News21 Projects
News21 projects are grouped around umbrella themes, which change each year. Here is a concise directory of all News 21 projects published to date.
2008 - What's at Stake: Election 2008
Immigration: New Voters, Old Fears
Barack Obama and John McCain probably won't battle over immigration in the fall. Both favor comprehensive immigration reform. But the issue has not gone away. It is at center of local and congressional races, and after the election will re-emerge with a vengeance in the new Congress.
This country is in the midst of a wave of immigration that is transforming our politics. Latinos and Asians are now acquiring the kind of political clout that the Irish or Italians once enjoyed. And in older towns and in states affected by this new immigration, resentment is building against the new immigrants. It is directed explicitly against illegal immigration, but often includes legal immigrants as well.
News 21 sent teams of journalists to Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Texas, Arizona and Washington, D.C. to explore how this new wave of immigrants is affecting American life and politics.
We'd also like to thank all the kind staff at Columbia Journalism School who went out of their way to help us, including:
Tarin Almanzar, Steven Aungst, Susan Caplan, Thaddeus Craddock, Larry Fried, Krishnan Gajadharsingh, Jason Gambrell, Derek Gano, Craig Hettich, Bernardo Huapaya, Clyde Lingenfelter, Jairo Mateo, Scott Osborn, Dee Phillips, Regina Scriven, Steve Ross, Jeffrey Sieben, Christine Souders, Tim Spayd, Chenese Wilson, Vincent Wright and Dian Zhou.
And a special thank you to our 2007 coordinator, Prof. Ari Goldman, for the generous use of his mini-fridge and toaster.
The American Dream
In many ways, The American Dream is at stake in every presidential election. The loose collection of beliefs we have about our national values and identity is what the campaigns tap into every four years to capture our votes.
But this year, voters' notions about opportunity, abundance, security, and individual initiative - the very foundations of the American Dream - seem especially shaken. Are the public opinion surveys and economic data reflecting merely a temporary loss of optimism and confidence or are they pointing to more fundamental changes or re-definitions of the dream?
The News 21 fellows at UC Berkeley spent the summer of 2008 exploring that question - in the cities where the two major political parties chose to hold their national conventions, in the battleground state of Ohio, in the suburbs and open spaces of the Interior West and in one of the booming cities of the New South. Look for expanded coverage in battleground states through the November election.
As is the tradition with the Berkeley News 21 incubator, the overall site design and construction were the work of the fellows themselves. We are grateful to Professor J. Bradford DeLong of the UC Berkeley Department of Economics for big think help and calculations on the Tradeoffs Calculator and to Emily Coven of Flax Media for engineering it as well as our middle class blogroll.
Thanks as well to E.J. Dionne, Matt Dowd, Darshan Goux and David Cay Johnston for visiting us in the Spring to share ideas.
Special thanks to our colleagues at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism - Gayle Allerson, Roy Baril, Bob Calo, Karen Everett, Mary Anne Glazar, Helen Ettlinger, Michele Kerr, Jeremy Rue, Kean Sakata and Milt Wallace for technical, administrative and moral support.
Politics and The Environment
ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT/NEWS21 AT THE MEDILL SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
No one voted on it. But the combined crises of skyrocketing oil prices and global warming gave a sudden rush of support for the first nuclear energy push in 30 years. McCain promises 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030. Obama is more cautious but says nuclear must be part of any energy independence mix. It’s just one of the surprises as presidential politics shifts focus to energy and the environment -- issues tackled by the Carnegie-Knight fellows at Medill for News21. What's at stake is America’s way of life that takes for granted affordable and plentiful energy, water and food. What's at stake is a beautiful blue planet.
Medill’s News21 reporters visited Alaska, where life is rapidly changing as global warming melts the ice and Governor Sarah Palin, the new GOP candidate for vice president, heats up the political landscape. Reporters explored the Tennessee Valley Authority, a prism to the past and future of government impact on energy choices. They toured coastal states where civil defense plans look for ways to cope with rising ocean levels. They added up the water resources that often mask the strategic hidden cost of energy production. They discovered the frontlines of grassroots political battles over coal mining that blasts mountaintops and megadairies that threaten groundwater supplies with contamination. And they found the boom towns of old energy and the bright new capitals of solar and wind.
This fall, four reporters continued Medill’s News21 coverage, exploring the influence of the environment and energy independence on the presidential debates and the election itself. A corps of additional reporters contributed to election night blogs and other coverage as more than 150,000 people flooded Chicago’s Grant Park with hope, joy and a rollicking good party for President-elect Barack Obama. Our enviroVOTE meter and story followed the election results in nearly 500 other races to show a 19 percent increase in eco-friendly lawmakers elected. As Obama’s new administration takes hold with plans to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming, News21 tracked the national security, research and energy impacts of climate change.
The Carnegie and Knight Foundations gave our 11 summer fellows and four fall reporters the opportunity to explore the future of journalism by taking these stories in innovative directions. Medill's News21 reporters paired in-depth, watchdog journalism with story packages that give you compelling reporting, visual drama, varied media and plenty of interactive choices for following the stories. We are grateful for the support of Carnegie-Knight for new forums in journalism through this initiative.
