News21 Project

A national initiative led by five of America’s leading research universities with the support of two major foundations will advance the U.S. news business by helping revitalize schools of journalism.

The universities will take advantage of the riches of their institutions by integrating the schools of journalism more closely with the entire campus in an effort to better teach, challenge and prepare the next generation of news industry leaders for an increasingly complex world. The initiative will experiment with curriculum and hands-on experience with the hope of creating a national conversation with other schools across the country.

The Carnegie-Knight Initiative involves three distinct efforts:

1. Curriculum Enrichment that will integrate the schools of journalism more deeply into the life of the university.
2. News21 Incubators: annual national investigative reporting projects overseen by campus professors and distributed nationally through both traditional and innovative media.
3. The Carnegie-Knight Task Force, focusing on research and creating a platform for educators to speak on policy and journalism education issues.

At a time when technology’s digital revolution is changing the news industry, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative will focus on preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.

A study prepared pro bono at the request of Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian by McKinsey & Co. interviewed 40 of the country’s most prestigious news leader who indicated a need for change in the way journalists are educating. The news leaders challenged schools of journalism to help reporters build specialized expertise that will enhance coverage of complex beats ranging from medicine to economics to international conflicts, and to understand the languages and cultures of distant parts of the world.

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The report, undertaken for the Corporation by McKinsey & Co., also revealed a desire for journalism schools to help students understand and appreciate the ethical dimensions of their work as well as prepare them for the pressures they will face in a 24/7 competitive news environment. The news leaders voiced a need for the profession to depend on universities to channel the best writers, the most curious-minded reporters and the finest analytic thinkers to the news business. An executive summary is available at www.carnegie.org and www.knightfdn.org.

Will this changing world still include journalism that satisfies democracy’s basic needs?” said Alberto Ibargüen, President of the
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “Will great journalists still hold true to Jack Knight’s vision of journalism that “bestirs the people…and rouses them to pursue their true interests”? What news organizations will emerge in the 21st century to do what Jack and Jim Knight’s newspapers did for American communities in the 20th? Those newspapers helped define the communities we lived in by sharing events that happened to neighbors, by defining the problems and possibilities, and by connecting people with a shared language and a sense of place. ”

“Journalism is too important to this nation and our democracy to have the schools that educate its future leaders be anything but central to the universities in which they reside,” said Vartan Gregorian, President of Carnegie Corporation of New York. “Our American universities, which offer the most enriching, challenging and academically excellent higher education in the world, can provide journalism schools with an unparalleled opportunity to engage with ideas about subjects such as history, philosophy, economics and culture that will help their students develop a passion for learning and knowledge along with the exemplary skills they will need to be at the forefront of the journalism profession in the 21st century.”

As part of the planning for the initiative, the five participating deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history. The “deans’ manifesto” clarifies goals for today’s schools of journalism and focuses on the centrality of the university in the preparation of tomorrow’s journalism leaders.

In the summer of 2005, as part of this five-university journalism education launch, Carnegie Corporation sponsored an ABC News Summer Institute that involved 10 students—two from each of the universities involved. The students had eight-week fellowships under the guidance of ABC News and worked with the award-winning ABC News Investigative Unit on a specific project that took advantage of the students’ experience, learning and research abilities.

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The Vision

The Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education was launched in 2002, when Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York invited the deans of four leading schools of journalism: Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University; Loren Ghiglione of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; Orville Schell of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; and Jeff Cowan of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, as well as Alex Jones of the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University—to begin laying a foundation for developing their vision of what a journalism school can be at an exemplary institution of higher education, and how that can help to enrich and revitalize the journalism profession. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has made the education of journalists a hallmark of its philanthropy for more than half a century, has been the Corporation’s partner in the initiative.  In addition to the work being done by initiative participants, two major reports have resulted from discussions among the deans and leading journalists, editors, news executives and others interested in the future of journalism in America: The Business of News: A Challenge for Journalism’s Next Generation and Journalism’s Crisis of Confidence: A Challenge for the Next Generation.

In 2005, Carnegie Corporation invited four additional journalism schools and their deans to participate in the curriculum enrichment aspect of the initiative.  They are: Thomas Kunkel of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland; Dean Mills of the Missouri School of Journalism, University of Missouri; David Rubin of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University; and Roderick Hart of the School of Communication, University of Texas at Austin.

Both the Corporation and the Knight Foundation have emphasized the centrality of universities and the support of their presidents—who have become partners in this vision for change—to improving journalism education on campus because, as Gregorian notes, “In the U.S., we have a long tradition of looking to our universities to produce the generations of thinkers who have helped to guide our nation through social and cultural upheavals, political crises and even the dark days of war and terrorism. When the students of such schools become the journalists of the future, our nation and our democracy will be the true beneficiaries.”

