“Stick to sports”: Evidence from sports media on the origins and consequences of newly politicized attitudes. By Erik Peterson and Manuela Muñoz, in Political Communication.

How do people come to see areas of society, or media sources, as political where they hadn’t before? That’s the question Peterson and Muñoz are addressing in this study, and it’s one that many of us have wondered over the past several years, as subjects like vaccines and Dr. Seuss have become widely perceived as fundamentally political ones.

Peterson and Muñoz examine an interesting example in the sports broadcasting behemoth ESPN, which has seen its longstanding apolitical perception dramatically shift in the face of sustained conservative attacks on its impartiality over the past decade.

The authors hypothesize two potential routes to politicized attitudes about ESPN: viewing it as political because they perceive public opinion (and especially conservative media) as seeing it as political, and viewing it as political because of their actual experience with ESPN content. They also try to determine if politicization makes people more likely to reduce their consumption of ESPN.

Peterson and Muñoz address these issues in a remarkably thorough article consisting of three studies — two survey-experiments and a third survey. They find that people are much more likely to see ESPN as political based on consumption of political (i.e., conservative) media with commentary about ESPN than based on actually watching ESPN.

But the influence of these partisan media-induced cues doesn’t extend into action. The authors found no partisan differences in ESPN use during a time (2016-17) when they found massive partisan differences in perceptions of ESPN. (The biggest factor driving ESPN use was, of course, interest in sports.) Partisan media, they suggest, may be very effective at generating antipathy toward media sources, but much less so at changing media consumption behavior.

How investigative journalists around the world adopt innovative digital practices. By Jessica Kunert, Jannis Frech, Michael Brüggemann, Volker Lilienthal, and Wiebke Loosen, in Journalism Studies.

Investigative journalism has had a conflicted relationship with technology. It’s often seen as one of the least technologically reliant subdisciplines of journalism — the domain of “pounding the pavement” — but it’s been much more closely tied to data journalism over the past decade.

Kunert and her coauthors took an international look at how investigative journalists adopt and adapt to technology, interviewing 133 investigative journalists from 60 countries and analyzing the results through the lens of the diffusion of innovations, one of communication studies’ longest-standing theories.

They found that while investigative journalists are hungry to learn about new technological aids to their work, “they are overwhelmed with acquiring digital skills and feel helpless in the light of the complexity of the digital practices that are potentially at their disposal.” To cope, they often collaborate with specialists — largely technologists — and hang onto some traditional methods.

But the authors also found that social structures affect adoption far more than diffusion of innovations has typically held. Specifically, they characterize investigative journalism as a social system operating at two different speeds, with those in Global South dramatically limited in their ability to access advanced digital tools. “The gap between South and North is widening,” they wrote. “While in the Global North more and more digital practices are becoming part of everyday work in the newsroom, the Global South often continues to struggle with the preconditions for the use of digital practices.”

Harassment of journalists and its aftermath: Anti-press violence, psychological suffering, and an internal chilling effect. By Changwook Kim and Wooyeol Shin, in Digital Journalism.

Journalists around the world have been subject to increased amounts of derogatory rhetoric, harassment, and violence over the past decade. A wave of recent studies has examined the effects of that harassment on journalists, finding that it tends to make journalists less willing to pursue emotionally oriented tasks, cover particular types of stories, and view audiences as rational.

Kim and Shin provide a notable addition to these studies by examine the psychological and emotional effects of harassment and coping mechanisms among journalists in South Korea, where anti-press sentiment is severe. They argue that anti-press discourse has been normalized through the widespread adoption of the word giraegi, a portmanteau of the Korean words for “journalist” and “trash,” and the violent and abusive rhetoric around it.

Kim and Shin conducted interviews with 10 journalists and an analysis of 18 self-reflective articles written by journalists in response to harassment. They found that harassment, which is especially intense against women, produces senses of anger, helplessness, and fear in journalists. They try to cope through perfectionism (which isn’t effective, since the harassment rarely comes in response to actual mistakes), putting emotional boundaries between themselves and audiences, and ‘counter-hating’ and belittling them.

Kim and Shin also found that journalists are vulnerable to “mob censorship” when their organizations don’t support them against such attacks, leading journalists to choose not to pursue certain types of stories for fear of angering audiences. They conclude by posing a stark question: “Should journalists serve members of the public who deny the reason for their existence?”

Do more with less: Minimizing competitive tensions in collaborative local journalism.” By Joy Jenkins and Lucas Graves, in Digital Journalism.

Collaborative journalism has created a lot of buzz in both the profession and the academy as a means for news organizations (particularly under-resourced ones) to undertake projects and achieve impact they couldn’t otherwise. But it can be difficult in practice, especially when the organizations involved have strong competitive interests with their newfound partners.

Jenkins and Graves sought to illustrate some potential solutions to these problems through three case studies of local journalistic collaboration in Europe. Through each case, they outlined a different collaborative model: co-op, contractor, and NGO.

In the co-op model, similar news organizations (a group of 11 Finnish daily newspapers) agree to collaborate only on specific topics in which they don’t compete. The contractor model (based on a collaboration between an Italian newspaper publisher and two startups) is structured through a contract in which organizations specialize in different areas. And in the NGO model (built around a British nonprofit news organization), a coordinating nonprofit manages common data through which many outlets develop their own stories.

For each model, Jenkins and Graves detailed the main level on which tension is alleviated — the topic, the role, or the story. While each differed on where competitive tension lay and how it was resolved, each one, the authors concluded, represented a sustainable path for local collaborations among news organizations.

Recommended for you: How newspapers normalize algorithmic news recommendation to fit their gatekeeping role. By Lynge Asbjørn Møller, in Journalism Studies.

From Digital Journalism:

We’re in this together: A multi-stakeholder approach for news recommenders. By Annelien Smets, Jonathan Hendrickx, and Pieter Ballon.

Between personal and public interest: How algorithmic news recommendation reconciles with journalism as an ideology. By Lynge Asbjørn Møller.

To nudge or not to nudge: News recommendation as a tool to achieve online media pluralism. By Judith Vermeulen.

Benefits of diverse news recommendations for democracy: A user study. By Lucien Heitz et al.

Five articles on news recommendations have been published this month — four by Digital Journalism (part of a forthcoming special issue on AI and journalism), and one by Journalism Studies. Together, they form a fascinating deep dive into what role algorithmic news recommendation systems are playing in the professional world of journalists and our political and social structures more broadly.

