News 21

by Christopher Connell

Are Next-Generation Journalists the Future of a Profession in Transition?

It’s 7:35 a.m. on the beach in Lincoln City, Oregon, and the mellifluent Roger Robertson, morning host on KBCH AM 1400, is on the air with “a couple of young gentlemen” who have come a great distance. “News21 is the program that they are with. Phil and Andrew, you guys are from where?”

“Roger, we are coming here from Syracuse, New York,” replies Phil Tenser, a freshly minted broadcast journalism graduate from Syracuse University.

“On purpose?”

“On purpose, yeah,” says Tenser. “We’re here to study youth and technology as part of a national project. We are sponsored by the Knight Foundation and Carnegie Corporation. We are trying to study youth and technology and tell the stories in ways that will also help inspire the future of journalism.” That may sound presumptuous for someone ten days out of college, he allowed, but given the parlous state of the economy and the news business, “you can’t avoid it.”

Tenser and partner Andrew Burton aren’t just being interviewed. They are filming Robertson and the KBCH studio with a flip cam and taking photographs, all the while soliciting listeners to contact them with stories. Before the sun sets over the Pacific, they will have posted on the Internet a blog, pictures, video and sound from their 25 minutes on air with the Larry King of this stretch of coastal Oregon. And they were not alone. They were part of a larger army of 93 News21 fellows who fanned out across the country from eight campuses with high def cameras, sound recorders, laptops, iPhones and other devices in search of that elusive future for their beleaguered profession.

News21 is a multi-million dollar experiment by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation to determine if these next-gen journalists can awaken interest in news where their elders have failed, and to do so first by studying in depth important issues—liberty and security; the role of religion in American life; the country’s dramatically changing demographics—and then spin out stories with all the multimedia tools that the digital age has to offer. Their work can be viewed at www.news21.com.

A crippling recession has created further hardships for an industry that was already in a tailspin. Venerable newspapers such as the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer have folded, and big city dailies from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to Chicago to Philadelphia to Hartford are in bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. News operations that closed foreign bureaus to pinch pennies now are retreating from covering the nation’s capital. The august New York Times had to sell both classical radio station WQXR and its glittering, new skyscraper to keep the wolves at bay. News magazines struggle with their own anorexia, while entertainment news and vituperation dominate the airwaves.

Elevating Journalism’s Place in the Academy

A profound belief that democracy cannot thrive without good journalism initially led Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian and Vice President Susan Robinson King to reach out to journalism deans and presidents of five leading universities—Columbia University, Harvard University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California (USC)—to consider how to bolster the education and practice of journalism. Later the Knight Foundation joined the effort, and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education was formally launched in 2005. By revitalizing the curricula and intellectual quotient at journalism schools, they sought to ensure that a new generation of well-trained reporters, editors, producers and ultimately news executives would rise up to sustain the media’s role as democracy’s watchdog. Not incidentally, the deans also hoped to win new respect for their schools within the academy and from the industry that hires their graduates.

Their principal tool for gaining this leverage would be News21, a summer laboratory showcasing the talents of their top students. The deans of the four journalism schools and the director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy would select the summer’s topic a year in advance, and each journalism school would arrange a seminar for fellows to study that issue in depth, with faculty drawn from across university disciplines. The fellows—ten from each journalism school and four from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government—would be paid $7,500 stipends to report and produce their stories over an intense ten weeks on the road and toiling on campus under the guiding hand of faculty and professional editors and web designers.

The number of fellows doubled in the summer of 2009 after seven more top tier journalism schools were welcomed into the News21 tent. Newsrooms were opened at Arizona State University, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina and Syracuse University, while the three other newcomers—the University of Missouri, University of Nebraska and University of Texas—joined Harvard in contributing fellows to the eight test beds.

