Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 25

2019, she wrote, " We hope to provide a full picture of the
commitment to progress within the district. While we know
MCS faces obstacles, we want readers to see what is being
done. " Kemp told me in a conversation this summer that it
had been exciting to lead the paper at this historic moment:
" A reporter's dream-being young and being able to cover
this felt like a big deal. "
Taylor Smith, this year's outgoing Daily News editor in
chief and a first-year reporter in 2018-19, echoes Kemp's sentiment.
Smith says the students were motivated to tell the stories
that no one else was telling and were delighted to work like
" real journalists. " One of her favorites is on a history teacher
telling his students about Muncie itself, and " what it means for
us to be Middletown and having inspired Americans that way. "
(Nearly a century ago, Muncie was the setting for Middletown,
a famed book of sociology.)
Covering the story of the university-MCS partnership was
a win for student journalists. Renze-Rhodes said this chance
helped the students improve their craft, and " now more than
ever, there is a need for strong, smart journalism. "
Over the past four years, the Daily News has published
several dozen articles about different aspects of the collaboration
between Ball State and MCS. The series is dubbed The
Partnership Project and branded " One district. One university.
One shared future. "
In April 2021, Natasha Leland reported from inside a firstgrade
Spanish-English bilingual classroom at West View Elementary.
She talked with students, teachers, parents, and BSU
faculty whose university students were helping at the school
as part of their Spanish studies. She wrote about the history,
goals, and everyday challenges of the dual-language program,
and the context of bilingualism in the U.S.
In May 2021, Dorian Ducre wrote about Indiana's new bill,
inspired by the 2020 national election, requiring middle school
students to take a one-semester civics course. The article included
commentary from a state legislator, a Muncie middle
school principal, and BSU political science professors about the
various implications of the new requirement.
Having student reporters dig into stories was a new experience
for the town as well as the young reporters. " Creating
the relationships, building the trust, took time, " said Kemp,
describing the initial reticence among those in the schools who
had grown wary of negative stories. The staff was intent on
building a solid foundation to pass along, aware that the reporters'
longest tenure would be a short four years.
Kemp told me that once they started writing, the situation
" became real. " It was a big step, she said, " accepting the
fact that we are a local paper and a local source of news. " Kemp
grew up in Muncie, but through the Daily News reporting,
she saw a new side of her hometown. " These are people who
are moving our community forward, " she said. " I never knew
about it before. I was being a better citizen, too. "
For the city of Muncie itself, this kind of local reporting
has a number of advantages: helping it see its own story unfold,
letting townspeople speak for themselves, imparting to
students a rich sense of where they live, and building shared
knowledge of a community and its values.
Lee Ann Kwiatkowski is CEO and director of public education
of Muncie Community Schools. Like Taylor Smith, she
told me the students cover stories not done by the mainstream
press in Muncie. " They do a nice job tailoring stories and going
deeper, " she said. " Word about the schools is getting around.
More people learn about work we're doing because of the university
paper. " Andy Klotz, MCS's chief communications officer,
told me that while it is difficult to quantify the impact of
the stories on enrollment, graduation rates, and so forth with
hard numbers, there is a clear soft measure. " A big factor [is]
turning the tide on old perceptions of an old system that existed
before the partnership, " he said.
Smith described to me the creative audience development
strategy that her team carried out, building readership
through savvy social media that connects with students via Instagram,
alumni via Facebook, and colleagues via Twitter. The
students also applied an old-fashioned shoe-leather approach
Journalism exists to cover
the exceptional-an
emergency, a surprising
event. But much of its value
lies in covering the routine-
what happens day to day in
classrooms and communities.
to building awareness, providing copies to local businesses and
showing up at community events in Muncie to distribute papers
when stories relevant to the event-goers appeared. When
Muncie's branch of Habitat for Humanity held a fund-raiser,
copies of the Daily News were available for the roughly 300 attendees
to take home.
On June 23, 2022, nearly four years into its new reporting
style, the Daily News ran a sports story that jumped off
the virtual page in contrast to the 1922 announcement of a
trial position for a " physical director " for women. The headline
is " 50 Years of Title IX. " Just as women's sports have
moved from the sidelines to the big arenas, so has the Daily
News moved from being a college newspaper to must-read
local journalism.
Deborah Fallows has worked as an admissions officer at Georgetown
University. Her three books are A Mother's Work, drawn from her Washington
Monthly writing; Dreaming in Chinese, based on her years living in
China and learning Mandarin; and Our Towns, coauthored with her husband,
James Fallows.
Washington Monthly 25
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