ASU News - Journalism + Journalism

Jody Brannon to direct Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative

jnewberg — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:36:53 -0600

Jody Brannon, a digital media leader who has held top editor positions at MSN.com, USAToday.com and washingtonpost.com, will direct a 12-university, $7.5 million project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to explore new ways to produce in-depth multimedia journalism.

Brannon will be national director of the Carnegie-Knight News21 journalism initiative, which moved last month to the new Phoenix home of Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

News21 was started by the foundations three years ago with digital media “incubators” at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California. Under a new three-year grant recently approved by the foundations, four more incubators have been added to the program: ASU, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina and Syracuse University. Four other schools under the Carnegie-Knight journalism initiative – Harvard University, the University of Missouri, the University of Nebraska and the University of Texas – will send students to participate in incubators at the other eight schools.

Under the News 21 program, journalism students are enrolled in a spring course to explore a major news topic, and then in the summer they are fellows in the News21 incubators, traveling across the country to produce in-depth stories while experimenting with different multimedia forms.

Brannon, senior home page editor and ombudsman at MSN.com in New York and Seattle, has experimented with new approaches and entry points to content by incorporating user input. Before joining MSN.com in 2006, she served as executive producer for news at USAToday.com, directing breaking news and prime-time programming.

She entered the world of digital media in its infancy, starting as a copy editor for The Washington Post’s first online initiative, Digital Ink, in April 1995. She rose to become manager of news and production and later managing editor of washingtonpost.com. She also served as executive producer at Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive before joining USAToday.com as executive producer.

Under her direction, multimedia news staffs won national awards from the Online News Association, Editor & Publisher, the Newspaper Association of America, the National Press Photographers Association, Associated Press Managing Editors and the National Press Foundation.

She is on the board of directors of the Online News Association and on the advisory board of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

“Jody Brannon is the ideal person to lead the next generation of News21,” said Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan. “She is highly collaborative, possesses great leadership experience and is a nationally recognized leader in the digital news industry. She will help promote collaboration and innovation at the highest levels among the Carnegie-Knight schools.”

Prior to her work in digital media, Brannon worked in magazines and newspapers, primarily as a reporter and editor at the Tacoma News Tribune and Seattle Times.

Brannon has journalism degrees from Seattle University and American University and a doctoral degree in mass communication from the University of Maryland, where she studied the early days of multimedia journalism. Since 1988 she also has regularly taught a wide range of journalism courses at the University of Maryland, Pacific Lutheran University, Seattle University and American University, including the capstone seminar in its master’s program in interactive journalism for the past six years.

“These young journalists, guided by so many seasoned educators and the deans at their respective schools, are poised to prove the future of journalism is bright,” Brannon said. “The fellows will focus on telling important stories in new ways, blending learning and teaching styles, new and proven. I’m excited about doing what I can to ensure some next-gen approaches will have resonance for decades to come, thanks to the Carnegie-Knight commitment.”

Cronkite school takes journalism on the road

jnewberg — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:14:32 -0600

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is hitting the road to bring journalism to high-school students around the state.

The school recently equipped a hybrid SUV with the tools of journalism, including a television camera, microphones, audio recorders and backdrops, and is taking it to high schools in an attempt to get students interested in journalism. The program is funded by the ASU Foundation Women & Philanthropy and the Scripps Howard Foundation.

Anita Luera, who heads the Cronkite Institute for High School Programs, has taken the vehicle, which is wrapped in an eye-catching, full-color graphic depicting students with video cameras, computers and microphones, to a half-dozen schools in the past few months, including several on the Navajo reservation in northeast Arizona.

At St. Michael Indian School near Window Rock, Ariz., Luera talked about the need for minority journalists and explained opportunities at the Cronkite School. Then she gave the students a chance to practice in front of the camera, learn basic camera moves and watch their taped performances afterward.

Luera said some students “are itching to get the microphone,” while others have to be coaxed to get in front of the camera.

Playing a video back usually elicits nervous laughter. Luera said she addresses students’ concerns about how they appear on camera by explaining that in the real television world, the tape would be edited down to the best sound bites from a three- or four-minute interview.

