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Public Media 2.0 Showcase
News21 initiative continues to help journalism schools innovate and adapt
email discuss Posted by Katie Donnelly on Oct 13, 2009 at 4:29 PM
Now in its fourth year, the News21 project has learned something about innovation in journalism.
News21 is a multi-year initiative, funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation through 2011, that aims to breathe new life into schools of journalism at 12 American universities, including eight “incubator” sites: Arizona State, UC Berkeley, Columbia, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina, Northwestern, University of Southern California, and Syracuse. Each incubator offers 10-week journalism seminars based on a common theme. This year, participating fellows created 60 in-depth multimedia news packages based on the theme of “American Tapestry: Exploring the Demographics of a Changing Nation.” As described on the News21 site:
Demographically, culturally, politically, geographically, technologically. The United States is evolving in many ways, through its people, institutions, policies and cultures. For the summer of 2009, News21 fellows traveled the nation, investigating a wide range of topics, looking to present their in-depth journalism in fresh ways with innovative approaches. Their reporting followed a spring seminar that immersed them in their topics and helped them to sharpen their investigation and digital presentations.
The individual school projects from this year’s program include: The Latino Experience Across America (Arizona State), Intersections: Bay Area Communities at the Crossroads (Berkeley), Charter Explosion: Hybrid Schools in Public Education (Columbia), The New Voters: Identity and U.S. Politics (Maryland), Powering a Nation: Quest for Energy in a Changing USA (North Carolina), Young Urban Adults and the New America (Northwestern), Southwestern Shifts: New Communities and New Realities (USC), and The Young and the Wireless: Net Gen Rising (Syracuse). All of these projects are available online, save for The Young and the Wireless, which is scheduled to go live later this fall.
In the past, the News21 project has received some criticism for their broad topics, lack of real innovation, lack of true cross-campus and cross-university collaboration, and inability to keep the sites active after the duration of the project. For example, see this 2006 article from MediaShift’s Mark Glaser.
In his 2007 follow-up piece, Glaser notes that the interactivity and site design of the news packages had improved, but in-depth audience involvement remained untapped: “…despite those improvements, there’s still the nagging problem of fellows trying to engage online communities in a subject— and then abandoning the project as they leave the program each fall.” There is clearly a real tension between experimentation and the desire for mainstream distribution.
When I spoke with her recently, News21 national director Jody Brannon addressed these concerns. While most of the projects have ended for the year, some of the participating schools have arranged for students to continue to be involved by providing them with credits and/or payment to keep the projects going through the fall — at the very least, by monitoring comments and promoting content.
Brannon pointed me towards several innovations in video storytelling among this year’s participants. Perhaps most notable is the University of Maryland’s video tag player, which allows users to watch media clips based on tags. Also, the University of North Carolina’s video player enables users to search the full text of video and ASU’s player lets users access related files, links and graphics without ever having to exit the video player.
One of the more intriguing experimental interfaces emerging from News21 is included in the University of Maryland’s New Voters project. It combines linear and nonlinear elements with traditional video, scrolling horizontal text, and a feature that allows users to jump to segments featuring a particular person. Underneath the video is a display of related video, photo and text items. In one of the videos, project creator José Castillo explains how the Flash interface was developed, noting that this format provides viewers with “a way of stepping to the side of the story,” and replaces the traditional use of the lower third of the screen for text overlays in documentary film.
Other experimental methods of storytelling include ASU’s Analyzing Amnesty, which features embedded modules for live Twitter discussions, ASU’s The Virgin of Guadalupe, which is atypically arranged in unordered “pods,” and Berkeley’s 51st and Telegraph which offers a 360-degree interactive photograph with embedded stories.
Fellows also found creative ways to integrate data, including the University of Maryland’s Compare the Generations, which includes a “talking bar chart” tool, and USC’s CityLab, a prototype of a national location-based information database for reporters.
Brannon also shared the topics for the upcoming semester. Some schools will continue to focus their efforts on their fall projects, including Northwestern, and the University of North Carolina, which is retaining Powering a Nation (they are currently working on creating an online game that analyzes energy consumption). Additional themes include: Small Businesses (Berkeley), Injustice in America (ASU), Elderly America (Columbia), The Changing Chesapeake (Maryland), Distressed California Communities (USC) and Race in America (Syracuse). The themes, according to Brannon, are intentionally selected to be “broad enough to have national resonance yet narrow enough to allow each school to craft a project that leverages their faculty’s expertise, fits into their curriculum and engages their students’ interest.” Brannon explained that each school will decide how much of the previous years’ project to maintain since “new fellows may wish to go in a totally new direction.”
Brannon acknowledged the current lack of inter-school collaboration and said that this year, they are “making concerted effort to do more collaboratively.” The project has employed social media tools, such as Ning, to encourage the free flow of information across institutions, but some of the schools were reluctant to embrace it, since they already had their own established blogs and social media tools. There is still a hope of pairing students across borders in the project. At the least, Brannon hopes to be able to send the fellows out to collect data in their cities (likely through man-on-the-street interviews) and then analyze that data for larger trends.
Innovation in journalism is still largely a business of trial-and-error, but the Arizona State News21 team has a comprehensive round-up of the lessons learned so far here. These lessons include: get the story first, report in teams, hire developers and put them in the newsroom, understand developers and their tools, hire journalists with basic video and photography skills, provide the best current equipment and software, think visually, get everyone in the same room, and embrace failure. (For more reflection and analysis, check out the News21 group blog.)
Many of the lessons described are consistent with the recommendations we provided the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in our recent report, Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism In and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting. Clearly, these projects are addressing the best practices in digital journalism we describe in the report; most notably, they are going deeper by taking advantage of digital platforms to add depth and context to news coverage and playing with form to innovate and integrate new technologies. While it might be difficult in a 10-week program, these projects would likely gain more longevity with an increased focus on two additional best practices: collaboration (with each other as well as with innovative mainstream news organizations) and audience involvement.
Want to learn more about Public Media 2.0? Read our white paper: Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics. Want to learn more about innovation in journalism? Read our report:Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism In and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting.
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