About
CommunityWire.Miami is an independent, community news outlet in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.
The news service, staffed primarily by graduate journalism students, provides informative and interesting coverage of the university’s nearby cities, including:
- Miami
- Coral Gables
- Key Biscayne
- Pinecrest
- South Miami
- West Miami
CommunityWire.Miami also covers the Miami neighborhoods of:
- Brickell
- Downtown Miami
- Coconut Grove
- Little Havana
- Richmond Heights
History of the School of Communication graduate news service program at the University of Miami:
For more than a decade, the news service, then called the U/Miami News Service, successfully provided hundreds of stories and photos to the various Neighbors sections and to other local newspapers and magazines. The U/Miami News Service was launched in August 1991 with six print journalism graduate students. Five completed the program the following year in May 1992. The program started a month before the start of fall semester to give students, none of whom had significant journalism experience in their undergraduate years, a headstart on learning the community and the basics of reporting and writing.
Although we were not the first college-based news service, we pioneered the concept of newspaper-generated stories, which allowed our students to receive actual story assignments from our newspaper clients. Other universities, including Florida International University, launched similar news services based on our model.
Although U/Miami News Service bylines appeared in The Sun-Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, The Miami Times, Miami Today, the South Florida Times and in a few local magazines, The Miami Herald Neighbors was our biggest supporter.
Following a stint of low enrollment of print graduate students, the School of Communication shifted to a multimedia-based curriculum focus to help students better prepare for today’s changing newsrooms.
CommunityWire.Miami is launch
Under the direction of Dean Karin Wilkins and department chair Sam Terilli, the School of Communication revived the news service in the fall semester 2021 to give students a chance again to earn bylines and showcase their work in professional publications. Starting with our graduate M.A. program in journalism and gradually including experienced undergraduates, CommunityWire.Miami produces news stories across different platforms or modes of communication (i.e., writing for print, the web, broadcasting, videography, photography and new media). Students write stories that are offered to local affiliated media such as the Miami Herald, WLRN, smaller community-based newspapers and campus-based publications. Students also generate stories that are posted to our news service website. In some instances, local community newspapers assign stories to be reported by our students.
CommunityWire.Miami Logo
School of Communication professor Randy Stano created a logo in spring 2022 for the news service. It was first used for the news service’s April 26 community forum with local mayors and city managers. It also is used on the news service website and social media.
Community Coverage
CommunityWire.Miami reporters focus on neighborhoods surrounding the university. Issues affecting South Florida’s multi-ethnic communities, the environment, safety, healthcare and the area’s vast young adult communities will be among the topics covered by the news service.
The managing editor of the service, a faculty member in the School of Communication, guides news service students through the reporting and editing process. The managing editor is assisted by other SoC broadcast, visual and digital faculty.
The news service during its first semester had nine reporters, including a senior journalism major and a graduate student from a department outside of the School of Communication. Half of the students were fluent in Spanish and could navigate South Florida’s diverse ethnic communities. The students spent the semester working on large- and small-group reporting projects. One of the stories, an assignment proposed by SoC professor Erin Brown, highlighted the challenges remaining in Surfside, three months after the condo collapse. The story was offered to The Miami Hurricane.
Another group reporting project focused on how South Florida movie theaters fared during the pandemic. That story was offered to the Distraction magazine:
https://www.distractionmagazine.com/back-on-screen/
Getting stories published in campus media had a two-fold purpose: Student media leaders felt they could benefit from in-depth stories written by grad students; the news service needed some published articles to promote the students’ work to local news media outlets.
Today, largely in response to shrinking newspaper staffs across the country and the challenges newspapers face in creating sustaining economic models, the University of Miami is one of approximately 120 universities that sponsor student reporting programs that provide local news.
According to the Center for Community News based at the University of Vermont, 2,000 student reporters in university-led programs published more than 10,00 stories in local news outlets in 2023.
The future of local news is dire
By Barbara Gutierrez
The United States has lost more than 2,500 newspapers since 2005, or 25 percent of the total number of papers in the country, according to a 2022 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
A new report released in November by the Medill School of Journalism found that the rate of newspaper closures has accelerated, now at 2.5 closures per week with more than 130 confirmed newspaper closings or mergers in the last year.
The result is that a growing number of Americans are living in “news deserts” without community newspapers or with newspapers with diminished staffs that make it nearly impossible for their journalists to be the watchdogs of the communities’ institutions—considered to be one of the bedrocks of a healthy democracy.
This situation has prompted the University of Miami School of Communication and several other universities,including the University of Florida and the University of California Berkeley, to release a statement in support of news initiatives that will help to promote local news coverage. The consortium of universities is working on a report on this subject that will be released in February at a Knight Media Forum.
“We believe that journalism is essential for good governance, which calls upon us as citizens to be informed and engaged,” said Karin Wilkins, dean of the School of Communication. “We appreciate these kinds of opportunities to collaborate to strengthen local and community news particularly. Research demonstrates that we are more likely to trust local news and to rely on community sources of information to navigate our economies, our health systems, and our climate actions. These programs, along with the compelling student work we currently support, give students opportunities to contribute to our communities as well as gain professional experience.”
The School of Communication offers a news service called CommunityWire Miami, where graduate student reporters are assigned coverage of neighboring cities and communities throughout South Florida, including Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, and Richmond Heights.
Their stories have appeared on the school’s website, the University’s student-run Distraction Magazine, and sometimes in local newspapers including the Miami Herald and Miami Today, according to Tsitsi D. Wakhisi, associate professor of professional practice who oversees the news operation.
Wakhisi is a veteran newswoman with extensive experience in community reporting and editing as a former Miami Herald Neighbors editor. She held various other newsroom positions at newspapers.
“Covering local news is important because the residents of these cities are no longer informed as they used to be,” said Wakhisi. “The local news media don’t have the resources to staff the cities and to make sure that all of those stories that matter get covered. Those small stories can make a difference.”
Wakhisi, who is writing a textbook on the coverage of local news, and other communication faculty members contributed to the consortium report coming out later this month. She said the report will look at the successes and challenges faced by the different institutions as they run classes and on-campus newsroom operations.
Some of those challenges include how to attract and retain readers in an age where many get their news from social media and other digital sources. The schools will also investigate ways to make news more accessible as well as integrating multimedia elements into the stories, said Wakhisi.
“Decades ago, the hometown newspaper would curate the news,” she said. “Now everyone is a news curator.”
CommunityWire reporters have covered community forums with local mayors with the mission of understanding that city’s needs and concerns, said Wakhisi. One such forum in 2022 explored how local cities were faring post-pandemic. The 11 students now enrolled in the program are interviewing local mayors on the topic of the “State of their City,” said Wakhisi.
Sabrina Catalan, a second semester graduate student who works for CommunityWire, has been assigned the city of Homestead, which is her hometown. In her reporting she has found stories that show the life of everyday people and places, including one about a small Mexican bakery called La Patrona.
“It was interesting to do this,” she said. “The owner was very passionate about passing his culture to the community through his bakery, and he is very conscious of people’s needs so the prices are not very high.”
Catalan said that in today’s environment local news should be more accessible. She said that covering Homestead has helped her become much more knowledgeable about the community she lives in.
“It is certainly more important to have news about people who live near you than national news,” she said. “Those stories matter. It is important to know about the people and issues that are around you.”
Contact Us
For more information, please contact:
CommunityWire.Miami
University of Miami
School of Communication
P. O. Box 248127
Coral Gables, Florida 33124-2105
Email: communitywire@miami.edu
Phone: 305-284-6943
Instagram: @CommWireMiami
Twitter: @CommWireMiami