St. Michael journalism teacher Joan Levitt, who arranged for Luera to visit, said that many of her students have never thought about careers in journalism, and they’re intrigued by the idea.

“Journalism offers a wonderful opportunity to combine interest in the world around us with writing,” she said. “Plus, the advances in technology offer more choices for students in that field.”

The ASU Foundation Women & Philanthropy program funded the purchase of the vehicle. The program brings together women to support educational, research and public outreach missions.

The program also is funded in part by a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation, the corporate foundation of the E.W. Scripps Co. The Scripps Howard Foundation seeks to support quality journalism education while advancing the cause of free speech and promoting excellence in journalism. To schedule a free visit to a school, contact Luera at (480) 965-5477 or at anita.luera@asu.edu.

Washington press corps diversity remains low, study finds

lccampb — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:29:40 -0600

Only about 13 percent of the Washington daily newspaper press corps are journalists of color, according to a study on diversity by UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc. and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

There were slightly more journalists of color covering the nation’s capital in 2008 than there were four years earlier when UNITY conducted its first census of the racial makeup of the Washington press corps. But progress has been much slower than UNITY officials had hoped.

“With the nation growing increasingly more diverse, we need a press corps in Washington, D.C., that reflects what America looks like,” said Karen Lincoln Michel, UNITY president. “We represent a mere 13.1 percent of journalists pressing for answers from a federal government that serves a population nearly three times that size. UNITY considers the findings a call to action for media companies to reinvent their Washington news bureaus by staffing them with more journalists of color.”

Improvement is needed not just in overall numbers, but in the number of minority journalists in leadership positions and in the diversification of all news operations – big and small, she said.

The study, which was made possible by a generous grant from the McCormick Foundation of Chicago, showed that representation of journalists of color was lowest in top leadership positions. While there were three bureau chiefs of color in 2004 heading up major news operations in the nation’s capital, there was just one in 2008 – Dean Baquet of The New York Times.

Additionally, nearly 80 percent of the newspapers with their own staffs in Washington had no journalists of color working for them as reporters, editors, correspondents or bureau chiefs. Most of those were staffs of one or two people.

The release of the study coincides with UNITY 2008, the world’s largest gathering of journalists of color, which is being held this week in Chicago. The convention is the signature event of UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc. – an alliance representing the combined 7,000 members of the Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association.

The study also found:

• Among individual newspapers, USA Today made the biggest four-year gain in the number of journalists of color on its Washington staff, going from less than 4 percent to 20 percent. But other large newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News, the New York Daily News and the Houston Chronicle, reported no minority journalists covering Washington.

• Some Washington bureaus of the large newspaper chains, including Newhouse News Service and Gannett News Service, reported the most diverse staffs in Washington, but other chain bureaus, including Scripps Howard, Hearst, Media General and Copley, had among the least diverse newsrooms in Washington.

• Retention of minority journalists continues to be a concern. More than half of the journalists of color identified in the 2004 study were no longer part of the Washington press corps in 2008.

• Asian American journalists have made the most progress proportionately in the Washington press corps since 2004, going from 1.9 percent to 3.2 percent of the total. There was one Native American journalist covering Washington for daily newspapers in 2008.

• Journalists of color surveyed said they believe readers are interested in Washington news, yet they describe the Washington press corps as being out of touch with audiences back home and they attribute that, at least in part, to the lack of diversity in the Washington press corps.

• Of those surveyed, many expressed uncertainty about their long-terms prospects as journalists. Almost 70 percent said they either don’t plan to end up in journalism or they’re uncertain whether they will finish their professional careers as journalists.
Kristin Gilger, assistant dean of the Cronkite School, was the project's lead researcher and authored the report. She was assisted by Stephen Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Cronkite School, and two student researchers.

The new study follows up on one conducted by UNITY and the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in 2004. That study, conducted by Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan when he was at the University of Maryland, was the first to focus on the makeup of the Washington press corps. It found that fewer than 10.5 percent of the reporters, correspondents, columnists, editors and bureau chiefs in the Washington daily newspaper press corps were journalists of color. The findings led to calls from UNITY leadership to improve diversity in these high-profile journalism jobs.

