In early 2020, Lindsey and Joey Young, owners of the small rural media company, Kansas Publishing Ventures (KPV), were interviewing a journalism school graduate for a job. The interview was going well until the student told them she planned to work remotely, reporting an hour away from the community she would cover daily.
Today, many rural newsrooms across the U.S. find it hard to hire fully-trained journalists. Young graduates often don’t want to move to a smaller town, and because of financial constraints like student loans, many can’t accept the lower salaries local papers offer.
The Youngs instead turned to hiring from the people who already lived in south central Kansas. But if they were going to rely on local talent, they needed to train them first. Recognizing this need, they founded Earn Your Press Pass, a on-demand online course to train journalists from within the communities being covered on the basics of journalism.
Earn Your Press Pass
The Youngs' initial plan was to reach out to local colleges to provide journalism training for locals. But the schools’ suggestion – to enroll community members in journalism courses for college credit – was too expensive and inflexible, explained Lindsey Young. “Classes meet at certain times and have assignments due at certain times. It limits my pool of potential hires if they have to commit to a certain time and place for class,” she said.
Lindsey Young, who was a high school teacher for 10 years, set out to write information sheets and record 10-minute long videos that would teach the fundamentals of journalism. Earn Your Press Pass came out of this effort.
To reach the community papers in most need of the course, KPV first partnered with the Kansas Press Association, which subscribed for $2,000 per year and offered the course to their members either for free or at a low cost. Today, newspapers in 18 U.S. states, among them Nebraska, Texas, Montana and Wisconsin, use Earn Your Press Pass. Newspapers can also subscribe independently, as opposed to going through a press association.
Of all the statewide journalism associations the Youngs have reached out to, only the California Press Association has declined the course, explaining that its members didn’t require the program to find new journalists to hire, Joey Young said.
Empowering community journalists
For Lindsey Young, the program helps democratize journalism, by offering an alternative path to break into industry beyond university journalism programs. “[It] opens up the doors for what an ideal candidate can be for your newspaper,” she said.
Lindsey Young cited the story of a former accountant and aspiring novelist who started working as a journalist. His knack for delving into school budgets made him a great investigative journalist. Another example is Casey Jacob, an Earn Your Press Pass student, who freelances for Harvey County Now while homeschooling her children. For four years, she has covered city council meetings and written the occasional feature story.
Before she enrolled in the program, she felt like her editors “covered her mistakes,” she explained. Now, they hardly edit her work at all.
Earn Your Press Pass empowered Jacob to better decide on a story’s direction and, as a result, “bother her editor less.” She learned common journalism terms, and how to structure her writing in creative, compelling ways. With newfound confidence, Jacob is writing more stories for the paper than ever before.
The benefits for editors
Earn Your Press Pass offers benefits for editors, too. Laura Fowler Paulus, an editor and reporter at the Hillsboro Press, a free weekly paper in Hillsboro, Kansas, finds the training an efficient way to train interns and new hires.
Since fall 2022, a high school intern with no prior experience has worked with Fowler at the Hillsboro Press. “My strength is writing and editing, not teaching [the intern] how to do it,” said Fowler. “But Lindsey is really good at [that]. By having that tool, I could be writing while [the intern] was sitting there training.”
Fowler herself has used the course to hone her reporting practices.
Seeing the success of Earn Your Press Pass, the Youngs are dreaming bigger. Newspapers in Canada have expressed interest in the training course. Lindsey Young also hopes to expand the training through a regular newsletter or podcast. She’d like to translate the course into Spanish, too.
With Earn Your Press Pass, rural papers can cover more of their communities, Young said. “As an industry, we get so disheartened. All the newspapers are closing, and everything sucks,” she said. “But I think there's so many great things going on in rural journalism.”
With just a little help from the community, the paper can stay relevant.
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash.
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