Emphasis on Innovation

From the start, the News21 fellows have faced two daunting challenges: to come up with stories of national importance and to tell them in ways that break the mold of traditional news media. The deans regarded innovation and invention as the higher priority. “The experimental was the most important side of this. Otherwise, it was just a really rich, pleasant internship program,” said Alex S. Jones, the Shorenstein Center director. Geoffrey Cowan, former dean of the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, said he envisioned News21 as the journalism school equivalent of an engineering school laboratory, only this one “would be about inventing what journalistic storytelling could be like.”

Former Berkeley journalism school dean Orville Schell, another of the original deans, had a practical objective in mind, too. He was dismayed at the paucity of openings in the broadcast news business—a particular strength of Berkeley’s—and believed News21 could help fill that void. “I’d been sitting at too many meetings where people lamented that the serious media were melting away before their eyes,” said Schell, now Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. “There were big gaps in the journalistic food chain, like a salmon run with no salmon ladders.”

Knight Vice President Eric Newton coined the moniker for the experiment. News21 is short for News for the 21st Century: Incubators of New Ideas. These would be stories reported and told in 21st century ways—such as using Adobe Flash to stream audio, video and slide shows—and the storytellers themselves were mostly 20-somethings, speaking to their own generation, accustomed to getting news online, not from newspapers, and tuned more to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report than to the nightly news or Meet the Press. Back in 2005, some news leaders thought all the talk about how the digital revolution would transform the industry “was crazy, but if you look at where we are today, we weren’t crazy enough,” said Newton. “We were moving in the right direction, but no one had an appropriate sense of urgency.” USC’s Cowan observed, “We didn’t know that old journalism would collapse, but we knew how important new journalism would be.”

The deans had chosen as News21’s first topic the difficult balance in post- 9/11 America between keeping the country safe and protecting civil liberties. While all pursued stories clustered around that theme, the fellows at the different test beds did not then and have never since functioned as a single army under joint command. Cowan, one of the framers, had expected that they would operate as one large investigative unit, à la the students that Ralph Nader attracted to Washington for his “Nader’s Raiders” exposés.

The 2006 fellows scored remarkable successes in getting their stories in major newspapers and on national television broadcasts. They landed a string of big stories about privacy and security in The New York Times and the Associated Press as well as on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°. The Columbia fellows followed the money trail from the post-haste creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Northwestern’s Laura McGann made headlines with an exposé on how the FBI was sifting through college students’ financial aid records. Other fellows from Northwestern’s Medill school produced eye-catching reports on how government and industry digitally tracked citizens’ digital transactions. The USC Annenberg fellows examined the social impact of stepped- up enforcement of immigration laws. And the Berkeley fellows sent four teams of reporters around the world to capture glimpses of the everyday lives of young soldiers and sailors serving in U.S. peacekeeping missions in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, at bases across the Middle East, in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan and near the demilitarized zone in South Korea. Anderson Cooper 360° devoted a full hour to the documentaries produced by three of Berkeley’s teams.

Bob Calo, a Berkeley senior lecturer who directed its News21 newsroom in 2006 and 2007 and was the national director in 2008, remembers telling his graduate students not to approach their interview subjects like some “network fancy pants,” but as peers. “We wanted to do a narrative experiment and come up with a fresher and different way to report on the military. Most of the soldiers serving in places like East Africa and Kyrgyzstan are young and so was my staff of reporters,” said Calo, a veteran television news producer. “Instead of having that Ted Koppel conversation—‘Young man, where are you from and how do you feel?’—these were 27-year-olds looking at each other across a cultural divide.”

From News21 to Newsweek

Katie Connolly, a fellow from Harvard, was on the team that journeyed to South Korea to report on how efforts to downsize and transform the U.S. military were playing out on the peninsula. “Bob Calo really emphasized innovation to us,” she said. “That was in the forefront of our minds: how do we tell the story in a way that The New York Times wouldn’t?” Connolly, a trade policy wonk from Australia, wasn’t thinking about journalism when she enrolled at the Kennedy School. But she caught the bug from News21, landed a job at Newsweek and spent all of 2008 on the campaign trail covering John McCain. Connolly, now a political reporter in Newsweek’s Washington bureau, said, “I came back from News21 thinking, ‘This is the coolest job ever. You get to talk to interesting people and learn about fascinating topics and go to really cool places.’”

