On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Barbara “Bob” Allen, a Los Angeles-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country.
Allen is also the editor of the Student Press Report, a brand-new national news desk covering the state of the college press. The debut piece — “Cash-starved and censored, America’s student press is in crisis” — lays out the financial and free-press challenges facing campus newsrooms. Allen also writes the weekly College Journalism Newsletter.
Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was the adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia.
Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access.
Dan’s Quick Take stays close to home. The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper, just celebrated its 100th anniversary.
Ellen’s Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with The Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.
You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
A summary of our conversation
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Barbara “Bob” Allen, founder and director of CollegeJournalism.org, joined Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg on “What Works: The Future of Local News” to discuss the state of college journalism in the United States — its promise, its financial struggles, and its role in addressing the local news crisis.
The Student Press Report
Allen opened by describing her newest venture, the Student Press Report, a national news desk devoted to covering student media and college journalism education. The idea emerged from a conversation she had with Gary Green, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, at the annual college media convention in Washington, D.C., in October 2025. The two agreed that professional journalists, funders, and the general public simply don’t have a clear picture of what it’s like to be a student journalist today — or, for that matter, to advise and teach student journalists. They resolved that if they could assemble the funding, they could coordinate reporting that would illuminate this critical but often overlooked corner of the media ecosystem.
Funding and Partnerships
Allen’s work is backed by two key partners: the Student Press Law Center and Flytedesk, a national advertising agency that specializes in reaching college audiences through student media. Allen described the world of student media advising as exceptionally collegial and collaborative, noting that both partnerships grew organically out of conversations at industry gatherings. She singled out Flytedesk as a vital piece of infrastructure for student media, responsible for generating significant advertising revenue for independent student publications. She encouraged any student media organization struggling financially to reach out to the company, emphasizing that Flytedesk genuinely cares about the health of student journalism. That financial lifeline, she said, is one reason the Student Press Report exists in the first place: to raise the alarm about the severity of the financial challenges facing student media, which in some respects are even more acute than those confronting professional outlets.
College Papers and the Local News Crisis
Ellen Clegg asked whether college newspapers can serve as a meaningful solution to the local news crisis, particularly in communities that have lost reliable sources of journalism. Allen’s answer was nuanced: yes and no. Student journalists cannot be expected to replicate the work of professional reporters who are deeply embedded in their communities over many years. But covering local government, school boards, and even high school sports gives students an invaluable opportunity to understand the importance of local media and to develop their skills.
Allen drew a distinction between the community reporting done by independent student media and the model championed by the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News. The CCN approach involves professors leading reporting initiatives with a layer of editorial review before the content is passed along to local news partners. Independent student media, by contrast, often skip that step, publishing directly. Either way, Allen said, most communities welcome the coverage. She noted that student journalists have been particularly strong on emerging beats such as food insecurity, homelessness, and affordability — areas that many nonprofit news startups have also prioritized.
One observation that stuck with Allen from the college media convention was that students from the same newspaper would all insist they shared a clear sense of their publication’s mission, only to articulate it in entirely different ways. She challenges student journalists to have explicit conversations about their role in the media ecosystem so they can operate with a shared sense of purpose.
Are There Downsides?
When Clegg pressed on whether there are risks to having college papers provide community coverage — town-gown tensions, student turnover, errors — Allen pushed back firmly. She said she is very hard to convince that the downsides outweigh the benefits. Student journalists are part of an educational community, she emphasized, and community members who encounter errors have a straightforward path to resolution: reach out, flag the mistake, and participate in the educational process. She expressed frustration with administrators who stonewall student reporters over perceived misquotes or errors, arguing that people who have devoted their careers to education should not abdicate their responsibility to help students learn and improve. For every alleged mistake, Allen said, there is likely a student on the other side who is genuinely upset about the error and eager to do better. She urged administrators and professional journalists alike to open the door to mentoring relationships with student reporters, calling the experience enriching for both sides.
Censorship and Financial Pressure
Dan Kennedy asked Allen about censorship and financial cuts imposed by college administrations. Allen pointed to a remarkable piece of pro bono research conducted by two Penn State University graduates who had worked together at the student newspaper, the Collegian. Returning to the paper’s alumni board after their professional careers, they were shocked by its financial condition. Their study found that advertising revenue at the student newspapers they examined fell from 91 percent of total revenue in the 2006–2007 academic year to roughly half by 2020–2023. Other sources Allen consulted for a recent story confirmed that student media suffered the same post-2008 advertising collapse that devastated professional outlets and have been on a downhill slide ever since.
The financial picture is directly tied to the censorship question. Many student media organizations depend on subsidies from their universities, whether through student fees or grants from student government associations. That dependency puts the administration’s finger on the scale. Even when outright retaliation is rare, the mere possibility creates a chilling effect: students may pull back on tough coverage for fear that aggressive reporting could jeopardize their funding. Allen described this dynamic of self-censorship as a serious and underappreciated threat to the independence of student media.
Independence vs. Staying on Campus
Kennedy noted that some student papers have gone fully independent and digital to escape administrative control. Allen acknowledged the appeal but argued that remaining part of the university has real advantages. Universities provide infrastructure — accounting, payroll, office space — and employ advisors and advertising directors whose salaries would otherwise fall on the student organization. Staying on campus also simplifies fundraising, which has become an increasingly important revenue stream. Allen shared a colorful example from her own student newspaper days: at home basketball games, students would hold up copies of the paper during the opposing team’s lineup introductions and yell “Who cares?” before tearing the papers into confetti. That kind of nostalgic connection, she said, can be a powerful fundraising tool, and she encourages student media organizations across the country to find their own version of it — some unique tradition or campus presence that deepens the community’s attachment to the publication.
Advice for Administrators
Asked what college administrators should do to strengthen their student newspapers, Allen returned to a theme she had sounded throughout the conversation: stop stonewalling and start communicating. Administrators should sit for interviews, stop insisting on vetting questions in advance, and refrain from limiting students’ access to campus experts. A better approach, she said, would be to provide media training — tip sheets and guidance on how to prepare for an interview and what to expect from a reporter. Creating firewalls between the administration and student media is counterproductive for everyone. Clear, two-way communication, Allen argued, is the foundation of a healthy relationship between student journalists and the institutions they cover.
What Bob Allen Reads
Allen said she starts every morning with national headlines from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. She is a devoted reader of the Poynter Report by Tom Jones and a fan of CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter. She also maintains Google News alerts for terms like “student journalism” and “student-run newspaper” and has built — or, as she put it, “vibe coded” — an RSS feed scraper that delivers a daily digest of student media output from across the country. She hopes eventually to expand that tool and make it available to researchers and others who want a better window into the student media landscape.
