Professor John Murphy | Faculty Writer
Communication/Film/Theatre Department
Host, Co-Producer, On the Homefront, WILI/WICH Radio
JOIN NOW—WORK BEGINS NEXT SEMESTER
A new and historic opportunity is coming for Eastern students to expand their personal experience with media and journalism and cultural storytelling. A new multi-media and multi-language project begins next semester, and the goal is to get student-created stories published in professional media statewide, print, radio, and TV.
This article will introduce a statewide collaboration of media and academic professionals and a new project at Eastern that will begin next semester and bring our school into this collaborative. We are recruiting now, before the semester ends, to identify a media team that will meet and plan stories for research over break and production next semester. Funding is available for project-related expenses.
I want to thank The Lantern for providing space for me to reach students across the campus who might benefit from participating in this project. The purpose is for students to tell their own stories about their lives today, their concerns, needs, interests, and challenges. Whatever impacts their work, housing, health, culture. Students need to hear from other students across the state to find common ground and understand regional differences.
The background information below, from their websites, will give you a quick overview of the partners and how they want to support the next generation of media storytellers and the future of journalism.
This is a unique and significant opportunity that is targeted for:
graduating seniors, to create the highest quality portfolio materials that are published
media majors/minors in all areas, to develop mid-level core production skills and media literacy
non-media majors/minors (a second major), to use media tools for storytelling in any field
Spanish-speaking and/or bilingual students with media skills and storytelling interests
DACA students are especially welcome, your stories can help and support others
students in Communication 100/Spring 2025, Intro to Mass Communications, for new class projects
Contact me now if you are interested, I will follow up: murphyjo@easternct.edu
Partner #1/The Center for Community News at the University of Vermont: their mission is to create and support local media collaborations where student reporting is seen outside of the college/university. These take many different shapes and sizes, from a class partnership to university/college run newsrooms, to the management of media interns, to re-directing student media to be more community focused.
I was deeply honored to be selected as a Faculty Champion and member of the 2024-2025 cohort of professional partners at CCN. The faculty awarded this year represent 24 different states and 13 Minority Serving Institutions. Sixteen of the honorees have proposed partnerships with public media and/or local radio stations. Eighteen will lead democracy and elections coverage this fall and three lead bilingual reporting programs.
Partner #2/The Connecticut Student Journalism Collaborative (CTSJC): they have taken the idea of a news-academic partnership to the next level. Instead of being based at a single university, journalism education leaders in Connecticut have formed a coalition of universities to produce student-reported stories to fill the gaps in local coverage. Newspapers have been consolidated and internships are now scarce. All the collaborative members agree that it is important to offer the student reporting experience through the classroom to ensure equity in access. In order to ensure stories are to publication standards, students' class work must go through three rounds of editing before being sent to the collaborative’s news partners.
Partner #3/A Regional Community-Based Multi-Media Hub: based at WILI Radio in Willimantic, the On the Homefront series links live regional radio on three radio stations with a YouTube Channel, Spectrum Public Access Channel 192, the Neighbors regional newspaper, related websites, and an archive.
I have served Eastern as part-time media faculty for 41 years and I still love sharing classrooms and studios with students. This new project is one of the most interesting and exciting new student opportunities I have seen in a long time. It opens many doors to many platforms and channels, and your success with your stories will keep this important work moving forward in the future to serve many other students. Keep the faith!