The News Lab enhances journalism and empowers students

The News Lab at Penn State, housed in the Department of Journalism and led by Maggie Messitt, the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice, facilitates partnerships between professional news organizations and student journalists — regularly collaborating on long-form and special projects.

Among its recent collaborations was a six-month-long reporting effort by Penn State journalism students that included three separate site visits, dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of preparation produced an in-depth, immersive look at the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment in February 2023 and its ongoing impact.

The students translated their reporting into an immersive experience using the app Gesso, which is typically a platform for self-guided walking tours in cities and for self-guided museum tours, allowing visitors to engage with an exhibit on their own. For these purposes, the Gesso platform allows listeners and readers to find themselves more intimately inside the story, traveling alongside the train, walking inside someone’s home, stepping into Sulphur Run and experiencing the trauma of displacement.

The News Lab also conducts badging programs for students to help hone their journalism and storytelling skills and launched Centre Documenters as part of a partnership with SpotlightPA. Centre Documenters trains and pays note takers to attend municipal meetings to help enhance access and transparency for municipal government. Since that launch in December 2023, the News Lab has expanded the note-taking service to share information with media outlets that serve Centre County.

During the upcoming academic year, especially in the fall leading to the presidential election, the News Lab will work with media organizations in underserved areas of Pennsylvania to help cover the election — making the lab’s mission of offering opportunities for students and impacting communities across Pennsylvania in positive ways a reality.