The studies by Møller (in Journalism Studies) and Smets et al. both examine how algorithmic recommendation systems are implemented by journalists, and both find that news organizations remain cautious in their use of recommendations out of a concern for maintaining traditional gatekeeping control and the kind of autonomy that comes with manual decision-making.

Møller looks at how Scandinavian newspapers have incorporated editorial control into their recommendation products, and Smets et al., based on interviews with media professionals in the Flanders region of Belgium, propose a model that takes into account the perspective of numerous stakeholders including users and management.

Møller’s other article looks more broadly at the tensions between journalistic values and news recommendation technology, arguing that journalists can navigate that conflict by emphasizing diversity, serendipity, and editorial input in designing recommendations. Vermeulen, meanwhile, reflects on a parallel set of tensions on the users’ side — between nudging users toward higher-quality news and preserving their autonomy and choice.

Finally, Heitz and his colleagues built an app aggregating and recommending news from Swiss outlets to test the effects of news recommendations on exposure to different viewpoints and polarization. They found some indications that diverse recommendations increase openness toward opposing views and appreciation of journalism, but no effect on political knowledge or participation.

An RQ1 read: Surviving Mexico by Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly

This is the second of what we hope will be occasional summaries by RQ1 readers of notable recent books on news and journalism. This month’s summary is from Erin Siegal McIntyre, a professor at the University of North Carolina who previously worked as a journalist based in Tijuana. If there’s a recent research-oriented book on news or journalism that you’d like to write about, let us know!

“In Mexico, undoubtedly, too many journalists have died, but journalism is far from dead.”

While that sentiment may be true, at least so far in 2022, the murder of reporters in Mexico has broken record after record.

This grim reality makes Surviving Mexico: Resistance and Resilience among Journalists in the Twenty-First Century, the new 288-page book by Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly, even more urgently indispensable. For the last twenty years, Mexico has “fade[d] from a hopeful moment into an era of tumult and fear,” the authors note, despite “finally reach[ing] some level of democracy” after seven decades of semi-authoritarian rule.

Based on more than 160 interviews with journalists, activists, and academics across several regions of the country, González de Bustamante and Relly present a highly readable account of the myriad dangers faced by journalists in Mexico, the impact of trauma and violence on their lives, and how individuals and collectives have organized to meet the challenges of working in such a dangerous place. Journalists are more vulnerable, so they’ve been forced to develop new mechanisms by which to cope and survive.

While the first two sections of the book focus on anchoring and quantifying violence, the third and final section offers a refreshing long gaze toward the future. Building resiliency is key to basic survival. Drawing clear connections between resistance and resilience, González de Bustamante and Relly outline various ways that journalists in various Mexican states and cities have come together, formally and informally, to protest, resist, and organize.

“Changing course will require enormous effort in tandem with the will of all sectors of society,” they write. “Some journalists and activists have started down that road … [and] many more must join them for real change to happen.”

1. What if journalists were to cut the time they spend on Twitter in half?

2. Or what if their bosses, the ones who over the past decade insisted on reporters being active on Twitter, were wrong all along — that social media use, on balance, would never be the net positive that many imagined?

3. What if journalists individually and news organizations collectively had a better understanding of the things they do that actually create value (economic, societal, or otherwise)?

4. And what if they had a better sense for what stands in the way of their doing more of the high-value and less of the low-value work?

5. What if research about journalism — of which we have so much, more than ever! — were more fully integrated into the way that universities teach journalism?

6. How might that change, for one thing, the way that journalists tend to look so skeptically on people who study the media — even as they give overwhelming deference to economists, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists (roughly in that order) when it comes to sourcing experts, even on issues where communication scholars have important things to add to the conversation?

7. Or, more consequentially, what might finally help us bridge the persistent gap between academic research and industry practice, to the betterment of both?

8. What if newsrooms produced less news but had greater impact?

9. How would the conversation around the sharing of misinformation be different if we more fully recognized that communication is as much a ritual experience — a cultural means of identity and community and self-expression — as it is about the functional transmission of information?

10. Who will bring much-needed nuance to the public debate about filter bubbles and echo chambers, particularly at a time when pundits proclaim one thing and empirical evidence seems to suggest another?

11. How can we better account for social inequalities in who gets news?

12. If lower-income people generally get lower-quality information, and if the transition to paywalls and elite-oriented nonprofit news only exacerbates information asymmetries, what would a journalism look like that prioritizes serving the poor?

13. What would news organizations do differently if they better realized what a frustrating and fraught experience it is for many people, across the political spectrum, to consume news much of the time?

14. Would they start with simply rethinking and redesigning, entirely from scratch, how news products are labeled — for example, to clarify differences that bother people about what’s news vs. what’s opinion, or what “news analysis” is supposed to mean?

15. Or would it involve more transparently explaining the reporting process, the use (and abuse) of anonymous sources, and why some voices appear in the news more than others?

16. What if relational forms of journalism — ones that emphasize building relationships with communities and developing more mutually beneficial interactions with audiences (yes, ones I’ve argued for) — sound nice in theory but assume that people want to participate in news more than they actually do?

17. Or what if the forces that are pushing journalists to develop a personal brand online are also putting those same journalists (especially women and minorities) into more compromising situations of hostility and harassment?

18. Though people generally could stand to be better informed than they are at the moment, when is too much news, well, too much?

19. Or: When does news begin to harm more than it helps?

20. If, in the end, there’s more to celebrate than lament about the state of journalism, and if we want to preserve what we prize and appreciate about journalism, how can we more forcefully defend the press as an institution — particularly in the face of authoritarian attack — even while just as readily acknowledging its broken parts and urging their repair?

That’s a question worth considering in 2020 and beyond.

In short: The gap between our two worlds is still far too large, and we’re both losing out. This is especially troubling at a time when together we could make scientific, policy, and public debates about journalism far better informed, evidence-based, and mutually beneficial.

The first conference that I attended was the annual convention of the International Communication Association, which has a Journalism Studies Division that is both the largest of its kind in the world and a leading venue for presenting the latest research on journalism. In the journalism studies track of the conference, there were 130 peer-reviewed papers that addressed a wide range of important issues for journalism — from questions about how, why, and to what effect journalists use social media to emerging concerns about misinformation and “post-truth” politics as well as enduring issues surrounding how news is framed on controversial topics.

