About

The Roy Howard Community Journalism Center, housed at The University of Southern Mississippi, is dedicated to enhancing the media landscape in southeast Mississippi by prioritizing impactful, issue-oriented, and people-centered reporting. Supported by a grant from the Scripps Howard Fund, the Howard Center combats disinformation and misinformation, fosters the development and growth of student-journalists, and helps grow newsrooms across our 10-county service region.

The Howard Center is based in the School of Media and Communication in College Hall on the Hattiesburg campus. Additional bureaus are located at the Gulf Park campus in Long Beach and at Mississippi Public Broadcasting in Jackson.

The Howard Center’s high-quality, original reporting covers southeast Mississippi and specifically these 10 counties: Lamar, Forrest, Perry, Greene, Pearl River, Stone, George, Hancock, Harrison, and Jackson. Additionally, through our bureau in the state’s capital city, we cover statewide issues and how they affect our service region.

In addition to providing original reporting, we also aim to improve media literacy efforts among the citizens of southeast Mississippi. To that end, we host free, public media literacy trainings and awareness events. We also operate a “What is True?” section, where the public can submit disinformation and misinformation questions—through a special hotline or an email address—for us to research, investigate, and answer.