UNITY leaders said the need for change is no less now than it was four years ago.

Rafael Olmeda, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, said newspapers have to pay attention to not just hiring journalists of color, but to issues of career opportunities and advancement and job satisfaction. And Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, suggested that newspapers rotate staff members into their Washington bureaus as a way to add diversity.

The 2008 UNITY census shows “how much more work remains to be done in diversifying our newsrooms – particularly when it comes to covering the seat of power in this nation,” said Jeanne Mariani-Belding, president of the Asian American Journalists Association. “As an industry, we can do better.”

The McCormick Foundation is a nonprofit organization committed to making life better for children, communities and the country. Through its charitable grant-making programs, Cantigny Park and Golf, Cantigny First Division Foundation and the McCormick Freedom Museum, the foundation positively impacts people’s lives and advances the ideals of a free, democratic society.

UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc. is an alliance of four major national journalism organizations: Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and Native American Journalists Association. Its mission is to advocate quality news coverage about people of color and improve ethnic diversity in the nation’s newsrooms.

News diversity database launched

lccampb — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:16:48 -0600

A digital clearinghouse for news diversity research was unveiled recently at UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.’s national convention in Chicago.

The UNITY/McCormick Foundation Electronic Clearinghouse for News Diversity Research contains more than 400 references to books, articles and reports that relate to diversity in journalism, provided in an easily searchable online database.

UNITY President Karen Lincoln Michel said the clearinghouse is an important step in making certain that information about news diversity is readily available to a wide audience.

“Until now, information about news diversity has been scattered and easily overlooked,” Michel said. “This clearinghouse, with its critical data and important lessons, will help us make better decisions as an industry. We aren’t going to be able to say: ‘We didn’t know’.”

The project was created for UNITY by researchers at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University with a generous grant from the McCormick Foundation of Chicago, a national leader in news diversity issues.

“We wanted to put this important information in the hands of news leaders who make policy decisions in newsrooms,” said project leader Stephen Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Cronkite School.

Doig, a national expert in computer-assisted reporting, said the database covers a wide range of topics about diversity, including newsroom staffing, news sources, journalism education and portrayals of minorities in the media. It references scholarly research, books, articles, professional reviews and journalism organization and foundation reports. While academic research is included, all abstracts are written in easy-to-understand language for the non-scholar.

Covering more than 60 years of research, the clearinghouse includes abstracts of everything from the 1947 report by the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press to a new book about the growth of the African-American press in the United States.

Doig said he and two student researchers used a database search engine to identify relevant materials then individually scoured hundreds of books, reports and articles to come up with a database that focuses specifically on diversity as practiced in newsrooms and as produced by news outlets.

“Much research has been done on diversity in movies or television, for example, but we didn’t include it unless it was really targeted to journalism,” Doig said.

The resulting database can be browsed, sorted, filtered and searched. The clearinghouse is available at http://cronkite.asu.edu/unity.

The project was unveiled during UNITY’s annual convention along with a census of diversity in the Washington press corp, also conducted by the Cronkite School in partnership with UNITY and the McCormick Foundation.

Rodriguez named Carnegie Professor at Cronkite

lccampb — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:43:06 -0600

Rick Rodriguez, the former executive editor at the Sacramento Bee who joined the faculty of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University earlier this year, will be the school’s first Carnegie Professor specializing in Latino and transnational news coverage.

The Carnegie Professor is part of the curriculum enrichment component of the comprehensive Carnegie-Knight Journalism Initiative to improve journalism education at 12 universities nationwide. The program is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“Today’s journalists must be steeped in experience and deeply knowledgeable about the subjects they report on,” said Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian. “To understand the underlying ideas and possible ramifications of import, even truly transformative events, requires that journalists be trained and informed enough to deal with complex, nuanced information with a richness and depth.”

Arizona State University, the University of North Carolina and the University of Nebraska were recently added to the Carnegie-Knight initiative, joining the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Maryland, the University of Missouri, Northwestern University, Syracuse University, the University of Texas and the University of Southern California.

The Carnegie-Knight grants are used by the schools to “expand the intellectual horizons of journalism students, in large part by harnessing the tremendous subject-matter expertise that resides in each of the universities,” according to a joint statement from the foundations.

