Elaine Salisbury, lecturer and director of the Journalism program in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany’s College of Arts and Sciences, discusses how her undergraduate students are participating in a new initiative aimed at closing gaps in local news and information access. The program gives UAlbany students valuable hands-on journalism experience while helping under-resourced newsrooms to continue to deliver essential community coverage through additional reporting produced by students.
Elaine Salisbury, Lecturer II, Journalism Program Director, Department of Communication
UAlbany Journalism Program Pairs Students with Local Newsrooms (Article from the UAlbany News Center, January 21, 2025)
UAlbany, Spotlight News Win Award for Partnership to Strengthen Local Journalism (Article from the UAlbany News Center, September 11, 2025)
Center for Community News, University of Vermont
Institute for Local News at SUNY
The New York State Writers Institute presented a conversation with Adam Aleksic on the future of language. The program took place at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center on January 29, 2026. This event was mentioned in this episode of The Engagement Ring.
Books by Elaine Salisbury:
The Cruelist Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic by Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Aly Sujo and Laney Salisbury
The Engagement Ring, Episode 38:
More News: UAlbany Student Journalists Bring New Energy and Much-Needed Content to Local Newsrooms
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from the program.]
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Welcome to The Engagement Ring, your connection to an ever-widening network of higher education professionals, scholars and community partners working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast…
ELAINE SALISBURY:
We're facing sort of a five-alarm fire in terms of the state of local news, in particular in this country, and the state of news in general on a national level.
ANNOUNCER/ MARY HUNT:
I’ll talk with Elaine Salisbury, lecturer and Journalism program director in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany’s College of Arts and Sciences. Elaine’s students are involved in a new initiative designed to close gaps in local news and information access.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
It's about connecting with your neighbors and understanding what everyone else is doing, as well as making sure your town functions.
ANNOUNCER/ MARY HUNT:
The program provides UAlbany students with real-world journalism experience while making it possible for under-resourced newsrooms to continue to provide critical community news through additional student-produced content.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
The students actually ended up really learning a lot, and through that experience also just started to really understand what news is and what it's all about.
ANNOUNCER/ MARY HUNT:
Here's my conversation with Elaine Salisbury.
MARY HUNT:
Laney, welcome to the podcast.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Thank you for having me.
[Music fades out.]
MARY HUNT:
I guess you could say it's either a great time or possibly the very worst time ever to be a journalist.
[Elaine and Mary both laugh]
MARY HUNT:
What do you think about that?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
You know, it's interesting, because I was thinking about that this morning, how this sort of crisis we're in is sort of creating all these opportunities for us as a journalism program. You know, we're facing sort of a five-alarm fire in terms of the state of local news, in particular in this country, and the state of news in general on a national level. Readership is down in many parts of the country. We've seen a decline of about 75 percent in the number of local journalists since 2022, and 2022 was not the high point by any means. So, in some ways, there's, you know, a lot of opportunity out there to help improve the landscape and at the same time provide, you know, reliable information to a lot of people who are in the dark. And that's a great opportunity for students as well as professors who are in journalism programs around the country.
MARY HUNT:
Do you think your students have a sense of that? Or do you think this is the reality that they're growing up in? They're 18, 19, 20, and, I guess, the state of journalism has been this way for a few years now. I mean, I can remember when it's been different. But do you think they have a sense of the challenges that it's going through?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
I think they have a sense of the challenges that the country is going through. They may not necessarily understand the challenge that journalism is going through because what I'm noticing in the classroom is many of them don't understand what is different. Many of them don't understand how to distinguish journalism from all the other media messages they see. When Pew Research surveyed a bunch of teenagers, a large number of teenagers on their impressions of what a journalist is and what kind of work they do, the feedback that came back in return was indicative of what they think. And you know, they thought reporters were lazy. They thought reporters made things up. They thought reporters were biased, like they didn't really have a concept of the kind of work that the reliable fact-based, standard-based news outlets do because they're mixing everything together and calling it journalism. They call journalism scary. But, you know, journalism is not scary. It's the world that's scary. So, you know, the first step always is just sort of slowing down and getting students to fully understand that, you know, under freedom of the press, almost anyone can be a reporter. Anyone can have a news outlet and call it that, and distinguishing and being careful that it's important for them to understand what they're reading and why they're reading it. We sort of call it the slow news movement, like you're not going to eat candy all day at dinner or lunch. You're going to be really careful about your diet, because that's important for your health and your mental health, and what you consume in the information landscape is also equally important. If you want to feel like you have some control over the world, be informed.
