The University of North Carolina’s “Powering a Nation” site won the large group multimedia project Gold Award in the annual College Photographer of the Year Awards for the second consecutive year for its coverage of energy issues in America.

Additional, Syracuse University took the Silver Award in the same category, for its “Apart from War” site, exploring issues facing veterans in a remote part of Washington state. For their project, nine Syracuse fellows, one from Texas and three professors spent several weeks near Republic, Wash., covering their story. Some of their efforts are captures in a set of Flickr photos.

The final round of CPOY judging by the team of evaluators is captured in a podcast available here.

This award acknowledges continuing excellent work by the Carnegie-Knight News 21 fellows, who are top students selected from the top journalism programs in the country. Work from the 2009 projects earned more than 50 awards.

The work from UNC and Syracuse was recently highlighted in photography blogs on the sites of NPR and the Los Angeles Times, with one post focusing on UNC’s “Spilling Over” story, about the impact of the oil spill on a Louisiana community, and one on Syracuse photographer Juliette Lynch’s work for “All that Lingers,” a look at a former soldier who lives quietly in the woods but suffers from PTSD..

UNC’s Luca Semprini, a fellow who handles marketing and social outreach, about the “Powering a Nation” award.

Five years ago, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation issued a challenge to the nation’s top journalism schools: Take the best students. Put them with expert editors and give them time and resources to report in-depth stories that are both multimedia-rich and journalistically excellent.

That’s what we did, with the 11 students featured above, from left: Jennifer Brookland, Columbia; Richie Duchon, Southern California; Ben Giles, Maryland; Charlie Litton, Nebraska; AJ Maclean, Syracuse; Stevie Mathieu, Missouri; Tessa Muggeridge, Arizona State; Ryan Phillips, UC Berkeley; Robin Schwartz, Texas; Aarti Shahani, Harvard; and Ariel Zirulnick, North Carolina.

That challenge culminated in late September 2010 with an unprecedented national reporting project on transportation safety in American that appeared in two of the world’s largest and most recognized media outlets — The Washington Post and msnbc.com.

The package of 23 stories may well be the largest investigative reporting project ever produced by college journalism students from several universities. It analyzes recommendations made by the National Transportation Safety Board over the past 40 years and calculates how many accidents have happened — and how many Americans have died — because agencies, states and industries have resisted safety measures. The safety issues range from reducing ice buildup on the wings of airplanes to cutting down on the dangers posed by fatigued operators.

The students came from 11 universities to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication to report, write and produce their stories over a 10-week summer period. They worked with editors and reporters from the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization as well as top Cronkite faculty, including Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post.

The News21 reporters traveled across the country and to Canada and Mexico, interviewed hundreds of government officials, industry leaders, safety experts and accident victims and analyzed thousands of pages of documents, reports and accident and investigation data from the NTSB and federal regulatory agencies.

Their journalism has impact among readers, agencies and the media. But in the course of doing their work, the Carnegie-Knight fellowship had a huge impact on the students themselves.

Said Mathiue, a master’s candidate at the University of Missouri who hails from Bonney Lake, Wash: “I was most impressed by the amount of resources News21 could provide. The amount of money that backed the program really helped our stories flourish. We were able to travel to places that were critical to our stories and see things first hand, which is something I feel is being done less and less at legacy newspapers. We also had very experienced journalists to help us along the way, including Len Downie, Kristin Gilger and people from the Center for Public Integrity. I definitely grew as a journalist this summer.”

Ryan Philips, a Berkeley native completing his master’s at UCB, said the experience changed him, too, showing the the program’s goals of blending in-depth reporting with live learning works. “I walked into the newsroom every day knowing I was going to have to think really hard. It was like difficult treasure hunt, trying to navigate a maze of documents and numbers enough to make sense of all the information,” Philips explained. “Working in the newsroom with the other students was a huge help – sitting next to Charlie and Tessa, asking if they’d heard of this person, or who would be a good source to answer this question, or just venting about somebody who just won’t call you back. It was definitely stressful, trying to become an expert in a subject I knew next to nothing about in a short amount of time. But the fact that everyone else was in the same boat was helpful; we were all learning together so there were no stupid questions (or at least, not too many of them). The interviews and information I was able to collect on the road – from Flagstaff, Ariz., Las Vegas, Washington and Akron, Ohio – ended up being important for my stories, along with all the data, of course.”

Please take a good look at the journalism presented on the national.news21.com site — it’ll take some time. But the depth of the journalism and the experiences provided to the next generation of journalists deserves your attention. And we welcome your feedback, either at the bottom of each story or by contacting News21.

