Young people are often at the center of our fiercest debates. In the first weeks of school this year VTDigger has reported on covid policy disputes in Bellows Falls, Rutland, and Hinesburg, among other communities. A photo of a student confronting protesters at CVU went viral. The Black Lives Matter flag was raised, stolen, and raised again at Mill River High School in Clarendon.
At this critical juncture for our democracy, it’s clear we need more young voices in the public sphere. VTDigger’s Underground Workshop empowers young Vermonters to shape the discussion as journalists, reporting and publishing for a statewide audience.
The Underground Workshop is a collaborative community, bringing together student journalists from across the state. The project is led by a team of student editors, representing ten of Vermont’s high schools and colleges. We gather on zoom every two weeks, on Thursday evenings, with student work at the center of each meeting. Any student is welcome to attend, to pitch ideas for stories, to submit drafts for feedback, or just to listen in.
In our first year we published a range of successful feature stories, including several invitational series that explored issues with installments from several schools. Our series about the BLM flag in our schools will conclude this month. This year we have new invitational series in the works, and we are also offering simpler opportunities to contribute, with the goal of making publication accessible for more students.
These three assignments are open for submissions on an ongoing basis:
Snapshots:
Capture a moment in your community, in the form of 3-5 high-quality photographs, each distinct from the others, and accompanied by a short piece of writing, giving context and quoting from people who appear in the pictures. This is wide open to interpretation: it doesn’t have to be “news,” it just has to be interesting for a statewide audience. A great opportunity for a journalist to partner with a photographer.
Dispatches:
VTDigger does its best to report on all of Vermont but can’t cover the news in every community. Some towns have excellent publications of their own, but there are lots of gaps. Student journalists can contribute to local news coverage in the form of “news briefs”: short articles of a few paragraphs, with a lead, a quote or two, and a couple of good photos.
Voices:
Interviews with people who have a story to tell, an unusual or underrepresented perspective, or special insight into an issue of statewide relevance. The finished Q&A opens with an engaging lead and a paragraph or two introducing the interview subject, then transitions to an edited interview, with a few strong photographs to complement the text.
These are just a few ways to contribute. We’re eager to support students’ own ideas for stories or projects, in any media (not just articles, but podcasts, video, etc.). We also work with teachers to develop projects for their students. Student journalism can be a transformative experience of civic engagement, and can be integrated into projects across all subject areas.
Please help spread the word, and for more information, please email Ben Heintz, the Workshop’s editor, at ben@vtdigger.org.