She also learned how to “craft an interesting narrative out of a boring policy topic like military transformation...It was actually the knowledge component that has been the most useful for me because I am a print journalist now, not a multimedia journalist. All the stuff I learned was fun and great, but I haven’t had to use a video camera or Flash or anything like that since.”

Aliza Nadi and Cerissa Tanner, who followed the rock band Hello, Dave, on a USO tour across the Middle East, became TV news producers at Dateline NBC and Current TV. Nadi said, “News21 was a fantastic opportunity to go beyond what we learned in grad school, take risks in our storytelling, experiment in our style, and brand a type of journalism that’s raw, intimate, and transparent.” Tanner said the experience allowed her “to develop my own distinct voice and brand of storytelling.” She added, “The fact that Anderson Cooper 360° aired my documentary the month I entered the job market looked pretty friggin’ hot on my resumé,” said Tanner.

Although the liberty-vs.-security stories impressed mainstream media editors and producers, those same packages elicited a collective ho-hum from the internet avant garde. One such verdict came from Mark Glaser, executive editor of MediaShift, a PBS blog and web site that bills itself as “Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution.” Glaser opined in August 2006: “From what I’ve seen so far, the fellows have done some great investigative work on topics such as digital data trails and life in the military abroad—but I wonder whether they are doing really cutting- edge, innovative work that will live on beyond the annual program.” The fledgling News21 web site, he added, was “clunky.”

Patricia Dean, associate director of the USC journalism school, said the work that first summer “wasn’t as multimedia because the world wasn’t as multimedia then.” Calo observed, “We showed we were capable of doing mature reporting that would be valued nationally and locally. Where we didn’t succeed was having those people focused on the digital future saying, ‘Wow! You blew our minds.’”

Religion in America— and Tattoos

In each of the following three summers, the News21 stories would be presented in ever deeper and more complex multimedia packages designed to attract eyes on the web. But as the work moved closer toward the cutting edge, it also became harder for newspapers and networks to run the stories or even adapt them for their web sites. The religion topic that the deans chose for 2007 wasn’t one “that lent itself to breaking big stories,” said Merrill Brown, News21’s first editorial director, “but it did lend itself to creative, multimedia storytelling, and we did a way better job at that in year two.” Traffic to the News21 web site tripled to three million page views.

One Medill feature practically went viral: a multimedia look at tattooed Christian rock fans who advertise their beliefs with vivid body art. Fellows Brad Flora and Ben Helfrich found their subjects at Cornerstone, an annual religious concert and happening on 500 acres of farmland in central Illinois. Medill’s Mrinalini Reddy eventually got a freelance follow-up feature in The New York Times on her story about how television sitcoms were shattering stereotypes about Muslims with series like Canada’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and a U.S. show, Aliens in America. Columbia’s fellows journeyed to India over spring break with professor and religion writer Ari Goldman and returned to examine how immigrants were finding ways to practice their faiths in America, from Buddhists and Baha’i to the Mandeans, adherents of an ancient Gnostic religion. Berkeley produced a “Moral Compass,” a roulette-wheel-like web graphic that spun out answers to where nine major religions stood on questions of sex and morality. Their “God, Sex and Family” package also mapped states with the fewest abortions (Idaho), the most divorces (Arkansas) and other values- laden distinctions. USC fellows followed seekers of spirituality off beaten paths to Mount Shasta and to a dome in the California desert where tourists lie down to listen to soothing “symphonies” played on crystal bowls.

MediaShift’s Glaser said News21’s web site and multimedia were much improved in 2007 and he applauded the replacement of “the traditional objective journalism structure...with a more personal tone and narrative.” But, he said, “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.”