SEE THE COVERAGE AND PACKAGES ON PARTNERS SITES

SEE COVERAGE OF THE IMPACT OF THE NEWS21 NATIONAL PROJECT

News21 is part of the Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, sponsored by the Carnegie Corp. and the Knight Foundation.

Two Arizona State University fellows and a team from North Carolina’s “Power a Nation” has received more awards for 2009 Carnegie-Knight News21 content in recent contests.

The 2010 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Student Magazine Contest (pdf) honored two ASU students for their work on “Latino America,” tied to the Carnegie-Knight News21 seminar and newsroom experience last year.

In the consumer magazine division, for investigation and analysis articles, with 22 entries, David Kempa won first place for “Crossing Lines,” a look at Mexican villagers looking to bring industry to its town, to avoid having to cross the U.S. border. Kempa, who graduates with a master’s degree from ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism in December, is now a reporter for Thompson-Reuters in New York.

Among seven entries in the specialized business press, Christine Rogel took second place for “Dueling Policies,” which explores the E-Verify program and immigration reform. Rogel, also a December 2009 Cronkite master’s graduate, is a reporter for the Los Cruces Sun, in her native New Mexico.

At North Carolina, the Society of Environmental Journalists bestowed first-place honors in the “Outstanding Student Reporting” category on the four-person team who produced “The Coal Story,” a part of the larger “Powering a Nation” site. The students involved were Carolina fellows Sara Peach, Monica Ulmanu and Chris Carmichael, and visiting University of Missouri fellow Jenn Hueting.

News21 is part of the Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Here is the press release being distributed at the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Denver.

News21, a program of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, is offering a new web-based resource center to help colleges and universities advance the way they teach journalism.

The site offers help for schools interested in starting programs that emphasize in-depth reporting and digital media skills for students. The materials were drawn from five years of experience with News21 programs at 12 of the nation’s top universities.

Students in the programs spent the summer reporting in-depth on topics ranging from immigration and homeless veterans to the dangers of traveling in America. The projects are featured on the News21 website as well as in professional publications around the country.

It was the fifth summer of the program, which gives students a chance to write and report in-depth projects and present them in innovative ways on the Web. Prior to their summer experience, the students attend a seminar to learn about their chosen topics from experts within their universities.

“News21 is essentially an experiment to help journalism programs master in-depth digital story-telling and prepare students for a changing media landscape,” said Kristin Gilger, executive editor of the national program and associate dean at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, where the program is headquartered.

“We’ve learned a lot in five years, and we’re ready to share what we learned with other schools in the hope that they’ll consider starting their own News21-types of programs,” she said.

The website includes advice on how to encourage innovation, course materials from News21 seminars around the country and videos from News21 training sessions in which new media experts share their expertise on topics ranging from social media to investigative reporting.

It also features an interactive “Explore & Compare” page where visitors can see how the same story was presented in multiple ways and comment on which presentation they think is most effective.

News21 National Director Jody Brannon said the materials can be used by journalism programs of any size and “like many things coming out of universities these days, many of the lessons learned can also be of value to the journalism industry or even a content hobbyist.”

News21 is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Participating schools are Arizona State University, the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University, Harvard University, University of Maryland, University of Missouri, University of Nebraska, University of North Carolina, Northwestern University, the University of Southern California, Syracuse University and University of Texas.

Related links:
News21
Learn at News21
Recreate the News21 Experience
Resources for J-Schools
Explore and Compare News Presentations
Best of News21 2009
Carnegie Corporation
Knight Foundation
Cronkite School

The University of North Carolina’s News21 team was the first to release a copy of a May 2 gag order that apparently prohibited British Petroleum workers from speaking with the media — a document that no longer must be signed. Originally BP said it had not enacted any such limitation on workers. The News21 efforts showed otherwise.

UNC posted a blog item on Memorial Day, showing photos of the document workers were asked to sign.

Once the item was posted, UNC’s students then went into marketing mode, sharing their post on social networks and passing it to media outlets. Their efforts then began to have an impact, reflected in a 1,000 percent traffic spike over two days.

On June 3, Jacqueline Leo, editor in chief of The Fiscal Times, referred to UNC’s efforts in a story about BP’s use of Google to manipulate the media. On that same day, the Washington Post’s Dan Zak chronicled various media attempts to cover the story, mentioning the UNC Powering a Nation project for releasing images of the document workers were expected to sign, saying they would not speak with the media.

By publishing the images then sharing the news on Twitter and Facebook, UNC’s post began to gain traction among followers of the spill. Many voiced outage in their sharing of the story and in re-tweets.

In Louisiana covering the story for their Powering a Nation project, the students acquired the document through sources who were frustrated by a threat to their jobs but insistent on their right to free speech.

News21 is part of the Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.