The final panel at the pre-AEJMC conference workshop on the role of journalism schools as news providers looked at innovative initiatives.
Joe Bergantino gave some background to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University. It works as a 24/7 newsroom run by professional journalists with students as researchers and trainees. Students learn by working with at the center.
Looking ahead, the center is working to develop products and revenue streams to replace foundation dollars. One of the ways it brings in revenue is by charging for the content it provides to news outlets.
Bergantino said the center would need to raise $300,000 a year to be sustainable. One of the ideas under consideration is having a separate “research for hire” business.
The main goals of the center are to boost quality of investigative reporting, reach underserved communities through partnership with ethnic media and deliver long-form investigative work online.
Digital experimentation
An intiative still at start-up mode is the Reese Felts Newsroom at UNC-Chapel Hill. Monty Cook said the project has received five-to-seven years funding to explore digital news experimentation and audience research.
The project has an applied side. It will hire a staff of students to work in the newsroom and the curriculum will feed content into the newsroom, together with freelancers and student volunteers.
But also key is to research digital business models and experiment with journalism forms. Cook said it could result in the creation of a platform or software.
The project aims to look beyond digital journalism what it is now and expand it to data visualisation, gaming, geolocation to enable journalists to enhance public understanding. It is due to launch in the autumn.
Going local
Richard Jones of NYU talked about the East Village Project. One of the things the project is doing is reaching out to other parts of the university. For example working with computer science to work on apps to enable contributors to provide real-time content.
Part of the process of integrate the project into an ecosystem, said Jones, was looking at ways of working more closely with the community.
But he added that they were also thinking about new ways to engage with partners, such as local news outlets.
Test kitchen
The University of Colorado, Paul Voakes explained, seeks to apply applied experimental research to community journalism.
Voakes ran through a list of projects at the Digital Media Test Kitchen.
One of the ones he showed was a project called The Resolving Door, where questions are posed and crowdsourced. The next stage is hiring a web designer to turn the experiment into a news product.
Another project is called Slices of Boulder, aimed at better the diverse communites in the city.
Sustaining journalism
Len Witt ended the panel by talking abut the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw. Its approach is to focus on a topic that is under-reported, in this case reporting on juvenile justice in Georgia.
The goal is to post three new pieces of information every day.
Witt doesn’t expect to reach a mass audience, but hopes that enough people will think that juvenile justice is important and will fund the initiative.
Currently, the project costs about $125,000 a year.
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