The research, while quite good in many respects, had key limitations in the aggregate, as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen has explained. There was virtually nothing about the business of journalism — a conspicuous absence at a time of ongoing policy debates about how to sustain quality news production. There was much research attention paid to the internal workings of newsrooms and journalists, but not enough to the external dynamics of technology platforms, political actors, and audience relationships that play a growing role in shaping the ultimate outcomes of journalism. What’s more, there was an accessibility bias toward studying data that could be more easily gathered — which explains why Twitter gets more attention in media research than more popular platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

The second conference that I attended was Newsgeist, an industry-focused, invitation-only gathering co-sponsored by Google and the Knight Foundation that brings together “practitioners and thinkers from the worlds of journalism, technology, and public policy who are re-imagining the future of news.” Newsgeist follows the “unconference” format, with sessions organized and selected on-site by attendees. Many (seemingly most) of the attendees were journalists, with some representatives from Google, Facebook, and the like. Among the dozens of sessions proposed, Mathew Ingram noted, “there were a number of suggestions that boiled down to ‘What Should Facebook Do?’ In other words, what should Facebook do for journalism?”

In essence, if some journalism researchers were failing to address the power of Facebook and platforms more broadly, journalists themselves were keenly aware of the threat — and yet it also became obvious to me, in session after session, that journalists had too little research-based evidence on which to make key decisions about the future. Journalists had piles of Chartbeat data, but few models for understanding the social psychology of media audiences. They were stuck musing about things like filter bubbles, bots, and young people paying for news, when there is growing research evidence available with answers to these questions.

We could do better research and better journalism if we better engaged with one another. Some of that could happen through better representation at each other’s conferences, but much of it could occur in simpler and less expensive ways — like calling out the culture of indifference and defensiveness that too often gets between us, and simply reaching out to share ideas with one another.

A journalism studies field that is more attuned to the central political, technological, and economic questions that press upon journalism — and a news industry willing to partner with scholars and learn from their research — should be a long-range goal for us all. It won’t be resolved in a year, or even several, but in 2019 we can at least give it a shot.

As someone who probably has spent more time thinking about the Knight News Challenge than anyone outside of Knight Foundation headquarters — doing a dissertation on the subject will do that to you! — I can’t help but follow its evolution, even after my major research ended in 2010. And evolve it has: from an initial focus on citizen journalism and bloggy kinds of initiatives (all the rage circa 2007, right?) to a later emphasis on business models, visualizations, and data-focused projects (like this one) — among a whole host of other projects including news games, SMS tools for the developing world, crowdsourcing applications, and more.

Now, after five years and $27 million in its first incarnation, Knight News Challenge 2.0 has been announced for 2012, emphasizing speed and agility (three contests a year, eight-week turnarounds on entries) and a new topical focus (the first round is focused on leveraging existing networks). While more information will be coming ahead of the February 27 launch, here are three questions to chew on now.

Does the Knight News Challenge still dominate this space?

The short answer is yes (and I’m not just saying that because, full disclosure, the Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Lab). As I’ve argued before, in the news innovation scene, at this crossroads of journalism and technology communities, the KNC has served an agenda-setting kind of function — perhaps not telling news hipsters what to think regarding the future of journalism, but rather telling them what to think about. So while folks might disagree on the Next Big Thing for News, there’s little question that the KNC has helped to shape the substance and culture of the debate and the parameters in which it occurs.

Some evidence for this comes from the contest itself: Whatever theme/trend got funded one year would trigger a wave of repetitive proposals the next. (As Knight said yesterday: “Our concern is that once we describe what we think we might see, we receive proposals crafted to meet our preconception.”)

And yet the longer answer to this question is slightly more nuanced. When the KNC began in 2006, with the first winners named in 2007, it truly was the only game in town — a forum for showing “what news innovation looks like” unlike any other. Nowadays, a flourishing ecosystem of websites (ahem, like this one), aggregators (like MediaGazer), and social media platforms is making the storyline of journalism’s reboot all the more apparent. It’s easier than ever to track who’s trying what, which experiments are working, and so on — and seemingly in real time, as opposed to a once-a-year unveiling. Hence the Knight Foundation’s move to three quick-fire contests a year, “as we try to bring our work closer to Internet speed.”

How should we define the “news” in News Challenge?

One of the striking things I found in my research (discussed in a previous Lab post) was that Knight, in its overall emphasis, has pivoted away from focusing mostly on journalism professionalism (questions like “how do we train/educate better journalists?”) and moved toward a broader concern for “information.” This entails far less regard for who’s doing the creating, filtering, or distributing — rather, it’s more about ensuring that people are informed at the local community level. This shift from journalism to information, reflected in the Knight Foundation’s own transformation and its efforts to shape the field, can be seen, perhaps, like worrying less about doctors (the means) and more about public health (the ends) — even if this pursuit of health outcomes sometimes sidesteps doctors and traditional medicine along the way.

This is not to say that Knight doesn’t care about journalism. Not at all. It still pours millions upon millions of dollars into clearly “newsy” projects — including investigative reporting, the grist of shoe-leather journalism. Rather, this is about Knight trying to rejigger the boundaries of journalism: opening them up to let other fields, actors, and ideas inside.

So, how should you define “news” in your application? My suggestion: broadly.

What will be the defining ethos of KNC 2.0?

This is the big, open, and most interesting question to me. My research on the first two years of KNC 1.0, using a regression analysis, found that contest submissions emphasizing participation and distributed knowledge (like crowdsourcing) were more likely to advance, all things being equal. My followup interviews with KNC winners confirmed this widely shared desire for participation — a feeling that the news process not only could be shared with users, but in fact should be.

I called this an “ethic of participation,” a founding doctrine of news innovation that challenges journalism’s traditional norm of professional control. But perhaps, to some extent, that was a function of the times, during the roughly 2007-2010 heyday of citizen media, with the attendant buzz around user-generated content as the hot early-adopter thing in news — even if news organizations then, as now, struggled to reconcile and incorporate a participatory audience. Even while participation has become more mainstream in journalism, there are still frequent flare-ups, like this week’s flap over breaking news on Twitter, revealing enduring tensions at the “collision of two worlds — when a hierarchical media system in the hands of the few collides with a networked media system open to all,” as Alfred Hermida wrote.

So what about this time around? Perhaps KNC 2.0 will have an underlying emphasis on Big Data, algorithms, news apps, and other things bubbling up at the growing intersection of computer science and journalism. It’s true that Knight is already underwriting a significant push in this area through the (also just-revised) Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project (formerly called the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership — which Nikki Usher and I have written about for the Lab). To what extent is there overlap or synergy here? OpenNews, for 2012, is trying to build on the burgeoning “community around code” in journalism — leveraging the momentum of Hacks/Hackers, NICAR, and ONA with hackfests, code-swapping, and online learning. KNC 2.0, meanwhile, talks about embracing The Hacker Way described by Mark Zuckerberg — but at the same time backs away a bit from its previous emphasis on open source as a prerequisite. It’ll be interesting to see how computational journalism — explained well in this forthcoming paper (PDF here) by Terry Flew et al. in Journalism Practice — figures into KNC 2.0.

