Media School students report on rural communities and research the environment with support from the Restle Teaching Fellowship
Through the Restle Teaching Fellowship, several IU Media School students are reporting on rural communities and investigating news coverage of environmental issues in Southern Indiana.
The fellowship is supported by a gift from IU alumna Barbara (Blackledge) Restle. Restle worked in environmental activism and farming before she attended IU in the middle of her life to get a degree in journalism and political science. She also started a local conservation newspaper published in the 1960s and 1970s called The Balancer, where Restle worked as the editor and, for a long time, the only reporter.
Restle’s original gift created the Barbara Restle Press Law Project in 2017. That fund has been expanded to the Barbara Restle Fund to support research and teaching activities surrounding environmental media and communications and/or issues that threaten how the media functions to support democracy.
Last semester, the fellowship was awarded to Media School professors Kelley French and Suzannah Evans Comfort. In line with Restle’s intended focus, French developed a spring semester class on reporting in rural communities and Comfort developed a spring semester class on the intersection of the media and environment.
French’s class, Reporting on Rural Communities, is an advanced writing course where students are required to produce enterprise stories with a focus on rural communities in Southern Indiana. At the end of the semester, French intends for each student to have a story ready for publication.
“Everyone has a topical beat from healthcare to agriculture to transportation,” she said. “They are working on projects about everything from sustainable agriculture to news deserts and misinformation to the shortage of small animal veterinarians and maternal fetal medicine.”
In rural communities, French said there is a noticeable drop in news coverage because so many small town newspapers have gone away. And many of the papers that do remain exist in name only.
“They call them ghost papers because they don’t have staff and publish stories from nearby areas,” French said. “These news deserts are a source of misinformation because when people don’t have well reported news they can trust, they jump to conclusions and that’s how some conspiracy theories start. And it’s a disservice to communities facing serious issues.”
First-year graduate student Tyler Spence is a reporter in French’s class whose semester project focuses on the Morgan County Correspondent, a local newspaper founded in Martinsville last August. Spence said the newspaper is interesting because the editor is focused on for-profit print journalism, whereas a lot of startup journalism is nonprofit and digital only. In his reporting, Spence found that the paper is more successful than it anticipated for being so new.
“There’s clearly a demand for someone to go cover city council and high school sports,” he said. “This is really simple community journalism that just doesn’t exist anymore, and the Morgan County Correspondent is bringing that back and putting it into a newspaper.”
Spence, who received his bachelor’s degree from Marshall University in his home state of West Virginia, has some prior experience in reporting on rural communities and said he has noticed the power of small town communities.
“They are really tight knit, and oftentimes, not well understood by outsiders,” Spence said. “If you’re going to a unique cultural area like Appalachia, there’s a lot of stereotypes within the media about that group of people and how they have a poor relationship with outsiders coming in to try and tell their stories. What’s going on in small towns is often unheard of but really important.”
Haley Miller, a senior in French’s class, said she took the course to get a more nuanced take on rural communities. Her current class project is a story about a hospice chaplain and former minister in Brown County who is turning Harmony Baptist Church into an arts collective to offer services to hospice patients.
“He’s turning this old church into a center for people to come die,” Miller said. “They will have access to things like music therapy, meditation, and Reiki for free. And that’s the kind of thing I don’t think anyone would ever expect in Brown County, Indiana.”
Before the class, Miller said she had assumptions about rural communities regarding religion and conservatism. In reporting on the hospice chaplain, though, she said she has developed a more nuanced view on the beliefs and drivers within rural communities. In her reporting, Miller has conducted interviews and met with sources for the past couple months.
“The class is such a learning lab where we aren’t just talking about theories of journalism, but we are also calling someone every day and have new information to report back in each class,” Miller said. “It really forces us to be better journalists.”
While Reporting on Rural Communities is focused on groundwork, the other course supported by the Restle Teaching Fellowship requires students to engage in a deep analysis of how environmental issues make their way into the public sphere.
Associate professor Comfort’s class, Media and the Environment, looks at all major forms of communications to understand why there is a lack of coverage on environmental issues throughout the U.S. Comfort said the course is also a true reflection of Restle’s passions and gifts.
“I run my classes with a focus on conceptual issues first,” she said. “[I want us] thinking about questions like how and why journalists cover the environment. And what is the role of social media in advocacy for environmental change? Later in the semester, we’ll start doing more project-based work where students will apply what they learn to real work.”
Comfort also said one of the class goals is to talk about environmental issues in Southern Indiana specifically. For example, she said the class will talk about Lake Monroe and the burning in Hoosier National Forest.
“I want us to be engaged with issues facing our local community here because they rarely make it into the news,” she said. “The idea is that students will walk away from this class with a certain understanding of why some issues get more coverage and some don’t. Without an active activist community, it’s very easy for an organization to ignore a problem.”
With both Reporting on Rural Communities and Media and the Environment exposing students to a variety of issues that affect rural communities and environmental news coverage, is it the hope that student journalists will finish the semester with a better understanding of underrepresented areas and groups in Southern Indiana.