CHAPEL HILL – UNC-Chapel Hill’s student-run business newswire, NC Business News Wire, is back up and running again after a hiatus.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic disrupting the University’s plans to hold some classes in person, the class that produces the news feed had always been a virtual offering. As such, it remains unaffected and is proceeding as scheduled this week.
The wire was shut down in late 2019 due to low enrollment.
The upper-level class offered by UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media is being taught by Yahoo Finance correspondent Julia La Roche.
La Roche graduated fro the same program in 2011. For the last ten years, she has been working as a business journalist, first as a senior finance reporter at Business Insider, before taking on her current role at Yahoo.
She also represented the state of New York at the Miss United States pageant in Washington, District of Columbia in 2014.
She will be teaching the course remotely from New York City.
Yahoo Finance correspondant Julia La Roche
“We’re using Slack daily to communicate as a team. I’m also meeting with the students one-on-one via Zoom and scheduling group workshops,” La Roche told WRAL TechWire. “This week, we hosted Bill Hankes, the founder and CEO of Sqoop, a platform that monitors regulatory filings.”
Last spring, the new feed had been put on pause because of low-enrollment in the class.
“We have a policy at the school if we have a class with fewer than 10, we don’t teach that class. That was the situation that we had this semester,” Dr. Charlie Tuggle, Senior Associate Dean at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, said at the time.
NC Business News Wire started up in 2016 with a group 10 business journalism students under distinguished professor and senior associate dean Chris Roush, producing more than 330 stories each semester.
The stories were picked up by media such as the Charlotte Observer, The (Durham) Herald-Sun, the Charlotte Business Journal and WRAL Techwire.
“Business news coverage is critical, and it’s even more important at the local and state level. There are nearly 100 publicly-traded companies in North Carolina, and many of them receive little coverage in the national financial news media,” La Roche said. “Chris started the site to change that, and I plan to continue that mission.”