Regardless, the Knight News Challenge is worth watching for what it reveals about the way people — journalists and technologists, organizations and individuals, everybody working in this space — talk about and make sense of “news innovation”: what it means, where it’s taking us, and why that matters for the future of journalism.

The buzz and chatter are mostly just idle guesswork, and of course it’s all to be expected when serious money (think: $5 million for MIT, $1 million for EveryBlock) is on the line. (Indeed, there’s an extra $1 million on the table this year, thanks to Google’s donation to journalism innovation announced yesterday.)

So, that’s why this year, the fifth installment of the Knight News Challenge, already feels a little different. In years past, the Knight Foundation has approached the News Challenge with a “hey, we’re not the experts — you tell us what’s innovative” kind of attitude, purposefully leaving the door open to just about any submission, assuming that it met certain basic requirements of geographic community focus, open-source software, and so on. With the exception of some tweaking along the way, the general focus of the News Challenge remained the same: to stimulate innovation in the name of making communities better informed. Simple enough.

But this year, even though the KNC’s general pitch remains the same, applicants will make their submissions in one of four categories: Mobile, Authenticity, Sustainability, or Community. Only the Community category requires a place-based geographical focus, which marks a significant break from previous cycles where all projects had to be tested in a local community. Overall, the categorization scheme lends some direction — even a certain narrowing — of the contest, and it suggests that Knight has learned a few things over the past four years that it’s going to apply in this final go-round, to get a more focused pool of contenders.

And that’s where this post comes in, on the question of lessons learned. At the risk of contributing more baseless speculation to this parlor game, I’d like to share some insights I gained during the past year as I examined the News Challenge — and the Knight Foundation more generally — for my doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas. (I’m now a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota.)

For starters, you can read the full text of my dissertation (“Journalism Innovation and the Ethic of Participation: A Case Study of the Knight Foundation and its News Challenge“) by going here, or by reading the embedded Scribd file below. If you’re looking for the highlights, skip to page 182 and read the last chapter (Participation and the Professions). Quick tip: This is generally a good way to go when trying to interpret academic articles — look for that “discussion and conclusion” section toward the end.

I described some of my key findings in an earlier Lab post. But with regard to the changes in the KNC for 2011, here are several observations from my time studying the Knight Foundation that might fill in some of the context:

This is increasingly true of all nonprofit foundations, really — not just the Knight Foundation. But it was striking to see the extent to which the foundation is working to assess the impact and effectiveness of its funding efforts, through an ongoing “deep review” of its mission and goals. A major part of this review: an examination of the Knight News Challenge after its first three cycles (2007-09). This included a massive content analysis of nearly all proposal documents — resulting in a data set that I analyzed as my part of my project (see Chapter 6 of my dissertation) — and interviews, conducted by outside consultants, with many KNC grantees. At one level, there’s the basic assessment of seeing if grantees’ outcomes matched their goals. At another, there is the big question of reach and influence. For nonprofits funding myriad online sites, as Knight does, at least part of that means reviewing web metrics: traffic, unique visitors, etc. All foundations want metrics to justify their investment — and now more than ever.

So, what does this emphasis on evaluation mean for News Challenge applicants this year? Well, it suggests that in a world where user behaviors are easier to track and analyze than ever before, and thus funders of all stripes (for-profit and nonprofit alike) are hungry for good numbers, having a plan for web metrics — for reaching quantifiable and identifiable targets — is probably going to be more important than in previous cycles.

Is this the News Challenge on SEO steroids? Not exactly, but you get the idea. And this gets to the second point, which is…

There was an interesting quote in recent coverage of KNC changes that got some attention. It was from Jennifer 8. Lee, a Knight consultant and contest reviewer:

We’re not totally into the citizen journalism thing anymore. It has been given its chance to do its thing and kind of didn’t do its thing that well.

Now, Lee was quick to clarify that she was speaking only for herself, and that the KNC is open to citizen media approaches — just not the kind of generic and repetitive pitches that have populated the pool of applicants recently (think: Flip cams for urban youth):

The contest welcomes content or citizen journalism projects. Innovative content or community reporting models can and do get funded…Since innovation is a core value of the contest, traditional content and citizen journalism projects lacking in innovation were generally not looked upon favorably by contest reviewers.

But, nonetheless, this statement is telling because it gets at a key focus of my dissertation: how Knight has dealt with participation in journalism. In my study of the first three years of the News Challenge, I found that the foundation and its KNC winners championed citizen participation in the news process as something that should happen, not merely something that could happen because of new technologies. Participation was portrayed as an ethic of good journalism in the digital age, a foundational piece of journalism innovation.

So, does that square with the notion of we’re not so into citizen journalism anymore? Perhaps there’s a better way to think about this: Knight has already funded lots of citizen media projects, and the evidence — based on my interviews with KNC winners and overall analysis — suggests that many of these sites struggled to build and maintain a base of users. On the one hand, that’s perfectly understandable: Some of these projects were meant to be short-term in duration; Knight knew many of them would fail, because that’s the nature of innovation; and, hey, in the attention economy, it’s tough for any content provider these days, right? Yet, on the other hand, this struggle to get attention — from citizen contributors and audiences alike — was a formidable challenge for many of the early KNC projects, and, well, it just so happened that many of those early projects happened to be citizen media sites. As a result, citizen journalism comes off looking like a failure, even if the motivation behind it was well intentioned and still well regarded in Knight circles.

The lesson here: Going forward, with this ramped-up emphasis on evaluation and impact, and with apparent concerns about citizen journalism’s sustainability, it would seem that Knight wants to see applicants with a clearer path to success, especially in web metrics. Or, perhaps there’s another way to read this: In a media ecosystem awash in sites pushing content — read our blogs! watch our videos! — with less thought about how that content gets subsidized on a regular basis, Knight wants a better business plan. It wants a sustainable model. After all, there’s a reason it hired a director of business consulting.

David Sasaki, of the 2007 KNC winner Rising Voices, might have captured this problem best in this prescient blog post from 2008:

The Knight Foundation is single-handedly making citizen media both more serious and more respected by giving financial support to some of the field’s most innovative thinkers. But is this a sustainable model for the transformation of media? What happens when the News Challenge’s five-year funding period concludes? All of the News Challenge grantee projects are impressive, innovative, and important, but not a single one is turning a profit, nor do they seem poised to any time soon.

