By Lauren Milideo
On December 10, 2021, an EF-4 tornado struck western Kentucky. The town of Mayfield was hit especially hard, and in the midst of the tragedy and recovery, countless stories of local residents waited to be told. At western Kentucky’s Murray State University, Professor Leigh Wright took her students into the field to tell some of these stories.
Wright, who joined the university’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications in 2011, had a prior career as a features editor at the Paducah Sun.
“Community journalism is near and dear to my heart, of course,” Wright said. She teaches the Department’s Collaborative Journalism Capstone course, and said she works to create professional experience for students who are preparing to graduate and begin their journalism careers.
“I want to run my class more like a newsroom because it's the last stop in the curriculum before these students get out into the professional world,” Wright said. “So I wanted to give them a professional experience.”
Wright started the local news site 270 Stories in 2022 to provide such opportunities. The town of Mayfield, just 15 minutes from campus, was a location where community reporting could make a real difference, and over the course of two semesters, students traveled there to report on the residents’ experiences.
Wright brought the students to Mayfield and introduced them to leaders and volunteers in the community. Students walked the town and got to know what had happened there and all that had changed in the wake of the tornado, Wright said.
On 270 Stories, Wright noted, “our goal has been to go out and tell the stories of the rebuilding, recovery, resilience and hope after the tornado.” During the fall 2022 semester, students’ work also appeared in the local newspaper the Mayfield Messenger, and students met with the paper’s publisher at the time. Students sometimes uncovered their own stories; other times, they chose from a selection offered by the Messenger’s publisher.
The students produced individual stories and contributed stories to a special section of the paper titled “We Will Remember,” which appeared in the Mayfield Messenger in December 2022.
The number of students in the course varies from semester to semester, Wright said, with five students last fall reporting from Mayfield and two this spring, who are seeking stories in a different community in nearby Marshall County. And each semester, the students choose slightly different approaches, with the spring 2023 class bringing a multimedia focus to their work – integrating audio and video elements into their storytelling, which will appear on 270 Stories. Wright is also encouraging her students to incorporate social media into their work as well.
Wright noted that solutions journalism is also an important component of her teaching.
“That goes very well into this project because this is a response to a problem.” Wright added, “it's community journalism. It is solutions journalism. And honestly, it's just good journalism… for the past three years, they were on campus, pretty much doing campus stories, either for the campus newspaper or for classes. This is their opportunity to have to get out and start doing community journalism.”
She noted, “Most of them, if they're going into the business, they'll start at a community paper or a community radio station, or a local TV station.”
The community is even invited to join the students for an event at the end of the semester, Wright said. “They sit down by the computer where people will come and talk to them about their work.” This allows students to take pride in what they’ve done, but it also has a practical reason, Wright noted: “I don't ever remember giving a presentation at a newsroom, but I do remember having to talk about my stories.”
These personal connections were a key component of the experience, noted graduating senior and former 270 Stories executive editor Emery Wainscott. “I definitely grew as a writer… having that personal connection right down the road really helped bring the stories to life.” Wainscott added, “I learned how to have an appropriate distance between myself and the subject because it was really emotional, talking to them and hearing them.” Wainscott plans to remain in journalism, headed to Lexington to work as a television news producer following graduation.
Going forward, Wright said, she’s exploring making the students’ work available via a Creative Commons license. “A lot of these papers around here have different special sections they might need content for, and rather than using wire content, if there's local content, why couldn't they use this?”
The class will likely be offered only in the spring semester in future years, and the geographic focus may shift or become broader and more regional, Wright noted.
“It’s telling this region’s story. And the story right now is about all this tornado recovery, because it was devastating.” Wright added, “That gives students stories because there's so many stories to tell (about) the recovery and the rebuilding, and (we’re) telling a lot of human stories. That's what people want to read, is that human story.”