The nationally acclaimed Carnegie-Knight News21 program, created by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is an intensive experience in which students work with top professionals to blend serious, in-depth reporting with innovative digital storytelling to create powerful national investigative news packages. The program started in the 2005-2006 academic year with five schools – the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Harvard University, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California. Three years later, seven other schools joined News21 – Arizona State University, University of Maryland, University of Missouri, University of Nebraska, University of North Carolina, University of Texas and Syracuse University. It has been headquartered at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2008.
News21 enters its seventh year in the 2011-2012 academic year and, under a new configuration and new grants from Knight and Carnegie, will be open to all journalism schools. The new News21 will be modeled after the highly successful multi-university national investigative projects at Cronkite during the summers of 2010 and 2011. In 2010, students from 11 universities came to Phoenix to report, write and produce a 23-story package on transportation safety in America. The project, “Breakdown: Traveling Dangerously in America,” was published by MSNBC.com, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News and the Center for Public Integrity. The Washington Post led off the series with a Sunday page 1 story, and MSNBC.com featured stories for a full week at the top of its home page. The project drew more than 5.2 million page views in its first 18 days – the largest distribution of university-produced journalism in history. This year, the national News21 fellows produced a food safety investigation.
Over the past two years, News21 fellows have produced products on transportation safety and food safety. The fellows work closely with top professionals, including Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post and newly hired News21 Executive Editor William K. Marimow, a Pulitzer-winning journalist who has been a top editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, National Public Radio and The Baltimore Sun.
The Spring Semester
The Summer News21 Newsroom
The fellows will work out of a Cronkite School digital newsroom for 10 weeks in the summer, from late May to early August. Fellows will receive a stipend of $7,500 for their work and up to $2,500 in travel expenses. Fellows will work under a team of journalism leaders that include:
Interested schools should contact News21 for more details (see contact information below). All program costs will be paid for except fellows’ salary and travel stipends. The latter costs will be covered by the participating school. Participating schools will be required to:
The Cronkite School will notify schools of approval of their fellows by Nov. 30. ASU will be responsible for delivering:
Housing will not be provided, but past fellows have stayed in university housing located directly across the street from the Cronkite building in downtown Phoenix.
The benefits of News21 to the fellows are proven: They receive an unparalleled experience working one-on-one with some of the best journalism minds in the country on in-depth and digitally innovative projects and receive unprecedented national distribution and recognition of their work. Past News21 fellows have an employment placement record – both qualitatively and quantitatively – that is far superior to both the national averages and the placements of peers within their institutions.
The benefit to participating schools is equally striking. The News21 program, with its focus on depth and innovation, experiential learning and important national projects, has permeated throughout the 12 original News21 schools. Those deans and directors report a dramatic transformation of their curricula in recent years, due in large part to the lessons learned in News21. We invite the deans, directors and faculty members of all participating News21 programs to join us in the spring or in the newsroom over the summer.
Interested schools should contact Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan at christopher.callahan@asu.edu or 602.496.5012. A letter of commitment from the program dean or director is due by Nov. 1. Final News21 approval of nominated candidates will be by Nov. 30.
The nation's leading journalism schools come together in this unique program to experiment with new forms of in-depth and investigative reporting.
Fellows travel the country to report on critical issues facing our changing nation and then find innovative ways to tell those stories.