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Participating Universities

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Stephen B. Sample, President
Geoff Cowan, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication

Founded in 1880, the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles is one of the world’s leading private research universities. The university includes the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences as well as 17 professional schools, including the country’s first school of international relations and the first filmmaking program. USC has been recognized for its commitment to public service for its Joint Academic Project, one of the oldest service-learning programs in the United States, and for its innovative outreach programs, particularly in the area of medicine.

The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California was established through the generosity of media magnate and statesman Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg. Offering degrees in journalism and communication, USC Annenberg is also home to path-breaking research and professional education projects, including the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, the Center for Communication Law and Policy, the Center for Journalism and Democracy and the Norman Lear Center, which focuses on the convergence of entertainment, commerce and society. [back to top]

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Lee Bollinger, President
Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

Columbia University, established in 1754 as King’s College and renamed Columbia College after the Revolutionary War, is one of the country’s oldest private institutions of higher learning and an international leader among research universities. Throughout its history, the school has been a center of advancement in education and was one of the earliest academies to develop graduate faculties. By offering research facilities and opportunities, Columbia students have had the opportunity of working with leading scholars such as Franz Boas, Mark Van Doren, Jacques Barzun, Enrico Fermi and I.I. Rabi, among others. Columbia encompasses numerous top-ranked schools and programs, including the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Law, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the School of International and Public Affairs and the Graduate School of Journalism.

Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism was established in 1912 through an endowment from Joseph Pulitzer, owner and publisher of The New York World newspaper. The school is home to the Pulitzer Prizes for writing and the duPont-Columbia awards for broadcast journalism as well as the Poliak Center for the Study of First Amendment Issues, the George T. Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism and the Columbia Journalism Review. [back to top]

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Drew G. Faust, President
Alex Jones, Director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government

Harvard University, established in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and a world-renowned research university. Its schools and programs consistently rank in the top tier of their fields and its research centers are at the vanguard of groundbreaking discoveries and achievements. Graduate schools include the Harvard Business School, the Graduate School of Education, Harvard Law School, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Medical School and the School of Public Health. Seven American presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush, graduated from the university and its faculty has produced 40 Nobel laureates.

The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy, a research center of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has emerged as a major source for research on political campaigns and elections, journalism and public policy, international news, and race, gender and the press. Drawing from America’s most distinguished journalists, scholars and practitioners, the Center is working to help the press improve its role in democracy.

For more information on the Carnegie-Knight task force at the Joan Shorenstein center, click here. [back to top]

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Henry S. Bienen, President
John Lavine, Dean of the Medill School of Journalism

Northwestern University was established as a private institution in 1851 in what was then the hub of America’s Northwest Territory and is today part of the greater Chicago metropolitan area, with campuses in Evanston, downtown Chicago and Washington, DC. The university is one of America’s finest research institutions and has been recognized for the quality and depth of its doctoral programs. Northwestern’s schools and programs stand as models of excellence, including the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the Kellogg School of Management, the Medill School of Journalism, the School of Law and the School of Communication. Many of Northwestern’s graduates have become leading voices in American society: Justice John Paul Stevens, Richard Gephardt, Saul Bellow, George McGovern, Sherry Lansing and Garry Marshall.

The Medill School of Journalism was founded in 1921 and named for Chicago Tribune editor, publisher and owner Joseph Medill. The school of 1,000 students offers an undergraduate journalism program and a one-year graduate program leading to a Master of Science in Journalism. Specialized master’s programs focus on religion reporting, business reporting (with the Kellogg School of Management) and legal reporting (a dual-degree program with Northwestern’s law school). Medill also offers a 15-month master’s degree in integrated marketing communications. Medill’s curriculum emphasizes academic work and substantial practical training. Opportunities for students to gain professional experience include a global journalism program of international internships, and year-round programs in Chicago and Washington, where the Medill News Service runs a bureau for newspapers, news services and television and radio stations across the country. [back to top]

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism

The University of California, Berkeley, established in 1868, is one of the world’s premiere public universities, with superb research facilities and a distinguished faculty that includes Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, National Academy of Science members and Guggenheim Fellows. Berkeley is ranked the best overall graduate institution in the nation and offers more than 50 organized research units, including the Space Sciences Laboratory, the Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics, the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Graduate School of Journalism. Berkeley also ranks first in the number of distinguished programs for faculty scholarship. The university’s student body is unique in its diversity and variety: no single racial, ethnic or cultural group forms a majority of its students.

The Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley encourages students to gain a broad understanding of current affairs and develop expertise in specialized subjects along with traditional journalism practices. The two-year program leading to a Master of Journalism allows students to take up to one-third of their coursework in other departments and schools. Joint degree programs in combination with Asian, Latin American, international and area studies are also available. The school’s programs include mid-career training for journalists and the Berkeley China Internet Project. [back to top]

Curriculum Enrichment

Toward a reinvigoration of the journalism curriculum, offering students a deep exploration of complex subjects like history, politics, classics and philosophy

The goal of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education is to elevate journalism schools within university communities and to integrate them into the academic life of the campus so that they will attract and prepare the journalism leaders of tomorrow for a more complex and intellectually challenging industry. A key feature of this initiative is curriculum enrichment, which demands a reinvigoration of the journalism curriculum to offer students a deep and multilayered exploration of complex subjects like history, politics, classics and philosophy to undergird their journalistic skills. In partnership with the Corporation, the deans at four leading journalism schools have developed their vision of what a journalism school can be at an exemplary research university.

Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley
The Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley has expanded its already flexible curriculum for its two-year master’s degree program to include joint-degree programs with schools and departments such as law, public health, literature, the arts, public policy, the sciences, humanities, social sciences and business, while at the same time creating a more journalism friendly way of bringing this specialized knowledge to their students. The school has reached out to other units on campus by initially focusing on three areas and then expanding outwards to other disciplines: Human Rights Issues and International Reporting; Public Health; and Urban Reporting on Design and Planning.

Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University launched a new Master of Arts program in Journalism in the Fall of 2005. This new academic program focuses on teaching future journalism leaders about the substance of complicated subjects central to their careers. The program departs from the traditional journalism school practice of teaching students the skills associated with various forms of journalism, and focuses instead on teaching them to master complex subjects and communicate their essence clearly to general audiences. The Corporation’s grant enables the journalism school to bring experts and other Columbia faculty from other disciplines , to teach in partnership with journalism professors, in ways that they believe will be especially useful to journalists.

Dean Nicholas B Lemann’s Report on the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, April 2006 [pdf]

Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is offering two new courses for undergraduate journalists as part of a larger effort at the school to continue its history of enriching the curriculum. This is being accomplished through innovative approaches to journalism education and cutting-edge training in the undercovered, important and complex issues that tomorrow’s journalists will need to be able to explain to their audiences to help ensure an informed electorate. The two courses, The Nexus Between the Media and Military in Conflicts and Terrorism and News and Numbers: Statistics and Analytical Research for Journalists represents an important step forward in the quality and substance of journalism education for the school. These courses also continue Medill’s innovative approach to journalism education and cutting-edge training in the, important and complex issues that tomorrow’s journalists will need to be able to explain to their audiences to help ensure an informed public.

Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California
As part of their curriculum reform plan, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California is launching a new Master of Arts degree in specialized journalism. Areas of specialization include science and technology, religion, globalization and education. This new degree program is a fundamental element of the school’s vision for transforming journalism education by integrating the School of Journalism fully into the intellectual life of the university. This program will be designed to meet the profession’s need for journalists who are not only educated, curious, expert and effective, but who are also prepared to report on the complex policy issues, social concerns and ethics that will shape science and technology issues in the future.

The Carnegie-Knight Task Force

The Carnegie Knight Task Force will serve as a high profile platform to speak out in an authoritative voice about the importance of upholding the highest standards and ideals of journalism. As it thinks appropriate, the Task Force will take public stands and issue public statements pertaining to the rights and responsibilities of media companies, journalists, educators, government and American citizens. It will stand in opposition to institutional, structural, and commercial threats to the integrity of the profession and will work to improve the quality of the journalism industry and journalism education.

Crucial to the authority and credibility of the Task Force will be a body of research that will be aimed at bolstering its arguments and supporting its vision for change. Based at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, the founding members of the Task Force will be five journalism educators, who will together choose the issues upon which to focus their collective attention. Members of the Task Force will act as a body to set the organization’s research agenda, the resulting research projects will be pursued by a senior scholar or practitioner under the supervision of the Center’s Director. This research will be made broadly available and will be aimed at creating compelling, innovative realistic guidance for solutions to journalism’s and journalism education’s most serious problems.

One of the Task Force’s first tasks was to create a powerful manifesto stating a shared vision and a common purpose to advocate for excellence in journalism. At appropriate times, the Task Force will also convene individuals who share the urgent sense of journalism in peril and wish to lend their support to specific efforts to address individual problems or trends. This broader group, convened by the Task Force, would include university presidents and other leaders in higher education, journalism, government, business, philanthropy and other fields who posses the moral and intellectual authority to have major influence. The Task Force itself will expand over time to include others who share its goals and commitment.