With the wide-open race for the White House and the likelihood that the Democrats’ standard bearer would be either the first African-American or the first female nominee, the deans’ choice of the elections as the topic for 2008 was an obvious one. But it posed a new challenge: with the blanket coverage in the major media, it would be hard for the fellows to get a word in edgewise with their reporting. Columbia journalism dean Nicholas Lemann defends the choice. “A national election is a huge, huge, huge thing,” he said, and many races and issues below the top of the ticket are inadequately covered. “My thought was, let’s not be perverse and not cover this very important and consequential election that all our students are dying to write about—but let’s not send them to cover the Democratic National Convention, either.” But web traffic slumped, few stories found a second life elsewhere, and a partnership with National Public Radio yielded little. Again, most stories were geared for the web, which made them harder for traditional media to pick up. “The bigger commitment you made to innovation, the harder it was to distribute a lot of stories because you stopped doing traditional nuggets of content,” said Calo. “We weren’t producing television segments per se. Everything was cross platform, linked together and integrated into the web. You could do quality work, but it wasn’t as easily parceled out to mainstream media partners.” And to Calo, pushing forward on that front was more important “than getting our heads patted by mainstream media.”

Expanding and Extending the Initiative

The funders and the founding deans always planned to bring other top journalism schools into the initiative; Berkeley was the lone public university in the original gang of five. Six of the seven added for the second phase were large, public institutions. Arizona State University (ASU) and its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, newly ensconced in downtown Phoenix, were to become the new base of operations for News21 (Berkeley had been the administrative base for the first three summers). Calo and ASU dean Christopher Callahan crafted a proposal in 2008 that secured an $11 million commitment from Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation to support the expansion of News21 and to extend the experiment for three more years. They argued that the case for it was still compelling:

The Initiative sought to address central issues at the intersection of public journalism and journalism education. Among those issues were the disconnect between traditional journalism and millions of younger Americans, a general malaise and uncertainty inside the profession...and the extreme disturbances in the media industry due to quickening technological change. There was also a notion that among the nation’s top graduate schools of journalism, there was a window of opportunity to lead: they possessed an already built infrastructure for media production, a cadre of the nation’s most talented young reporters, and faculty members all too aware of the parlous state of American journalism.

The News21 experiment, they said, “could offer solutions and strategies to an increasingly jittery profession,” while at the same time allowing the journalism schools to improve their curricula. They said News21, which had gotten by with a part-time director in its first two years, would hire a full- time director and web site programmer to turn the experiment into “a live, vibrant, year-round enterprise” with “a nationally recognized news site.” While each school and dean would retain autonomy over its work, the national coordinator “would serve as the editor/publisher of the overall site” and seek to foster closer collaboration and a more “cohesive” product.

Callahan turned to Jody Brannon, a veteran editor at Microsoft’s msn.com, USAToday.com and washington-post.com, to fill those shoes. Brannon also had academic credentials, having earned a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland’s Merrill School with a dissertation that examined online journalism by major media. The deans chose the changing U.S. demographic tapestry as the topic for 2009, and Callahan and Brannon sought to get the eight incubators off to a faster start by bringing 39 fellows and a score of advisers to Phoenix in early April to share ideas and be tutored in digital storytelling techniques.

“News21 Needs to Go Far Beyond That”

In the tradition of Knight’s Eric Newton, who puckishly told a News21 gathering in 2008 that their task was “to think about new forms of truth-telling...in a totally new technological era, and create some innovations that will help keep the human race from destroying itself. No pressure,” Callahan told the fellows that they “really need to dream.”

“If what you accomplish at the end of the summer is having produced fantastic stories that are really interesting and really important and really matter and have never been told before and you get them published in the Washington Post or The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times—if that’s what we accomplish this summer, we fail. We fail miserably,” he said. “News21 needs to go far beyond that.”

In an interview, Callahan explained, “What I was trying to get across in a not so subtle way was that this project needs to be more than great journalism done in a traditional way, because the reality is that Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation could take those resources and invest them in The New York Times or NBC News or the Washington Post or Time magazine to do great journalism. This needs to be something more.” That something more, he added, “is taking advantage of an incredible smart group of young people who think differently about news” and who are capable of coming up with new ways to keep the public informed.

