be leading — whether that’s a small group or a team or whether that’s a whole organization,” Porto said.
Slaughter said the best part of the conference was knowing that their newsroom’s plans began a year ago and seeing the implementation begin.
Slaughter said that this year’s workshop made her realize how much her organization is growing but recognizes that it never could have happened without the planning process and intense discussions they had at the workshop.
“I was just like, ‘Oh, wow. Like, this is real, like we’re actually pushing our newsrooms to what we envision,” Slaughter said. “I’m just always grateful to be in those rooms and those spaces and bring back everything I learned to our newsroom.”