University of Missouri

By Austin Fitzgerald

March 24, 2025
Photo by Nate Brown

The University of Missouri School of Journalism is leading an effort with newsrooms at colleges and universities across the country to create more informed, collaborative coverage of state governments.

Launched with the help of a grant for more than $250,000 from philanthropic organization Arnold Ventures, the Statehouse Reporting Project harnesses existing, student-powered statehouse newsrooms to work together in ways that are rare for student operations.

“We want to show that by working together across state lines, we can improve the public’s knowledge and understanding of what’s happening in state legislatures,” said Mark Horvit, head of the Missouri School of Journalism’s Statehouse program and director of the new reporting network. “If this works, then as it grows, we’ll be able to expand the reach.”

A significant portion of the membership comes courtesy of the Center for Community News (CCN) at the University of Vermont, which supports local newsrooms with student-produced content in Vermont and nationwide. Horvit credited CCN and its executive director, Richard Watts, with getting things in motion by organizing meetings between the leadership of nearly two dozen student statehouse programs.

That group became the foundation for the network, but it was the grant that finally took the concept from a dream to a reality. Horvit was able to hire an editor and pay student writers, forming a staff capable of managing collaborative content production across states and time zones.

In some ways, the program is a natural extension of the concept driving the Missouri News Network, the Missouri School of Journalism’s five professional newsrooms working collaboratively to plan coverage and share resources.

“A lot of stories don’t stop at artificial borders, like state boundaries or even national boundaries,” Horvit said. “So it’s becoming more and more important for students to learn how to work with other journalists.”

Therein lies another benefit of the grant: The network now subscribes to BillTrack50, a service that tracks legislation in real time across all 50 states, including the federal level.

The network’s first story, published in early February, offered a textbook example of that approach. The story combined local details about immigration bills in a variety of states with a national perspective on trends toward more aggressive immigration enforcement and deportation policies.