News21’s lofty aspirations can give pause to even its most seasoned participants, the faculty. Susan Rasky, a Berkeley senior lecturer and former chief congressional correspondent for The New York Times, said, “You go to bed at night thinking, ‘Oh, my God! They are not really innovating. They’re just figuring out how to do what’s already been done,’ and ‘Oh, my God, the reporting is only half as deep as I want it to be because they don’t have [enough] time to report and produce.’”

Brannon made the rounds of the eight newsrooms over the summer. When she visited Columbia in early July, several fellows remarked on feeling overwhelmed. Not to worry, the director assured them; everyone felt that way.

While News21 was originally for graduate students only, 16 of the 2009 fellows were undergraduates, including half those selected by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. Steve Davis, the chair of newspaper and online journalism and News21 executive director, confessed in a telephone interview a few weeks from the finish line to feeling that “we probably didn’t push the envelope enough...[and] ended up being a little more traditional than we wanted.” In hindsight, he said, Syracuse asked its fellows to do too much as they went out to 11 prototypical communities that the Christian Science Monitor had earlier selected for its “Patchwork Nation” reporting project. Newhouse students regularly go on reporting trips around central New York during the school year, but News21 was like no other assignment, Davis said. “They were very excited about it, to tackle a story as a team and spread out around the country. Part of the whole News21 thing is to have [that] experience and do something that you otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to do.

Building a “Piece of the Future”

News21 has served as a springboard into the profession for many. Former fellows can be found at major news organizations (AP, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Newsweek) as well as start-ups. Brad Flora, the lead reporter on Medill’s Christian tattoo project, is the founder, editor and publisher of The Windy Citizen, a free, online news site that aggregates local Chicago news and encourages Chicagoans to submit their own stories, videos and photos and rate what interests them most. Flora said his site has attracted 70,000 visitors a month. “There’s lots of talk about the future of journalism,” he said. “I’m actually building a little piece of this future here in Chicago.”

Laura McGann, who exposed the FBI’s snooping through student financial aid records, is editor of the Washington Independent, an online investigative news site. She called News21 “the most important part of my formal journalism education...[It] offered me a chance to do the kind of reporting that young reporters just don’t normally get to do.”

Most other former fellows contacted spoke highly of News21, although some were disappointed that their stories did not get picked up by mainstream media. That may change now under Brannon, who told the Columbia fellows, “My role as national director is to ensure that the whole world sees your journalism and hopefully offer it to enough media partners that they’ll want to run your stuff on their sites or in their publication or on their television show... Everyone’s thirsty because they see great, excellent, free copy.”

Indeed, the success of Pro Publica, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization bankrolled by two philanthropists who made their fortune in the savings and loan industry, demonstrates just how thirsty news organizations are. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS’s Sixty Minutes and others all have collaborated with Pro Publica’s well-paid staff of investigative reporters. In an earlier era, big newspapers might look down their nose at reporting done by student journalists. But in the Internet era, they ignore it at their peril. Thanks to the web, “you can now do actual journalism without having to have a media partner, and then go and find your media partner later, or not at all,” said Knight’s Newton. “It gave impetus to this notion that the students could not only join together and be an investigative force larger than what nearly all news organizations can muster, but a force that could be creative in figuring out new ways to display and disseminate this news.”

No Monopoly on Experimentation

But this also raises another challenge for News21. It is far from the only entity practicing experimental journalism. As riots in Tibet and Xinjiang, China, and election protests in Iran demonstrated, ordinary people are using cell phone cameras and Twitter to broadcast their own news around the world.

“The web has very low barriers to entry,” said Columbia’s Lemann. “You get lots and lots and lots and lots of people trying web journalism in every possible way, shape and form. That’s nice. It’s a period of very vigorous experimentation, some at News21, some in start-ups and individual news outlets, some inside big news organizations. There are thousands of these things going on. It’s nice to have News21 as part of this general feeling of experimentation.” But, he added, “I can’t look you in the eye and say News21 rises above all else as the most significant experiment in innovation in journalism.”

