Carnegie-Knight News21 Initiative

The national News21 Initiative is part of an effort on the part of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to change the way journalism is taught in the United States and train a new generation of journalists capable of reshaping the news industry.

The Cronkite School serves as the national headquarters for the initiative, which includes fellows from the nation’s top journalism schools. The school received a $7.5 million grant to run the program, the largest grant in the history of the school.

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

In 2008, the number of incubators was expanded to eight schools, including the Cronkite School. 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 - contribute students to the program.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York are funding Arizona State University to operate the News21 in-depth digital journalism program for the next decade and announced $2.32 million in grants to this end in 2011.

In this next generation of the highly acclaimed national program, News21 will now be open to journalism schools beyond the 12 universities that are members of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. The program will continue to be based at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Students participate in an intensive seminar working with professors who are acknowledged experts in the school’s field of inquiry. Students from the seminar are then are selected in a competitive process for paid summer fellowships, during which they report their stories and produce material for publication or broadcast across a number of platforms.

In past years, each school chose a cross-disciplinary topic under the theme "Changing America." The 2009 projects ranged from in-depth explorations of Latino issues and racial identity to energy use and charter schools.

In 2010, schools explored the following topics:

• Arizona State University: Injustice in America
• California-Berkeley: 2010 Census and the Making of the American Identity
• Columbia: Elderly America
• University of Maryland: The Changing Chesapeake
• University of North Carolina: Powering a Nation
• Northwestern University: Urban Identity: News that Matters to Latino Communities
• University of Southern California: California in Crisis: Distressed Communities
• Syracuse University: Homelessness: Focus on Veterans and Other Americans

Also in 2010, a national reporting team partnered with the Center for Public Integrity to do a major national database project. Students from 11 universities came together at Cronkite to create a 23-story package on transportation safety in America. “Breakdown: Traveling Dangerously in America” was published by MSNBC.com, The Washington Post, Yahoo News! and the Center for Public Integrity. The Washington Post led off the series with a Sunday page one story, and MSNBC.com featured a story every day for a full week at the top of its home page. The project drew more than 5.2 million page views in its first 18 days – the largest distribution of university-produced journalism in history.

In summer of 2011, the national News21 fellows are working on a sweeping investigation of food safety, working closely with former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and other top news leaders.

Under the new News21, fellows from around the country will participate via videoconference in a spring seminar taught by Downie, the Cronkite School's Weil Family Professor of Journalism. The seminar will immerse students in their summer investigative topic. Fellows also will be able to participate in Downie's Accountability Journalism class in the spring semester.

In the summer, the paid fellows will work out of the Cronkite School's state-of-the-art digital media complex in downtown Phoenix for 10 weeks. The fellows will work with a team led by a soon-to-be-hired executive editor. Other members of the summer News21 team will be Retha Hill, the former vice president for content for BET Interactive and director of the Cronkite School's New Media Innovation Lab, who will serve as the newsroom's digital leader, collaborating with students on how to best tell their investigative stories in innovative and compelling ways on multiple platforms; Downie, who will provide regular consulting to the newsroom from Phoenix and Washington; Steve Doig, a Pulitzer Prize-winning computer-assisted-reporting specialist and the school's Knight Chair in Journalism, who will provide data analysis expertise and support; Mark Ng, chief Web developer for the New Media Innovation Lab, who will work with fellows throughout the summer to help operationalize their digital visions and innovations; Cronkite Washington Director Steve Crane, a longtime Washington editor and former University of Maryland assistant dean, who will serve as the project's copy editor; and Associate Dean Kristin Gilger, former deputy managing editor of The Arizona Republic, who will provide project oversight.

News21 fellows 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 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 newspaper’s website.