David Scobey tells Inside Higher Ed readers that colleges should launch community news organizations
An Inside Higher Ed essay by Bates cultural historian David Scobey suggests how colleges might respond to the decline of the American newspaper and the resulting loss of civic engagement provided by newspapers.
Scobey suggests that colleges launch campus-based news operations, staffed professionally but also offering training and mentoring to students. Focusing on local issues, such news operations could “catalyze new forms of journalistic education…more organically connected to liberal learning, writing pedagogy and student engagement in public affairs,” Scobey writes. “They might serve as a much-needed laboratory for the civic journalism movement.”
Scobey is the Harward Professor of Community Partnerships and director of the Harward Center.
