Sacramento School Beat and its Origins from Steve O’Donoghue
Posting: Monday, October 10, 2022
I met Louis Freedberg, then director of EdSource, for coffee at the historic Sacramento train station. We worked together years ago in Youth News, a student news training program and early attempt at using digital media. During our conversation, we both ended up bemoaning the shrinking journalism landscape and discussed how few reporters there were to cover government.
I particularly was upset at the lack of education reporters. I had been at school board meetings where there was not a single reporter present. The stacks of contracts and other key documents piled in the back of the room went unread and unexamined.
Louis and I arrived at a similar conclusion: Why not train students to cover schools and districts to fill in news deserts, especially in low-income schools with large populations of underrepresented youth?
We garnered a small grant and launched a small pilot with several students from Richmond (CA) High School. A semi-retired professional journalist, Carol Pogash, who still strings for the New York Times and other publications, agreed to be what we designated as a writing
coach. She was a combination editor, mentor and coach. She helped students develop stories, taught them some AP style, edited and gave the students feedback, and passed their stories on to EdSource where Louis had a staff member vet the stories and make requests for fixes if needed.
Unfortunately, just as we started this effort, Covid hit. The school shut down. It was difficult for students to interview school sources since everyone was working from home. But we ran the effort for several months and learned some valuable lessons.
We needed more instruction time and more editing before we passed student work on to professional outlets. I spoke to Matt Perry, the administrator I worked with at the Sacramento County Office of Education in the spring of 2021 about converting the existing countywide student newspaper program I ran for SCOE into a student reporter program. Perry jumped at the opportunity. We started designing a program from scratch for what we termed reporter internships: Sacramento School Beat.
I recruited Karl Grubaugh, a former copy editor for the Sacramento Bee and a nationally recognized high school journalism adviser at Granite Bay High to work as a writing coach. Tess Townsend, a freelance journalist in Sacramento who had started up a journalism speaker program in the schools, also helped put the program together. Casey Nichols, a retired nationally renowned journalist from Rocklin, joined as our web guru.
The Dow Jones News Fund and the California Black Media both donated small grants to help augment the funding we had from SCOE, as well as to help spread the word about the program.
Covid shutdowns meant we couldn’t meet with classes or recruit students face-to-face in the schools. We passed the word to educators we knew who could reach out to students about the program. Teachers, a school board member, and an interested parent helped get the word out. We staffed our first class with 14 applicants. We trained them for two weeks on Zoom with the help of a dozen professional journalism presenters and some outstanding Northern California journalism educators.
The basic model we developed was to recruit students who wanted to report on their school and education issues, train them, support them with regular meetings and conferences via email and text, and pay them a stipend for their work. We required they produce one story a month for 10 months during the academic year. We then distributed the stories we published online at www.sacschoolbeat.com to all local news media for free.
The first year was learning on the job for us. We had a plan but encountered glitches as we went along. We discovered that school activities were serious competition for our student reporters’ time. That they needed more structure, not less, and plenty of instruction in Google Apps and AP Style as well as press law and copyright law, and help in understanding that teachers and principals didn’t decide what they would write or how.
We suffered a huge setback when Casey Nichols was felled by Covid in the spring of 2022. With heavy hearts, Karl and I filled in his duties. Casey had been our colleague in journalism education for decades.
Eleven of the original 14 student recruits from 2021 completed the year and celebrated at a recognition luncheon. Three stories produced by the students were picked up by local media and republished, our first successes at having student-produced journalism treated as professionally competent.
We began recruiting applicants for our second class in the spring of 2022. We contacted every high school counselor in Sacramento county. Over 50 students applied and we selected 21 (with several replacements on a waitlist). We trained them for two weeks with faculty from Sacramento State University and professional journalism presenters.
Extra funding from the James B. McClatchy Foundation, managed through Journalism Funding Partners, allowed us to double the number of student reporters and to plan enhancements. I am talking with the Sacramento Bee about co-hosting an editorial cartoon contest for local high school students. The winner would win a cash prize and be hired to produce an editorial cartoon monthly for sacschoolbeat.com.
When asked why she signed up for this program, Mira Loma High School senior, Kayli Huang, said, “I wanted to equip myself the necessary skills to professionally cover a news story at my school. This would enable me to improve my writing and bring awareness to current topics directly affecting youths in my community.” When asked what students get out of this program, sophomore Josh Cullers of Gat High School said, “I am learning a wide range of skills that are useful in all areas of professional life. Knowing how to interview someone and how to deal with sources in forming a cohesive news piece is something that I have already seen affecting my professional life with my teachers being impressed that I know so much on this subject. Plus I get a chance to build up a reputation and name for myself in a way that will allow me to have an advantage in looking for a career. Plus I get a great deal of enjoyment from this program, it’s great to be able to tell the whole of Sacramento about a small high school in a small town that they likely haven’t even heard of, and I get to be the one that gives them their only insight.”
Pictured: (Top) Kayli Huang (Bottom) Josh Cullers
The Communications Department at Sacramento State is partnering with us and we are talking about campus visits, possible workshops for high school students, and other ways to collaborate.
I am talking with SCOE about the possibility of setting up a dual enrolment journalism course for students where they would earn college and high school credits for participating in this program.
Last, I have been collaborating with the Contra Costa County Office of Education. the Journalism Department at Diablo Valley College, Ed TV and Local News Matters (a non-profit web-based news outlet for the Bay Area) to create a similar program in Contra Costa County that would also include broadcast journalism.
About Sacramento School Beat: is the website of the Student Education Reporter program, an effort funded by the Sacramento County Office of Education. This program trains Sacramento County high school students to become education reporters for their schools and districts to help compensate for the current shortage of professional education reporters and subsequent lack of coverage of schools and education in the region. Each student reporter works with a writing coach (a professional journalist or educator who act as coach, mentor, instructor and editor) throughout the year. All stories produced by students are provided free to local professional media outlets. The goal of this program is to increase media coverage of local Sacramento County schools and districts to benefit the students, the parents and educators.
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Media Contact for Sacramento School Beat: Steve O’Donoghue | Director | steveod@pacbell.net
Media Contact: Rusty Coats, Executive Director | rusty@jfp-local.org | (813) 277-8959
