Statehouse Reporting Project, led by Missouri School of Journalism, launches with $250,000+ grant from Arnold Ventures
By Austin Fitzgerald
Photos by Nate Brown
COLUMBIA, Mo. (March 10, 2025) — The Missouri School of Journalism is leading an effort with newsrooms at colleges and universities all over the country to create more informed, collaborative coverage of state governments.
Launched with the help of a grant for more than $250,000 from philanthropic organization Arnold Ventures, the Statehouse Reporting Project harnesses existing, student-powered statehouse newsrooms to work together in ways that are rare for student operations.
“We want to show that by working together across state lines, we can improve the public’s knowledge and understanding of what’s happening in state legislatures,” said Mark Horvit, head of the Missouri School of Journalism’s Statehouse program and director of the new reporting network. “If this works, then as it grows, we’ll be able to expand the reach.”
A significant portion of the membership comes courtesy of the Center for Community News (CCN) at the University of Vermont, which supports local newsrooms with student-produced content in Vermont and nationwide. Horvit credited CCN and its executive director, Richard Watts, with getting things in motion by organizing meetings between the leadership of nearly two dozen student statehouse programs.
That group became the foundation for the network, but it was the grant that finally took the concept from a dream to a reality. Horvit was able to hire an editor and pay student writers, forming a staff capable of managing collaborative content production across states and time zones.
Currently, the network encompasses programs in 14 states, including The Statehouse File, an Indiana Statehouse news site staffed by journalism students at Franklin College. Now in its 20th year, the program exemplifies the public service values behind statehouse reporting — like many statehouse programs, it offers coverage for free to media outlets, and its stories have appeared in national outlets like CNN and state-level publications like the Indianapolis Business Journal.
“We get used by a lot of small newspapers that don’t have access to the AP wire and otherwise wouldn’t have statehouse coverage or state politics coverage,” said Colleen Steffen, executive editor of The Statehouse File. “So I feel like we’re doing a lot of cool things on a lot of levels: filling news deserts, helping small media and giving students real-world experience.”
But beyond these localized impacts, the network is also connecting student newsrooms that serve an increasingly crucial role in the wider news ecosystem: As of 2023, close to 10% of statehouse reporters are students, helping to counter — or at least soften — a steep decline in the number of full-time, professional statehouse reporters over the last decade.
“I didn’t know if there were any other programs like us at all,” Steffen added. “I was operating in a bubble. Now there’s this infrastructure around the idea of getting students more on a national stage, telling national stories.”
In some ways, the program is a natural extension of the concept driving the Missouri News Network, the Missouri School of Journalism’s five professional newsrooms working collaboratively to plan coverage and share resources.
“A lot of stories don’t stop at artificial borders, like state boundaries or even national boundaries,” Horvit said. “So it’s becoming more and more important for students to learn how to work with other journalists.”
Therein lies another benefit of the grant: The network now subscribes to BillTrack50, a service that tracks legislation in real time across all 50 states, including the federal level.
“It’s going to allow us to look for trends,” Horvit said. “If there’s a bill happening in Florida, for example, we want to see if there are similar or identical bills making their way through other legislatures. How far have they gotten? Who is sponsoring them?”
The network’s first story, published in early February, offered a textbook example of that approach. The story combined local details about immigration bills in a variety of states with a national perspective on trends toward more aggressive immigration enforcement and deportation policies.
Featuring contributions from nine of the network’s newsrooms and a byline from School of Journalism graduate student Natanya Friedheim, the project found a national audience and predated other national coverage.
From here on out, as the network works to identify more legislative trends, its members hope to build a trend of their own: one of repeat success.
Updated: March 14, 2025