Across the country, people are taking a fresh look at the role of universities in the journalism landscape and as critical anchor institutions for helping meet community information needs.

A lot of attention has been focused on journalism schools as producers of original reporting and their potential to help fill the gaps in local coverage facing many communities around college campuses. However, just as important is the role of universities in helping build the infrastructure for more sustainable journalism.

Campuses can be:

1) Trainers — Leveraging their resources, skills, knowledge and technology colleges can train current journalists in best practices.

2) Advertisers — Local newsrooms should tap into various budgets across college campuses for sponsorship and ad dollars. (For more on this see my blog post here)

3) Conveners — Campuses have great meeting spaces and technology making them terrific hosts for local events. They can also help draw in experts and scholars on a given issue from around the nation.

4) Practitioners — The teaching hospital model for journalism education involves students directly in covering local communities alone or in partnership with local outlets.

5) Consultants — Universities are full of experts, and not only in subject areas where they have departments, but also in terms of event planners, marketing, technology and more.

6) R&D — Schools can be terrific laboratories for research and development. They can help with mapping and research or create space for cutting edge experiments and technology development.

 

via localnewslab.org

It’s a new day for journalism programs.

What Dodge Foundation is doing in New Jersey, we are doing in our own way at UNM (thanks to funding from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation).

This week we launch “Creative New Mexico” from our innovation/collaboration lab, The New Mexico News Port.