Sacred Heart University’s Community Journalism Collective (CJC) was awarded a Press Forward Initiative grant of $100,000. The CJC works in collaboration with the Easton Courier, and this grant will allow the Courier’s operations to expand to the cities of Fairfield and Bridgeport.
Back in 2018, the Easton Courier was shut down.
“The original for-profit Easton Courier closed in 2018, two years shy of its 40th birthday, a victim of changing economic times in Connecticut and beyond. At a time when community newspapers were closing nationwide, Sacred Heart University reopened a treasured news source in the neighboring town of Easton,” said Prof. Nancy Doniger, a SHU adjunct professor and the original editor of the Easton Courier.
Doniger worked closely with colleagues in the process.
“Prof. James Castonguay assembled a team of journalists, photographers and community contributors, and the new non-profit Easton Courier was born. The first edition launched on Leap Day 2020. Since then, the Courier has published thousands of articles and won 60 Society of Professional Journalist awards,” said Doniger.
Local papers failing to stay in business across the country is something that’s become more prevalent in recent years.
Prof. Richard Falco, a coordinator of multimedia journalism, said issues are developing with the current landscape of local news.
“What has gone on across the entire nation is these local papers are going out of business. Gobbled up, they cannot afford to stay in business. It has been a really serious problem. We watched it get worse and worse over the years,” said Falco.
The Press Forward Initiative is a national movement to strengthen democracy by revitalizing local news and information.
According to the Press Forward website, “The steady and significant decline in the availability of reliable, fact-based local news across the country is connected to growing threats to democracy, increasing polarization, and the spread of disinformation. At the same time, over a decade of investment in journalism experimentation and transformation have produced new models and solutions that are ready to scale, and a new generation of leaders prepared to reinvent and revitalize the field.”
According to Doniger, it was Castonguay who applied for this grant.
“[Castonguay] learned about Press Forward and worked with the University to apply for a grant to increase the capacity of the SHU community journalism project,” said Doniger.
Doniger said that the Easton Courier is bound to see changes from this grant as a result of its expansion into coverage of Bridgeport and Fairfield.
“The Easton Courier will continue its reliable and timely local news to Easton residents as it adds multimedia capacity and increases training opportunities for SHU students,” said Doniger. “Additionally, the community journalism collective will work collaboratively with other news outlets as it expands its depth and breadth of coverage into Fairfield and Bridgeport.”
Broadening the opportunities of the paper is one of the things Falco highlighted when speaking about the coverage expansion.
“We have been doing it with bubble gum and tape until this point. This is a very small group of us. We will be able to bring in some freelancers. But also the scope will change because each of these places has different uniqueness and problems,” said Falco.
According to Falco, SHU students also have something to gain from this grant.
“It allows students to work as real journalists, and we hope to expand that. A number of the students that have been working have won awards themselves,” said Falco. “We give them the foundations. Some of them have gone out with a portfolio of published work.”
