Student News21 teams are getting their work published in national papers.  Outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times are running stories, photos and video from the students who are part of the program revitalizing journalism education at 12 universities.

Just last week, Columbia’s News21 team’s work was featured in the Washington Post.  Fellows produced “Brave Old World,” a report package on aging in America.  Their contributions ran in the Health and Science special section.

Video from North Carolina’s News21 fellows was featured on the washingtonpost.com homepage a few weeks ago. Their work “Powering a Nation:  The Truth About Energy,” was used in reporting the oil spill.

Other News21 fellows have had work published on the LA Times Photo Blog, in the Baltimore Sun, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among many others.

The News21 project is funded by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative.  In addition to improving student journalism skills, one anticipated outcome of the project is to show that journalism students can do stories at the highest levels.

Having reports published in the national presses is added motivation for these students, and allows them to develop an area of reporting expertise.  It demonstrates the quality of their work and helps them build portfolios.

Journalism schools are still pioneering new forms of news, with a role to play in shaping the future of news and information through their students and contributions in the field.

Poynter’s News University now has more than 150,000 registered users.

It’s easy to see why:  NewsU offers affordable self-paced online courses to enhance professional skills in journalism, management and advertising.

Titles range from “Advice for the Newly Named News Director” to “Video Storytelling for the Web,” and more than a hundred courses are free.

For educators, NewsU just released a Syllabus Exchange, where ideas and teaching materials can be shared.

The Exchange is similar to the News21 initiative blogged last week, and allows educators from all schools and universities to share syllabi, assignments and other teaching materials.

15% of NewsU users are from outside the U.S., making the most of being able to access resources at any time and from any place.

Looking for free training?

Browse courses and search by price.  Innovation at Work: Helping New Ideas Succeed is one of many courses available free to participants through Knight Foundation’s support in developing and providing training for the digital age.

Subsidized courses are also available to assist under-represented groups get the skills and training they need, with financial backing from the Knight Foundation aimed to improve diversity in newsrooms.

News21 launched a web-based resource center to share tools colleges and universities can use to advance the way they teach journalism.

Resources include class syllabi and materials from the 12 participating universities, as well as training sessions and guidance on encouraging innovation.

News21 is a program of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. The initiative is an effort to improve student skills in reporting and digital media.

Student work from the program is available online, as well as an ‘Explore and Compare’ feature where visitors can view and comment on different presentation methods of the same story.

News21 entered its fifth year, and Kristin Gilger, executive editor of the national program and associate dean at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, said “we’re ready to share what we learned with other schools.”

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Michael Vitez says that being a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan taught him storytelling skills, which he used to write a series of articles on end-of-life issues that won a Pulitzer Prize.

Knight-Wallace Fellows spend eight months living and studying in Michigan. Director Charles Eisendrath leads the group and helps them build skills to advance their careers. Some fellows find new jobs after their time at Michigan by starting new programs. At least one fellow has launched his own company: Chris Carey was a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and now runs shareslueth.com, a for-profit investigative news site about stock fraud.

The University of Michigan, Stanford University and MIT host many of Knight Foundation’s fellowships for professional journalists. Knight has endowed a Batten professorship at Davidson College, Latin American fellows as part of the the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard University, and Knight Chairs at journalism schools throughout the country. The foundation also supports the fellowship program run by both the International Center for Journalists and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative's News21 project.

Congratulations to David Kempa, a Carnegie-Knight News21 reporter from Arizona State University who won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in the college print category.

Kempa’s story “Crossing Lines,” illustrates one man’s goal to help impoverished Mexican farmers.

This is the second consecutive year a student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism wins the award.

The RFK Journalism Awards program honors outstanding reporting on issues that mattered to Robert F. Kennedy, such as human rights, social justice and the power of individual action in the United States and around the world.

Kempa was part of a team of Cronkite students who participated last summer in News21, a national journalism education initiative funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

To read more about Kempa, visit here.

For more awards received by News21, follow the link.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaks to the American Society of News Editors on April 11, 2010 in Washington, D.C.

In Washington D.C., a convention of leading newspaper editors is underway that in very few ways resembles such gatherings of the past. 2010’s “News Now Ideas Summit” features more than 20 Knight Foundation grantees on the program. The conference is hosted by the American Society of News Editors. (The N in ASNE used to stand for newspapers, but in a move that reflects this year’s major conference sponsors – Google, Yahoo!, Bloomberg and Knight Foundation – the N now just stands for News.)

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt opened the program Sunday night by encouraging the editors to keep experimenting and congratulating such efforts as Politifact and DocumentCloud, both Knight grantees. Other grantees on the program include SnagFilms, Sunlight Foundation, News 21, National Public Radio, Voice of San Diego, the Poynter Institute, Northwestern University, Minnesota Post, the Media Standards Trust, University of Southern California, Printcasting, News Cloud, The Project for Excellence in Journalism, J-Lab at American University, News Literacy at Stony Brook University,

Knight chairs on the program are Jacqueline Banaszynski (Editing) at the Missouri School of Journalism, Rich Beckman (Visual Journalism) at the University of Miami, Brant Houston (Investigative and Enterprise Reporting) at the University of Illinois and Pam Fine (News Leadership) at the University of Kansas. An afternoon panel, moderated by Knight Foundation’s Jose Zamora, is featuring six innovations the editors can start using right away in their newsrooms, nearly all of them projects that emerged from the foundation’s Knight News Challenge.

