News21 Fellows Attend Digital News Symposium at ASU

More than 60 journalism students and professors from 12 of the nation’s top journalism programs recently gathered at Arizona State University for an intensive digital media symposium, part of the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative. News21, headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is a joint program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami. It is designed for top journalism students to experiment with innovative forms of in-depth, digital story telling. The News21 fellows and faculty advisers heard from national digital media leaders who helped them plan innovative projects to be published this summer at news21.com. Speakers included Ellyn Angelotti, interactivity editor at the Poynter Institute; Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at ASU; and Amy Webb of Webbmedia Group. “This was an intense immersion into state-of-the-art concepts now on the forefront of digital journalism,” said National News21 Director Jody Brannon. “Our goal was to expose the brightest journalism students in the country to current examples of excellence so that this summer they might take their own ideas, experiment with doing new ways of journalism, and come up with different ways to engage people in important new stories.” The News21 symposium, held April 4-5 at the Cronkite School in downtown Phoenix, is part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. Participating schools were the Cronkite School, the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of Southern California, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina and Syracuse University, all of which will host summer “incubator” programs to develop multimedia news projects. Student fellows from four other News21 schools — Harvard University, the University of Missouri, the University of Nebraska and the University of Texas — also participated in the conference and will be part of the summer programs at the eight incubator schools.