Still, News21 has provided a jolt of energy that has surged through the faculty and curricula at the country’s top journalism schools. “The unexpected pleasure of News21 is that it’s helping to reform faculty as well, getting them tuned up,” said Berkeley’s Calo. Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation at the University of Maryland and former Washington Post columnist and editor of washington-post.com, said, “All journalism schools are struggling with the transition that’s roiling through the news industry. Most faculty members haven’t worked in the news media for a long time and haven’t

experienced those changes. One of the beauties of News21 is that faculty members are learning alongside the students in these multidisciplinary newsrooms.” News21 “gave us a jumpstart” in making the Medill curriculum more multimedia and interactive, said Ellen Shearer, who runs the school’s Washington news bureau. “It’s had an impact on our curriculum,” said USC’s Patricia Dean. “The team of people that work on News21 during the summer get a lot of terrific ideas that we then push into our classes and into the curriculum.” Judy Muller, the former ABC News correspondent and National Public Radio commentator who has taught at USC since 2003, said, “News21 radically changed my approach to teaching journalism and continues to set the standard, as far as I can see, for a successful marriage of content quality with innovative delivery.”

A Place for Nonprofit News?

Google, Facebook and, much earlier, the first web browsers all were invented at universities, although not at their journalism schools. News21’s participants so far haven’t produced a Twitter or even a blog that is a mustread for journalists. But some of its impact may not be known for years. Can it be sustained after the foundation funding runs out? That, too, is an unanswered question. But one of the tasks for Callahan, Brannon and their colleagues going forward is to explore the sustainability of a university-based, nonprofit news organization.

“This may be the biggest challenge facing the News21 partnership. It will require creative thinking about how public and private universities could partner to build a free-standing news operation that has as its primary asset the credibility of a diverse group of young American reporters, their schools and mentors,” the deans’ funding proposal said.

Already, these journalism schools have succeeded in getting their voices heard in serious discussions about the future of the news business. At a January 2008 Carnegie Corporation summit on “Journalism in the Service of Democracy,” New York Times editor Bill Keller said he was “a convert to the cause of journalism schools.” Keller, an English major at Pomona College, confessed that he used to disdain them and thought the best education a young reporter could get was under some “grizzled editor” at a small newspaper. Now, he said, “I’ve come to think of journalism schools as maybe the last resort” to give students the wisdom they need. Recalling Keller’s remarks, Berkeley’s Calo said, “You could argue that this is the first time that graduate journalism schools have had a key role in journalism. Their role before was always ancillary.”

Whether News21 reports reverberate in the mainstream media and whether it’s a leader or laggard on innovation, the timing of the initiative was impeccable. And Carnegie Corporation’s Susan King believes the foundation chose the right leverage point to bring about change in the profession.

“I’m convinced that if we had tried to change the news business, which is what was being asked of us at the beginning, we couldn’t have gotten anything done. Working on the pipeline and forcing the schools to face up to these challenges was the only lever to bring about change,” said King, a former ABC News correspondent. “It is serving us well to have helped create this entrepreneurial, well-educated generation because they are going to be flexible enough to move with the business—and some will define what that future is.”

Christopher Connell is an independent journalist who writes frequently about education and other public policy issues. He has written previously for Carnegie Corporation about its journalism education initiative, and authored a 2002 Corporation white paper, Homeland Defense and Democratic Liberties: An American Balance in Danger? Connell, a former Associated Press education writer and assistant Washington bureau chief, also writes the annual Internationalizing the Campus reports for NAFSA: Association of International Educators. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia. cvconnell(at)gmail.com.

Blogs, Videos Catch Journalism Experiment As It Happens

Jody Brannon, national director of News21, exhorted this year’s 93 fellows to chronicle their work in progress through blogs, Twitter, video, audio and contributions to a Ning (a digital bulletin board for these “next-gen journalists”). Here are vignettes from those blogs as well as their responses to questions posed by e-mail by Christopher Connell.