MARY HUNT:
Well, the issue that you set out to address with your course, and we're going to talk more in detail about your course, is the challenge or the problem of news deserts, local news deserts. What is a news desert?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
A news desert is a community or county or state, even a city, that does not have either a news outlet or enough news outlets to cover all the aspects of the community that's needed to be covered. So, basically it’s a lack of news, a lack of access to news, and those are growing at a pretty quick pace in the country.
MARY HUNT:
I think I read something like 50 percent of U.S. counties were considered news deserts, which really seems shocking, but what accounts for that growth, and why does it matter? Why is it important? Some people might say, well, I don't need a local news outlet. I can just go online and I can find the news about my locality or somewhere else. But what accounts for this increasing number of news deserts and why does it matter to us?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
It's sort of been a long time coming. News traditionally was never meant to have been supported by just subscription or ad dollars. There was always some public funding involved. We lost that at some point around the 1970s. News outlets, by tradition, were supported maybe 70-80 percent of ad dollars. But in the 80s, we saw a lot of mergers or companies that started hurting revenues. The Internet, of course, was the biggest blow. Once people… we lost a lot of ad dollars, they turned from dollars to pennies. Only three or four companies in this country now have the lion's share of the ad revenue. So, there's like this financial side that, you know, rightfully so, I guess the news owners didn't keep pace with fast enough, didn't innovate fast enough, but people also now are reading information that's not spatially centered. It's not around where you live. If you live in a news desert, you could still get news on Ukraine, but you can't get news on what your school board is doing or whether there's a warehouse going up in your backyard. So, it's sort of reading habits have not been favorable to local news outlets. There's also just, you know, decline in trust of institutions and disinformation, and we also are just hit with a tsunami's worth of information every day, and so people are overwhelmed, and they are more inclined to, you know, have entertainment, rather than read the news. So that's also part of the decline.
MARY HUNT:
Why is it important to have access to local news? What contribution does that make to the quality of your life, to citizenship, the quality of our citizenship, or the contributions we make? Why is it important?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Well, there's been several studies about the impact of the loss of journalism on towns, and they're finding that when you don't have local news outlets the town has lower bond ratings. There are higher financing costs for the town. You know, higher taxes. Everything becomes more expensive. Less people go to the polls on a local level because they're not informed of candidates. There are fewer candidates who run for office. There are fewer qualified candidates who run for office. And they find that if you have a congressional representative, they're less likely to participate in their job to help the communities that hired them to be there because no one’s monitoring them. So there's this cascading effect on the impact that it has on local communities. And, in addition, they're finding that on a nationwide level, it increases polarization. Local news is not politics. It's not political. You tend not to vote whether you're Republican or Democrat on whether or not your garbage needs to be collected, whether or not you want to renovate the school. It's much more based on day-to-day life, but when you don't know what's going on in your community, you tend to just default to your party line. So we're seeing that happening. It's also, you know, the whole country is no longer informed about what all the individuals are doing on the county and state levels, because local news used to inform the national press. So when there are trends going in certain states or certain counties, there are fewer possibilities for other reporters who take a bird's eye view to see a bigger problem. So, we kind of all lose.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, democracy suffers. We hear a lot about that these days… the state of democracy, where are we headed?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
I mean for me as a New Yorker, it's just as important that my local news survives as it is that it survives in Texas.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah. Tell me about the course that you developed or modified. It may have been a course that was existing and you changed it, but tell us a little bit about that course.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
So we got a visit from the Center for Community News. It's based in University of Vermont, and they've taken on this issue and have been researching solutions. And they came up with… one of the groups came up with a model of why not use university-led reporting programs to help bolster local news outlets. And I completely identified with what he was talking. I loved his enthusiasm, and he just asked us if we could transform one of our courses and turn it into basically a news writing course and find a local news partner. So we did that and they were really happy to suddenly have five or six students who would help them cover a town board meeting, write a profile, cover parking issues, you know, they did whatever they needed, and in return the students actually ended up really learning a lot, and through that experience, also just started to really understand what news is and what it's all about. It's much better than just reading a textbook.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, what a great experience for the students.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Yeah.
