New at the BU Summer Journalism Academy (BUSJ) this year, a pilot partnership allowed high school participants to pitch, report, and write stories for the Daily Free Press—BU’s independent, student-run newspaper. In the past, stories written during the three-week immersive experience were published primarily on The Terrier, a news site created expressly for the academy, or in participants’ high school publications. But Burt Glass, the BUSJ director and director of marketing and communications at COM, says he and BUSJ program manager Ermolande Jean-Simon began looking for a bigger platform that would publish student stories.

“I knew that the idea of getting a clip is so important to a student, especially high school students who are thinking about applying to college, exploring whether they want to go into journalism as a profession, or just want the satisfaction of seeing their name in print,” says Glass. They first looked for a local newspaper to pitch the idea. But amid the closures of small- and medium-sized newspapers across the commonwealth, they were unsuccessful. “The answer has been right here in our backyard the whole time, and that’s the Daily Free Press.”

So Glass and Jean-Simon reached out to the paper’s student advisory board last winter with their plan: the Daily Free Press would get an influx of pitched and assigned stories that have been edited by an institute instructor, to publish during the summer and start of the academic year, when news production is typically slower. BUSJ participants would get coveted clips in a multimedia daily newspaper with a print circulation of 3,500 and more than 180,000 monthly pageviews online. The Daily Free Press board was enthusiastic, and incoming editor Chloe Patel (’24) says she saw the win-win right away.

“I’m really excited, honestly, to have content to publish [in the summer] and to get high schoolers published,” she says.

BUSJ was launched in 2009 by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting (NECIR), which was housed at the time at COM, with 23 student journalists participating, Glass says. BU faculty and area journalists teach courses on news reporting and photojournalism in the morning, and participants report stories each afternoon. With their provided MBTA passes in hand, students explore Boston in groups on the weekends and in the evenings. This summer, 66 high school juniors and seniors from as far away as Brazil, Colombia, Greece, and China piled into Warren Towers for the three-week residential academy. Another 60 students joined a learn-from-home BUSJ experience, reporting and writing stories on their local communities.

While academy instructors edited student stories and oversaw fact-checks, Patel approved the initial story pitches and edited them for house style before publishing. For Patel, the experience brought her full-circle: she attended BUSJ in 2019, an experience that helped her choose to attend COM as an undergraduate. “It would have been so cool” to have the stories she wrote that summer appear in the Daily Free Press, she says.

“They asked great questions, and they seemed super engaged,” Patel says. “They were a very engaged group who were all very eager to write.”

BUSJ stories published by the Daily Free Press include features about the viral marketing machine behind the Barbie movie and a BU student’s vintage clothing startup, Girls With The Fits. Patel says additional stories will be published into the fall.

It wasn’t all reporting, however, at BUSJ. Guest speakers like WBUR arts and culture reporter Cristella Guerra, Michael Holley of NBC Sports Boston and an associate professor of the practice of journalism, and NBC10 Boston investigative journalist Ryan Kath (’05) showed BUSJ participants what a career in journalism might look like. Jean-Simon says that while most participants this year came into the program with a goal of working at a print publication, tours of the NBC10 Boston and WBUR newsrooms may have changed a few minds. She’s just thrilled to see where they all go from here, she adds.

“After the program ends, I get to hear how many of them come to BU or another journalism school and flourish in the industry, all because they came to our program and got to write stories they care about,” Jean-Simon says. “This year, they got to have them published in the [Daily Free Press]. This brings me, our program staff and instructors so much joy. I hope they thank us in their award speeches.”