 New York Times veteran Kathleen McElroy to serve as editor of a digital media initiative at UT’s J-School
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| Texas Press Messenger
Photo Credit (Clockwise from top): Raymond Thompson, Lizzie Chen, Abbey Adkison, Oscar Ricardo Silva, Lizzie Chen, Tara Haelle and Sean Mathis.
The photos featured on the cover of this month’s Messenger are the work of talented student journalists and the product of a new open information resource for news organizations.
Reporting Texas, a digital media initiative from The University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism, is offering its content free of charge to all news outlets. One objective of the project is to provide a trusted source of journalism for newspapers that have limited resources but want to expand their coverage.
Currently, ReportingTexas.com is a mashup of community reporting and mixed media. Content is produced as coursework by undergraduate and graduate students.
Students are not taking assignments from news organizations yet (Reporting Texas is considering potential partnerships), but faculty members say they hope to offer a fully functioning student news service in fall 2012.
Next year the J-School will open a new student newsroom that will serve as the home of Reporting Texas. Students will be on hand to take assignments at that time.
The concept evolved from two previous initiatives: CapLink and Capital News Service. The first effort, CapLink, was the brainchild of veteran journalist and journalism instructor Griff Singer.
“It wasn’t a publication; it was a student news service,” Wanda Cash, the associate director of the J-School, said. “Publishers would call and talk to either Griff or one of the other faculty members here and ask them to assign a student to cover a legislative hearing at the Capitol or to attend a meeting of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality or take pictures at a UIL track meet ... something like that.”
CapLink, which launched about 20 years ago, lasted only a few years. Technology proved to be a significant constraint at the time, Cash said.
“We had the Internet but email was not as ubiquitous as it is today, so if a student filed a story, he would have to fax it and that took a long time,” she explained.
“It took some logistical effort to find a fax machine and make sure somebody was on the other end to confirm that it had been received, and then there was the inevitable editing process — back and forth — by telephone and fax. It was kind of cumbersome, and it never really got off the ground.”
About three years ago, the J-School revived the effort via a similar project called Capital News Service, which also aimed to provide free public affairs reporting to community newspapers in the state and served as a successful test run for Reporting Texas.
In the latest incarnation of the concept, spearheaded by journalism professor Tracy Dahlby and supported by a grant from the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, content is freely available to local, state, national and international news organizations. All that is asked in return is to give the students credit.
Cash, a community newspaper veteran with more than 25 years of experience, said she would have welcomed such a service during her time as a publisher.
“If there is an opportunity to work with a journalist who I can depend on and know that the product is going to be credible and vetted for accuracy and libel … I would be thrilled to have that service available, especially in covering the state capital — the legislature and state agencies,” she said. “Small papers just don’t have the resources to send a reporter to Austin for that coverage, and that’s what Reporting Texas is hoping to offer.”
Kathleen McElroy, former senior editor for The New York Times, will serve as editor of Reporting Texas this year, along with Web Editor Mark Coddington. McElroy will be “crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s,” as she put it.
A Houston native, McElroy recently returned to Texas following a 20-year career at The Times to pursue a doctoral degree in journalism at UT and to be near family.
After graduating from Texas A&M University with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism, McElroy started her career at The Bryan-College Station Eagle, and later worked for two other Texas papers: The Huntsville Item and the Austin American-Statesman.
“I had a really good time in New York, but where I really learned about editing was Bryan/College Station and in Huntsville and in Austin,” McElroy said. “A lot has changed since I was an editor at those places, but I remember all that I learned there and that’s so important to me.”
McElroy said she wanted to assure publishers that the goal of Reporting Texas is not to supplant newspaper staff or replace The Associated Press.
“This is what Reporting Texas is not: It is not a hyperlocal website trying to serve Austin,” she said. “We happen to be based here in Austin, but we’ve covered stories in San Angelo, Cuero and New Mexico, at one point.
“We have some really smart and experienced students here, so if you’re a community newspaper and you want to expand your coverage, we would love to help you with that.” |