Amanda Bright | Nieman Lab
For most of our journalism majors, reporting for The Oglethorpe Echo is akin to studying abroad.
With only 15,000 residents served by a single stoplight and grocery store, Oglethorpe County is quite different from its neighbor Athens, home of the University of Georgia, or the Atlanta suburbs from which many of our students hail.
We started this news-academic partnership — stepping in to prevent a news desert — because we knew it would be mutually beneficial. Students would gain exposure to (and perhaps learn to love) community journalism, and the residents of a rural county would continue to have local news.
In the first 18 months, we added six digital products, won awards, tripled advertising, and doubled subscriptions to the 149-year-old weekly newspaper. An unmitigated success, right?
As our nonprofit chairman Dink NeSmith would say, “the devil’s in the details.”
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