Many thanks to News21 coordinator Robert Calo for his support and to technical wizards Brian Kennedy and Milan Andric for their expert assistance with the News21 content management systems. At Medill, thanks to Jeff Prah and Ivan Meyers for technical guidance. And special thanks to people from all over the country who opened their lives and shared their stories with us.
Meet our News21 reporters, faculty and staff.
The Western Edge
http://www.annenbergnews21.org/
2007 - Faces of Faith in America
God, Sex and Family
Stories about religion are too often framed around conflict and controversy, culture wars and holy wars. We want to tell another story – the lived experience of people’s faith.
We are a team of journalists from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley exploring "God, Sex and Family." That's where choices about marriage, dating, the building of community, family and faith play out in private life.
Special thanks to Milan Andric, Scot Hacker, Roy Baryl, Kean Sakata, Milt Wallace, Paul Grabowicz, Marsha Parker, Neil Henry, Gayle Allerson, Mary Ann Glazar, Helen Ettlinger
Belief and Public Life
In this nation that has separation of church and state as one of its key precepts, the deep connection between politics and belief is undeniable. Carnegie-Knight News21 Fellows at Northwestern University's Medill School have been looking at that relationship since January, examining how it is expressed and what role religion and belief play in public life, from the campaign trail to the classroom and at many points in between. It has been a remarkable journey that carried the fellows to a Christian rock concert, where they examined the phenomenon of religion-based tattoos, to a biblical theme park in Florida, to a creation museum in Kentucky, to street corners and workplaces across the nation, where they asked people to explain what role faith plays in their daily life. A team examined the faith experiences and traditions of the major presidential contenders, an assignment that yielded a robust and engaging multi-media tool for examining candidate positions.
The effort, which carried the fellows everywhere from prisons to churches to mosques and onto the campaign trail, yields an impressive multi-media presentation that dissects many aspects of the nation's sometimes uncomfortable connections to its own beliefs.
The New Americans: Homelands and Diasporas
American religion is undergoing a vast and monumental change, in large measure because of the new immigrants coming to these shores. Will Herberg’s 1950s paradigm of Catholic-Protestant-Jew has given way to a festival of rituals, practices, behaviors and beliefs that once seemed like the province of faraway lands. Today, mosques and gurudwaras and temples sacred to Buddhists and Hindus dot the American landscape along with churches and synagogues. What is more, Catholics, Protestants and Jews -- having absorbed immigrant populations -- aren’t what they once were.
We are a group of graduate fellows of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government who studied the religious diversity of New York and then traveled together to India to see the roots of the faiths we examined. Our studies and our travels have convinced us of the imperative of better understanding the beliefs and practices not only of America, but of the world. With instant global communication and the ease of international travel, the faiths of distant lands are immediately at hand.
We plan to go about this exploration by undertaking a series of reports and interactive, multimedia projects on new American immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Our prism, however, will not be geography but faith. We will look at Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Buddhists, as well as Christians and Jews. We will begin with our home base of New York and then expand to American and foreign cities that best tell the stories of the new immigrants. We will look at how they are being changed and how, in the process, they are changing America.
Off the Beaten Path: The Search for Spirituality
The ways in which Americans seek spiritual enlightenment are as diverse as America itself. Millions of Americans consider themselves "spiritual, but not religious." USC reports on the various paths explored by these "seekers," and how those paths intersect with science, commerce, education and culture.
2006 - Liberty vs. Security
U.S. Military Abroad
The American military is undergoing a profound shift in strategy that is transforming its presence as well as its mission on a global scale.
During the summer of 2006, we reported stories from a range of angles – cultural, economic, political and environmental – regarding the nearly half-million women and men serving the security interests of the United States overseas.
Homeland Security
News21 fellows at Columbia – ten 2006 graduates of its Graduate School of Journalism and one from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government – have spent months, in teams and alone, following the Department of Homeland Security. We’ve used new, computer-assisted reporting techniques to assess information in federal databases and we’ve used old-fashioned reporting techniques to interview dozens of current and former DHS officials, industry executives, academics, advocates, lobbyists and individuals affected by homeland security issues. We’ve investigated the department’s management and the operations of many subsidiary agencies, and we’ve scrutinized private-sector companies that are selling homeland security services to the government. What we found was always interesting and frequently unique.
Privacy in an Age of Security
Northwestern University's News21 fellows look at America's new system of surveillance, developed by the government with the help of private data mining firms after 9/11. One story reports on how the Social Security Administration's massive databases are being used in homeland security investigations; another uncovers new details about a secretive program in which the Department of Education shared personal information on hundreds of student loan applicants with the FBI. Two immersive interactive presentations explore the digital trails we leave behind in our daily lives and government data-mining initiatives that might incorporate information about you.
Immigration
The United States is a country of immigrants. Even so, the debate over immigration has never been so intense. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, concerns about securing borders and screening immigrants have dramatically escalated. The in-depth coverage from the University of Southern California looks at how both people and policy have been impacted.
The USC News21 Fellows and Faculty also wish to thank California Connected (KCET) and Christina Wu for extra footage used in our stories, Lee Warner for Editing Assistance and Scott Shulman for Camera Assistance.
