The International Multimedia Institute opened its doors to an inaugural class of 30 students this summer.  The new school for journalists is located in New Delhi, but participants come from all over India, as well as Bhutan and Liberia.

Students will learn the fundamentals of journalism and digital media skills such as podcasting and web design to equip them for journalism in the digital age.  The school is led by Dean Sunil Saxena, with support from Knight Fellows Jody McPhillips and Dave Bloss.

The institute is expected to create a cadre of journalists dedicated to covering issues that need attention in a rapidly changing India.  With lower tuition requirements than other schools, the program is accessible to an economically diverse spectrum of applicants.  There are also scholarships available.

The International Center for Journalists and the Society for Policy Studies launched the project, with support from the MacArthur Foundation and Knight Foundation.  The City University of New York is also assisting the school.

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.”

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s 94th annual conference (AEJMC) is taking place August 4-7 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver, Colorado.

Eric Newton, Vice President for Journalism at Knight Foundation, gave the opening remarks to journalism educators in Denver at the Aug. 3, 2010 pre-conference workshop, “Journalism Schools as News Providers: Challenges and Opportunities.”

Here’s what he said:

“In journalism school they taught me the story was the only thing that mattered.

Make a story good enough, it will change the world.

Well…

A great story can change the world, under the right circumstances.

But an equally great story will change absolutely nothing, if conditions aren’t right.

Why?

Because the stories we love so much are not the only things that matter.

Not just reaching but engaging communities matters.

Portable, personal, participatory technology matters.

Business models that support quality journalism matter.

The whole media ecosystem matters.

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities warns us that news and information are so essential to democratic life that we need get over the impulse to save yesterday’s journalism and get on with the business of creating today’s and tomorrow’s.

That’s why an expanded role for journalism schools in creating content is a timely topic.

I see this topic as one of four transformational trends emerging in journalism education.

Alas, and this is a bad group to confess this to, I have brought with me not a scintilla of data to back up this contention that these are emerging trends.

My defense is that it is all your fault. Years of working closely with you, people who hope to lead journalism to a better, 21^st century future have put me on to these ideas of trends.

I think these meta-trends are crystallizing around the four basic components of traditional journalism -- the journalist, the story, the medium and the audience – all of which are changing fast.

So here they are:

• Transformational Trend Number One: Journalism and communication schools better connecting to the intellectual life of the entire university.

When you teach students to produce professional quality work while in school, when you teach entrepreneurial journalism, when you teach the specialties of health, business, environmental or other advanced forms of journalism, when you teach it to computer programmers or citizen journalists, you are expanding the definition of who a journalist is and what a journalist can do. This is too big a job for journalism schools to do by themselves. So we see the best of you connecting with other parts of your universities.

• Transformational Trend Number Two: Journalism and communication schools as content and technology innovators.

Since even our top industry leaders admit no one knows what the future of news will be, you have just as good a chance of inventing it as anyone. We see the early adopters among you experimenting with new story forms, teaching everything from data visualization, web scraping and computational journalism, even developing new software. Some are experimenting with new tools as fast as they come out. You aspire to be not the caboose of the news community but its engine of change. To do this, more of you are learning how to innovate.

• Transformational Trend Number Three: Journalism and communication schools as the master teachers of open, collaborative approaches.

We see stories done by multiple newsrooms in partnership, different campuses working together, campuses working with news outlets, pro-am work with bloggers. We see the sharing of teaching methods and tools and more e-learning. An increasing use of open source software as a teaching tool. We see the teaching of students to work harmoniously in teams and small groups. When a story can be told in 30 different ways in 30 different technological forms, we need new ways of seeing the essence of the message and hooking it up with the right media. The leaders among you are showing how open, collaborative approaches make these choices easier.

• Transformational Trend Number Four: Journalism and communication schools as digital news providers who understand the media ecosystems of their communities.

Teaching journalism without producing real news is about as useful as holding target practice without real bullets. That’s why many of you do it already. But in the digital age we are seeing trend-setting universities going further. We see them trying to more deeply understand and engage with the people we once called the audience. We see engagement metrics, not just usage metrics. We see news organizations hoping to increase story impact by trying to figure out why some stories change the world and others don’t. This places them in the role not only of news providers, but of those who hope to understand the media ecosystems of their communities.

So there you have them:

-- Connecting with the whole university

-- Innovating content and technology

-- Teaching open, collaborative models

-- Providing digital news in new engaging ways

My hypothesis is that these transformational trends are keys to the success of journalism schools from this day forward.

My assumption here is that these new approaches are built on top of your existing programs to teach quality journalism, the fair, accurate, contextual search for truth, the idea being that how we do journalism is changing, but why we do it is not.

Now, are these emerging meta-trends, the very best practices of a few or just wishful thinking? You tell me.

If you don’t like these trends, go out and make up some of your own.

But while you are at it, let’s get the scholars in our field to do a lot better job in studying journalism education itself so we can understand if and how it’s actually changing.

If you agree these are indeed emerging trends, what should we do next?

Exactly what you are doing today.

Talk about and hopefully change your rules and tools, standards and practices, laws and statutes – the institutional things, accreditation requirements, make shield laws that protect students, all of those other things the Knight Commission and other reports have called for.

Change it all until the day comes when these are no longer emerging trends but the new traditions.

With help from Knight Foundation, The World Journalism Education Council (WJEC) has launched a new project to help journalism educators get better organized.  The project, named the World Journalism Education Census, It aims to provide a complete directory of programs at universities worldwide with links to university websites and information about the programs.

2,338 journalism programs are currently active in the census – sorted by country.  This Knight-funded initiative provides shows students, teachers and professionals which universities do what and how to contact them.

Journalism projects that desire international assistance can use this tool to find institutional partners, and the work can also be used for further studies and research. Users have included visitors from 135 countries.

The census is constantly vetted for accuracy and completeness.  In addition to the international programs in other countries, the council has also identified 371 international programs among the 480 U.S. programs listed, and will complete this task in the fall.

WJEC also issued the Declaration of Universal Principles of Journalism Education which were approved in June 2007 as principles to serve as a standard for journalism education worldwide. The website also has a video of this declaration.

The Henry Luce Foundation awarded a grant to Diane Winston, the current Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.                              

The two-year, $395,000 grant will support a fellowship program for journalists reporting on religion and international relations. It will also fund graduate-level reporting classes on the same topic, and it will pay for a group of Winston’s students to travel to the Middle East next year. This year, the students documented their experiences in “The Israel-Palestine Project.”

Winston’s journalism classes focus on religion as a changing and moving part of culture. She and her students study how religion affects individuals and communities as well as its effect on national and international politics. See TRANS/MISSIONS, the Knight Chair in Media and Religion’s web site, for more. 

Knight Foundation established Knight Chairs at top journalism schools around the country. The professional journalists who hold these chairs teach, practice journalism, and start new programs and experimental projects in journalism.

Knight funded the Lex Mundi Foundation to create a web site that provides free legal support and resources to non-profit organizations.

Lex Mundi is dedicated to linking social entrepreneurs to pro bono legal services from law firms across the country and abroad.

If you are a social entrepreneur, or your organization is working on social innovation, we hope you take advantage of the Lex Mundi network and their new site.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation.

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.

ASNE’s High School Journalism Initiative, a program funded by the Knight Foundation, has far exceeded its predicted unique monthly visitors on its site my.hsj.org 

Check out the chart below. 

According to the grantee, there are two keys to this success: heavy promotion of the monthly Got News? Get Clicks. Win Money! contest, which encourages student sites to do their own marketing, and getting indexed by Google News.

                                          --Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger