Abstract
<p>This paper examines rural-urban differences in student journalism performance among higher education institution (HEI) student produced news outlets. With journalism quality frameworks, three article-level dimensions serve as comparisons: textual distinctiveness, Critical Information Needs (CIN) coverage, and localeness. Using a dataset of approximately 15,000 student articles, we utilized outlet-level soft cosine similarity, validated LLM-assisted binary coding, and logistic regression. Our results suggest three findings within our dataset: 1) the textual patterns of articles are not strongly structured by locale, 2) rural articles had substantially higher descriptive rates and odds of addressing a CIN than urban articles, and 3) rural articles had higher descriptive rates and odds of being coded as local. These results suggest that student journalism’s local-news role varies more in their civic ability, corroborating that being locally engaged is not synchronous with addressing CINs and that rural-urban differences could extend beyond institutional capacities into HEIs informational role in surrounding communities.</p>