At Cronkite, the grant will be used to create a journalism specialization on covering Latino communities and U.S.-Mexico transnational issues.

“The rapidly changing demographics of the nation represent an enormously important – and complex – story,” said Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan. “Today one-third of the U.S. population is people of color. By 2050, minorities will make up half of the U.S. population. Latinos are both the largest and fastest-growing minority group. Yet much of the news media coverage of Latinos and Latino-related issues is superficial and often polarizing. We believe there is a critical need to develop a cadre of young journalists who can draw on a deep reservoir of knowledge from multiple disciplines – history, sociology, political science, economics, art, culture, religion, law – to create powerful, sophisticated and insightful journalism about these increasingly important stories.”

Under the program, the Cronkite School will offer a new specialization in the coverage of Latino issues that includes a multidisciplinary seminar to explore cultural, historical, political, legal, economic, religious and sociological dimensions of Latino life in the United States and U.S.-Mexico transnational issues, featuring top faculty and experts from a wide variety of disciplines. There also will be a new field course in which students will delve in-depth into critical Latino-related issues and meet with discipline experts during trips to Mexico. Students in the specialization also will take appropriate Latino courses across multiple disciplines outside of the Cronkite School and do an in-depth project at Cronkite News Service.

Rodriguez is uniquely suited to serve as the school’s first Carnegie Professor, Callahan said.

“Rick is one of America’s leading newspaper editors, a champion of not only the kind of in-depth reporting that we want our students to produce, but a national leader on news diversity issues,” Callahan said.

Rodriguez, the first Latino president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, joined the Cronkite School faculty in March after serving as the top editor of the Sacramento Bee for nine years.

The Salinas, Calif., native graduated from Stanford University in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He was only 18 when he began his career with his hometown newspaper, The Salinas Californian. One of his first assignments was interviewing legendary farm labor leader Cesar Chavez, and he says that reporting on Chavez’s career is among his proudest achievements as a reporter.

Rodriguez worked for another McClatchy newspaper, The Fresno Bee, before joining the Sacramento Bee in 1982 as a political writer. He was the Bee’s managing editor for five years before being named executive editor.

The Cronkite School has a deep commitment to journalism diversity issues. Later this week the school will unveil two national research projects conducted for UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc. at the group’s national convention in Chicago. And two years ago, the school conducted a major study for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists on the depictions of Latinos in America’s leading news magazines.

ASU, Stardust equip high schools with newsrooms

jnewberg — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:18:05 -0600

Five Arizona high schools will get fully equipped multimedia newsrooms in time for fall classes as part of a new high school outreach program by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Stardust Foundation of Scottsdale.

The five schools are Buckeye Union High School, Coolidge High School, Douglas High School, Miami High School and Snowflake High School. The schools are the first to be chosen for the Stardust High School Journalism Program, a unique initiative to create newsrooms in high schools.

Five more Arizona high schools will join the program next year under a grant from the Scottsdale-based Stardust Foundation.

The grant targets schools with large minority populations that do not have school newspapers or viable journalism programs. Those are the schools that often don’t have the resources to publish school newspapers, said Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan.

Under the program, the Cronkite School will equip newsrooms at each school with computers, scanners, video cameras, digital cameras and software necessary for publishing an online newspaper that can also be published as a print product. The Cronkite School staff will install the equipment and manage servers that host schools’ Web sites.

More than 100 students will take classes in multimedia reporting and producing this fall, learning skills such as writing, reporting, grammar, editing, page design, Web production, videography and photography as well as journalism ethics and values.

The Cronkite School will provide ongoing training and support for teachers and students in the program. The first group of teachers and advisers will participate in a converged media boot camp this summer at the new Cronkite building in downtown Phoenix, where they will get help developing journalism curricula and learn up-to-date technical skills.

High school administrators said the program will transform their schools’ journalism programs.

At Coolidge High School in Coolidge, about 45 minutes southeast of Phoenix, the school’s journalism program has been limited to a yearbook class. Under the Stardust program, Coolidge will add an introductory journalism class for sophomores and advanced classes in digital media, newspaper, yearbook and broadcast journalism, said Principal Keith Greer.

