On the Beat with URI’s Community News Lab

University of Rhode Island professor Betty Cotter, right, mentors students in the Community News Lab at The Harrington School of Communication and Media. Photograph courtesy of URI Community News Lab

When veteran journalist and URI professor Betty Cotter sat down with nine student reporters on the first day of the fall 2025 semester, she recognized a feeling she hadn’t experienced in more than a decade, one that brought her back to her days as the first managing editor of The Independent.

“I said to them, ‘We don’t know where this is going. You’re the inaugural class. Let’s see what we can do with this.’ And it just took off.”

Last fall, the University of Rhode Island’s Harrington School of Communication and Media launched a Community News Lab, an effort to increase local journalism while giving students real newsroom experience. Students have already published more than two dozen stories in southern Rhode Island newspapers, like The Westerly Sun and The Narragansett Times — coverage that wouldn’t have happened without them.

The idea for the lab took shape when Daniel Hunt joined URI’s journalism faculty in 2024. He had worked on a similar initiative at Boston University and saw an opportunity to replicate it in Kingston. Local newsrooms have shrunk immensely throughout the years, leaving rural communities near the university — Charlestown, Richmond, Hopkinton, Exeter and West Greenwich — with little to no dedicated reporting.

“These were areas where coverage had become lean,” says Hunt, chair of the journalism and public relations department. “We wanted to increase local news coverage in underserved communities and provide our students with professional newsroom experience before they graduate.”

Cotter, with more than thirty years of reporting and editing experience, was a natural choice to lead the project. She also spent part of last year in the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News ‘Champions’ program, where she connected with people who led similar news-gathering initiatives nationwide.

“I saw so many models,” she says. “It made me think about where we could take this.”

What emerged was a fully functioning newsroom that operates out of Ranger Hall, with Cotter as the full-time editor, a student copy editor and a group of hand-selected reporters, mostly former students. The nine students on the team were chosen based on prior reporting experience, classroom performance and “a sense of maturity and readiness,” Cotter says. They each earned three credits while working at the lab.

“One of the first things I realized was that I couldn’t assume they remembered everything I had taught them,” Cotter says. “The stakes are real now. It’s not an assignment — they’re publishing for the public.”

The students spent the fall covering municipal meetings, land-use debates, environmental issues, the agriculture and fishing industries, and local schools. Cotter met with each reporter one-on-one twice a week to review sourcing, discuss story structures and teach the kind of skills that don’t translate as easily in the classroom.

“I’ll sit with them and show them how to find records, how to search the Secretary of State’s database, how to pull old newspaper clips,” she says. “They’re learning how to actually dig.”

Many of the lab reporters saw their bylines appear weekly, gaining clips that would normally take years to accumulate. Cotter and Hunt both say that giving students responsibility for real community coverage elevates not only their skills but the entire journalism program.

“The academic-news model is gaining momentum nationally,” Hunt says. “We’re part of that movement.”

With eleven students currently enrolled in the spring semester, the lab is publishing even more stories. Cotter hopes to add general assignment reporting and hyperlocal General Assembly coverage in the future.

Right now, the biggest constraints are staffing and funding. URI provided the space and equipment to launch the lab, and Hunt is applying for grants to help the center grow.

The energy in the room is similar to a startup newsroom, Cotter says — uncertain but hopeful. “You don’t know how long these things will last,” she says. “But the impact is already huge — for readers and for the students.”