A Highly Scientific Study

If you scrape every headline from PSPA’s student newsrooms across the region – you will notice something funny. The stories are always honest – it’s a portrait of what students actually care about. Coding every headline from the past year, the dataset would reveal the truth every student journalist eventually learns: campus life is the real breaking news.

Across campuses, logistical reporting reigns supreme. Dining hall updates, housing shortages, Wi-Fi outages: these stories aren’t glamorous, but they are the ones students actually read – and the ones that spark the most productive conversations and passionate group chat debates.

Mapping the most common story topics across all 14 campuses, community news would be the most commonly-circumventing by far. It is the beat nobody dreams about, yet everyone relies on. One could argue that student journalists are Philly’s most dedicated infrastructure reporters – just with more iced coffee and usually no salary.

The second most-discussed category across Philly-area newsrooms is administration, policy, and power. New presidents, leadership transitions and tuition changes show up everywhere because students are paying attention to how institutions are making their decisions, and how these decisions shape daily life. This is civic journalism at the campus level, and it is always happening.

Identity-driven stories like pride events, cultural celebrations, mental health initiatives, first-gen experience and religious life appear across every newsroom in the region. These aren’t just “features;” they serve as community diagnostics revealing who feels seen, who feels overlooked, and what the campus culture actually is. 

Sports coverage is the universal constant. Whether it’s Villanova basketball, Rowan football, Drexel crew, or Swarthmore club teams, student newsrooms publish a steady stream of game recaps and athlete profiles. Sports stories are about campus pride and athletics, which is why they never disappear from the dataset. Let’s be honest: nothing unites a campus faster than a last-minute win or a perfectly chaotic rivalry matchup.

Across all 14 campuses, the most covered stories fall into four buckets:

• Campus logistics – the everyday stuff that actually affects students

• Policy & power – decisions made by people students rarely or ever meet

• Identity & community – belonging, representation and culture

• Sports & achievement – the heartbeat of campus pride

Student journalists report what matters to their communities - the things that shaped daily life, define campus culture and reveal how institutions operate. If anything, this dataset shows that student journalism in Philly is deeply civic, deeply human and deeply local. It is not about chasing prestige; it is about telling the truth about the places students are learning, living and growing in. 

And here’s the truth the data makes impossible to ignore: Philly’s next generation of reporters isn’t waiting for a big story. They’re already telling the ones that matter.

Written by: Claire Herquet