News21
In seeking to deepen the intellectual life at journalism schools and create a voice for their deans with the news industry, a key element is seeding innovative reporting on little covered issues important to American's robust democracy in ways that attract new and younger audiences. This project in innovative reporting is called News for the 21st Century: Incubators of New Ideas, or News21.
News21 is a partnership among five participating research universities. The "incubators" situated on 4 campuses but involving students from 5 universities, emphasize innovative, hands-on journalism study and practice. Approximately 44 students each year will participate for ten weeks each summer starting in June 2006. An individual leads each journalism school "incubator" on campus — the School Coordinator — in conjunction with the dean and faculty. The five campuses are networked by a National News21 Coordinator who works to create outlets in mainstream and emerging news organizations for these student news products that are experimental in substance and style and on a topic of global importance. The Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley is the fiscal agent for this project for the duration of this grant and responsible for establishing the national infrastructure that will serve all the universities involved.
ABC NEWS initiated Summer Institute | News21 Blogs | Project News
Will this changing world still include journalism that satisfies democracy’s basic needs? Will great journalists still hold true to Jack Knight’s vision of journalism that “bestirs the people…and rouses them to pursue their true interests”? What news organizations will emerge in the 21st century to do what Jack and Jim Knight’s newspapers did for American communities in the 20th? Those newspapers helped define the communities we lived in by sharing events that happened to neighbors, by defining the problems and possibilities, and by connecting people with a shared language and a sense of place.
