More news from the crisis in journalism.
Stanford University is re-deploying its famous mid-career Knight journalism fellowships to drive a shift towards innovation and entrepreneurship.
The Fellowship website states:
“The program is transforming itself in order to serve the needs of journalism and journalists as much in the years ahead as it has in the past. The dizzying landscape of layoffs and consolidation, Internet media sites, citizen journalism and bloggers make journalism a chaotic and exciting proposition today. We are making bold changes to meet these new realities.”
The Stanford fellowships have a small but significant place in Australian journalism history. During the late 1980s and early 1990s leading editors at Fairfax, including Michael Smith, Malcolm Schmidtke (now at the Herald Sun) and Bill Birnbauer (now at Monash University) had periods at Stanford. Some of the world’s best journalists have done likewise.
Jay Rosen, the new media guru from New York University, has posted an interview with Fellowship Director Jim Bettinger, on the reasons for the change. Partly, according to Rosen, it is the uncomfortable fact that applications are dropping because US journalists are too scared to take a sabbatical, in case the jobs aren’t there when they return.
But Bettinger also says its about trying to solve the problems, and seize the opportunities:
“We will be expecting fellows to come with a particular journalism problem, challenge or opportunity that they want to work on during the year, and to have something to show for it, which we will then publish on our website so that others can use it. Our idea is that these results would be replicable, scalable and open-source: It could be putting on a symposium, which we would record and post. Or it could be guidelines to using new digital or other tools for better storytelling in a specific realm, like foreign correspondence. Or maybe the beginnings of a business plan template for independent publishing. We’ll see.”
Bettinger’s blog, which includes a video interview about the changes, is here.
