The West Virginia University Reed College of Media has partnered with the Morgan State University College of Global Journalism and Communication to work on a variety of projects related to social justice reporting.

In 2018, the two schools and the American Press Institute hosted a collaborative "social hackathon" to come up with solutions for the lack of diversity in newsrooms and news coverage.

The "Missing Voices: Diversifying the News" Hackathon focused on the persistent absence of a diversity of voices and influence in American news media. This event provided the opportunity to bring together diverse representatives of students and media professionals from across the country to collaboratively address these challenges.

College students from a range of institutions — public, private, rural and urban — worked side by side with media professionals who represented news organizations working towards improving diversity in the industry. Participants included students from West Virginia University, Emerson College, Northwestern University, Morgan State University, CUNY, UC Berkeley, and University of New Mexico and media professionals from Scalawag, Maynard Institute, PRI, Rewire and others.

In Fall 2016, journalism students at West Virginia University and Morgan State University reported on the topic of food justice and America’s food system as part of the Innovators-in-Residence program, led by John Ketchum, social media producer at CNN and Tricia Fulks Kelley, independent digital journalist and alumna of Reed College of Media. The project also included WVU Food Justice Fellow and Ph.D. candidate Joshua Lohnes as an expert-in-residence to provide context and subject matter expertise.

Students investigated inequities in food access within each others’ communities and learned how to use new techniques in social media to crowd-source content and to create content designed for social distribution. Students also learned how to disrupt conventional journalism practice by applying counter narrative techniques to their reporting on issues of social justice.

In collaboration with WVU Associate Professor  Joel Beeson, WVU teaching assistant professor  David Smith and MSU faculty, Ketchum and Kelley worked with students to cover such topics as systems of food distribution, access, security, and the roles of government, corporations, local communities and individuals in the food ecosystem.

The Innovators-in-Residence also worked with Morgan Statue University faculty and Associate Dean Jackie Jones to teach students across both programs in a one-of-a-kind shared classroom experience. Students, faculty and innovators gathered by Google hangout each week to hear from industry experts, practice new skill sets, as well as to work with their teams on their reporting projects. In addition to working together virtually via hangout and in the project management application Slack, students conducted three shared immersion reporting trips in Baltimore, MD, Morgantown, WV and in Charleston, WV.

The reporting project continued a unique social justice reporting partnership between the two programs — one an HBCU located in Baltimore, Maryland, and the other a predominantly white institution located within a largely rural area — in an effort to bridge the nation’s racial and rural/urban divides. This partnership previously produced  Bridging Selma, an ONA Online Journalism Award finalist, and  Fractured Tour, an award-winning VR documentary short.

This project experimented with emerging social media platforms as both a reporting and audience engagement tool. Students experimented with Medium, a hybrid online social journalism platform, to publish stories. They learned how to produce what digital journalists call a “content vertical,” an in-depth digital product featuring expertise and content around a specific topic. The class also produced a mobile app in partnership with the WVU Food Justice Lab to enable community members across the nation to provide data about their food access strategies and food security status.

“During our first immersion trip, students began to establish an understanding of food justice from the city’s perspective and how members of the community were trying to combat things like food insecurity, poverty and food deserts,” said Ketchum. “Students met with community members, heard lectures from guest speakers and toured community gardens.”