NEW YORK (March 22, 2007) - The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism today announced the creation of the Networked Journalism Project to assist the early efforts of professional and amateur journalists to work together. The Project is funded by a $175,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

"The internet's ability to connect people presents many opportunities for journalism," said Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Networked Journalism Project and a faculty member at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. "It is time to examine those opportunities by bringing together journalism's leaders and innovators to share best practices and to encourage innovation. What journalism needs today is a new generation of inventors, starting with our own students."

The Networked Journalism Project brings together leaders and innovators in journalism to gather, study, share, and help create new means for journalism to expand in the networked age. It will focus on networked journalism - collaborative, professional-amateur efforts to extend the reach of reporting into communities. It will also explore, devise, and test new business models for news.

In announcing the Networked Journalism Project, Steven Shepard, dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, said, "We are honored and grateful to have the support of the MacArthur Foundation. As a new and publicly supported journalism school in the headquarters city for media, we have an opportunity to participate in mapping a new future for news while maintaining the cherished values of journalism's past.  The Networked Journalism Project is the first center to open as part of the newly-opened CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which opened its doors to its first class of more than 50 students in September 2006.

The Networked Journalism Project will begin by holding two conferences in 2007, each supported by extensive reporting before the sessions and follow up reporting afterwards. The meetings themselves and the reporting around them will be open to the public via the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism web site at www.journalism.cuny.edu.

The first conference will concentrate on current and future practices of networked journalism that enable professionals and amateurs to collaboratively extend journalism as never possible before. These include new efforts such as NewAssignment.net, the rebuilding of newsrooms at Gannett, the birth of Comment is Free at the Guardian, and the founding of Readers-Edition.de at Berlin's Netzeitung.de. Participants will learn from the successes as well as failures of these projects and then work together to create new projects to use networked journalism. The Networked Journalism Project will then follow these efforts and share the results on the web. 

The second conference will concentrate on new business models for news, gathering not just professional and amateur journalists but also business executives and academics from various fields. The participants will examine the current assumptions underpinning the economics of news, proposing changes that need to be made to ensure the health of reporting in a time of profound and endless change. They will then propose new means of supporting journalism, including networked journalism and also other models, such as publicly supported reporting, distributed hyper local reporting networks, and new forms of advertising support.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, headquartered in Chicago, is a private, independent grantmaking institution dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster lasting improvement in the human condition.  With assets of more than $5.5 billion, the Foundation makes grants and low-interest loans totaling approximately $225 million each year. For more information about the Foundation, visit www.macfound.org.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which is in its second semester, will admit 150 students annually by 2010. The three-semester full-time Master of Arts program is designed to equip students to work in multimedia newsrooms and to report in specialty areas. A key mission is to help diversify and elevate the journalism profession.

The School provides subsidized summer internships and opportunities for student work to be distributed through the NYCity News Service (www.nycitynewsservice.com) and on CUNY TV.  The School's state-of-the-art campus is located in the heart of New York City in the former New York Herald Tribune building, next door to the new headquarters of The New York Times. 

 

Contacts:

For the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and Networked Journalism Project:
Jeff Jarvis
jeff.jarvis@journalism.cuny.edu
Office: 646 758 7827
Voicemail: 646 502 5256