A Manifesto

Professional schools that reside in research universities have evolved over the last century into vital and highly influential institutions that perform a function much more complex than simply training students for jobs (although they do that as well). Professional schools function, first of all, as the intellectual wing of their professions. Their faculties and students are freed, by virtue of their university setting (and, in the case of senior faculty, by academic tenure), from some of the immediate commercial and competitive pressures of professional life and conversely they often have more time and ready access to a much wider array of expertise, thought, and research material than do most of their professional colleagues. Therefore, they can place themselves at the frontiers of their professions, exploring and expanding the limits of what the profession can and should do. Most significant advances in medical research and treatment emerge from schools of medicine, not doctors’ offices. There is no reason why significant advances in the means and methods of delivering news to the public ought not to emerge from professional schools of journalism, as much as from news organizations themselves.

It is hard to think of a profession of greater public importance than journalism. What journalists publish and broadcast constitutes the chief means whereby citizens inform themselves about public life in their societies, enabling them to play the role of active participants in democratic life. Journalism is particularly important as a provider of independent information about government, and therefore as one of the main checks on the power of the state. It also has the capability to monitor the activities of large, powerful institutions–both profit and nonprofit–that affect the lives of Americans. Indeed, in this complicated world, it is almost impossible for people to keep informed about and engaged in public life without the presence of a well-trained and capable press. A well-functioning democracy depends on good journalism. Markets cannot function well without reliable, timely information provided by good journalism. Nor can educational institutions educate in the fullest sense without a vibrant, credible, and thoughtful press to provide material for their discourse. Because of the press’ First Amendment protections and its role as a monitor of government performance on behalf of the public, journalism also has a special role in the United States and a special relationship to government.

In today’s changing world of news consumption, journalism schools should be exploring the technological, intellectual, artistic, and literary possibilities of journalism to the fullest extent, and should be leading a constant expansion and improvement in the ability of the press to inform the public as fully, deeply, and interestingly as it can about matters of the highest importance and complexity. Journalists, and their audiences, have to adapt to constant changes in the structure and mores of the profession; employers, almost by definition, cannot alone prepare them for these changes, so journalism schools ought to help them do so by identifying and conferring professional skills and habits of mind that do not depend on a particular, perishable set of circumstances to be useful. They should also be arenas of experimentation on new and interesting ways to get serious reporting before as large a public as possible.

Professional schools should also strive to act as the consciences of their professions. They can and should train their students to operate at a higher ethical and intellectual standard than often prevails in the arena of professional practice, and they do this knowingly. It is their job to be both “realistic,” and, as well, to establish and uphold an ideal in training professionals who, after graduation, will be prepared to push their employers to hew to this ideal more closely. Anyone who is in professional education knows that the profession itself is usually grateful to its professional educators for helping to uphold the profession’s core values.

The United States can be a beacon of good journalistic practice to the world, especially the many places where journalism and its associated legal, regulatory, and economic structures are only just beginning to take hold. This is a role we should embrace more fully, even as we American journalists must be ever mindful of our own shortcomings and ever attentive to the work of correcting them.

Journalism schools too often have been thought of as trade schools rather than modern professional schools. As the importance of journalism grows and its task of explaining the world to the public becomes more complex and demanding, journalism schools ought to move firmly into the professional-school realm. This would include having faculties whose members are active leaders in the profession through their journalistic work, their teaching, and their participation in public discourse and who confer on their students not just entry-level job skills, but also a sense of the history of the profession and its importance to the public and the nation. It would also mean that journalism schools would draw on the resources available at their universities to give students the most powerful set of tools possible for making sense of the world and then conveying their understanding to the public.

Journalism schools are committed to the idea that societies function best when their citizens have access to information that has been gathered and presented by well-trained, well-educated, honest, trustworthy, curious, intelligent people who have devoted their lives to their profession.

ABC News Summer Institute

The Summer Institute at ABC News was inaugurated in 2005 as a lead-off program for the Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.

Each of the five higher education institutions participating in the initiative selected two of their top students to participate in the 2005 summer institute, which took place over an 8-week period at ABC News’ Investigative Reporting Bureau in New York City. The lead reporter in the unit is Brian Ross and the executive producer is Rhonda Schwartz. Nicole Gallagher, Director, News Practices, was the executive in charge of this summer institute.

The ten students had the opportunity to experience and observe all the constellations of the ABC Network from World News Tonight to ABC Radio to abcnews.com. They were trained in ABC News ethics and procedures and on digital equipment that permits both taping and editing of news material. Students did significant research for the ABC News investigative unit on a major probe of nuclear safety on college campuses. That project, “Loose Nukes,” was the result of a four month investigation.

The 10 students, Carnegie Fellows, traveled the country to test security at 25 campus nuclear reactors, recording their findings with tourist cameras. The entire ABC News investigation can be viewed at :

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/LooseNukes/

You can read stories by each of the 10 fellows at: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LooseNukes/story?id=1221204