Democracy and Journalism for the 21st Century: Reporting on Solutions

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In the United States, democracy and journalism go together: the Continental Congress placed ads in local newspapers to crowdsource the grievances that appeared in the Declaration of Independence; the framers of the Constitution enshrined freedom of the press as the First Amendment; Black and immigrant journalists centered community collaboration to make change in the 19th century and beyond. Today, however, both democracy and journalism are in decline. Roughly 3,500 local papers have vanished across the past two decades, and political scientists have argued that in 2025, the American political system is best described not by “democracy” but “competitive authoritarianism.” Tracking these dual crises, this course seeks to discover and follow mutually supportive paths for revitalizing democracy and journalism. As we seek answers in theory and practice, we’ll adopt a pro-democracy, but non-partisan lens, and we’ll take a local, rather than national, focus to observe how democracy operates from the ground up and what we miss when local journalism goes missing. As we report on solutions that citizens bring to bear on democratic problems, we’ll endeavor to make the abstract values of liberty and equality into something people can feel and touch, rendering democracy as tangible an issue as the functionality of Wi-Fi in your dorm room or the wages paid the person who prepares your dinner. The course will conclude with a phased reporting project that centers a concrete element of democracy in a student-produced story (medium open). This course is sponsored by the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy, but insofar as journalism and democracy shape our common future, the course aims to engage students from all majors and minors, and it will embrace diverse disciplinary lenses and ideological points of view.