Franklin College serves just over 900 students, and despite its small size, its student reporting program, TheStatehouseFile.com, has produced nationally award-winning journalism for four years running.
Most recently, incoming junior Olivia O’Neal was recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists for best in-depth reporting at schools with 10,000 or fewer students for her powerful story on Afghan evacuees living in Indiana. The Student Press Law Center was proud to arrange free, pre-publication legal vetting for the piece.
“This is by far the story I am most proud of,” said O’Neal, who was a sophomore when it was published in November 2025. “It took months and constant emails, dead ends and headaches over immigration law.”
In the midst of a rapidly shifting U.S. immigration landscape, O’Neal’s article featured personal anecdotes from those who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover in 2021 and ended up in Central Indiana. It also offered a legal guide for evacuees, including how ICE has shifted its policies and what to do if immigration officials knock on the door.
Student journalists are increasingly doing this type of sophisticated reporting on their communities, which often requires more legal support. TheStatehouseFile.com is among a growing number of student reporting programs across the country — the Center for Community News has identified at least 282 — that serve to bolster disappearing local and state news coverage.
Colleen Steffen, TheStatehouseFile.com’s executive editor and a journalism lecturer at Franklin College, said her 26 students created 2,225 pieces of news content in 2025, all of which were available for outlets across the state to republish for free.
The program allows students to “fill in cracks in the coverage that other outlets don’t have the time for anymore,” Steffen said. “The Afghan story is such a good example of that. Lots of people have written about immigration policies and new administration announcements when they arrived at Camp Atterbury. But nobody came back to ask them, ‘OK, but what now? What’s it like to live with this uncertainty as the rules keep changing?’”
As the story took shape, O’Neal reached out to the Student Press Law Center to work through any potential legal issues before it was published.
“I knew this story was going to be impactful, but I needed some way to ensure that both me and my sources wouldn’t face any legal consequences for the work,” O’Neal said. “SPLC really gave me and my editor the confidence to publish this piece.”
Steffen said SPLC’s free legal resources make a big difference for complicated stories in student newsrooms that don’t have access to fact-checkers and in-house legal departments, plus it gives students an opportunity to work with attorneys earlier in their career.
“In the end, it was good to know that we did this good work and we did it the right way,” she said. “We’re not going to mess up someone’s life, and we’re not presenting something that’s incorrect or misleading.”
Through its free Legal Hotline, Student Press Law Center attorneys review dozens of student-produced investigative stories each year before they are published or broadcast. This vetting gives student journalists an additional layer of legal protection as they pursue stories that matter to their campuses, communities and states.
This work has expanded as SPLC has partnered with the Center for Community News and other non-traditional and emerging student journalism models that need unique legal support, including enhanced pre-publication review.
O’Neal was the first to benefit from a new SPLC partnership with Davis Wright Tremaine, a law firm with a nationally renowned practice supporting journalists of all kinds. The partnership adds vetting capacity to SPLC’s in-house team, and it unlocks access to the firm’s attorneys with experience in various issues, including immigration law.
Steffen said SPLC’s resources and this new partnership give her the ability to greenlight these ambitious stories with greater peace of mind.
“I really hate to discourage them when they come to me with an idea,” Steffen said. “Just knowing this SPLC program exists — and that I’ve done it, and it’s easy and fast — I can, with more confidence, say yes to students when they want to tackle those big, thorny, complicated issues.”