MARY HUNT:
Who are your local media partners? Was there one particular partner you started with? And are you expanding? Talk a little bit about the partners in the program.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Well, we started with a news outlet called Spotlight News. He has a history of taking a lot of UAlbany journalism students as interns and also as reporters who learn the ropes and then they would go on to graduate school or into even other careers. So there was already a little bit of a relationship there. So he was aware of who we were and was always very, you know, happy with the students he received. So we met for coffee, and he embraced the idea, and we just developed a way to work together. The goal is for… to relieve the pressure on him, since, you know, he's not a very large newsroom. He used to have, I think, eight people, and he was down to two people at the time, so everything we give him is just supposed to be like publication ready, you know, I polish it, I edit it, I tell students to go back to the phone and do more interviews. We try to deliver the stories that he requested. Sometimes we find our own. And it's been really great. You know, he's been happy. I've been happy. The students have been happy. And what was it, I think, last year, you know, he actually just financially was struggling so much that when an opportunity came up for him to merge with The Daily Gazette, he embraced the opportunity. So, he is now the managing editor at The Daily Gazette, which owns five newspapers in the Capital Region. They go sort of northwest into the Adirondacks and down south towards Coxsackie.
MARY HUNT:
Excellent. So, could that merger open up more opportunities for the UAlbany students perhaps that are in your courses?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Oh, totally. Yeah. No, they've already published stories and written profiles of people that have ties in the communities that they cover.
MARY HUNT:
Excellent. How else is the program supported? I understand SUNY provided some support for it. The Lumina Foundation?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Yeah, so the SUNY… the chancellor started something called the SUNY Institute for Local News in October 2025 and that coincided with what the Center for Community News is doing, and those two organizations are also collaborating and working together. And SUNY, the SUNY Institute for Local News also got a lot of philanthropic money from the Lumina Foundation and the Press Forward Foundation, which is helping to provide solutions for community news and to provide opportunities for community news. So, you know, our program is not very large, and my course only has four or five students, and SUNY has allowed me to continue to teach the course, which has been great. So it's a very, you know, in a way, it's a very expensive course If you look at, you know, what numbers we’re really supposed to have, which is nine or 10.
MARY HUNT:
It’s expensive not to have it too, though, in some regards.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Yeah.
MARY HUNT:
Think about what we lose by not having it.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Yeah. So I'm very grateful that they allow the course to continue. And I'm, you know, I'm confident it'll grow. We just have to sort of get the word out, find more students, and open it up a little more.
MARY HUNT:
Well, the students are obviously learning from the people that they work with, you, from the professionals they work with at the media outlets, but are you and your partners in media learning from them? I mean this is a younger generation, and they've been exposed to tools and ways to get their news and information that I didn't grow up with. So their experience has been one of, you know, a lot of online access, technology access. I'm just curious, how are they changing the newsrooms that they're working in? Do you see a change? Or are you getting feedback from the partners that's telling you they're not only providing labor or assistance helping us to continue our mission, but they're helping us to change and understand maybe our news consumers differently?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
I mean, I think several students have come up with their own story ideas, and it definitely reflects their generation more so than mine, which is great, and one of the goals of local news too is to be more relevant to younger people. You know, an example that comes to mind at least as recent is the New York State Writers Institute invited a self-proclaimed etymology nerd.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
He's a TikTok influencer who studies language and how social media is changing language.
MARY HUNT:
Graduated from Albany High, right?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
I'd never heard of this kid before. He's 25, wrote a book, and a student said, “I would like to cover him.” And my big question was like, “Who is he?” And I went, and the whole time I was in the audience, I had no idea what he was talking about, He was talking really fast. I couldn't follow him. And I remember walking out of that thinking to myself, I am so glad I don't have to write this story because I don't know how I would do it. But the student knew exactly what to do. She knew who he was. She nailed it. It was a fun story. It was a great story, and interesting. And, you know, and her age, pretty much.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, that's interesting.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Yeah.
MARY HUNT:
Very interesting. Here at the University, we have students from throughout New York State and beyond. We have students who are local to the Capital Region. This is their hometown, but I would imagine some of the students that are in your course are from areas outside of the Capital Region, so they have to get to know their local community to tell those stories. How do they do that? You can teach them the journalism skills I would imagine, but how do they get acclimated into the community, or start to learn what's important to the community and what to write about, how to choose the stories, or how to have a sense of what they should be reporting on?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
You know, the students I have taken a couple journalism classes, so they do understand what makes news newsworthy. You know to a degree. Again, by example, I had a student last semester who, you know, just on his usual shopping routine… and I tell them, when you go out into the real world keep your eye open. You know, this is the kind of profession where you never stop working. You always have a story-hunting mindset. You know, any person you can meet has a story to tell, most likely, and if they live in the community, bingo, you know. So he was in BJs one night, and people kept talking about this guy called the chicken man. And so, he was like, "Who's the chicken man?" And they told him, well, if you just wait another half hour, you'll meet the chicken man. And so in comes this man who lives in Colonie, is an appliance repairman. And at the end of every night at eight o'clock, he would buy up all the unsold rotisserie chickens and drive them to a homeless shelter and feed them because he realized that if no one bought them they would be thrown out. And the student comes to me the next day. And he's like, “Well, I met this guy, and I don't know if it's a story.” I'm like, “Oh my gosh, this is a perfect story.” Like, yeah, go back to BJs and wait for the chicken man. So we talked about how to cover it, and I was like this is the kind of story where you just follow him, you know, go into the van, watch him buy it, ask him why he does it, you know, watch the interactions. Jot it all down, get some color. And he wrote a really good story to the point that readers for The Daily Gazette were calling. They were calling the newsroom and asking if there was a Go Fund Me page to help him out.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah, it's funny you should bring that example up because in today's paper... I was just talking with some folks about this. Well, actually, somebody sent me a link to a story about a store that didn't charge anything for their goods. And I thought it was a joke. I thought, is it April 1, or is this a link they just want me to open? And it was a real story about a store that realizes that in this day and age, people need goods, and they may not have the money to pay for those goods. So you can bring your goods that you want to discard to this store, and people can come in, and they can pick a certain number of items a week and take those free of charge. And happens to be very close to where I live, and I thought that reminds me of the chicken story, chicken man story. That's a really important relevant community story. You know, not only are you telling something that's kind of unusual, could be of interest to people, but it's really relevant to our community and the needs of our community.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Right.
MARY HUNT:
And that sounds like what community news is really all about or trying to get to the heart of.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
It's about connecting with your neighbors and understanding what everyone else is doing, as well as making sure your town functions. So has this story been published?
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, it was this morning.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
I was going to say I’ll send a student there.
[Elaine and Mary laugh together.]
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, I will send you the link. It just actually came to me via a link from one of my family members this morning. Okay, but it was then I, I went to the link, and it was published so…
ELAINE SALISBURY:
It’s sort of, also the whole idea of, you know, are they changing news? And it's sort of yes and no. These students, obviously, are young, and you know, they may think going into it, oh, going to a planning board meeting is boring, and what does this have to do with me.
MARY HUNT:
Right.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
But obviously, in like, 10 years’ time, they'll understand why it's important because it'll affect their lives. But each and every time that they go to a planning board meeting they are shocked at how interesting it is, how people are yelling, you know, and protesting and complaining and criticizing and, you know, they're sort of like, "Cool."
MARY HUNT:
Well, on its face, this story is an interesting story. It's a quirky kind of a business, unusual business. You don't hear of that too often, but underneath, when you dig deeper, it talks about, well, what's going on in the community, that we need a store where there's, you don't have to pay for anything, where people can come in, or that this store has gone out of business, and now there's this shell, there's this location where somebody needs to fill and a business is coming in to fill it. So I mean, it really, there are a lot of layers to this story that can be told and peeled back...
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Right.
