By DANIELLE JAMES & ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING – It was 40 years ago this fall that newspaper publisher Richard Milliman launched a course called the Capital Reporting Program at Michigan State University’s Journalism School, where he was an instructor.
The course – soon renamed Capital News Service, or CNS – focused on coverage of state government, public policy and politics, with three major purposes: advance students’ reporting and writing skills, familiarize them with some of the “intricacies and complications of state government” and provide readers with coverage of their government’s activities in Lansing.
The intent wasn’t to cover breaking news or duplicate other news organizations, but instead to concentrate on underreported aspects of state government, like commissions and agencies.
As Milliman wrote at the time, that approach was “perhaps less glamorous than the governor’s office and the Legislature, but does have direct impact on communities and their citizens.”
CNS began with a roster of 10 student reporters and 10 subscribing newspapers, including three that remain members today: the Cadillac News, Holland Sentinel and Traverse City Record-Eagle. Those papers were, in Milliman’s words, a “fine cross section of good Michigan community journalism.”
Participating students, then and today, and including ones from such far-flung locations as Russia, Kazakhstan, Denmark, China, India and South Korea, practice real-world journalism for real-world audiences.
These correspondents cover such diverse issues as education, health, criminal justice and public safety, transportation, agriculture, economic development and opportunity, energy, environment, civil rights, tourism, culture, politics and taxes.
Most CNS papers have no reporters of their own in Lansing, so CNS is their state capital bureau.
And many readers may never know about or understand the impact of such issues on them and their communities without the fair, balanced, accurate and independent coverage that CNS supplies to its member news organizations, whether in print or online.
Much of this deeper understanding is accomplished by interviewing lawmakers, advocacy groups, and scientific experts, as well as by studying reports, documents and data.
In its first four decades, CNS has expanded to serve more than 30 newspapers and online news outlets across the state. Member publications reach from Marquette, Bay Mills and Sault Ste. Marie in the Upper Peninsula, to Monroe and Blissfield in Southeast Michigan, to Sturgis and Three Rivers in the Southwest, to Clare, Big Rapids and Crawford County in the state’s heartland.
The largest circulation member is the daily Detroit News, and the smallest include weeklies in St. Ignace, Oceana County and Montmorency County. CNS also serves two business publications and a Native American publication.
CNS has remained on Michigan State’s campus under the leadership of three directors. After Milliman’s launch, professor William Coté, a former reporter in the Booth Newspaper’s Capitol Bureau, took over CNS. When he retired, professor Eric Freedman, a veteran of the Detroit News Lansing Bureau, became director.
The CNS experience has influenced the careers of hundreds of journalism students, some of whom went on to major news organizations in the U.S. and abroad, including the Associated Press, New York Times, NBC News, Bloomberg News Service, National Geographic Films, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Reuters, Politico, NPR affiliates and CNN.
Others landed jobs in government, higher education and corporate communications, journalism teaching, public relations, law, business, philanthropy, politics and even medicine, nursing and social work.
As one former correspondent told us, “CNS made me want to be a journalist in the worst way. Once I got a taste of getting published, I wanted more. I wanted to write about serious, impactful news. Stories about people.”
That kind of passion in our students gives us hope for the future of journalism at a time when the news media gets wrongly maligned and attacked as purveyors of “fake news,” where journalists get assaulted and even killed for doing their jobs and where Big Lies spread at a frighteningly insidious pace.
And that kind of motivation and commitment among students to tell true stories makes it possible for journalists to continue serving as watchdogs over government and other powerful institutions, as well as providing a forum for community discussions and debates on the issues of our day.
Danielle James is a CNS correspondent and Eric Freedman is the director of CNS.