While efforts to create a regional news service met with limited successes and a revamped Miami Valley News Network website was launched in 2012, project leader Cheryl Gibbs reports frustrations on many levels.
On the plus side, journalism faculty at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, changed the Online Journalism class so that students post their stories to MVNN.org. And the project helped the school:
- Generate quality news content in many classes.
- Provide content to legacy news organizations.
- Provide free student labor.
But, Gibbs said, the project suffers from having no full-time faculty or editors and no dedicated grad students or work-study students.
She said the region’s legacy media were not in a financial position to pay for stories that might produce a revenue stream to support the project. And Oxford itself was probably too small of a community to generate philanthropic support. Moreover, officials and residents might be overwhelmed if a corps of students were dispatched to report on the town.
A possible solution, she said, would be to reimage the Miami Valley News Network as a selective “off-campus” semester program based at the university’s Middletown campus. Students could earn 16 credits by generating authentic news coverage for a community of more than 50,000 people. Student could either file stories on MVNN or work for the local Middletown Journal.