JENNIFER WARD, Syracuse University

Jennifer Ward is a triathlete, foodie and aspiring reporter from Winnipeg, Canada. In a videoblog last winter, she likened the News21 experiment to preparations for a difficult race. Speaking over soft music and a slideshow of her warming up in the snow, Ward said: “I look at it as if we are a bunch of people new to the sport of running. We’re trying to figure out which shoes to buy, what the proper form is, the pace that’s right for everyone...I definitely feel a bit of that same trepidation and excitement.”

Ward and fellow Mary Buttolph, a photographer and environmentalist, spent weeks in Nixa, Missouri (an “evangelical epicenter”) and Eagle, Colorado (a “boom town”) pursuing stories about teens and technology. The pair explored how the evangelical church culture met technology in Nixa. All the churches they visited had web sites, and one pastor took text messages from congregants during services.

May 22. Our days in this persistently sunny town have been spent meeting pastors, visiting schools, and barging in on youth events. Last night we were invited into the home of one of the area youth pastors, where we promptly derailed their discussion on the Gospel of Luke.

In Eagle, Colorado, Ward voiced frustration about hitting dead ends and coming up empty in their search: “That’s what’s hard about this project: you can have 15 interesting conversations, and yet not a single compelling story idea will emerge.” But they also were met with kindness and help from former strangers. “It’s amazing how people start caring about what two random journalists are doing in their town.”

MAURA WALZ, Columbia University

Walz focused on multimedia reporting while earning a master’s degree. Her News21 team traveled to Minnesota to look at the growth of ethnic charter schools. She responded by e-mail to a question about balancing innovation and good journalism.

I don’t believe that most innovations have come because someone wanted to be “innovative”...[They] come about because someone is trying to solve a problem, because they want to do something that they can’t do right now. Someone wanted an easier way to share videos, and now we have YouTube. Somebody else wanted an easier way to find out who the cute girl in his calculus class was and meet her, and now we have Facebook. Of course those things have expanded far beyond that as people figured out they could use those tools for other purposes, but the core of the innovation was figuring out a way to solve a problem.

I’m not sure that News21 had a specific enough problem that we wanted to solve or process we wanted to improve...[T]he most concrete goal I had was to do great journalism and tell the stories in compelling ways using multiple mediums and new tools.

SARA PEACH, University of North Carolina

Sara Peach was an environmental activist before returning to her alma mater for a master’s degree in journalism. She doubled as reporter and editor-in-chief for UNC’s project looking at how the country can slake its growing thirst for energy. Peach first wrote an introductory blog titled “Powering the journalism of the future.”

Welcome to an experiment. This summer, I’m working with a team of reporters to develop new ways of telling stories online...

How can we involve our audience? How can we be more transparent? How can audio, video, 3-D graphics and Facebook applications expand the reach and power of our stories—or become the stories themselves...We welcome you as a fellow experimenter in the journalism of the future.

BRAD HORN, Syracuse University

Brad Horn enrolled in graduate school with experience as a documentary filmmaker. His first video blog for News21, shot on a snowy Syracuse street last winter, used music, cutaways and split screens and made clever use of questions written on scraps of paper as storyboards.

This project is the future of journalism, right? So what are we doing? We’re doing youth and technology...What does it mean to live a modern life? Some sort of personal Internet device attached to your hip all the time? And what does it mean to be able to see and talk to people on other continents? How does that change the way people live?... Often in student projects the broader world doesn’t care about them. My hope is that we can create something that people actually want to be part of...and something that touches hearts.

Horn and Melissa Romero went to El Mirage, Arizona, a town with a large immigrant population, and visited a family of ten who shared a single laptop computer. Horn let the camera roll for two hours as kids and parents cycled on and off the laptop.

June 29. El Mirage. Woe unto you if you ever decide to set up a video camera in a room full of kids under 15-years-old...I had to say ‘Get away from the camera!’ about every 10 minutes. All the poking and prodding of the poor camcorder. I think someone even kissed the lens. But when I sat down to edit the tape it wasn’t the typing and the MySpacing and the clickety-clacketing that made this video what it is. It’s the kids... Thank god they didn’t listen to me.

