Wednesday, May 30, 2007

About that trip to Miami...

One of the reasons my blogs have occasionally ceased for weeks at a time is because I've been working on a grant proposal for a project since last Fall for The Chronicle, my old student newspaper at Duke University. Though we'd found out the Knight Foundation had selected our proposal several weeks ago, we weren't really allowed to talk about it until they announced the winners last week at an Interactive Media conference in Miami. The Miami Herald did a story about it here.

The project will attempt to design a "newsroom of the future" for The Chronicle through a web site that invites anyone who is interested to collaborate in the process. In addition, as we gather research and make decisions, we'll post everything on the site so that it can a resource for all campus media as they begin to grapple with how to overhaul their own newsrooms.

There's a temporary version of the site that I built here: www.NextNewsroom.com . But let me assure you, we're working with some folks to develop the real site now that we have a bit of money...So please, don't mock mine...

So how did I get into this mess? Well, let me tell you...

Last fall, I took the kids down to Chapel Hill to visit Jen's parents. Over the weekend, I stopped at a Chronicle alumni event where a Duke administrator was giving a presentation on a proposal to build a third campus at Duke. The new campus included plans to create a student media center that would bring The Chronicle, the student TV station, and radio station, under one roof. The Chronicle was nervous because it has a great location on the main campus and was worried that the administration was trying to force it out.

My reaction was quite different. I thought this was an incredible opportunity for the paper: Someone is offering to build a new building from scratch. How many other campus papers would kill for that chance? But more importantly, given all the radical changes going on in the news business, this seemed like an amazing opportunity to create an ambitious plan for the center. At lunch that day, I argued to the Chronicle folks that they should embrace this moment as a fantastic opportunity for the paper.

When I returned to Cambridge, Jen mentioned something about a new Knight Foundation Challenge Grant. She was taking a class with John Carroll, the former LA Times editor, and he had told his students about it. I suggested to The Chronicle that they ought to apply for some planning money. And of course that evolved into me writing the grant application, with substantial assistance from another Chronicle alum, Kath Sullivan. Lo and behold, the Knight Foundation picked us, though we were one of the smaller grants. We get $40,000 for the project. Some guy at the MIT Media Lab is getting $5 million. So, there you go...

But, back to the project. I hope to use this project to reconsider just about every aspect of what The Chronicle does. What should its role be on campus? What should be the relationship to other campus media? How can it prepare journalists for the radical changes that are occurring in the industry? What should it be doing with new media? Should the paper play a role in developing citizen media throughout the campus? Or helping all students develop media literacy as they become producers and not just consumers?

We're not necessarily pushing an answer or an outcome. Rather, we hope to create a process to study these questions that will lead to an ambitious proposal. Among the things I'll be doing over the next year is visiting various newsrooms that have attempted some type of convergence, interviewing lots of experts, and managing what I hope will be a substantial number of alumni volunteers. At the site, we're planning to try using a f interactive features that are in the works, such as a wiki to let folks actually help us write the proposal, a forum for discussion and commentary, and a few other things.

Among the more daunting aspects is that the Knight Foundation attached one condition to our grant: We have to build a version of the proposed newsroom in Second Life, the virtual community. I have no experience with this sort of thing, but I guess I'll have to get some quickly.

Beside the site, we will be holding a conference on the "Newsroom of the Future" next spring at Duke. And next May, we have to deliver an actual proposal to Duke...

Oh, and I'll be doing all this outside my regular full-time job at the Mercury News, where I report for duty on June 9.

So, there it is. I'm probably completely insane. But on the other hand, I'm incredibly excited. The trip to Miami last week was unbelievably thrilling. We met the other grantees for the first time, and they are an incredible group. Oddly enough, I'm the only grantee of the 30 or so who works full-time at a daily newspaper. People were incredibly excited about the Next Newsroom project and kept stopping me, asking for details, and how they could get involved. The folks I've contacted at Duke are also incredibly enthusiastic about the possibilities...

Perhaps the best part of last week, was the support and encouragement among the various grantees. It's a been a grim few years in the world of journalism, especially at the Merc with multiple rounds of buyouts and layoffs and our paper being sold -- twice! -- last year. It was nice to be surrounded by folks last week
who were so optimistic about the future for a change...Whether that outlook is warranted, I guess, we'll have to see...