From left to right: Leah Freeman, graduate assistant for the Student Media Collaborative, and Caitlin O'Neil Amaral, director of the Collaborative, stand with Emma Woods, associate librarian and director of the Digital Scholarship Hub at UMass Dartmouth.

By Dominic Minadeo

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth sold their radio station, WUMD, to Rhode Island Public Radio — since renamed The Public’s Radio — in 2017, laying the groundwork for the launch of their student media community news program.

The Student Media Collaborative sprang up within two years of  the sale, said Caitlin Amaral, associate professor and the program’s director. Since then, the Collaborative partnered with Cape and Islands NPR stations which cover Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and the South Coast. They also work with The New Bedord Light, a digital nonprofit news outlet.

“We want to be the main resource for students to find career and scholarship opportunities related to media,” said Leah Freeman, the Student Media Collaborative’s graduate assistant.

The program provides students internship opportunities, in-class collaborations and workshops for students to learn digital and media literacy skills. Roughly 20 students participated this year, Amaral said.

“Once we had a bunch of community partners, we decided to sort of create this idea of the Student Media Collaborative to sort of house all of the opportunities,” Amaral said, noting the university doesn’t have a journalism program.

“We're looking at it just as a way for students to maybe get some more practical experience using their communications degrees,” she said.

Students can work on whatever they want, she said, but a big focus is digital media savviness.

“Everybody is listening to podcasts and students seem jazzed for that,” she said.

Students create short radio stories and Amaral edits them before she sends them along to the partnered stations. She said they’re typically no longer than around six minutes. Students can also write articles for The New Bedford Light. This past fall, Amaral invited editors from the local outlet to her class to teach students profile writing.

Amaral is the faculty leader and editor of the program, but she relinquishes student outreach to Freeman, a graduate student in UMass Dartmouth’s professional writing and communications program. Freeman runs the center’s Linkedin and Instagram accounts, along with organizing events and recruiting students. She said the program is tailored to student’s interests.

“When it came to SMC, my first year was dedicated to asking students what they want to see in relation to media opportunities on campus,” she said.

Freeman met with leaders at the student newspaper and the literary magazine to partner with one another so they can refer students going forward. She looked at other schools to create a model for their own program.

“Then the second year was really jumpstarting events,” she said.

One such workshop she organized last fall included a podcasting crash course for students. The workshops work really well, Amaral said, because they serve as a recruiting tool to “attract some new interest in students who maybe hadn’t heard of it or in different majors than English and Communications.”

Amaral said the program is “at the right scope” right now, but she hopes to get more funding so she can pay her students and continue to expand. She’s also thought about trying to dedicate a course to the Student Media Collaborative.

“We’ll see. I have dreams,” she said.