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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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