MARY HUNT:
for people to really understand what's happening in the community.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
I mean, I think they're learning that civics can be fun.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, absolutely.Is there anything different about the style of writing or the approach to reporting in a community or in community news, or local news, as opposed to other kind of news, the news we see, you know, we read online, or we read, or we see on national media or broadcast TV? Is there anything different? Any way you're teaching students differently when it comes to local news?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Mostly that it's really about being close, getting up close to people, what motivates them, why are they doing something, how it impacts them emotionally and physically. You know, the national press is, particularly because we're in of the times we're in, it's very much of a polarized kind of a coverage. Local news is really just more about, you know, the universality of the human experience in the specific. You know, one student wrote about a father who wrote a memoir about his daughter who died. And she went to his living room, sat down at the dining room table, went through the photographs. Why did he write the book about his daughter? Why did he need to preserve his met her memory in this way? And it's very personal. So I think students also just learn… One thing I like about this sort of program is there are all these soft skills that students are developing without realizing they're developing, you know, empathy among them, and also just kind of getting out of themselves and hearing other people's lives. I think social media tends to be very much of a deep-me type experience. This forces them to hear from others and exposes them to other issues and problems and ideas, and also just positive things too. It's not all negative, and local news is, has, I feel much more of a positive feel to it too. It's, you know, the school kid who wins the award type stories.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, people do seem to identify with it. It surprises me that there are these news deserts with local news because people seem to really identify with the people that bring them the local news. I mean, I think of your local TV channel and the local station. You always watch this channel every night. You don't miss this. People feel like they get to know the people who are on those channels. We have a number of alums who are meteorologists locally because we have an outstanding weather, environmental program, environmental sciences program here at the university. So we're fortunate enough to have a number of our local meteorologists who've graduated and who've come back and who’ve worked with our students and have also helped them to find jobs in the field. But people really feel close to those folks as if they know them.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
And they minor in journalism in our program.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, is that right?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
We have a relationship with them.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, that’s nice.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
So we would love to expand that too and try to get more people behind the camera.
MARY HUNT:
They’re so generous with their time and with their expertise, and as I say, trying to connect them to people where they can find employment because they know the program is good and they know the students will be well prepared. So it's a great network.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
People tend to trust local news more than they do national news because they see the stories that are getting written and it compares to their own experience. So when the local news goes out and covers a high school football game or soccer game, the parent or the reader, they already, maybe they had seen the game, or they talked to people who saw the game, and it matches up with the conversations they had. So that tends to help with the trust more, whereas with the national level, as a reader, you may feel deeply about what's happening, but you can't see it.
MARY HUNT:
And you don't have the depth and breadth of the stories.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Correct.
MARY HUNT:
It tends to be the same three or four stories, and it's understandable, that seem to be, you know, taking the national focus, but you just, you don't hear about what really affects your life on a daily basis, maybe.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
And be able to verify it yourself as a reader.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, yeah. I should ask you about AI. I'm wondering if AI is impacting what you're teaching your students, or how you're talking to them about AI as a tool, as a threat, as an option. I mean, you know, what kind of conversations do you have with your journalism students about AI and the role it plays in their work?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
I see a lot of em dashes in the writing now. I mean, we try to use it as a tool as much as possible. You know, for me, just at this moment in time, it's about the writing. You cannot replace the interview with AI. You have to be there and talk to people and be up close. That's un-AI-able. That's AI-proof.
[Elaine and Mary laugh together.]
MARY HUNT:
I like that. Un-AI-able.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Right. You know, I do notice that there's a tendency for some to just put their information and put it into AI and have them write the story for you. I'm still grappling with what to do with that, you know, is it like a calculator where it's doing the equation and the formula for you? But they're in this program, or they're taking this course because they like to write, and it's important that their voice gets out there and in their language, and in their words. And AI is pretty much it's reducing the number of words, and so we tend to all use the same words. It's not increasing the number of words or expanding the number of words. I think it has a tendency to diminish. And when you diminish words, you start diminishing thought. So, you know, I impress upon them give me your rough draft. I want to see your mistakes, and I want to see your language and then if we struggle, we can use AI as a tool like, help me get around this conundrum. You know, if you've written yourself into a dead alley, or if you're, you know, lede isn't quite working, and we can't figure it out, let's then let's be very purposeful for how we use it as an editing tool. And obviously there's, you know, you can use AI in the newsroom for all sorts of things now in a very positive way, you know, finding data, scraping data. As a class, we're not there yet. I mean, that's sort of more complex work.
MARY HUNT:
Well, you know, we tend to think of, those of us who aren't in the profession, journalism as, oh, I know I'm going to get one of these wrong, as the who, what, when, where, why, how, which, kind of on its surface, makes you think, well, that doesn't really lend itself to a lot of creativity in writing. Is there space for creativity in journalistic writing or in local news writing, and is that important, or is it really just the facts?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
There's actually a lot of creativity in coming up with your questions when you're trying to figure out the five W's, surprisingly so, and students also, or that age group, tends to jump to the why first, without first establishing what happened to who. So, that is actually really important because most of the disinformation and conspiracy theories are all centered around the why, or many of them are centered around the why. But in terms of creative writing, yeah, I mean, even just the story that the student wrote about the philanthropic life of the chicken man, that was narrative. There's a whole tradition of narrative nonfiction journalism, where how you write it reads like a novel, but it's all based on fact, so you have to use imagery, metaphor, capture descriptions, contrast. You might have complication in there as well as climax and prologue, you know. It can get really fun and complicated and quite serious. And, you know, I worked with him on the chicken man story, and he did that. He pulled it off, and he was really impressed with himself. And he had all the reporting. He had the writing chops too. Just needed a little smoothing. And I think the newspaper made one change and that was to the lede, and we were both like, oh, yeah, why didn't we think of that, you know.