“We knew there was technology out there that we weren’t afforded because we’re a rural school,” Greer said. “This program enables us to compete at a much higher level.”

Stephen Truog, journalism adviser at Buckeye Union High School in Buckeye, Ariz., said The Hawk student newspaper had run into hard times. “We just started bringing the newspaper back at Buckeye, and this will be an exciting boost to our program,” he said in an e-mail interview. “And we’re thrilled at the opportunity to take The Hawk online.”

The Stardust program is run by Dave Cornelius, a longtime Valley educator who built the state’s premier high school broadcast education program at Arcadia High School in the Scottsdale Unified School District. He developed programs that have become models for teaching arts, audiovisual technology and communications at the secondary school level.

The Stardust Foundation is a nonprofit corporation founded by Jerry Bisgrove in 1993. Headquartered in Scottsdale, the foundation provides grants to organizations that impact the linked concepts of family and neighborhood stability.

“Stardust values the opportunity to expose more students to careers in journalism,” Bisgrove said. “The communication skills they will learn in this program will be useful to them, regardless of their chosen profession. In today’s fast-paced, information-driven world, effective communication is vital to achieving success in all facets of one’s life.”

Callahan said that getting more students involved in high school journalism programs will improve their writing and communication skills – and encourage them to graduate from high school and go on to college.

Five additional schools will be chosen for the program for the 2009-10 school year. Schools are chosen through a competitive process. Schools interested in participating in the Stardust program should contact Cornelius at david.cornelius@asu.edu or by calling (480) 338-1336.

New downtown address for Cronkite School

lccampb — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:00:07 -0600

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is moving into its new home, a state-of-the-art journalism education complex located in the heart of downtown Phoenix. The 223,000-square foot building will eventually be shared with Eight/KAET, Arizona’s public television station.

The new address of the Cronkite School, effective immediately is:

Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
555 N. Central Ave.
Suite 302
Phoenix, AZ 85004-1248
Telephone: (602) 496-5555
Fax: (602) 496-5116
Campus Mail Code: 2020

Cronkite Fulbright Scholars take expertise abroad

lccampb — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:55:20 -0600

Two recent graduates of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication have been named 2008 Fulbright Scholars.

Ian Lee and Emily Falkner are among 12 Arizona State University graduates who won the prestigious scholarships this year. ASU has the fourth highest acceptance rate among public universities and ranks in the top 20 universities nationally in the number of students accepted to the Fulbright Program.

The program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, is the largest U.S. international exchange program, sending U.S. students, teachers, professionals and scholars to study, teach, lecture and conduct research in more than 155 countries.

“To have two students from the Cronkite School selected for the Fulbright in a single year is a real accomplishment, both for the students and the faculty who helped to prepare them,” says Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan. The last time a Cronkite student was selected for a Fulbright was in 1998.

Lee, 24, of Lander, Wyo., received his bachelor’s degree in journalism in December, along with certificates in Islamic Studies and Arabic. He will spend a year at American University in Cairo, Egypt, studying the reporting differences between newspapers written in English and those written in Arabic. He also will monitor Arab satellite networks for the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism and do some freelance stories for American media outlets.

After his Fulbright year, Lee said he plans to continue pursuing journalism abroad. “I want to go to conflict zones and report from there,” he says. “My mom is a little nervous.”

While a student, Lee reported for Cronkite NewsWatch, the school’s award-winning newscast and was recognized as being part of the nation’s Best News Team for 2007-2008 by the Broadcast Education Association.

He spent part of this summer traveling in Egypt and Qatar as part of a select group of students awarded a Carnegie Knight Middle East Journalism Scholarship. He also has traveled and studied in Jordan, Syria, Israel and Palestine.

“Ian distinguished himself as a young journalist with a keen interest in and understanding of issues facing the Middle East,” says Mark Lodato, news director and professor of practice at the Cronkite School. “The Fulbright is a wonderful acknowledgement of his hard work and dedication and the perfect opportunity for him to continue his studies in a part of the world that is ever-changing.”

