Barnes had first heard about the possibility of a student-run news bureau from her predecessor at UK , Richard Wilson. [1] Shortly after she was hired in 2003, Wilson, the longtime chief education reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, discussed with Barnes whether UK could simultaneously train students in political journalism and feed Kentucky news organizations additional political coverage. Barnes liked the idea and, in the spring of 2004, sent Wilson on a fact-finding mission to Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and the University of Maryland in College Park (UMD), schools that had launched capital news services.

Maryland s program was the more ambitious of the two. UMD had set up four independent newsgathering operations, each directed by an experienced journalist. The print side consisted of bureaus in Annapolis and Washington , DC , which supplied daily newsfeeds to newspapers, wire services, radio, television, and online news outlets across the state and country. Students served semester-long tours in the bureaus, wrote 25 to 30 stories in that period and received academic credit for their work. Meanwhile, the schools broadcast division produced a nightly newscast that reached 400,000 DC households. Finally, the school produced an online news magazine Maryland Newsline that ran original feature stories and showcased the work from the print and broadcast operations.

Virginia Commonwealth s Capital News Service was much smaller in scale. The bureau was based on VCUs campus in Richmond , the state capital, and directed by Jeff South, a former editor at the Austin (TX) American Statesman . He anchored the program around a spring political news course, designed to give students the opportunity to cover the Virginia General Assembly and provide complimentary political coverage to the states small weekly, biweekly, and thrice weekly newspapers. VCUs service scaled back in the summer and fall, when it was primarily used to help students freelance and distribute stories they wrote in other classes.

Wilson returned to UK inspired by both programs and wrote a memo to Barnes that outlined a long-range plan for UK to set up its own capital news service. The first step would be to hire an experienced capital reporter to serve as director. This person, he wrote, would act as bureau chief and seek out partnerships with the states media outlets. Students, he envisioned, would then work as temporary employees of participating newspapers. Once the print side was up and running, UK would hire a broadcast director to run television, radio, and online operations. Perhaps, he suggested, the bureau could even be developed in partnership with surrounding schools in the region.

At the same time, Wilson was aware of the prohibitive costs of launching a full-fledged bureau. [2] To reproduce even VCUs more modest program would require UK to find funding to hire the director, secure dedicated classroom space in Frankfort , and build computer labsmoney Wilson knew Barnes did not have. UK did, however, have one advantage: the Kentucky legislative session happened to mirror the universitys spring term, which solved the problem of matching the academic calendar with the political calendar. So, as a compromise solution, Wilson proposed that he come out of retirement as an adjunct professor and teach a small, spring-semester, capital reporting seminar. Students in the class would report to Wilson, who would edit the work and seek outlets for their best stories. The seminar was intended more to expose students to civic service than ask them to perform a civic service. As he wrote Barnes in April 2004:

Rather than thinking grandiosely, or attempting to propose a Cadillac of state capitol journalism programs, I have tried to narrow the scope of this proposal to make it doable in the near, rather than distant future, and perhaps offering [ sic ] the course for the first time during the Spring 2005 semester. [3]

Barnes approved the course and redirected part of a modest Scripps-Howard grant to fund it. Meanwhile, Wilson convinced his friend Carl West, editor of the State Journal in Frankfort , to host the class in the papers conference room and to run the students best stories. Wilson taught the first section in the spring of 2005, and over the next three years it served for Barnes as an object lesson in how a typical journalism school could launch a modest student-run political news service.

Listen to Barnes discuss the relationship between the capital reporting seminar and the State Journal .

From the start, Wilson ran into several teaching and logistical challenges that highlighted the difficulty of simultaneously teaching journalism to undergraduates while asking them to produce publishable work. He initially intended for each student to publish three pieces in the paper per semester. He learned, though, that this was an unreasonable goal. His students took weeks to acculturate to the statehouse and to develop sound enough news judgment to distinguish a story from a term paper. Moreover, he had to instruct them on the inner workings of the legislative process. Finally, the UK campus in Lexington was a 45-minute drive from the statehouse in Frankfort . The workload proved crushing for Wilson and his students, and over the years enrollment dwindled from a high of eight to four. By the spring of 2008, it was too low for Barnes to continue to list the course.

Yet the experiment, in Barness view, was more success than failure. Wilson s students had managed to publish several front-page stories in the paper. Barnes was so encouraged by these results that she came to believe that the course could succeedand even blossom into a full-fledged news serviceif she could secure greater institutional support and resolve the logistical problems that made administering it so difficult. As she mulled the options, Kentucky State came knocking at her door.