UAlbany, Spotlight News Win Award for Partnership to Strengthen Local Journalism
By Bethany Bump
ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 11, 2025) — The University at Albany and the Spotlight News were awarded a Global Youth & News Media Prize for Journalism for a collaboration that uses student journalists to bolster local news coverage.
The Global Youth & News Media, a nonprofit organization based in France, developed the prize in 2018 as a way to honor organizations that innovate as they strengthen engagement between news media and young people.
This year’s prize theme centered around youth who are helping local journalism to survive. Awardees were selected for developing collaborations with news organizations in which young people help strengthen local journalism, and 19 recipients from 16 countries earned Gold, Silver and Community awards for their efforts.
UAlbany and the Spotlight News won a Gold Award for a partnership developed last year that paired students in the University’s journalism program with the weekly newspaper based in Delmar.
The newspaper’s staff has shrunk from eight to just two people in the past decade, leaving Albany County residents with less knowledge of what’s happening in their towns and communities. The addition of about seven UAlbany journalism students reporting for the paper during the 2024-25 academic year helped to significantly bolster its coverage and student-produced work was even part of a package selected for a New York Press Association Better Newspaper Contest for Arts Coverage award.
“The collaboration between the University at Albany and Spotlight News provides a compelling example of how journalism students can directly bolster a struggling local news outlet,” wrote the international jury panel that selected this year’s winners. “The students' extensive reporting on local government and community life, leading to over three dozen published stories and an award for arts coverage, clearly demonstrates a significant impact on local news coverage and quality.”
The collaboration, led by Elaine Salisbury, director of UAlbany’s journalism program, was supported by grants from the SUNY Institute for Local News and the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont.
Students gained hands-on journalism experience throughout the partnership and covered stories ranging from development proposals and town budgets to job hirings, student successes, artists, county elections and local protests.
The program’s success led to two students securing internships with local news outlets and a $10,000 grant from the University to expand the initiative to other disciplines on campus, including criminal justice, business and computer science.
"I am so proud of our students and grateful to Spotlight News for trusting them to report under its name,” Salisbury said. “The hands-on experience — covering meetings, researching databases, and talking with officials and community members — was invaluable in helping them grow as critical thinkers."
Spotlight News Publisher John McIntyre said the program has “made a difference in the communities we serve because it allows us to cover topics with real people and not rely on provided information and train young journalists at the same time. These students are the future of our craft."
"Book learning only gets you so far and the experience these students receive is so important as they venture into their first job," he said. "For us, it is an opportunity to work with the next generation of journalists and teach them what we know and especially how we communicate with a wide variety of people. We are honored by the prize, but more honored by the success of the program and its journalists."
As local news deserts grow worldwide, Global Youth & News Media hopes that organizations interested in the future of local news can learn from the success of the winning projects and develop their own collaborations.
"I had to stay completely out of the judging because I am happily linked to the university as a graduate with the class of 1973,” said Aralynn Abare McMane, executive director of the nonprofit. “I was a staffer at the Albany Student Press and participant in the pre-journalism program under Bill Rowley all of which inspired me to go into news, then teach it and then get a doctorate to study it.”
“I am delighted the judges chose this case as a top winner,” she said. “That current students get to do real reporting for audiences beyond the university itself is a big win for all. They get real-world experience and the Spotlight gets help it clearly needs with the bonus of working with young people up close."
More information about this year's winners is available here.