This is a truly intriguing and as-yet-unanswered question going into this final cycle. The five-year funding period Sasaki described is coming to an end. What comes next?

On the one hand, the News Challenge has proved a successful template for Knight’s growing network of prize-philanthropy challenge contests, and it represents the foundation’s most visible link to its historic roots as a “journalism foundation” with close ties to the industry and its concerns. But, as I pointed out previously, Knight is undergoing a shift in emphasis from “news” to “information” as a way of broadening the boundaries of journalism to accomplish innovation with outside help from other fields and philanthropic funders. The most obvious manifestation of this is the Knight Community Information Challenge, which involves partnering with place-based foundations to meet the “information needs” of local communities.

What becomes, then, of the News Challenge? Is there a renewal of some kind — and if so, does it keep the “journalism” tag? Or does the Community Information Challenge suffice in this space? Only time will tell, but the important thing here is to recognize that Knight has an increasingly nuanced view of journalism — one that sidesteps the “baggage” of professional exclusivity and proactively seeks ideas from other fields (say, the tech sector).

David Cohn, whose Spot.Us is one of the best-known KNC success stories, put it recently, in describing startups like Kommons:

As I’ve said before, we may not call it ‘journalism’ in the future, but if it still meets the news and information needs of a community, more power to it.

That, right there, nicely summarizes the feeling of the Knight Foundation: that it cares much more about the ends (i.e., informed communities) than the means (i.e., journalists and traditional news). How that translates into future challenges (or not) is left to be seen.

[Disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab.]

Go figure.

Now that the dissertation is finished (at least temporarily, in the hands of my committee members), I’ve had a chance to reflect on how this fourth class of winners fits into the overall picture that has developed from the Knight News Challenge. This contest matters because, far and away, it’s the most prominent innovation effort of its kind in the future-of-journalism space. And so, in some sense, the News Challenge has an agenda-setting impact on the rest of the field at large, emphasizing certain trends over others and altogether giving shape to what we think of as “news innovation.”

But to understand the News Challenge in full, we have to step back and consider the organization behind it — the nonprofit John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the leading funder of journalism training for years and now the biggest philanthropic supporter of news-related startups and experiments. This, of course, is especially true in the nonprofit news sector: Just pick your favorite news upstart (Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, et al.), and chances are it has a good share of Knight funding. [Including this website — full disclosure, the Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab. —Josh]

So, the question that prompted my dissertation was simply this: With all this investment and influence in journalism innovation, what is the Knight Foundation trying to accomplish? (We can put this another way. Mark Dowie, in his 2002 investigation of nonprofit foundations, said, “If foundations are indeed ‘America’s passing gear,’ we need to ask what, or whom, they are passing, and where are they taking the country?” In our case, if Knight is akin to journalism’s passing gear, how — and toward what future — is it attempting to drive the field?)

The short answer is that Knight has sought to innovate journalism in part by stepping away from it, by making a strategic shift from “journalism” to “information.” This broadening of boundaries has created crucial space for innovators — from inside and outside journalism — to set forth a reformed view of what journalism is and ought to be. Chief among these new ethics is the emerging ethic of participation — the sense that journalism not only can be participatory, but indeed should be, and that something is missing if the public isn’t involved. In this sense, the foundation and its innovators, in rhetoric and action, are working to bring change to the rather ossified occupational ideology of journalism, or this professional culture that has developed much of its authority around the idea that it has gatekeeping control over what passes as “news.”

Now let me try to explain the longer answer. First, I came at this case study of the Knight Foundation and the Knight News Challenge from a number of angles: interviews with foundation leaders and more than a dozen KNC winners (namely, the ones who seemed to want to build a news organization/platform with their funding); an analysis of hundreds upon hundreds of pages of documents, such as foundation reports and News Challenge applications; and even some statistical analysis using a large body of data gathered on KNC applications from the first three years (the 2007, 2008 and 2009 contest cycles). There isn’t space in a single post to summarize my findings from each of these areas, but elsewhere I presented some early results on the KNC, and you can contact me if you’re interested in the final dissertation come July.

For now, I’ll touch on the big picture: how the Knight Foundation and its News Challenge have evolved in recent years.

The Knight Foundation has long been a leading supporter of journalism education, and for much of the 1990s and early 2000s did this through the endowment of chaired professorships at journalism schools around the country. But after Alberto Ibargüen took over as foundation president and CEO in 2005, Knight began to realize that, as Ibargüen has said, it shouldn’t be in the business of teaching best practices for jobs that might not exist in the future.

Around the same time, Ibargüen and Knight became attracted to philanthropy’s growing use of challenge contests and other means of tapping into the “wisdom of the crowds” to find solutions to problems. If the “problem” for journalism in an era of digital disruption was the need to find new or refurbished models through which journalism’s core functions and societal benefits could be achieved — to “meet the information needs of communities,” in the foundation’s common refrain — then Knight was making a break from its past in turning away from faith in industry expertise and toward an acknowledgement that the solutions may well come from the aggregate expertise of a participatory crowd of contributors.

The Knight News Challenge was born in 2006 in this context: as a contest attempting to tackle a big professional problem (the shrinking of newspapers in many communities) by purposefully looking beyond the profession alone, seeking to engage a whole range of people — techies, entrepreneurs, activists, etc. — and their ideas that might shake up journalism. This crowdsourcing strategy is seen both in the nature of the contest — which is open to all — and in the actual content of the proposals that have been funded, many of which have a crowd-focused component of distributed participation (from Spot.Us in 2008 to Ushahidi in 2009 to GoMap Riga and Tilemapping in 2010).

These connected assumptions — that neither Knight nor the news industry had the solutions to its “informed communities” problem, but that answers could come through participation from distributed crowds that were newly connected online — led Knight to conclude that it should give up control over some facets of its philanthropy, as it did with its challenge contests, first the Knight News Challenge and more recently with the likes of Knight Community Information Challenge and Knight Arts Challenge.

What’s more, the foundation chose to give up control over maintaining journalism’s professional boundaries of exclusion — of defining journalism by one’s professional status — thus rhetorically opening the gates to greater participation from audiences. This was no small shift. Professionals, by nature, seek to be autonomous from outside influence, and so an acknowledgment of one’s lack of expertise or lack of control is a serious departure from the professional paradigm. Nevertheless, Ibargüen’s logic — of openness, of distributed control, of crowd wisdom and collective engagement — is more in tune with the digital media environment and its participatory culture. And, in this sense, his logic may reflect the Knight Foundation’s adaptation to the situation — its own way of “figuring out the flow” (Ibargüen’s words) and leveraging the momentum to accomplish its purposes.

