Sending congratulations to Medill’s Statehouse Fellows for their first year producing outstanding local news coverage as part of the Medill Local News Initiative.
The Medill Illinois News Bureau [read here] hit the ground running, and the 21 student fellows exceeded expectations for the program’s goal to fill gaps in coverage of the state capitol and bolster Illinois local news. Over the course of Northwestern University’s fall, winter, and spring quarters during the 2024-25 year, and even into the summer of 2025, our student reporters selected for the first cohort wrote 55 stories that were published on the Capitol News Illinois [read here] website and distributed broadly to more than 700 outlets statewide. The Medill MSJ students in the Politics, Policy and Foreign Affairs specialization, and other MSJs – along with two undergraduates – traveled to Springfield on Amtrak on about two dozen trips, got their House and Senate press passes and explored the statehouse and the Illinois General Assembly for news.
Those stories were republished in at least 550 news outlets across the state – in print, broadcast, radio and digital media, and amplified on social media. The analytics provided by CNI for the Medill Illinois News Bureau in September 2025 estimated that those stories amassed tens of thousands of page views on the CNI site and in outlets around Illinois and in bordering states. The numbers continue to grow as more readers and viewers find them online.
The results of the students’ journalism in the Bureau can be seen in their bylines on the CNI website for the Medill Illinois News Bureau [read here] and in media outlets ranging from Chicago’s WTTW Public Television to CapitolFax.com, the Illinois Times and WBDR 103.7 FM in Springfield, as well as from Crain’s Chicago Business, the Daily Herald, Google News and the Illinois Business Journal Online to Quincy’s Herald-Whig and the Muddy River News, WCBU Peoria, the Pantagraph in Bloomington-Normal and the Belleville News-Democrat, just to name a few. WTTW has also dedicated a special web page (read here) on its site to list the Medill Statehouse Fellows’ stories they run.
Among the students’ stories was a strong investigative project from the spring quarter fellows, published Sept. 29, that set a new mark for the bureau to do investigative pieces that required multiple reporters working with editors and interviewing dozens of people, sending out Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and reporting over many months. The piece polled all of the 102 county sheriffs in Illinois [read here] on their views about immigration enforcement around the state, and the Medill students heard back from more than a quarter of them. A number said they wish they were not prohibited by Illinois laws from helping ICE agents arrest undocumented immigrants under the current crackdown. That piece generated calls for investigation of at least one defiant sheriff.
A teacher shortage report – a special package of three stories written by two fellows, our first longer-term project – was published on March 10, and it drew thousands of readers. The main bar [read here] received more than 16,300 page views on CNI’s website, and counting, according to analytics compiled for Medill by CNI. Other stories got thousands of hits.
They wrote the vast majority of stories with Springfield and Chicago datelines, but many wrote stories from downstate, as well, when an appropriate reporting trip or dateline improved the story. They traveled to Peoria, Carbondale, Cairo, New Salem and other cities around Illinois in pursuit of a variety of Illinois stories that CNI published. For example, one story examined an effort to repair and renovate a Lincoln site [read here] in Petersburg. Another – from Peoria – involved the challenges for women and minorities to break into the Illinois trades [read here]. A third involved a campaign by Southern Illinois [read here] stakeholders to advertise on Chicago buses and elsewhere to boost tourism and visitors in far downstate places like the Shawnee National Forest. Enterprising students even traveled to a hemp farm with a colorful dateline (Rushville!) to explain the bitter, ongoing state controversy [read here] over the failure to regulate the selling of hemp.
photos courtesy of Storer Rowley
–Storer Rowley is senior lecturer and director of the Medill Illinois News Bureau, Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, School of Communication, MSC Program, Northwestern University. He calls his student fellows Team Awesome.