Somewhere in America each week, two more newspapers call it quits. Some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have closed since 2005, and just 6,500 remain. In places where once there was vibrant local coverage, there are now news deserts.

The Community News Service at The University of Vermont thinks it has an answer to this growing blight: student journalists. UVM’s Community News Service, or CNS, partners with nearly half of Vermont’s approximately 40 news outlets to provide them with reporting free of charge, including VTDigger.

Now the Vermont model is going national. Last month, UVM and the Knight Foundation announced a $400,000 grant to launch the Center for Community News at UVM. The idea is for student reporters and other citizen journalists around the country to fill the local news void.

We spoke with Richard Watts, coordinator of the Community News Service at UVM and director of the national Center for Community News; Lisa Scagliotti, founder and editor of Waterbury Roundabout, a new community news outlet; and Dom Minadeo, a UVM senior, assistant editor of The Winooski News and a reporter for CNS.

Watts said that 1,300 communities around the country no longer have any local news coverage. 

“That's bad for democracy,” he said. “If you don't have a local news source, you don't know what's going on in your community, and it's very hard to engage … Research shows that losing local news increases divisions and polarization and undercuts all these important institutions that we believe in.”