The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute has named Stacy Feldman, founder and publisher of Boulder Reporting Lab, to its 2023-24 class of RJI fellows.
The program gives individuals and their news organizations the opportunity to partner with RJI on “practical innovative projects for community-centered news, journalists and the communities they serve.”
Chosen projects typically involve “devising new strategies or models to solve a problem, building new tools, creating a training workshop/program or building a specific resource for journalists or newsrooms to utilize.” The published projects are free, accessible and open-source for everyone to use.
Feldman will build a guide to help local news organizations create pop-up, “micro” newsrooms with – and for – their communities to serve pressing information needs. The tool aims to offer smaller newsrooms a way to increase their ambition and impact, while providing emerging journalists or non-journalists the opportunity to be news shapers and make a difference in their cities and towns.
The idea for the community pop-up newsroom came out of a local collaboration between Boulder Reporting Lab and the Center for Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder. Partnering also with KUNC public radio and The Conversation, the two organizations created a pop-up newsroom, led by graduate students, to cover lingering and little-known health impacts of the devastating Marshall Fire. Earlier this month, the project won first place for Public Service journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies regional contest. The course is now in its second semester with a new group of students and topic.
Feldman aims to expand the pop-up newsroom concept to different segments of the community, and create a guide for BRL and other local news organizations to use and evolve over time.
She joins six other fellows from across the country who are working on projects ranging from tools to help newsrooms report factually on Latino and Hispanic communities and better cover climate disasters in real-time to reviving high school sports coverage in partnership with residents. The full list of RJI Fellows is here.
Boulder Reporting Lab is a nonprofit, 501c3 local news organization founded in 2021 to fill a gap in Boulder-local, public interest daily journalism.