Falkner, 28, of Tempe, Ariz., received her Master of Mass Communication degree from the Cronkite School in May. Her award will take her to the Slovak Republic for nine months, where she will be a teaching assistant at the University of Constantine the Philosopher. She will help students with their English composition skills and possibly assist with an American studies course.

She also plans to write a blog about what the country is like from the perspective of an American living there.

Falkner, who received her undergraduate degree in literary and cultural studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, says she has always been interested in Eastern Europe.

“It’s an area with intense traditions that is encountering a lot of changes,” Falkner says. “Slovakia is a country that remains very religious, while the rest of Europe has become more secular. I’m interested in the sociology behind that.”

As a student at ASU, Falkner volunteered tutoring a family from Burundi through the International Rescue Committee in Phoenix. She says she hopes to work for the U.S. Foreign Service after her Fulbright year.

Cronkite School to lead digital media program

lccampb — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:19:06 -0600

The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation are giving Arizona State University a $7.5 million grant to direct a bold, experimental digital media program at 12 leading U.S. universities.

The News21 initiative, which the foundations hope will help redefine journalism education and prepare a new generation of journalists capable of reshaping the struggling news industry, will be headquartered at the new Phoenix home of ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The Cronkite School also will operate one of the initiative’s eight digital media “incubator” sites. As part of the incubator program, advanced journalism students will travel the country to produce in-depth news coverage on critical issues facing the nation and then experiment with innovative digital methods to distribute the news on multiple platforms.

The News21 program started in 2006 with incubators at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California.

Under the three-year grant to ASU, four new incubators will be created at the Cronkite School, the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Syracuse University. In addition, four other Carnegie-Knight schools – the University of Missouri at Columbia, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the University of Texas at Austin and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University – will send students to the eight incubators.

“Although traditional models of newspaper, radio and local television news dissemination are severely challenged,” said Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, “every community in this democracy continues to have a core need for reliable information, news that informs and news that helps build the common language that builds community. That need will not go away and provide hope for future journalists. They will tell those stories with traditional, verification-journalism values but on multiple platforms and structures influenced by new technology. Journalism can train them to do that and, in that sense, journalism schools have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead the industry. Carnegie and Knight want them to succeed.”

ASU President Michael Crow applauded the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation for their investments in the future of the news and journalism education.

“ASU is an institution that is forward-looking and one that takes as a major part of its mission solving the most significant problems facing our nation and our world,” Crow said. “In that regard we are especially pleased to be involved in a project focused on the future of news, which is so vitally important to a free society. I thank the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation for making these investments and selecting ASU to be the headquarters of the News21 initiative.”

The initiative’s credo – to accelerate change at universities educating tomorrow’s journalists – has already begun to have an impact on the news business as the pipeline of young and innovative reporters from initiative-supported schools bring their skills to newsrooms around the country and across all media platforms.

Students participating in News21 incubators during the summer already have produced experimental reporting on seldom-covered but important stories, and their work has been published or broadcast by news organizations including The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, L.A. Weekly, Forbes.com, The Associated Press, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and CNN. This summer student-produced reports will be published on NPR.org, the incubator’s current national news partner as well as at newsinitiative.org.

News21 will grow from four to eight campuses next year, increasing the number of competitive, paid summer fellowships to 93 from 44. The summer fellowships, open to students at each of the 12 Carnegie-Knight schools, are preceded by a semester of self-guided research and intensive seminar work with professors who are acknowledged experts in the students’ field of inquiry. During the summer, students report their stories and produce material for publication or broadcast across a number of platforms.

News21 is the latest digital news program at the Cronkite School, which has taken a national leadership role in preparing students for the dramatic changes in the news industry triggered by the digital revolution. Cronkite already is home to the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, in which students learn to create and launch their own online news products; the New Media Innovation Lab, which serves as a research and development lab for news companies looking for digital solutions; and the Azcentral.com Multimedia Reporting Program, a partnership with The Arizona Republic in which students cover breaking news in multiple media for the Web site of the nation’s 10th largest newspaper.

