By Lauren Milideo
Point Park University’s Center for Media Innovation, started in 2016, is the hub of a number of initiatives to support local journalism.
The Center operates a community newsroom project in an area served by the Mon Valley Independent, a newspaper started by residents who had lost their local paper and missed the coverage it had provided. The community newsroom works with citizens on writing stories, creating photographs and podcasts and performing live storytelling. Some of their work runs in the paper, said center director Andrew Conte.
“We started working with citizens there to say, ‘We want to help you learn journalistic skills to do a better job of telling stories,’” Conte said. The Center for Media Innovation now also administers a program for Mon Valley high-schoolers to create journalistic content; one former student is studying journalism at Howard University, Conte said.
The Center also works with Trib Total Media, which publishes a daily print newspaper in two suburban communities and a weekly in others, on a project called Triblive Local. The effort provides “hyperlocal news sites for 35 communities throughout southwestern Pennsylvania,” Conte said. On these platforms, residents can upload content independently, posting their contributions directly.
“And interestingly, people treated it very differently than they treat social media because it appears to be a news site,” Conte noted. “People treated it like a news site. They take it seriously. They're like, this is journalism.”
The Center also provides funding for partners to pursue stories together, Conte said. If two or more collaborative members choose to cooperate on a story or a series, they can apply to the center for funding. Two such projects are currently underway, Conte noted.
One involves looking at environmental issues around a new, and controversial, local plant that turns natural gas from fracked wells in Pennsylvania into plastics. The story series feels especially timely, Conte said, in the wake of a February trail derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, just 50 miles upwind of Pittsburgh, that quickly ballooned into a full-blown environmental catastrophe.
The other collaboration is between the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress, which are covering the trial of the man accused of committing a mass shooting at a synagogue in the city four years ago.
Such collaborations produce stories that other members of the partnership can feature, Conte said. The papers doing the reporting publish the work first, but then it becomes available for the remaining outlets to pick up as well.
Another project at the school, the Point Park News Service, is a student-run wire service with stories picked up by other media outlets, Conte said. The service has operated as part of a capstone journalism class, but any student may submit content to the site. Three students who are not enrolled in the class are trained and paid to edit the content, Conte said, and editors at the Tribune-Review provide backup when these student editors need guidance.
One story from the site went national, Conte said. “We had a student who did a story on the Andy Warhol Museum here in Pittsburgh and about how they were creating online content for people who couldn't come to the museum. And so that story got picked up by the Tribune-Review, and then the Associated Press saw the story … so they ran it. And then it appeared in news outlets all across the country, which was pretty cool.”
Another partnership with the Tribune-Review is still in a preliminary phase, Conte said. This program provides opportunities for student journalists to cover hyperlocal stories across the city, which then appear on the Tribune-Review’s series of news sites dedicated to individual neighborhoods and communities around Pittsburgh. Students are paid $20 per story, Conte said, using funds raised through ad sales.
Their work does not replace other journalists’ efforts, Conte said. “It's filling the gaps. These are stories that would go untold.”
The Center for Media Innovation also supports interns — typically about a dozen each summer, Conte said — who work with partnership members. One program alum, Zoey Angelucci, recalls the wide variety of experiences she had while participating in the center’s offerings as an undergraduate.
She joined the Point Park News Service in her first year, then interned in her sophomore year through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. Working with the partnership, Angelucci said, provided countless opportunities to network and collaborate with colleagues in the Pittsburgh journalism and media world.
“When I was there, I worked with pretty much all of the media outlets that are part of Media Partnership,” she said. One of her roles was performing research for partnership members during the COVID crisis. Angelucci called schools across Pittsburgh to ask about what COVID policies they’d adopted. She then became a resource to reporters at partner outlets who needed this information to complete their stories.
“It was a really good way to get to know all of the media outlets in Pittsburgh,” Angelucci said.
The following summer saw Angelucci working with The Incline, which offered her a job that she turned down as she was still in school. But the connections she made have proven tremendously helpful in the job she has now, Angelucci said, working in public relations.
The experience “helped me figure out the types of media in Pittsburgh,” Angelucci said. “I know a lot about the outlets. I know most of the editors, so it gave me a really good connection that I definitely would not have gotten just as a sophomore in college.”
Another Center for Media Innovation project is called All Abilities Media, whose coverage focuses on people with psychological and mental disabilities, Conte said. Run by Jennifer Szweda Jordan, the outlet currently features Erin Gannon, who hosted a podcast wherein she interviewed her parents about their experiences raising her, a person with Down syndrome.
The work is “pretty powerful,” Conte said. “(Gannon)'s won two awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania for her podcast.” All Abilities Media is now about to become its own project independent of the center.
The last program the center offers is the Doris O’Donnell Fellowship, “a fellowship for journalists working anywhere in the United States who are working in a news desert and serving underserved communities,” Conte said.
The fellowship has operated for three years, offering up to $20,000 for working journalists to do their jobs over the course of about nine months. This year’s fellow, Marina Shachauffler, is an independent journalist providing coverage for the Maine Monitor. Fellows are usually at work in their communities but do interact with classes at Point Park and spend time with student journalists on campus as well.
“We want to provide resources for them to go out and to tell stories,” Conte said. “And we wanted to honor their work rather than doing it as an award for after they did the work; we wanted to do it proactively.”
Point Park University covers Conte’s salary as a staff member. He is also a part-time faculty member, teaching one class per semester, he explained. Several other staff members are also involved, Conte said, including a coordinator who also works with the university’s communications school; two part-time studio technicians; a full-time program manager for the shared newsroom; part-time program managers for the Pittsburgh Media Partnership and the community newsroom project; a graduate assistant; undergraduate practicum students (who work for credit); and a couple of undergraduate work-study students.
All the center’s work is grant-supported, Conte said, with local foundations providing the funds. About $6 million has been awarded since the center’s founding. The Allegheny Foundation provided $2.5 million in startup funds for the project, Conte said, and an additional $1.5 million when the center moved into its space on campus.
Going forward, Conte said, he would like to establish another program to help fill gaps that a recent American Journalism Project survey found in local news coverage in the Pittsburgh region. He’d like to see his program “doing additional reporting that's not being done, and at the same time creating opportunities for students to come up through it.”