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.

This week Webbmedia Group held a chat for journo-entrepreneurs, providing business models and use cases for journalists hoping to launch media start-ups.

Here are eight tips and a few examples of entrepreneurial journalism projects you can launch or replicate in your community. You can also find these and more tips on twitter: #kwchat.

Tip #1: Don't be a generalist. Create highly-specialized content that you're  an expert on.

Tip #2: Content producers must syndicate across platforms, but the RIGHT platforms.

Tip #3: Try to fund your new entrepreneurial jurno venture alone. Projects have launched for less than $10k.

Tip #4: You must create a business and marketing plan, regardless of how small your new venture is.

Tip #5: Find a few people whose opinions your trust to serve as advisers as you start your new venture.

Tip #6: "If you are passionate about your idea, find some people you trust and then go talk to people you don't know."

Tip #7: Remember, if you're going to record a demo of your product, make it good. Bad demos can doom great projects.

Tip# 8: Remember, most ideas fail. A vast majority of ideas fail. But, get to that point quickly.

Patch.com is an example of an entrepreneurial model that can be run with a low budget in any community.

Spot.us is another innovative model that includes crowdfunding and most recently a new sustainability model based on advertising through surveys.

Other journo-entrepreneur efforts include projects like WindyCitizen.com and its NowSpots advertising model and Front Porch Forum among other Knight Foundation grantees in this field.

If you are a journo-entrepreneur the Knight News Challenge, the Knight Community Information Challenge and J-Lab’s New Voices are great opportunities to launch your start-up to inform and engage communities.

For grant application tips and and other resources for freelance and entrepreneur journalists visit: knightchallenge.net. And to learn about Knight funded innovations that are ready for you to use, please visit Knight Apps.

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.

Knight gantee, The Participatory Culture Foundation, launched Miro Community 1.0 today. Miro Community provides a platform  people can use to build community-centered video web sites. The newest version lets users aggregate videos from designated video sources into one central video hub and easily customize the look and feel of your hub.

Key features from the mirocommunity.org site:

• Run a beautiful video presentation website on your own domain, without having to maintain the software.
• Works with your existing video hosting setup and workflow - no need to re-post videos.
• Works with free video hosting services, if you don't already have videos online.
• Lets you bring together videos from a wide-variety of hosts and sources, into one curated experience.
• Automatically import and publish RSS feeds of videos from any source.
• Create a discussion space for video about your community; strengthen your relationships with your community.
• Runs on open-source software.

Media in Knight Communities, including WDET Detroit and Bay Area Video Coalition, use Miro Community as a platform for their video sharing sites. Knight Foundation awarded a grant to the Participatory Culture Foundation to develop the Miro platform in October 2008.

Miro says they are always looking for local partners like nonprofits, universities, and other groups that want to run a site in their community. Anyone interested should email Anne Jonas.

The most recent issue of Nieman Foundation’s quarterly publication talked about news and neurology, the future of news, journalism education and news literacy, and bringing journalists and technologists together.

Brant Houston wrote about getting people to analyze and share public data for local reporting. Houston holds the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, and said that digital tools can make both journalists and citizens into better community watchdogs.

Michelle McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center wrote about finding 100 news sites that are creating content and revenue as a fellow at the University of Missouri. She saw that media such as niche and community sites are filling the gaps in the news ecosystem, as described by Knight’s V.P. for Journalism Program Eric Newton, and predicted greater partnerships between journalists and community members but fewer sites that charge for access to news.

Burt Herman, a former John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford, talked about launching Hacks and Hackers with the New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer and Northwestern professor Richard Gordon. The group is experimenting with ways to connect journalists and technologists around their strong beliefs in the need for freedom of information.

Krissy Clark, a former Knight fellow at Stanford, wrote that good journalism is like a map because it can inform people about where a story is and the best way forward. She said that journalists can filter through the information from sites like EveryBlock and use technology to “reconnect people to place.”

Andrew Finlayson, another former fellow, talked about the semantic web. The semantic web is a system of linked data in development that are readable to computers, not just humans. An example of this is the WolframAlpha search engine that generates an answer instead of links to pages. Journalists will be able to use this system to organize data and find connections for investigative reporting.

V. Michael Bove, Jr. leads the Center for Future Storytelling at MIT’s Media Lab. He studies the combination of shared experiences with media, like watching TV with friends, and personalized experiences, like watching it on an iPhone. He thinks that mobile technology will change the definition of successful media from whether it has a wide reach to whether it reaches a targeted audience. Also at MIT, Sherry Turkle, professor of technology and society,  explained her views on young people, connectivity and deep thought in interviews with PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation” and the BBC.  (Knight funds the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. )

James Paul Gee, professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, said that in games we learn by being guided whereas with content-driven media we learn by reflecting on what we are told. He said using games in journalism can help if the games’ creators focus on what problems the player has to solve rather than what material the player has to read. Knight funds an entrepreneurial journalism center at ASU.

Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen wrote about their research project called Playing the News. They studied how games could be used to tell “boring but important” news and found that people wanted to be guided through ongoing stories. Sites with lots of contextual material helped people both see the big picture and get in-depth information. They used their findings in the Convergence Journalism class they teach at the University of Minnesota.  Nora and Kathleen won a Knight News Challenge grant to create the game.

Esther Wojcicki is the current Chair of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons and teaches high school journalism. She thinks all students need journalism skills, and received a Knight Foundation grant to develop a curriculum for high school English classes. Esther says it is important to give teenagers both freedom and recognition.

Alan C. Miller wrote about launching the News Literacy Project, which teaches high school students about the importance of First Amendment and finding valid information. Journalists visit classes to talk about their work and the lessons focus on critical thinking and recognizing quality information. Alan's start-up funds came from Knight Foundation.

Bob Giles, Curator of the Nieman Foundation, said that fairness in journalism is as important as ever. Reporting fairly, like respecting the wishes of the story subjects or looking at a controversial issue from different angles, makes stories more credible and makes them have a greater impact. Knight funds Latin American journalism fellows at Harvard.

Photograph by Rachel Gadson

Five students and one recent graduate from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) School of Journalism and Graphic Communication are in Johannesburg this summer reporting on the World Cup and life in South Africa with six students from Shantou University in Guangdong Province, China.

The students will be in South Africa until July 11. FAMU students will produce the English content on the group’s web site, and Shantou students will produce the Chinese content.

Professor Joe Ritchie, Knight Chair for Journalism Student Enhancement, is leading the FAMU students in South Africa. Listen to Ritchie and student journalist Anamarie Shreeves discuss the project on NPR.

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

Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, a documentary that traces the early history of the American newspaper, outlines what’s at stake in the current crisis and peeks into the future of in-depth and investigative reporting.

The documentary includes several interviews from people from the news industry, including Eric Newton, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation.

The documentary recently aired on PBS and is available on DVD .

            --Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Stanford University has announced the newest group of John S. Knight Journalism Fellows and only the second class chosen under the program’s new emphasis on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.

Knight Foundation spoke with Program Director Jim Bettinger about how the changes to the program, announced in 2008, have impacted the fellows and their work.

The 2010-11 John S. Knight fellows will study a range of topics facing the future of news, civic engagement, developing new multimedia storytelling approaches, as well as creating tools to broaden information about immigrant populations and promote freedom of speech. The twenty journalists in this year’s program will include, for the first time, professionals from Cuba and Armenia.

You can find a complete list of the 2010-11 fellows and more about the Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at knight.stanford.edu.

Stanford’s Knight Fellowship program is funded by the Knight Foundation.

--Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger