The News Lab
The News Lab at Penn State, housed in the Department of Journalism and led by Maggie Messitt, the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice, facilitates partnerships between professional news organizations and student journalists — regularly collaborating on long-form and special projects.
Recent Collaborations and Special Projects
A six-month-long reporting effort by Penn State journalism students that included three separate site visits, dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of preparation has produced “East Palestine: One Year Later,” an in-depth, immersive look at the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment in February 2023 and its ongoing impact. Photo: Jackson Ranger
East Palestine: One Year Later — A six-month-long reporting effort by Penn State journalism students that included three separate site visits, dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of preparation produced an in-depth, immersive look at the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment in February 2023 and its ongoing impact. The students translated their reporting into an immersive experience using the app Gesso, which is typically a platform for self-guided walking tours in cities and for self-guided museum tours, allowing visitors to engage with an exhibit on their own. For these purposes, the Gesso platform allows listeners and readers to find themselves more intimately inside the story, traveling alongside the train, walking inside someone’s home, stepping into Sulphur Run and experiencing the trauma of displacement.
Navigating Inflation — A collaboration between the News Lab and WPSU. Between October 2022 and March 2023, a team of student journalists visited Tyrone in Blair County several times with the aim of listening to residents and workers talk about the impact of inflation on their businesses, households and day-to-day lives.
The News Lab also ...
- conducts badging programs for students to help hone their journalism and storytelling skills and
- launched Centre Documenters as part of a partnership with SpotlightPA. Centre Documenters trains and pays note takers to attend municipal meetings to help enhance access and transparency for municipal government. Since that launch, the News Lab has expanded the note-taking service to share information with media outlets that serve Centre County.