Wesley Wright doesn’t just want to teach the basics of journalism to his students at Florida Atlantic University; he wants to help colleges that have lost, or never had, student-run media organizations to build their own newsrooms and help them thrive.
As executive director of the ReNews Project, Wright and his team provide advice and support to students interested in running a newsroom, broadcast or podcast operation, or a combination of everything, on the campus of their Historically Black College and University or Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
“Prior to the pandemic, we noticed a lot of HBCUs, either their student media was not running or they got rid of their adviser because of funding issues,” he says. The ReNews Project was created with a two-fold purpose. “We want to help students who want to go to professional media, who would not have an outlet to use otherwise, and also in a lot of cases, on these campuses, there might not be a paper or news organization covering them, day in and day out, and that’s another opportunity for those students. We want to give those students the opportunity to cover their campus but also make it so their campus does not operate in vacuum.”
The ReNews Project is only a few years old, but it already has built a network of newsrooms and organizations at a handful of schools, including South Carolina State, Coppin State in Baltimore, Spelman College in Atlanta, and William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.
These institutions might have once had a strong, vibrant campus newspaper or other organization, but it’s possible the students leading the charge graduated and no one came in behind them to keep it going, Wright says. “In other cases, it’s funding. If students are saying, ‘Well, I can work at the student newspaper or I can work my part-time job at McDonald’s,’ when you cut funding for the student newspaper, they might say, ‘I can’t volunteer and give up hours at the job that pays me to do something that doesn’t pay me.'”
When the pandemic hit, students weren’t on campus or connecting in the same way, leading some organizations to be “whittled down to almost nothing. I appreciate having the chance to get student activity back in there,” Wright says. “Administrators know it’s good for their retention. I work at a university where the students, they’re focused more on this than their studies.”
When the ReNews Project gets involved with a group of students, Wright says he’ll initially provide advice and guidance remotely, which can vary from offering help with gathering story ideas to explaining basic journalism topics and practices. Wright and his team will show the interested students examples of what other student-run media outlets are producing and what good, well-researched stories look like.
“You’ll be surprised. After three months, six months, a year, if they’re committed, they’re a lot further along,” he says. Additionally, ReNews also provides the students with a website, if they need it, for hosting their reporting. “We have a deal with a provider where if you’re with the ReNews Project, you’ll get a free year of the website. That gives them a chance to budget for it, to get used to using that website and then from there. It’s a lot easier to use it as a brand, if you have a functioning website, to put stories on or podcast or broadcast. We tailor what we provide according to the university and what they need.”
Executive Director Wesley Wright discusses the ReNews Project, which funds and/or provides professional assistance to revive dormant student newspapers at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and at Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
