Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 23

Students' paper: The staff of The Ball State Daily News gather in their campus offices.
THE (STUDENT) PAPER
OF RECORD
The Ball State Daily News has filled a local journalism gap.
By Deborah Fallows
I
n 2000, the Gannett media company purchased the local
newspaper in Muncie, Indiana, The Star Press. Much
of what happened next will sound familiar to anyone who
has followed the long, accelerating decline of independent local
news sources.
As this magazine's editor in chief, Paul Glastris, has written,
first the chains began economizing on independent local
coverage. Then the chains themselves succumbed to takeovers
by even more ruthlessly profit-minded " vulture capital " firms,
of which the most notorious are Alden and GateHouse Media.
Three years ago, GateHouse took over the Gannett chain (and
rebranded itself with Gannett's name). This has left The Star
Press and countless other once-independent and -profitable local
papers with smaller newsrooms, shrinking audiences, and
fewer possibilities to do the kind of detailed coverage that connects
citizens with the progress and challenges of their towns.
That's the familiar part of the story. Here is the surprise:
the way another local institution rose to fill part of the civic
information gap. That institution is The Ball State Daily News,
the student newspaper at Ball State University in Muncie. Its
performance in the past four years, in response to a historic
change in the city's public schools, is an important illustration
of how colleges can innovate to address community challenges.
The background to the story is a decades-long cycle of
decline in the city's public school system, Muncie Community
Schools (MCS). Enrollments shrank, performance fell, and
budgetary pressures rose until, in 2018, the state of Indiana
officially placed the Muncie school system under state receivership
(along with schools in Gary). Soon afterward, the new
president of Ball State, Geoffrey Mearns, surprised the legislature
with a proposal that the university assume operating responsibility
for the city's schools. (See James Fallows, " When
Gown Embraces Town, " page 18.)
This was a revolutionary step in U.S. educational history.
We've found no previous case of a publicly run university managing
a whole city's K-12 schools. (The closest counterpart was
Washington Monthly 23
Courtesy of Lisa Renze-Rhodes/Ball State University

Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

Contents
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - Cover1
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - Cover2
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - Contents
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - Cover3
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