Journalism Program

Brandeis in Brookline

Brandeis University course partners with Brookline.News to produce student journalism with a purpose.

Story by Willow Bosworth

Just about every Thursday evening since January, a group of Brandeis University students has piled into a van, battled evening rush hour along Route 9, and then fanned out in Brookline Village to cover the community. They’ve been putting their classroom learning into practice while also helping to reimagine local journalism.

Enrolled in Professor Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism course, the students have spent the spring semester participating in an innovative partnership between the Brandeis Journalism Program and the independent, nonprofit digital startup Brookline.News.

“I wouldn’t even necessarily consider this a class. It’s almost like a workspace” says River Simard, a sophomore majoring in international and global studies and minoring in journalism. Sam Mintz, founding editor of Brookline.News (and a 2015 graduate of Brandeis), agrees. “It’s somewhere between a class and an internship. It’s really unique, it’s like this hybrid model…I think Neil was brilliant for coming up with it.”

Swidey, director of the Brandeis journalism program and professor of the Reinventing class, credits Ellen Clegg, co-founder of Brookline.News and co-chair of its steering committee. Former colleagues at the Boston Globe, Clegg and Swidey jointly hatched the idea of the partnership. Drawing on their Globe experience, they worked with Mintz  to transform a meeting room in the Village Works co-working space in Brookline Village into a newsroom every Thursday night.

“Every person in a chair in the room where we do our workshop is learning,” Swidey says. “I’m learning, Sam’s learning, Ellen’s learning, and all the students are learning because there’s an exchange happening.”

The breadth of student involvement extends well beyond that newsroom. In between the weekly workshops, students have traveled, either on their own or in pairs, from the Brandeis campus in Waltham to Brookline to report their stories. As Clegg sees it, what sets the partnership apart from other experiences is that “you come to Brookline, you walk around, you get out and talk to people, you take pictures, you’ve done really fun social media takes, you’re really immersing yourself in the culture of a town.” Students have produced a wide range of journalism -- from serious news stories to lighter features – in a variety of formats, including humorous short videos.

Left to right: Neil Swidey, Ellen Clegg, and Sam Mintz at Village Works. Photo by Khimaya Bagla.

Adetolani Odogiyon, a graduating senior double-majoring in neuroscience and public health, says this hands-on style of reporting has dramatically changed how she interacts with others. While most of her previous college courses “didn’t require me to do too much communicating with people,” she says she is now  “a lot more confident speaking to people” she doesn’t know. She appreciates how the experience has pushed her out of her comfort zone. 

An international student, Odogiyon says she has also enjoyed the chance to embed herself in Brookline and understand the culture of a new community. While reporting on a story about the Cypress Field, she was fascinated to learn that town opinions about turf choices could be so divided – and passionate. “I’m from Nigeria, so I’m not really used to things of this nature being of such importance to people,” she says, adding, “my knowledge about grass now I’d say has increased exponentially!”

The course roster features students from as nearby as West Roxbury and Somerville, and as far away as Nigeria, China, Northern Ireland and Eswatini. Swidey marvels at the wonderful camaraderie that has formed in a group “that was largely strangers at the beginning of the semester.” River Simard, one of two students in the class who drives the group to-and-from Brookline each week, points out that the van rides have helped foster a sense of community. “It’s forced bonding,” he jokes.

Adetolani Odogiyon showing her work to Sam Mintz and the rest of the JOUR 109b class. Photo by Khimaya Bagla.

Saaya Daga, a first-year student minoring in journalism, stresses that the hands-on nature of the Reinventing class has paired nicely with the other course she is taking with Swidey this semester: Ethics in Journalism. In Ethics, she says, “you’re talking about something that’s happened or that might happen to you, but it’s kind of in the world of ‘if.’” Her work in Brookline has helped bring those hypothetical lessons to life, Daga says. “Everything you talk about in ethics feels very, very relevant when we’re actually reporting.” 

Swidey agrees, noting how many of his Ethics lessons have naturally emerged during the weekly news workshops in Brookline. “Ethical issues, new technology issues, storytelling questions and expertise, the human component, how you interview people, how you get around roadblocks, how you adapt, how you deal with setbacks,” he says, “all these things have organically come up in our discussions.”

On Tuesdays, the Reinventing class has met on campus, with Swidey exposing students to a variety of cutting-edge storytelling approaches. He has also invited to campus a number of entrepreneurial journalists as guest speakers. These include Adrian Walker and Evan Allen, who led the Boston Globe’s podcast and narrative series reexamining of the notorious Stuart murder case; Matt Bai, the Washington Post political columnist who has moved into screenplays, cowriting the Hugh Jackman movie about Gary Hart called The Frontrunner; and Matt Shearer, the WBZ reporter who is adapting audio person-on-the-street reporting for the TikTok age.