MARY HUNT:
Well, good writers need good editors
ELAINE SALISBURY:
A little surgical precision there. It was great. So, yeah, there's a lot of creativity, and profiles lend themselves to creative writing. I mean you’re not writing people's resumes; you're writing their life.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah. Laney, what's coming up outside of the classes? Do you have any activities planned on campus to support the course or to support students in journalism?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Sure, and to support what really I call is a movement. So, in April, the second annual conference for the SUNY Institute for Local News will be hosted on the Albany campus. Last year it was at Oneonta. So, SUNY Albany is inviting all the professors at the SUNY schools who are taking part in the SUNY initiative. There will also be some private campuses too that are taking part in the initiative on the state level. So, there will be some local publishers as well, hopefully some publishers from downstate, and we're going to come and, you know, have, you know, a celebration also, as well, as you know, share best practices. There'll be some guest speakers. The dean will give a welcoming talk. The chancellor will pop in by Zoom, since, you know, this is his project as well. And students will help organize it and help people, escort them around. We're still building the itinerary, but we want it to be both fun, rewarding, and, you know, a learning opportunity.
MARY HUNT:
That's exciting, that's very exciting. Also, I want to ask you about the SUNY internship, summer internships. Tell me a little bit about that.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
So this summer will be the second summer in a row through the private foundations SUNY will be hiring 20 students and place them in local news outlets for a summer internship program. They'll be working for about 10 weeks, and they'll cover whatever the local news outlet needs for its community, and in return they'll be getting hands on experience building a portfolio. And you know, these jobs are not just for journalism students. I mean, we recognize that when you graduate, you might not find a job in journalism, but to show to any employer in any discipline that you can write a story, follow it from story idea creation all the way to its end, interview people, think on your feet, ask the right questions, get research to back up the ideas that are being presented in the news story, look at different perspectives, is you know, a great leadership-tool building and really illustrates to employers that you are a very competent, responsible, reliable individual to hire.
MARY HUNT:
What impact are you seeing, or do you hope to see through the students’ participation with the media partners that you've enlisted? What do you hope they bring to the newsroom?
ELAINE SALISBURY:
News. I mean, that's what they need. I don't know if I mentioned this already, but in 2022 there were 40 journalists, or the equivalent of journalists for every 100,000 people. And that back then was not enough. We now have 10. So, they need people to write it, and then we need people to read it. 10 is the average. So there are counties out there, like the Bronx has like less than three journalists per 100,000 people. New York as a state has 9.8. That's just not enough. So, the frosting on the cake would be like, wow, bring your 20-year-old, you know, outlook on life, and, you know, let's reinvent the news through your perspective and get more young readers too. That would be great. And maybe that will come. But I feel like right now it's let's get more people out there covering the school boards, covering the town boards, covering, you know, the development boards and covering the people. You know, healthcare is a huge issue. There are so many people out there suffering because they don't have access to health care or they can't afford it. We should be writing those stories, you know. Energy, a lot of people can't afford their energy bills, and those are just going up. So there's not enough people on the ground to cover this. And what do we do about it as a society?
[Music fades in.}
MARY HUNT:
Well, Laney, you keep doing what you're doing. We need good journalists. And we need more journalists, so keep working with our students and our partners. It’s much appreciated.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Thank you. It’s fun work and it's also rewarding work.
MARY HUNT:
Thanks so much for being my guest.
ELAINE SALISBURY:
Thank you.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Elaine Salisbury serves as lecturer and Journalism Program Director in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany's College of Arts and Sciences. Elaine is a print journalist whose work has taken her abroad to the Middle East, Africa, Europe and throughout the United States. She has worked as an editor for the Associated Press and as a reporter for Reuters. For more information on Elaine and UAlbany students working in local news, visit the resource page for this podcast at the engagement dash ring dot Simplecast dot com.
The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany O P E at Albany dot E D U.
[Music fades out.]