The Campus Coverage Project is a year-long program that helps student reporters uncover and write about current issues in higher education. Our aim is to help college students investigate and report more effectively on their universities through teaching skills, providing resources, and building awareness.
From 2010 to 2012, the Campus Coverage Project kicked off with a conference in early January at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Seventy-five students from colleges and universities throughout the U.S. have been selected each year from a pool of applicants. During the conference, they attended panel and small-group sessions designed to give them tools and techniques that will help them provide better watchdog coverage of their campuses. They learned from top investigative reporters and higher education writers, and got hands-on training in computer-assisted reporting. The Project covered travel and lodging expenses for each attendee.
Throughout the year and beyond, Project participants keep in touch with each other and their instructors through an exclusive listserv. Students can lean on each other as sounding boards for story ideas, get advice from their peers about challenges they run into on their college campuses, seek guidance from instructors, share new resources and celebrate each other's successes.
We also encourage students who have attended the Project workshop to submit their published watchdog and enterprise stories to this website, and to read other students’ articles for ideas and to find out what’s happening in higher education around America. We post the best articles and offer a $200 award winning student journalists each month.
If you have not attended Campus Coverage Project but want to get involved, let us know!
The Project will be on temporary hiatus starting in 2013 as we reconfigure the program. We are keeping a list of people interested in participating, so please drop us a line to express your interest.
In the meantime, the Resources section on this website are also free and open to all journalists to use.
Email campus@ire.org or call (573) 882-3364 for more information or to get involved.
For more information about the participating organizations, visit:
Investigative Reporters and Editors (www.ire.org)
Education Writers Association (www.ewa.org)
Student Press Law Center (www.splc.org)
Lumina Foundation for Education (www.luminafoundation.org)