In another blog, Horn told of meeting a 16-year-old who “has gone digital native” since moving to Arizona from Mexico five years ago.

When I told him and his family about Skype—thinking I was being all Mr. Cutting Edge, 21st Century Man—as a way to keep in touch with family in Mexico, Luis pulled out his iPod Touch and typed in “s- k-y-p-e” so he could remember to download the program later.

JENN HUETING, University of Missouri, Columbia, at UNC News21

A perennial challenge for journalists is finding real people to illustrate their stories. Two Arizona State University fellows, pursuing a story on undocumented immigrants who enlist in the military, found such a family using Twitter, the social networking tool that allows users to send messages worldwide in bursts of 140 characters, or about 30 words.

Jenn Hueting, a University of Missouri graduate student and News21 fellow at UNC, tried to replicate their success on Facebook. She was in for a surprise when she sent a string of messages to strangers:

It didn’t take me long...to discover how easy it is to snoop around on Facebook... Honestly, this did make me feel a bit like a creeper. And apparently Facebook thought I was a weirdo as well and sent me a warning. [The warning: “You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users.”]

Hueting expressed a wish that Facebook had a way of allowing reporters to troll for willing sources for stories.

Unfortunately, that wonderful Facebook world does not exist, and because my innocent behavior was deemed as potentially ‘annoying or abusive,’ I was sent back to square one... begging friends for help. Sad day.

ANDREW BURTON and PHIL TENSER, Syracuse University

No fellows posted online more of their adventures and mishaps than Syracuse undergraduates Phil Tenser and Andrew Burton. At a soapbox derby in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Tenser got clipped by a young racer who neglected to apply the brakes. He toppled headfirst to the ground, unconscious, as EMTs rushed to his aid. Burton Twittered updates from the scene and the hospital emergency room:

@pstenser survives to tell the tale of a soapbox derby gone bad—is responsive & talking to doctors. photo, video to come

Soon there was a blog titled “Becoming the News” showing the race (from two video cameras) and Tenser’s frightening tumble in slo-mo (from Burton’s).

Tenser and Burton hit pay dirt in an Oregon beach town, Lincoln City, when they found a teenager named Kaity Curry who chronicles high school life in a colorful cartoon blog she calls Frankensteinbeck. They quickly posted on the Syracuse News21 web site, www.youngandthewireless.com a “sneak preview” of their video on Kaity Curry. Then, life intimidating art, Tenser and Burton turned up in a panel in Curry’s next cartoon, with Tenser wearing earphones, wielding a boom mike and balancing a laptop, and Burton holding a camera and saying, “This is just so cool. You’re taking communication to the most primitive level—images. That goes back to hieroglyphics. Yet you’re combining that with technology to make it accessible and modern.”

SHARON MCCLOSKEY, Columbia University

More than a few News21 fellows have worked as professional journalists, usually for a few years directly out of college before enrolling in graduate school to learn new skills and advance their careers. Sharon McCloskey followed a different path to journalism school and News21. She is switching careers after a quarter century as a lawyer handling commercial and consumer litigation, including a stint as a deputy state attorney general in New Jersey. A deft writer, McCloskey saw News21 as an opportunity to hone not only reporting and story-telling skills, but to accelerate her own adjustment to the Internet age. News21, she said, “brings me and people like me into the 21st century.”

“I come from a generation that just reads newspapers and is still very paper oriented. I see the benefit of trying to change the viewing habits of my generation,” she explained. Already she has changed her own. Five newspapers used to land on McCloskey’s driveway in Red Bank, New Jersey. “We had the state and local papers as well as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. I stopped that. Now I go online and read most of my news there. I still get the Times delivered on the weekend, but the rest of the time I used the thing they call the Times Reader. I download the paper before leaving the house and flip through it on the train into the city.”

And has she caught up with classmates who grew up with computers and were already at ease with the new, technological demands of the job?

“It depends on who you ask,” McCloskey said with a laugh. “I’m better than I was.”