Through the Restle Teaching Fellowship, several IU Media School students are reporting on rural communities and investigating news coverage of environmental issues in Southern Indiana.
The fellowship is supported by a gift from IU alumna Barbara (Blackledge) Restle. Restle worked in environmental activism and farming before she attended IU in the middle of her life to get a degree in journalism and political science. She also started a local conservation newspaper published in the 1960s and 1970s called The Balancer, where Restle worked as the editor and, for a long time, the only reporter.
Restle’s original gift created the Barbara Restle Press Law Project in 2017. That fund has been expanded to the Barbara Restle Fund to support research and teaching activities surrounding environmental media and communications and/or issues that threaten how the media functions to support democracy.
Last semester, the fellowship was awarded to Media School professors Kelley French and Suzannah Evans Comfort. In line with Restle’s intended focus, French developed a spring semester class on reporting in rural communities and Comfort developed a spring semester class on the intersection of the media and environment.
French’s class, Reporting on Rural Communities, is an advanced writing course where students are required to produce enterprise stories with a focus on rural communities in Southern Indiana. At the end of the semester, French intends for each student to have a story ready for publication.
“Everyone has a topical beat from healthcare to agriculture to transportation,” she said. “They are working on projects about everything from sustainable agriculture to news deserts and misinformation to the shortage of small animal veterinarians and maternal fetal medicine.”
In rural communities, French said there is a noticeable drop in news coverage because so many small town newspapers have gone away. And many of the papers that do remain exist in name only.
“They call them ghost papers because they don’t have staff and publish stories from nearby areas,” French said. “These news deserts are a source of misinformation because when people don’t have well reported news they can trust, they jump to conclusions and that’s how some conspiracy theories start. And it’s a disservice to communities facing serious issues.”
First-year graduate student Tyler Spence is a reporter in French’s class whose semester project focuses on the Morgan County Correspondent, a local newspaper founded in Martinsville last August. Spence said the newspaper is interesting because the editor is focused on for-profit print journalism, whereas a lot of startup journalism is nonprofit and digital only. In his reporting, Spence found that the paper is more successful than it anticipated for being so new.
“There’s clearly a demand for someone to go cover city council and high school sports,” he said. “This is really simple community journalism that just doesn’t exist anymore, and the Morgan County Correspondent is bringing that back and putting it into a newspaper.”
Spence, who received his bachelor’s degree from Marshall University in his home state of West Virginia, has some prior experience in reporting on rural communities and said he has noticed the power of small town communities.
“They are really tight knit, and oftentimes, not well understood by outsiders,” Spence said. “If you’re going to a unique cultural area like Appalachia, there’s a lot of stereotypes within the media about that group of people and how they have a poor relationship with outsiders coming in to try and tell their stories. What’s going on in small towns is often unheard of but really important.”
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Categories: Indiana, Education, Rural Lifestyle