Two years ago, Washington State University's Murrow College of Communication developed a plan to help local news outlets increase their reporting capacity, while, at the same time, bolstering the reporting workforce in the state.
It proposed a fellowship program, whereby early career reporters would be assigned to local newspapers, radio and TV stations for up to two years with the state paying their wages and benefits. The college convinced the legislature to allocate the money and, last year, it began matching reporters and news outlets.
Spokane Public Radio and the Spokesman-Review applied and hired Monica Carrillo-Casas, who covers rural affairs in northeast Washington. See the full list of fellows.
Murrow Professor Ben Shors is one of the program’s creators and overseers.
Ben Shors: Our belief has been that we need to invest in journalism in the state just like we invest in any infrastructure, whether it's broadband internet or roads, bridges, things that connect us physically. Local news has connected Washington communities civically for generations, and we need that reliable local information to maintain that civic structure. So the cost of losing those local news outlets extends really far beyond the news industry itself.
The other point that I wanted to emphasize is that a lot of times we think of this as kind of a binary, this is a news desert or it's not. And one of the things that this report shows is that this crisis is not limited to quote unquote news deserts, but it extends across rural, suburban, urban areas. This is a crisis that affects all Washington residents.
Doug Nadvornick: What are your thoughts about how the Murrow Fellowship Program has worked? We're almost a year into it now since the first fellows began their two-year program. How would you measure how well it's working?
BS: Well, that's always tricky, measuring the impact of journalism and local news and so one of the really important things that this initial report does is just give us a foundation to start from. And that's really where Washington state needs to be at this point, a foundational understanding of the news ecosystem.
The Murrow Fellowship Program is designed to serve communities across the state of Washington that aren't receiving enough local news. And so we're trying to ensure that citizens have access to the information they need to make meaningful decisions and to participate in local government, from Walla Walla to Newport to Port Townsend. I think the program shows that targeted investment can help revitalize local news, can build back the social fabric of some of these communities, and can produce research that has real-world implications for the citizens of Washington State.
So we're rebuilding in some communities that local knowledge base, and we're trying to address unique challenges within each of those communities. In some communities, that might be agricultural policy or water rights or immigration and border issues. All these communities have some commonalities, but they also have really distinct needs and issues that are unique to those communities.
DN: The Murrow Fellowship program, like many state-funded projects around the state, became a part of the budget discussions in Olympia this year as legislators looked for places to trim the budget. After some angst that perhaps the program would be ended a year early, lawmakers agreed to allow fellows to stay on for their full two-year commitment.
BS: But it's going to have to continue in a bit of a diminished form. The state, as you probably saw, cut the budget essentially in half, so we're going to have to reevaluate what the program looks like going forward. We're confident that fellows will stay in the field for the remainder of their fellowships, but we're going to have to look at what we're able to fund moving forward and what positions we're able to replace if someone leaves or after the fellowship ends.
