High School Journalists, Rise Up!

-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on October 2, 2025

I’m posting a little later than usual this week as my wife and I are in the middle of a driving vacation around Colorado, checking out the vivid fall foliage that I think we’ve captured at its peak. I understand the locals call people like us “leaf peepers”—and I guess I’m fine with that. In my book, Colorado’s combination of brilliant colors set against majestic mountain backdrops beats any other fall displays you’ll find elsewhere in the U.S. (I will fight you, New England and Michigan).

Driving back and forth across the state to catch the best displays, I’m struck, as always, by the vast sections of Colorado with very few people living in them—and I’m not even talking about the big national parks. There are so many places where the small towns are many miles apart with just open land in between. Being raised in suburban St. Louis and living most of my adult life in a college town surrounded by many smaller towns just a stone’s throw away, it’s quite a stark difference.

The small towns we’re encountering have a few things in common. There’s always a gas station of some sort, usually a locally-owned diner and maybe a real estate or tourism-related business. The other thing I always see is a nearby high school decked out in its October splendor celebrating homecoming and its football team—all of these schools seem to have a football team

Being a TV news guy, when I travel in a remote, rural area, I often think to myself, “It would take a major disaster to ever see a TV news crew out here.”

The sad truth is that TV news is centered around large, urban areas and the likelihood of traveling outside those areas diminishes greatly with every mile traveled from the city center. Local radio news is all but gone in most states, with the only newsrooms found, once again, in the bigger cities. And the hard times seen by the newspaper industry mean many of the small local papers—a few dailies, mostly weeklies—are just memories. That means much of the beautiful landscape we’ve been traversing lies in a news desert.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it originated way back in 1980 in an academic paper describing the lack of news coverage in rural Canada. A “news desert” is more broadly defined as a geographic area with little or no access to credible local news (my emphasis). A recent study from the University of North Carolina shows about seven percent of U.S. counties have no local newsroom and fully half have only one local newsroom.

So what to do about these news deserts? That’s where all those high schools come in. Just as I’m sure each of them has a football team, I’m equally sure each of them has a journalism class. That means that right in the middle of all of these news desert counties across Colorado and the rest of the country, there’s a working newsroom doing its thing at the local high school.

Now, high school journalists typically report and publish for a very specific audience—the high school they attend.

But there’s no reason they can’t broaden their areas of coverage. Scholastic journalism programs are filled with young, enthusiastic people who bring native skills to digital storytelling. Many of these students will go on to college to study journalism and become journalists themselves. Why not take advantage of the skills and motivation sitting right behind those classroom doors and put these students to work covering their communities for a wider audience?

So how would this work? First, it would take a commitment on the part of the local journalism teachers—and their principals—to expand the focus of their classes’ reporting. The template to do this is not difficult to figure out. Assign reporters to the main newsmakers in town: city hall, police/sheriff, business community, health, etc. Setting up beats for the student reporters would probably be the best way to do this. With the teacher supervising, form a newsroom structure that has a chief editor, some people handling assignments (think city or assignment desk), photographers, graphics and design teams and a distribution team. That last role may be the most important. Producing the content is, of course, important. But getting it out to the community as a whole is key to eliminating the news desert. Online distribution would be the easiest. The newly-branded newsroom should have a presence on the main social media platforms (Facebook seems key here to reach the older consumers who would be most interested in news, as well as NextDoor), create a web page and explore limited printing of hard copies that could be done on a copier and hand collated and bound. Ideally, this new newsroom can distribute its content for free—even the printed version—perhaps adding a sales team to sell some advertising to offset what should be fairly minor costs.

In those communities that aren’t yet a complete news desert and have an existing news outlet, the student journalists could contribute their content for free to be published through a commercial partner, broadening their reach and adding content to an already valuable local newsroom. That existing newsroom should not see the students as competitors, but rather a team of journalists there to help expand the coverage the existing newsroom is already doing. I think there’s also plenty of room for this sort of partnership to expand beyond local newspapers to broadcasters, too.

If you’re about to drop a comment that says, “My local high school is already doing this!” I’m glad to hear it.

I’m not going to claim credit for inventing the idea of high school students doing real journalism. I just want to popularize it and make it the norm. If you’re working in a newsroom now, reach out to some top schools in your rural counties and see if you can get this started. Better yet, reach out to your state’s high school journalism association (most states have one) and see if you can lend your expertise to train the teachers on how to make this work.

Checking into my hotel tonight, my wife pointed out that there are actually two local newspapers covering this part of Colorado. That’s a refreshing and welcome sight. Wouldn’t it be nice for future leaf peepers to travel a state as blanketed with news coverage as it is with brilliant foliage?