All of this works to “open up” journalism in a way that allows something like crowd participation — which is still mostly at the margins of mainstream journalism — to become not only palatable but indeed truly valuable, a very ethic of good practice, in a rebooted formulation of journalism. This, in fact, is the general perspective of the KNC winners I interviewed, and is one of the core themes I explore further in the dissertation.

In more recent times, the Knight Foundation has undergone a further evolution from “journalism” to “information,” both in rhetoric and practice. First, remember again that Knight’s ultimate goal is helping people get the information they need to function in (local) democracy. Historically, it was the newspaper that took care of providing that crucial information, and so the News Challenge was an effort to work on the problem of declining news at the community level.

But, as the News Challenge developed over time, Knight staff began to wonder if they were unduly focused on the “means” of informed communities — on the troubled journalism profession — and instead should be giving more emphasis to understanding and promoting the “outcomes” of informed communities, with less regard to how those outcomes were achieved. It’s kind of like being less concerned about the well-being of doctors and more concerned about public health, whether or not doctors are the ones doing the healing. As Ibargüen told me in an interview:

If you’re being agnostic about the form [i.e., digital delivery], shouldn’t you really focus on the end result? [Emphasis mine.] That is, stop trying to figure out how to fix current media and instead ask the question, “What does a community in a democracy need? What kind of information does it need in order to function well within a democracy? Where are we now, and what public policy can you support that will get us from where we are now to where we ought to be?”

In other words: Worry less about journalism and more about quality information, however it gets gathered and distributed. This line of thinking led to the formation of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. This high-level commission produced a report that was among the major future-of-journalism treatises to emerge in 2009. While journalism does receive fairly substantial treatment in the report, Amy Gahran was “struck by how little [the report] had to say about how professional journalists and mainstream news organizations fit into the future of civic media.”

Even more, the Knight Foundation appears to have realized that it can have a broader impact in philanthropy and society to the extent it downplays “journalism,” a term that, like it or not, comes with the baggage of stereotypes and a professional identity complex. “Information,” by contrast, has no particular ideology, and therefore can be malleably shaped to suit the circumstances. By invoking “information” and “information needs,” the Knight Foundation has been able to communicate to and connect with a range of fields, foundations, and corporations in a way “that we almost certainly would never have done before,” Ibargüen said. Because “information” is an empty vessel, open to interpretation, it has enabled Knight to speak the language of other fields, even as it seeks to advance the interests of its own. As Ibargüen told me:

One of the lessons for me is that when I used to talk about this as journalism, I’d get the great glazing of the eyes, as people would say, “Get over yourself, you’re just not that important, you know!” And now I know to say, “OK, this matters, this is at the center of almost anything. You tell me your subject, and I’ll tell you how information matters.” [Emphasis mine.]

This journalism-to-information shift can be seen in how the News Challenge has developed. My own examination of winners over the years suggests that projects have become less and less about “producing journalism” and increasingly about “supporting information,” some of which might be considered journalism in a traditional sense. And this gets us to the big existential question: What is journalism, anyway? In a world where the boundaries (rhetorical and structural) around news gathering, filtering, and distributing are becoming increasingly hard to detect, when does information become journalism? It is in this soup of uncertainty and confusion that the Knight Foundation has sought to bring profession-wide change: opening the boundaries of journalism and its own philanthropy to the logic of crowd wisdom, and using its position as a boundary-spanning agent, straddling several fields, as a means of bringing fresh ideas into a field that sorely needs them.

When The New York Times and New York University announced last week that they would collaborate on a news site covering the East Village neighborhood, it got me thinking: Beyond Manhattan, what could this mean for the future of journalism education?

While it’s true that this isn’t the first pro-academic partnership — even the Times already has turned over editorial control of a hyperlocal site to CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism — this partnership is different in kind: NYU and its Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute get to approach this project (dubbed The Local: East Village, or LEV) like a true startup, as students and faculty work to build, design, and learn to maintain the site from the ground up.

That level of “ownership” makes this a unique experiment, and raises the specter of increased ties between j-schools and news organizations, both working together to plug holes in their offerings. Journalism programs need more opportunities for students to get in-the-field experience that is digital, “real,” and attuned to the hyperlocal, entrepreneurial, bootstrapping kind of newswork of the future. And news organizations need more outside help to blanket news and information at the block-by-block level, especially as in-house resources shrink.

Put the two together, and the possibilities are intriguing. (While critics cry foul over the Times’ “exploitation” of free student labor, they miss the point here: that this marks a progressive step for journalism training, and something students might actually want to do. Having your work appear on nytimes.com is worth a little “free” labor now for bigger benefits later.)

For NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, the partnership is something of a breakthrough, a melding of so many journalistic elements for which he has advocated over the years:

Permit me to say what I find so fascinating about this project. Man, it has everything in it — everything I’ve been studying since I gave my first talk to newspaper editors in Des Moines, Iowa in 1989. It’s neighborhood journalism; it’s cosmopolitan too. It’s about innovation; it’s about the classic virtues, like shoe leather reporting. It combines the discipline of pro journalism with the participatory spirit of citizen journalism. It’s an ideal way to study the craft, which is to say it’s an entirely practical project. It’s what J-school should be doing: collaborating with the industry on the best ways forward. It’s news, it’s commentary, it’s reviewing, it’s opinion, it’s the forum function, community connection, data provision, blogging — all at once. LEV I said is a start-up, but it’s starting with the strongest news franchise there is: the New York Times.

Last week I asked Jay to join me in a Q&A via Gmail chat. While his post at PressThink covers all the nooks and crannies of this partnership, I wanted to get his thoughts on what this arrangement could mean for journalism educators elsewhere.

Seth Lewis: What’s the key takeaway for other journalism programs? What can they learn from this partnership?

Jay Rosen: Well, first, I am hoping there are lessons in the set-up, or structure of the relationship between us and the Times, in which we have a “small project,” confined to one neighborhood, 14 blocks long, but a “big puzzle” and not a lot of bureaucracy — a simple “hinge,” as I said in my PressThink post. Then, I am hoping there will be lessons from what we actually do with the site, but those are to come.

So, are you suggesting that journalism schools could do well to focus on small, incremental steps toward local media partnerships? I mean, if I’m a journalism school director and I like what I see from this partnership, what’s the first step? What should I do?