Four journalists from the University of Maryland completed a month long study of racial and ethnic trends. The study was done by interviewing multiracial Americans who shared stories on what it means to identify as a mixed race in America.

These four reporters were part of News21, a national journalism program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corp.

See the interviews here.

--Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

The results are in. News21 has released the alumni report update for its 2009 fellows.

Of the 94 fellows that completed the program, 52 (55.3 percent) are working full time.  This includes three freelancers/independent journalists who report full-time work. Of the 52 full-time workers, 87 percent report working for media companies or in communications jobs.

Twelve (12.7 percent) are working part time, 22 (23.4 percent) are still in school, seven (7.4 percent) are still looking for work and one is not currently seeking employment.

Compared to the Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates by Lee Becker, with the most recent study in 2008, News21 students have had more success in finding full time jobs than other journalism graduates.

For the comparison between the two studies to be accurate, only News21 students who have graduated (76 students) are included.

Here are the results.

The Becker Survey shows that 60.4 percent of journalism graduates have found full time employment, while News21 results show that 68.4 percent of graduates found full time employment.

Of those surveyed by Lee Becker, only 50 percent are working in communications jobs, while 86 percent of News21 graduates are in communications jobs.

As one can see, News21 graduates perform significantly better than the national average when it comes to employment, especially in communications jobs.

This month's Carnegie Reporter magazine contains an in-depth feature about the News21 Initiative, a Knight-Carnegie collaboration we've written about before. From the story:

From the start, the News21 fellows have faced two daunting challenges: to come up with stories of national importance and to tell them in ways that break the mold of traditional news media. The deans regarded innovation and invention as the higher priority. “The experimental was the most important side of this. Otherwise, it was just a really rich, pleasant internship program,” said Alex S. Jones, the Shorenstein Center director. Geoffrey Cowan, former dean of the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, said he envisioned News21 as the journalism school equivalent of an engineering school laboratory, only this one “would be about inventing what journalistic storytelling could be like.”

Former Berkeley journalism school dean Orville Schell, another of the original deans, had a practical objective in mind, too. He was dismayed at the paucity of openings in the broadcast news business—a particular strength of Berkeley’s—and believed News21 could help fill that void. “I’d been sitting at too many meetings where people lamented that the serious media were melting away before their eyes,” said Schell, now Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. “There were big gaps in the journalistic food chain, like a salmonrun with no salmon ladders.” [...]

In the tradition of Knight’s Eric Newton, who puckishly told a News21 gathering in 2008 that their task was “to think about new forms of truth-telling...in a totally new technological era, and create some innovations that will help keep the human race from destroying itself. No pressure,” Callahan told the fellows that they “really need to dream.”

“If what you accomplish at the end of the summer is having produced fantastic stories that are really interesting and really important and really matter and have never been told before and you get them published in the Washington Post or The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times—if that’s what we accomplish this summer, we fail. We fail miserably,” he said. “News21 needs to go far beyond that.”

You can read the rest of the story in this PDF, and go to the News21 site.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Local media is the focus of the journalism conference circuit. Estimates claim $100 billion in local-ad revenue could support local news and information projects, if it could only be successfully tapped. This follows the Knight Commission for the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy recommendation for innovation: its report says journalism does not need saving so much as it needs creating.

So what’s an entrepreneur to do? First, you need a business model. Looking for just such a holy grail, the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism created the New Business Models for News Project. The project researched the best practices in the business of online journalism and released four business models that can be used by anyone in any community.

The four business models were presented and discussed last Wednesday at the New Business Models for (Local) News Conference and Hypercamp at CUNY. You can download the models at newsinnovation.com.

Ideas and experiments are springing up weekly. If you are interested in learning more about new business models for news you might also want to take a loot at:

Ideas for Micropayments

Journalism Online, LLC.

Village Soup.com an internet-age business model to transform the
traditional community newspaper business.

Printcasting, a new revenue model for "people-powered magazines."

Spot.us,  a new crowd-funding model for paying for investigative reporting.

Minnpost, is a new hybrid non-profit model  that is supported by ads, memberships and foundation support. You can also look at the Voice of San Diego.

Other non-profit experiments include St. Louis Beacon and Gotham Gazette (in NY).

News 21 and the Chauncey Bailey project pioneered public-private experiments in investigative reporting.

Other university-based news models include the investigative reporting projects at Boston University, UC Berkeley, Brandeis and Northeastern.

Other nonprofits that are doing well include Pro Publica in NY,
Center for Investigative Reporting in SF, Center for Public Integrity in DC.

These are only a few of the models that individuals, organizations and universities have been using to figure out a new way to sustain journalism.

If you think none of these projects are the right digital innovations to provide quality news and information to communities, come up with one of your own, and enter the Knight News Challenge at newschallenge.org