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A 2025 Muck Rack survey found that more than a third of working journalists identify as creators.

How should that influence the way you teach, advise and mentor the future journalists in your charge?

Hopefully, with the help of your journalism school.

Chatwan Mongkol, the editor of The Nutgraph newsletter for student journalists, has a new piece out today for the Student Press Report. In it, he examines American journalism schools’ efforts to embrace the creator economy and change curriculum to better prepare students for a future that will increasingly include creator roles.

From his story: “Schools are starting to recognize that their students are going to graduate into a very different media landscape than the one the curriculum was built for,” said Liz Kelly Nelson, Project C founder and a co-founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas.

Is your department or student media operation creator-curious? I would love to hear from you if so.

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Headlines

NPR has announced the 10 finalists in its College Podcast Challenge. Lots of good stuff in there to share with students looking to jumpstart their storytelling.

Awful Announcing (silly name, great sports site) is reporting that major photography organizations like Getty and the Associated Press groups are boycotting men's basketball games managed by the Gazelle Group due to their photo policies. Read this if you send students to cover sporting events.

I am a huge fan of Jeremy Caplan's Wonder Tools, a newsletter from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s director of teaching and learning. This week's installment might be particularly useful to journalism professors, as it spells out 10 practical ways to use AI in your teaching.

The latest from Adriana Lacy’s Influencer Journalism Newsletter hit me like a bolt: Are there any professors on campus with big TikTok or Instagram followings based on their areas of expertise or research, and if so, is there room to partner with them?

For College Watch, a student journalist at Columbia writes about the campus mood after ICE agents misrepresented themselves and arrested a student.

Here's a nice feature on the history and role of Black student newspapers at HBCUs.

I got a little thrill when I read “(as) first reported by the GW Hatchet, a campus newspaper” in the Washington Post's story about the sale of a university satellite campus in Ashburn, Virginia, to Amazon. Here's the Hatchet’s version.

More solid reporting from student media around significant university personnel ties to the Epstein files — this time from the Alligator at the University of Florida.

Here’s a piece from the good folks at FIRE: The secret war against student journalists.

Resources

The Solutions Journalism Network is accepting applications for the 2026/27 Student Media Challenge, which awards grants and provides training for eight college media organizations annually. Learn more in an information session Tuesday, March 10, at 1 p.m. Eastern. The application deadline is March 20.

You've got a little more than a month to apply for the Scripps Howard Fund’s Student Media Sustainability Project. Four to five college newsrooms will get a year’s worth of coaching and training across their entire enterprise, from audience to revenue to management. Here’s an FAQ and the application — deadline is April 12.

Feedback

I had the pleasure this week of presenting virtually at the annual ACP conference in San Francisco on fundraising for student media, along with super sharp leaders at Duke, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Michigan.

If you or your students need help thinking through a fundraising campaign, consider booking a free 30-minute consultation with me. I'm happy to talk through that, or anything else that's weighing on your student journalism brain.

Now get out there and enjoy that extra daylight!