Ask Gene Sonn, the program manager at the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative (PJC), about the origins of its new Reporting Corps, and he traces it to the 2025 summer transition for the collaborative from under Resolve Philly to its new home at Temple University. There, it is now within the Center for Community Engaged Media at Temple’s Klein College for Media and Communication.
As part of the transition process, Sonn and Letrell Crittenden, director of the Center for Community-Engaged Media, held several meetings with the collaborative’s more than 25 partner newsrooms to gauge what more PJC could do to support their operations.
One of the common concerns heard in those conversations was being stretched too thin.
“There are always more things that they would like to do than they have people to assign,” said Sonn.
In trying to address that conundrum for its partner newsrooms and meet a new mandate at Temple to incorporate students and faculty into PJC’s work, the Reporting Corps was born. A select number of students, nominated by their professors at Klein, would have the opportunity to spend a semester supporting a participating partner newsroom with anything from reporting and photography to social media production — and get paid for their work.
Crittenden called it a “grand opportunity” for Klein’s top students to get real newsroom experience, and for the newsrooms to get the support they need to expand their bandwidth.
“I think that it is going to be an innovative effort that will really highlight how our students can benefit from collaborative journalism,” he said.
Denise James, an associate professor of practice of journalism at Klein and the faculty liaison between PJC and the school, called the new Reporting Corps “a two-way street” for the students and partner newsrooms.
For the students, it’s a chance to be enmeshed and participate in a professional newsroom as it pursues various stories.
“They get real-world experience with real-world feedback and real-world deadlines,” said James, “and hopefully a sense of real-world accomplishment.”
The newsrooms, she said, “get to be part of ensuring that a group of young journalists is prepared to work in this world.”
James helped encourage faculty to nominate students for the program. After she and Sonn collected resumes and two journalism examples from the nominated students, they sifted through the group and selected the five students to be the Reporting Corps’ first cohort. They plan to go through the process again for the spring semester.
Meet the fall Reporting Corps
Morgan Ritter, a senior journalism major at Klein, was nominated for the Reporter Corps by Professor Ariel Goodman. Growing up in Fanwood, New Jersey, about an hour outside of New York City, Ritter’s first brush with journalism came in high school as a staff writer and the culture editor for The Fanscotian, the online newspaper for Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School.
“I just loved the process of it. I loved interviewing people and writing articles,” she said. “It was challenging for me at first, but it made me feel so fulfilled to tell people’s stories.”
At Temple, she’s the Editor-In-Chief of Her Campus Temple, an outlet dedicated to sharing the experiences of women navigating college. Ritter is also a Klein Rising Peer Mentor and an Honors REACT Peer Instructor. Most recently, she completed a summer internship on the arts and culture desk of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
As a reporter, Ritter wants to flip the script on the narrative that the news only covers negative things.
“When we’re reporting on big, important things, oftentimes those are bad things,” she said, “but there are so many local victory stories that people don’t know about.”
Hoping to expand beyond her arts and culture comfort zone, Ritter will be working with Technical.ly this semester.
Christian Barnes, another member of the Reporting Corps this fall, said the prospect of telling stories was always his draw to journalism growing up near Reading in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
“I’ve always had an interest in human stories — about ways of life, different cultures,” said Barnes. “I was always the kid that wanted to tell somebody something, the ‘did-you-know’ kid.”
What solidified his interest in the field was a reading of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.”
At Klein, Barnes is a senior journalism major and a Klein Rising Peer Mentor. He’s published work in Philadelphia Neighborhoods, The Temple News, and for the school’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting.
Barnes sees journalism as a “bridge between people.”
“I know a lot of times it’s talked about like it’s a watchdog, it’s the voice of the people, but I think all of that is contained within just being a connector between people and cultures,” he said.
This fall, Barnes will work with Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
Steve Jeffries is also a senior journalism major at Klein, and like Barnes, his spark to pursue journalism was also a book — Thomas L. Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” an account of Friedman’s 10 years reporting between Lebanon and Israel.
“The kind of journalism that speaks most to me is long-form, more narrative work, and I enjoy bringing that literary quality into stories,” said Jeffries, whose first passion was creative writing.
Arriving at Temple from Raleigh, North Carolina, Jeffries said he hopes his experience in the Reporting Corps will allow him to get even more in touch with Philadelphia and its many communities.
“It seemed to be an excellent opportunity to start to understand the Philadelphia journalism environment and some of the organizations there,” he said.
Just off a summer internship with Metro Philadelphia, also a partner newsroom with PJC, Jeffries will spend his fall with Next City.
Christian Lee, a senior double major in journalism and political science, said it’s been his experience at Temple that’s made him fall in love with journalism. A native of Edison, New Jersey, Lee said he always thought musical theater would be his calling, but that changed when he was a senior in high school.
When he got to Temple, Lee got immediately involved with Temple Update, and was thrown into sports reporting in his first semester, covering a fencing invitational.
“I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it took me way longer than it should have,” he said. “I was here until two in the morning, I went to my friend’s house to finish it up, and I remember being so proud of it.”
In the semesters since, Lee has anchored Temple Update, continued to report, and was also the program’s meteorologist. Outside of Temple, he has also completed internships at PHL17 and spent a summer in Portland, Maine, at the NBC-affiliate, News Center Maine. There, Lee said he turned TV packages every day for air, provided live reporting, and experienced covering breaking news.
“I essentially did the job before I had the job, so it was awesome,” he said.
Lee said becoming a member of the PJC Reporting Corps is another opportunity to expand his experience working in a professional newsroom, and he wants the chance to continue honing his chops on social media as a reporter — a must in the ever-evolving world of journalism.
“Everyone’s telling me that it’s changing, but I want to change it,” Lee said. “It’s a great industry, and I’m excited to see where it goes.”
Lee is spending the fall with Green Philly.
Susanna Coyle’s draw to journalism is rooted in her lifelong love of music. The junior journalism and audio and live entertainment double major from Abington in the Philly suburbs said she’s been going to shows “ever since I was born.” Coyle is also classically trained to play the clarinet, has joined many bands, and currently writes concert reviews for WHIP, Temple’s student radio station.
“There’s a certain magic about live performances and just creating music,” she said. “I just love the human aspect, the emotional aspect, the cultural, the political aspect, and all about it.”
In the same way a musician connects a captivated audience to themselves and the world around them through song, Coyle sees a journalist performing the same task for their readers, listeners, or viewers with stories, while making real, tangible impacts on society.
“I really care about human connection and just the way that people receive things and respond to them,” she said. “That’s why I really like doing journalism, and that’s why I really am interested in solutions-based journalism.”
Also at WHIP, Coyle hosts her own comedy podcast, “Last Two Standing,” with her best friend, and helps other students get their own podcast ideas off the ground. She’s previously been on the production crew of “La Charla,” Temple’s first-ever Spanish-language talk show, and was on the team that produced 6ABC’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast.
As part of PJC’s Reporting Corps, Coyle hopes to improve her written journalism.