“News21 is precisely the kind of innovative, unconventional and intensive learning experience that journalism schools desperately need to not only help educate the next generation of journalists, but to find solutions to help the news industry evolve in the digital world,” said Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan. “It is a great honor to help build on the first three years of News21 with an expanded group of schools.”

The Cronkite School will hire a national News21 director, a national Web developer and a program manager over the next few months. News21 will be based in the Cronkite School’s new building, a six-story, state-of-the-art journalism education complex that opens next month on the university’s new Downtown Phoenix campus.

Students document borderland issues

jnewberg — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:18:39 -0600

The images from South Africa are haunting. Streets strewn with trash. Children hanging out beside a pile of burning garbage. A young man gazing from a window with a broken pane hanging precariously beside him.

Students from the Cronkite School documented the lives of immigrants in South Africa during a venture into the country in June.

The 10 Cronkite students were joined by students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, as part of a reporting project supported by a grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. After two weeks in the country, the students are creating a Web site that explores borderland and immigration issues in the country.

In a blog they created for the project, Cronkite students say the experience of reporting in South Africa was challenging and eye-opening. For example, in a June 25 blog, student Daniel O’Connor describes Alexandra township, known as one of the country’s poorest areas and a hotbed for civil unrest and violence.

“A drive down London Road past the apartheid-inspired sniper towers, rubble fields and tin shanties reveals a daunting comparison to the makeshift battlefields that consumed the area in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” O’Connor wrote. “Not much has improved since Alex(andra) was liberated by its people’s revolutionary efforts and blanketed by the hopes of a democratic change to come. In fact, the township, surrounded by sprawling upper-class residential areas, continues to descend into the depths of poverty and chaos. Some officials speculate that less than 10 percent of its residents hold a steady job and more than half of the population suffers from HIV and AIDS. By economic and health standards, Alex may just be the worst place on Earth.”

Prior to their trip, students, who are enrolled in a summer school class taught by Cronkite associate professor Carol Schwalbe, researched the region’s border and immigration issues and practiced working in multimedia teams made up of writers, videographers and photographers.

Students are spending four weeks writing and editing stories, creating narrated slide shows and preparing video for the Cronkite School’s Web site, says Schwalbe, who accompanied students on the trip along with Sue Green, director of the broadcast division of Cronkite News Service.

“One of the goals is to have students think and report like multimedia reporters,” Schwalbe says. “Print students are taking photos and recording audio. Photojournalists are also recording audio and shooting video. Broadcast students will try their hand at creating slide shows that incorporate still photos, text and maps as well as video.”

The trip was financed by a $76,267 grant from the Buffett Foundation, an Illinois-based non-profit organization founded by the international photojournalist, author and philanthropist. The grant covers a three-year international exchange project that examines the complex issues that surround immigration and border regions in South Africa and along the Arizona-Mexico border. Cronkite students previously completed two

Buffett foundation journalism projects that examined the lives of children along the Arizona-Mexico border and the plight of families divided by that border.

Cronkite students who traveled to South Africa coped with the challenges of working in a country without the conveniences that are a part of everyday life in the United States.

Jen Wahl described working without a cell phone or a car and how that experience forced her to learn how to “really report” by talking to people and developing a network of South Africans who are living through xenophobia.

“I met a woman who takes care of orphan children who have lost their parents to HIV/AIDS, been inspired by a married couple that lost everything but still found time for a good laugh, and met a man who was part of the mob responsible for killing and injuring foreigners. (They told him if he didn’t join, they would kill him too.),” she wrote in her blog.

Cronkite student, Keridwen Cornelius wrote: “We navigated by an unusual set of landmarks: ‘Turn right where we heard the music;’ ‘Turn left at the river of garbage’ and ‘When you see the roosters and the house that looks like a garage, we’re there.’

In an e-mail, Schwalbe said the students held up well in a country that presented many challenges. “This has been an amazing opportunity for them to hone their skills in situations that have often been challenging - from heart-wrenching emotions to safety and technical issues.

They're learning how to build trust with people who are afraid to talk because they fear for their lives. The students have learned so much about themselves, pushing their limits and reporting under difficult circumstances.”

The students will report their findings, share their photos and post videos documenting their trip at http://cronkitezine.asu.edu. The site will be operational later this summer.