Local news fellowships gaining ground in New Mexico (and beyond)
Editor’s Note: In the second part of our guest writer series this fall (here’s the first), we're passing the mic to Rashad Mahmood and Diana Alba Soular. At the New Mexico Local News Fund, they run a number of innovative programs to support the New Mexico local news ecosystem. Ecosystems are the core of how we approach our local news work at Democracy Fund. This fall we are bringing you tangible examples from regions across the U.S. where people are putting in the work to build systemic responses to the local news crisis. Now up: Rashad and Diana!
The biggest strength of any newsroom is its team of journalists who are doing the day-to-day work of keeping their communities informed and empowered.
But we frequently hear from publishers and broadcasters that there is a disconnect between newsrooms trying to fill employee vacancies and the recent college graduates who’d be most likely to fill them. In particular, hiring managers would prefer candidates with more on-the-job experience than most newly minted grads have. And graduates, though eager for a chance at those entry-level jobs, may lack the confidence or full skillsets that would help them thrive in the roles.
Enter into the picture a workforce development initiative we set in place four years ago. Known as the New Mexico Local News Fellowships & Internships Program, this pairs recent college graduates (or students, in the case of the internships) with local newsrooms across the state. Thanks to support from Democracy Fund and our other funders, the New Mexico Local News Fund pays the fellows’ salaries for nine months.
In just a few years, the fellowships program has been a resounding success. Most of the fellows have gone on to get permanent journalism jobs in New Mexico, rather than leaving the state for opportunities elsewhere — or leaving the profession altogether. Two thirds of the fellows have been young people of color, and several have told us that without this fellowship, they never would have been able to build careers in journalism.
It turns out this disconnect between local news organizations and recent grads is taking place in other states, too. Earlier this year, Rashad had an opportunity to share the details of NMNLF’s efforts with a group in California that had the same problem. That group was ultimately successful in its pursuits: The California Legislature has allocated $25 million to the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to launch a fellowship program for journalists in that state.
This move is important for several reasons:
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It shows there is widespread interest among decision-makers to counter the erosion of local news. It recognizes the value local news provides for our society and our democracy.
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It demonstrates interest on a larger scale in a model that has been shown to work in our own state and for organizations like Report for America, which also invests in placing journalists in newsrooms.
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This represents a significant, direct investment in local news — it’s precedent-setting. This last point, in particular, will be crucial to local news nationwide, as efforts by stakeholders to seek public financial support for local news continue to gain traction.
Since last year, NMLNF has been working to develop a proposal to put forward to the New Mexico Legislature that would seek funding to not only maintain our own journalism fellowships program, but expand upon it by incorporating other fields, like business and computer science, that will also be critical to newsrooms’ success moving forward. Our efforts are in progress, but we hope to build a strong coalition of journalism and nonprofit groups and lawmakers around the state. To learn more, contact Rashad at rashad@nmlocalnews.org.
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