Journalists love to debate whether J school is worth its pretty penny. But lately the debate has shifted to what the schools should teach and how, perhaps a belated stipulation on the part of working journos that school enrollment and applications continues to climb despite the not-so-rosy job prospects for grads. “Teaching hospital” is the meme of the moment—schools that let, or even better force, their students to do the hard work they will someday be (hopefully) paid for.
The most prominent of these efforts is the recently-founded and Columbia-funded New York World. CUNY and NYU have theirs. Far from the glitz of Manhattan, however, Arizona State University’s Cronkite News Service has been quietly humming for five years, filling in the gaps left by a downsized Associated Press and shrinking daily newspaper presence.
Launched in 2007, Cronkite News Service (CNS) assigns students statewide beats focused on Arizona public policy and then disseminates the stories free of charge to more than 30 publications across the U.S. The service isn’t a class, it’s a working newsroom with deadline pressures, assigning editors, and customers who publish what the students write.
“The beautiful thing about CNS is that you are…a full-time reporter expected to do work as [professional as] any other journalist out there,” CNS alumnus Elvina Nawaguna-Clemente explained. “Your work has to be good enough for the 30 or more clients who used our content to want to run it.”
Now working as a business reporter for The Ledger in Florida, Nawaguna-Clemente says her Cronkite stories earned her bylines in the Seattle Times, the Sacramento Bee, USA Today and others.
“Almost everything we do gets picked up somewhere to the tune of hundreds of placements each school year,” said Steve Elliott, editor of the news service and director of CNS digital.
Such placements have translated into regional awards from the Society for Professional Journalists for in-depth and feature writing, a national SPJ Mark of Excellence award, and placement in the Hearst awards for spot news.
Sonu Munshi took part in CNS for her final semester at ASU in 2007 and now reports for The Arizona Republic. As a student, Munshi traveled across the state to cover speeches and events by Arizona politicians and in the process acquired those deadline-driven, on-the-scene coverage skills that many new J school grads lack.
“The [assignments] that took me to different parts of Arizona are the ones I remember the most,” Munshi said. “I traveled south of Tucson to write about a missile site which is now a museum; drove up northwest of Flagstaff to a small town where efforts were on to preserve black-footed ferrets, an endangered species, even as an old Harvey hotel nearby along historic Route 66 was on the verge of demolition.”
In fact, not being anywhere near the media hubs of New York or Los Angeles has its advantages. ASU journalism students aren’t looking to pad their resumes with flashy internships, said Elliott. They’re looking for newsroom experience like Munshi’s that will land them a real reporting job at at a local or regional outlet. All they may need is a better understanding of how freelance writers are able to market themselves as students.
“The biggest difference is responsibility,” said Cronkite’s Elliot. “We organize our reporters around broad beats, and they are responsible for spot and enterprise coverage on those beats. Working a beat and developing enterprise off that beat make this different than an internship. In my experience, hiring managers in Arizona consider CNS experience as valuable, if not more valuable, than internship experience.”