This project began when I noticed what the Times was doing with The Local, and thought I glimpsed a need to experiment and learn. I mean, that was the logic of what they were doing. So, the first step is to get inside the head of the potential collaborator and start with a need or interest they have. The next step was to look at what we are doing at NYU and where we wanted to go with our program, and figure out where the two circles overlapped.

So, my Studio 20 concentration wants to work on innovation puzzles that matter in journalism in the broadest sense, but to do that through projects that can be completed in a semester. The Carter Institute at NYU teaches local reporting and needs a better way to do that. Put those things together and you get a version of The Local that Studio 20 can incubate, that the Reporting New York concentration at NYU can “own,” and that the Times can benefit from as a learning lab — and the community can gain from because it serves the East Village well. So it’s really four or five overlapping circles, because this is a community that NYU, the university at large, has a big stake in; it’s a big land owner and expects to own more land here.

Once I had the idea — East Village! The Local! — I just looked for ways to multiply the overlapping circles.

Oh, and one more thing: I tried to listen well to what the Times needed from such a project and understand it from their perspective as well as I did from ours.

As University of Nevada journalism professor Donica Mensing mentioned in her comment on your post, there are some structural factors in higher education that can pose a challenge for these kinds of projects. For example, university curricula (particularly at the grad level) emphasize an individual-based pattern of learning, as opposed to the group collaboration required for something like The Local. And, of course, there’s the issue of transitory students staying with a project after the semester ends. Studio 20, being nimble and adaptive, seems better equipped than most for these challenges, but can you talk about how journalism programs in general can address these structural barriers in seeking to set up media partnerships?

There are a few answers to that. The first is: I built Studio 20 for projects like this, and the whole premise and starting point for the class that is incubating The Local: East Village (LEV) is, “everyone works together on one big project.” The basis on which students are accepted into Studio 20 is collaboration is key, so that’s not a “new” demand or a detail left to be worked out later.

Also, The Local is going to migrate over to the part of the Carter Institute where it is more logically sustained: Reporting New York, where it is an ideal teaching vehicle. And we thought a lot about the sustainability puzzle before we even started down this road. Third, the way I run Studio 20, people take the lead on parts of the project, which become their “baby,” so to speak. For example, Tim Stenovec is taking the lead on community relationships within the East Village — that becomes something he can own.

Finally, the most important thing is we knew going in that we would have to overcome the biggest hurdle for academic partnerships in journalism, which is the semester clock runs one way, but a news site runs all the time. That was present at the beginning, it’s not something we overlooked at all, and it’s been in our sights since day one.

So, perhaps one lesson from this is that journalism programs need to reform the curriculum first, seek media partners second, rather than the other way around?

We were greatly aided in this project by a Studio 20 curriculum that is built around doing projects, yes. And we planned far enough ahead to have a Reporting New York course, The Hyperlocal Newsroom, that feeds talent to the project. Without those two things, I don’t think this would work.

Compared to the New York Times’ partnership with CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, which has assumed editorial control of an existing Local site, NYU will be building something from scratch. How important is that, from a journalism education standpoint? Can you talk about the “value added” involved in that process, and perhaps how that should figure into other partnerships that j-schools might develop elsewhere?

For Studio 20, all the value is in the startup, design phase, figuring out workflows and how it should operate, and making it come alive not only for NYU journalism students and faculty, but making it come alive as a “learning project” for The New York Times. That is just very, very challenging and real. What I want for my students in Studio 20 is to grapple with the innovation puzzle whole; I wanted to walk into the classroom on the first day of the project with the entire problem on the table, as it were. And this project comes very close to that.

My approach intellectually speaking borrows a lot from American pragmatism. In pragmatism, the idea is our knowledge develops not when we have the most magnificent theory or the best data but when we have a really, really good problem. How to make The Local run and perform well, given the constraints and tools we have, is a really, really good problem, and I think that is where universities should start. The result is what I said last night.

Yes, like I think you’ve said before: It’s better to focus on questions rather than topics.

Topics suck. If you have a topic, you are nowhere.

You have a media partner here, but what about a funding partner? Do you foresee nonprofit foundations wanting to underwrite this kind of project, as Carnegie, McCormick Tribune, and Knight have done with CUNY’s partnership? And, for the cash-strapped j-school out there that’s thinking, “Hey, this is a cool idea, but I’m not sure we have the money to make the structural and curricular changes needed” — any thoughts to offer on funding options?

We are fundraising for this from potential donors, and we have an idea for a revenue model, that is all I can tell you now. We would love a funding partner that understands what we are up to and why it matters for journalism education.

Photo of Jay Rosen by Joi Ito used under a Creative Commons license.

The New York Times’ announcement that it would be charging for some access to its website, starting in 2011, rekindled yet another round of debate about paywalls for online news. Beyond the practical question (will it work?) or the theoretical one (what does this mean for the Times’ notion of the “public”?), there remains another question to be untangled here — perhaps one more relevant to the smaller papers who might be thinking of following the Times’ example:

What is the underlying economic value of online news, anyway?

Media economist Iris Chyi [see disclosure below] has a few ideas about this problem. An assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, she has been researching the paid-vs.-free, print-vs.-online conundrum since the late ’90s. Her research has consistently found that even while online news use continues growing, its preference lags behind that of traditional media. In other words: Even as audiences transition from TV/print news consumption to the web, they still like the traditional formats better for getting news, all other things being equal.

Now, this seemingly makes no sense: How could a format as clunky, messy and old-school as print “beat” such a faster, richer and more interactive medium on likability?

Chyi believes she found the answer in the economic principle of “inferior goods.” The idea is simple: When income increases, consumers buy more “normal goods” (think: steak) and fewer “inferior goods” (think: ramen noodles). When income goes down, the opposite occurs (again, all things being equal in economics terms). Inferiority, in this case, isn’t so much a statement of actual quality as it is of consumer perception and demand. If we get richer, our desires for steak go up and our desires for ramen go down.

What does this mean for journalism? “Users perceive online news in similar ways — online news fulfills certain needs but is not perceived as desirable as print newspapers,” Chyi said.

She and co-author Mengchieh Jacie Yang make this point through an analysis of data on news consumption gathered from a random sample of U.S. adults; their findings are published in the latest issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal for AEJMC. (See the related news release, overall highlights, and the full-text PDF). Chyi and Yang summarize their key findings as follows:

This analysis, based on data collected by the Pew Research Center in 2004, identified a negative relationship between income and online news consumption: When income increases, online news use decreases; when income decreases, online news use increases, other things (demographics, news interest, and/or other news media use) being equal — suggesting that online news is an inferior good among users. In contrast, the print newspaper is a normal good.

