By Greta Solsaa

When Wafa Unus was hired six years ago, she was the only journalism professor at Fitchburg State University. Her primary aim was to revitalize the student paper on campus, but her objectives soon expanded to tackle the lack of local news in Fitchburg, Mass., and the surrounding area.

“One of the things I made a goal to do when I was reviving the student newspaper was to really address or begin to address a local news gap and to consider the impact of this emerging news desert in a rather significant part of north central Massachusetts,” Unus said.

The Fitchburg paper, the Sentinel & Enterprise, serves a community of about 100,000 people. Since it was bought by MediaNews Group, owned by New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital, the staff has dwindled, Unus said. Recognizing the paper’s limited capacity for community reporting, Unus forged a connection between the Sentinel & Enterprise and her journalism program, hoping her students could fill the gaps.

Before the pandemic, journalism students at Fitchburg State wrote a series on the opioid crisis for the paper. The news-academic partnership has grown from there. This semester, Unus spearheaded a new formal internship program.

The “city news team,” as she called it, is a group of advanced journalism students at Fitchburg State who receive credit and a small stipend funded by a grant from the university to report for the Sentinel & Enterprise. Unus just acquired a university newsroom for the team.

Unus sees this internship as mutually beneficial for the paper, which will get increased coverage of community events, and the students who will gain skills and experience they can use to pursue journalism after graduation.

“One of my primary goals — independent of the obvious need to fill the local news gap and to address the issues that come with news deserts and lower civic engagement — is to really allow the students the opportunity to build their careers in the field,” Unus said.

Unus also has had her journalism classes work with other local papers, including the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, Lunenberg Ledger and the Harvard Press.

While the partnership has yet to be formalized, John Osborn, the award-winning editor of Harvard Press, said he values taking on student reporters from Fitchburg State and other schools nearby. His paper is short-staffed, and student interns add to its capacity to cover all the community’s activities. The students often have taken writing courses and have formal journalistic training, he said.

“I appreciate having them come in with this basic knowledge, which strengthens the reporting of our adult staff,” Osborn said, “because when we get into conversations about coverage and stories, [they] are bringing a perspective that our longtime community staff doesn't have.”

As a former teacher, Osborn said he believes in the importance of mentoring students. During the first week, before they work on bigger assignments, he offers his interns an orientation on understanding the specific nuances of reporting on the Harvard community.

He also appreciates their “youthful passion,” Osborn said. “It's just nice having kids in their late teens, early 20s, at the start of their career, on staff because they bring an energy that really brightens the place.”

Osborn frequently collaborates with Unus, helping to develop curriculum and working with her classes on semester-long reporting projects. In addition to the courses and internships, Unus organized a series of talks by local journalists and editors, including Osborn. Called “Good News, Bad News” the series drew a large turnout of students and community members.

Recently, Unus created the Political Journalism minor at Fitchburg State, alongside political science professor Paul Weizer, to work on solving the local news gap and providing more academic opportunities for her journalism students. Although the development of the Political Journalism minor was not funded, Unus used her own time and resources to develop the minor program while continuing to teach journalism courses and organizing internships and community talks at Fitchburg State.

“All of those things are really an attempt to create a news culture on campus and to grow awareness of the significance and importance of local news to the campus community, to the city of Fitchburg and to the university itself,” Unus said.

And all that is only “stage one,” according to Unus.

Plans are in the works for a Center for Collaborative Journalism, which the university has partially funded. Attached to the center would be a news lab where local journalists and editors could work with students and faculty on longform, investigative and narrative journalismUnus is seeking more external funding but  envisions the center as a beacon for interdisciplinary learning and connection between local news and academia.

“Aside from filling in the necessary news gaps and telling particular stories that are needed for the community, [we need] a center and a news lab that encourages more investigative kind of work, longform journalistic work, some narrative journalism work, and particularly journalism that is related to minoritized and diverse communities,” she said.

Unus also hopes her efforts make a difference beyond the worlds of the news industry and university by documenting the lives of people from diverse racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds in western Massachusetts.

“Local news historically has been the keeper of the stories of diverse communities and when that falls away, we lose entire parts of our small towns and cities, and we lose entire peoples in terms of historical narrative,” Unus said.

Unus is planning a three-day News Literacy Institute for next summer for high school and college educators to learn how to better integrate news literacy into their curriculums. At the institute, she said she and her collaborators hope to launch a consortium of local news editors that will become integrated into the news lab and help students learn to report on local communities and communicate to the public about different disciplines.

“Information and news literacy and civic engagement don't exist on their own. They're intertwined into all of our disciplines [and] into the way that we perceive the world,” Unus said.

The summer institute, collaborative center and editors consortium will create a link, she continued, “between all of our local publications and our educational community, so that there's a greater wealth of information that's shared.”