The Los Angeles Times and the journalism school at the University of Southern California have announced they will collaborate on homicide reporting, the LA Times reports.

Under the arrangement, students from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism will write stories for The Times' Homicide Report blog. This will provide more content for the blog and give crime-reporting experience to the student journalists.

The Homicide Report has been re-launched this week, to feature a searchable database and an interactive map of homicides in LA County.

Assistant managing editor at the Times David Lauter highlighted the benefits of the partnership. "Since the first days of the Homicide Report in 2007, our goal has been to tell two stories about violent death in Los Angeles - the overall statistical portrayal of who dies, how they are killed and where, as well as the individual portraits of the human beings behind those numbers," he said. "Collaborating with USC will allow us to tell far more of those human stories and, at the same time, help develop the next generation of L.A. journalists."

The Media Bistro blog was less than complementary, however. "This is one way to keep students off the streets," wrote blogger Tina Dupuy. "Get them elbow deep covering the waves of senseless violence in central LA. And way to score free labor, LAT. Nothing says 'respectful vigil' like having it covered by undergrads."

The LA Times did not specify whether the students would be paid for their work.

The New York Times has recently established a similar partnership, in which it has handed over control of its local Brooklyn blog to journalism students and their professors at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. In a climate where many publications have been forced to cut back on the number of interns they take, are these partnerships a good experience for students or a worrying trend towards reliance on outside labour?

Source: LA Times, Media Bistro