Such findings, at first glance, may surprise media scholars as well as online news professionals. After all, in communication research, no news products have been labeled as inferior goods before. In addition, major U.S. media companies have invested heavily in their online ventures, offering an array of interactive features and multimedia content — most of which are unattainable by print newspapers. It is therefore difficult to understand why online news could be an inferior good. Yet, from an economic perspective, “goods are what are thought of as goods.” Any product’s economic nature is determined by consumer perception and response. Based on this particular data set, which consists of survey responses collected from a national sample of online news users by a major polling institution in 2004, online news is an inferior good among users.

Clearly, the use of 2004 data is a limiting factor here (although the authors explain why more recent Pew surveys couldn’t be used for this kind of question). Yet, if we accept these findings, we’re left to unravel two mysteries: Why is online news perceived as an inferior good in the first place? And what should that mean for the future of web journalism?

On the first question, there are at least several possibilities, as Chyi suggests. Maybe the computer screen just isn’t an enjoyable reading device. (And how might that compare with smartphones and e-readers?) Or maybe online newspapers still have content/design problems — think of all the ads for teeth whitening and tummy tightening, not to mention the general lack of contextual cues afforded by print. Or maybe it’s simply because online news is free — and, as behavioral economics research has indicated, sometimes consumers perceive higher-price products as more enjoyable. In any case, as Chyi puts its: “More research, as opposed to guesswork or wishful thinking, on the perception of news products is essential.”

Then there’s the second question: What does this suggest about the future of online news? Perhaps nothing too dire, as people still do pay for ramen noodles when it suits them — when the price, convenience, or alternatives make ramen noodles the preferred choice. This isn’t to suggest that consumers invariably will pay for online news, but rather that they might if the perception calculation is right.

The key here is to recognize that consumers are rapidly adopting online news not necessarily because they prefer the medium to print, but because online news is “good enough” — cheap, convenient, flexible, and sufficient to satiate our information cravings. (This takes us into territory related to disruptive innovations and fidelity vs. convenience — interesting stuff, but something for a later post.) But the danger is in taking a “platform-neutral” approach if that leads one to assume that content value remains constant between print and online — that, basically, you can charge for content either way. Chyi suggests that is like trying to market ramen noodles as steak: Newspapers do so at their peril.

So, what does all of this say about the Times and its paywall? Perhaps not much because, after all, “the Times is the Times.” Yet, the notion of online news as an inferior good highlights a few salient points for thought: (1) news usage doesn’t always correlate with preference, counterintuitive as that is; (2) publishers hoping to charge for niche content need to understand where their offering fits in the normal-inferior goods relationship, and how that should affect pricing and marketing strategies; and (3) there’s a critical need for R&D to help us grasp why consumers perceive online news as inferior, and how that perception might vary among different demographics of users and/or according to different types of news content.

In the meantime, enjoy your ramen noodles.

[Disclosure: Chyi and I have collaborated on several research projects through her Media Economics Research Group in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas — including a recent peer-reviewed article on newspapers’ effectiveness in penetrating the local online market (PDF). Also, she’s currently a member of my dissertation committee.]

Photo of ramen by Broderick used under a Creative Commons license.

Last year saw no shortage of future-of-journalism conferences. But if 2009 was dominated with talk about business models for news, perhaps 2010 will be the year we hear more about education models for news.

The ongoing discussion of pay models has led us to think more critically about forms of press subsidy — to recognize that all journalism is subsidized to some extent, that each type of subsidy comes with its own kind of strings attached, and that journalists of the future will have to be more proactive in understanding sources of funding or finding ways to innovate their own. All of that talk is healthy for journalism.

Likewise, a wider debate about journalism education might lead us to ask some soul-searching questions, beginning with the existential one: What is journalism school for, anyway? If j-schools historically looked to the industry for leadership and jobs for their graduates, how should they orient themselves now? What happens when much of our journalism education has been built up around the “newsroom paradigm” of training 20-somethings to operate in a traditional organizational setting — at a time when media work (of all kinds, not just journalism) is increasingly individualized, temporary, and precarious? Even more, at a time when the future of higher education itself is in major flux, what becomes of journalism education’s place in the university and society at large?

These questions have been on my mind lately since I was invited to join the Lab as a contributor covering the evolution of the j-school. I won’t profess any more expertise than my own experience in j-schools (as an undergrad, and now as a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas), as well as the perspective I’ve gained recently after touring several major j-schools as a candidate on the academic job market. I had intensive two-day interviews at three schools, all major programs in different parts of the United States, and also engaged in half-hour phone interviews with another four programs, most of them of the Big J-School variety.

In each case, my interviewers posed a question that went like this: “What should we be teaching today?” This wasn’t a loaded question, a guess-what-the-teacher-is-thinking sort of test. They sincerely wanted some fresh ideas, as it was clear that just about every school is grappling with curriculum reform.

So, what do we teach?

After fielding that question at least a dozen times, I finally settled on this talking point: It’s about adaptability. We’re never going to find the silver bullet, so instead let’s teach students to be flexible — to work in unpredictable settings, to generate their own funding as needed, and otherwise learn as they go. We can do that by using a curriculum that is similarly flexible, adaptive to technological and cultural trends in society even while it retains bedrock values of truth-seeking and fairness.

That plan is imperfect, of course, but it’s a start. Looking ahead, I hope to draw on the wisdom of others in blogging about what j-schools large and small are doing for 2010 and the uncertain future beyond. For starters, I’m reaching out to the deans and directors at the 12 schools funded by a multimillion-dollar Carnegie-Knight initiative on journalism education to see how these schools — arguably the biggest players in the field — are responding both to the contractions among legacy media and the opportunities for growth elsewhere.

But, in the meantime, I would also like to hear from all of you, readers of the Lab: What should the 21st century journalism school look like? Would it have a more DIY focus to prep students for freelance careers? Take a more project orientation, as in Jay Rosen’s Studio 20? Focus on teaching the right mix of analog and digital skills, as Ryan Sholin suggests? Or try to become part of the wider academic curriculum — a sort of “journalism school for all” general-education requirement, as Dave Winer recommends?

What are your ideas? Drop them in the comments, or if you think there’s something I should cover in a future post, e-mail me directly at sethclewis@gmail.com.

Photo by Fabrice Florin used under a Creative Commons license.