By Lauren Milideo
Maryland is small but diverse, with both large cities and rural farmland, and a slew of local news outlets cover communities across the state. Now, college students from the University of Maryland’s Local News Network are stepping in to provide news research and reporting to their neighbors, often in their own hometowns.
The Local News Network at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism is composed of students in Journalism 320 (News Writing and Reporting II: Multiplatform), a required course for majors. Director Jerry Zremski, who also teaches a section of the class, collaborates with a team of full-time and adjunct instructors. The latter are all working journalists in the Washington, D.C. area.
For the fall 2022 semester, all the class sections – a total of nearly 100 students – focused on covering school board candidates across Maryland in the upcoming election, Zremski said. He began by distributing a questionnaire to candidates across the state, and students followed up with research to confirm candidates’ backgrounds and credentials. The structured database created through the questionnaire was made available to any news organization that wanted it.
One student, Khushboo Rathore, discovered through background checks and subsequent research that people with personal information matching a candidate had faced charges of shoplifting, tax liens and driving-related issues. Rathore eventually even ended up driving to another county to obtain court records.
“As a college student, you never expect to find something like that,” Rathore said, later adding, “even as a journalist, I would never expect to find something like that.”
The situation was quite the educational experience, Rathore said. “That was such an amazing project to work on as a student journalist… that I’m doing something like that, this early in my life, is an opportunity that I think a lot of journalism students don't get.” Rathore added, “And I think the Local News Network especially is giving students the opportunity to tell important stories that cover important and relevant-to-the-world and community topics.”
The candidate, Rathore noted, was unhappy with the reporting and made this clear.
Rathore said, “I am an Asian-American female journalist, which in and of itself… can be a scary thing to be, especially when you're talking about white people, and you're covering them.”
Rathore noted that Zremski checked in with her continually throughout the process to make sure she was still comfortable pursuing the story. “It was just an adventure digging all that up. And Jerry (Zremski) was very, very supportive and helpful throughout this entire thing.”
The students’ work garnered significant attention, Zremski said, especially on Election Day itself.
“The school got more hits than anything we could remember on our university wire service website, and there was a big uptick in clicks on Election Day,” Zremski recalled. “And what we presume was that people were googling the school board candidates while they're standing in line, and they found our voter guide. That's very, very nice.”
The students’ reporting ran in papers across Maryland and the region, including several high-profile newspapers.
"My section of the class worked on a series of enterprise stories based on the responses to the survey,” Zremski said, later adding, “My students did a story that was so good that it ran in The Washington Post.”
Zremski noted, “Other student stories ran in the Baltimore Banner, The Baltimore Sun, the Frederick News-Post, The Daily Times (of Salisbury, Maryland). They ran all over the state.”
All of this is especially novel considering that the students are in a “mid-level reporting class.” Zremski noted, “By and large, they were sophomores…so these were sophomores getting published in major news outlets.”
The University’s administration is supportive of the Local News Network’s efforts, said Philip Merrill College Associate Dean Rafael Lorente. He recalled a meeting that included several University leaders including fellow deans and University President Darryll J. Pines. Lorente knew the journalism students’ work on school board elections was having a significant impact in local papers – and their reporting had made its way to the front page, and a devoted internal section, of the Frederick News-Post.
Lorente distributed copies of this paper to university leaders during the meeting, and as the copy made its way to the university president, he enthusiastically commented on the students’ accomplishments.
Lorente noted that while Zremski works with students day-to-day, his role is facilitating faculty and instructors’ work, providing resources and making introductions whenever needed.
All this work is being funded under a two-year, $500,000 grant, Zremski said, and they are now approaching the end of the first year.
“We're really a startup, and I like to look at us as a startup,” Zremski noted. “And I would like to think that perhaps over the long run, we could be more than that.”
“We have two years,” Lorente said. “We have to do this well enough and convince enough people that they need (and) should support this.” He added, “I think we've got a good shot... It's one thing for us to be bemoaning the loss of local news, but it's become clear to non-journalists that it hurts the rest of society.”
“The loss of local news is devastating to democracy.”