COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The Philip Merrill College of Journalism‘s Capital News Service at the University of Maryland and Virginia Commonwealth University‘s Capital News Service are creating a collaborative, regional news service bringing together several dozen reporters across multiple platforms in bureaus in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
This week, the two student-run, professionally edited news organizations, with bureaus in Washington, Richmond, Annapolis and College Park, will begin sharing and distributing each other’s stories and multimedia. The two news organizations also plan to work together on issues of importance to Maryland, Virginia and the District, including the Chesapeake Bay, transportation, economic development, immigration and education.
This unique collaborative effort between student-staffed news organizations will deliver public policy news and analysis to the citizens of Maryland and Virginia in multiple formats via partner news organizations, destination websites, a nightly on-air television newscast and affiliated social media channels, including Twitter and Facebook.
Founded in 1990, the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s Capital News Service covers public policy news throughout Maryland. Capital News Service reporters have won numerous awards for their Maryland reporting, including the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Awards, the Hearst Foundation Journalism Awards Program and student Emmys. They’ve covered national political conventions, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other national stories. Capital News Service clients include The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, WTOP Radio and many of the daily, weekly and monthly newspapers in Maryland.
The Capital News Service at Virginia Commonwealth University was founded in 1994. It serves more than 90 newspapers and news websites across Virginia, ranging from metro dailies like the Daily Press of Newport News to online start-ups such as the Patch community sites in Northern Virginia. VCU’s Capital News Service program has won several awards in college journalism competitions, such as the Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards Program and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence contest. The program also uses various social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Tumblr, and it produces a weekly radio program in conjunction with VCU’s student radio station, WVCW.
About University of Maryland
The University of Maryland is the state’s flagship university and one of the nation’s preeminent public research universities. Ranked No. 19 among public universities by U.S. News & World Report, it has 27 academic programs in the U.S News Top 10 and 71 in the Top 25. The Institute of Higher Education (Jiao Tong University, Shanghai), which ranks the world’s top universities based on research, puts Maryland at No. 38 in the world and No. 13 among U.S. public universities. For the fourth consecutive year, the University of Maryland ranked in the top 10 of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine’s list of Best Values in Public Colleges for 2012-13. The university has produced six Nobel laureates and seven Pulitzer Prize winners and includes scores of Fulbright scholars and nearly 50 members of the national academies. The university is making entrepreneurship and innovation one of its signature features and is also recognized for its commitment to diversity. For more information about the University of Maryland, visit www.umd.edu.
About VCU and the VCU Medical Center
Virginia Commonwealth University is a major, urban public research university with national and international rankings in sponsored research. Located in downtown Richmond, VCU enrolls more than 31,000 students in 222 degree and certificate programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-six of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU’s 13 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University compose the VCU Medical Center, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers. For more, see www.vcu.edu.
Contacts:
Rafael Lorente, UMD, 202-841-2375
Jeff South, VCU, 804-827-0253
