Stanford's Knight fellows aim to reinvent the news industry
Knight fellows are pursuing ideas that may aid journalists and change the path of journalism – new ways to merge war reporting with social media, for example.
BY ADAM GORLICK
The Knight Fellowships program is one of the best-known havens for journalists. For four decades, it has allowed mid-career reporters, editors and broadcasters to take a step back from the pressures of daily deadlines and spend a year on Stanford's campus studying, interacting with faculty and honing an expertise meant to make them better journalists.
Nothing was expected of the fellows beyond their return to their news organizations with a greater authority and deeper insight of the beats they covered. But newsrooms are shrinking. More readers are accessing information from multiple sources around the clock. And the very role and definition of a journalist is in flux.
As the world of journalism has changed, so have the fellowships.
Beyond giving fellows an opportunity to pursue interests that would enrich their personal and professional development, the program now has the added expectation that they create something that can be used by other working journalists.
"In the past, fellows would come with a study plan designed to turbo-charge their work," said James Bettinger, director of the Knight Fellowships program. "We still want that. But we want to use the fellows to help solve problems. We want their proposals to be of use to other journalists."
Beginning with last year's fellows, the program has sought a broader and deeper pool of applicants. No longer open exclusively to traditional newspeople, the program accepts consultants, new media innovators and more technologically savvy journalists.
The result is a slew of projects that embrace the program's new focus on journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. The 2010 fellows created tools intended to help other reporters.
Paul Radu, a reporter with the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism, created the Investigative Dashboard, a website where anyone can find resources, share information and learn new investigative skills and strategies. He designed the site to make it easier for reporters to track corporate information across international borders.
Freelance photojournalist Teru Kuwayama spent his year at Stanford creating a new model of reporting on military operations. He designed the One-Eight Project, which will combine original reporting from Afghanistan with aggregated reports from other sources and use Web-based social media to distribute the information.
Other projects focused on creating new journalism models in Africa, helping reporters cover political transitions and connecting U.S.-based media outlets with reporters overseas.
"We've always had international fellows, but we've put a greater emphasis on candidates from countries where there are greater obstacles to the free flow of information," Bettinger said. "And we've made a greater effort to enlist the resources here at Stanford and throughout Silicon Valley. The ideas and technology here can help meet the new challenges of journalism."
Projects under way by this year's crop of 20 fellows include designing new interactive multimedia reading experiences, evaluating new funding models for investigative journalism and developing tools to improve collaboration between visual journalists and editors.
"We want to enable our fellows to invent the future," Bettinger said. "Rather than serve as only a refuge from all the problems with the journalism industry, we want to wrestle with the problems ourselves. We want to see if we can create solutions."
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