Breakout Sessions

The following are highlights of the breakout sessions that were part of the Journalism in the Service of Democracy Summit.

The News21 Experience
Moderator: Bob Calo, National News Coordinator, News21, and Associate Dean, University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Calo conducted two breakout sessions on News21—a component of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education—by showing a clip from a Simpsons cartoon where a panel of reporters is being introduced by a Dan Rather-type anchor. When the last panelist is identified as a reporter from The Washington post, a kid in the audience jumps up, points at him and laughs, “Ha, ha! Your medium is dying!”

Calo, a veteran news and documentary producer formerly with KQED in San Francisco, ABC News primetime and NBC’s Dateline who joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 2001, said the travails of the traditional media were no big secret. “When something’s in the popular culture, what it means is that everybody knows there is a crisis, even the Simpsons viewers.”

News21 is an experiment that each summer sets up model newsrooms on the Berkeley, University of Southern California, Medill and Columbia campuses and sets ten graduates to work on innovative reporting projects under the supervision of faculty who serve as the editors. Four students from Harvard also are hired for the ten-week project, which in its first summer (2006) broke stories on homeland security that ran in The New York Times, on the Associated press national wire and produced a documentary on the life of young American soldiers posted overseas. That show received a full hour’s airing on CNN’s Anderson Cooper program. The second News21 group examined faith in American life.

	Bob Calo

Calo said the News21 experiment “was a bet that money, a semester of specialized intensive study, a professionally funded ten-week production period, a group of really talented young reporters, and a commitment to innovation and bravado could really get universities in the game of media production.” He recalled that when he first joined the Berkeley faculty in 2001, his first thought was, “Why aren’t we news producers?

Every school gets the odd clip out, but beyond that, how can we be players? How can we get off the sidelines?” The newly graduated fellows were well positioned to look for the audience that “brilliant” journalists such as David Westin and Bill Keller have lost, he said. And the cutting edge News21 incubator also served as a way to “transform the schools and faculties. Trust me, there’s some transformation that has to happen,” he said.

“We want our stuff to be seen and we want to find that audience that has walked away,” said Calo. With a production budget of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, stipends of $7,500 and travel budgets of $2,500 for each student, Calo likened it to trying to pull off a pulitzer prize-caliber series in ten weeks while “working in the teeth of the challenge we were just talking about.”

“You basically take on all the things that are driving all the other news media people crazy,” said Calo. “I couldn’t do this with 40-year-old reporters. I could only do it with people who are really at ease in a digital world.” He said some graduates of the program, with their technological savvy, find themselves being asked to advise network executives and senior editors on how to reach young audiences. “They’re giving away the keys of the kingdom to children,” he quipped.

The News21 veteran said there were some tensions between the sponsors’ desire to see the fellows’ stories “make a big splash” in the major news media and the desire to see the professors and their top students “be really innovative.” The schools leaned heavily in the first direction in 2006 with homeland security projects that broke national news, but did not drive much traffic to the News21 web site. They took the opposite approach in 2007 as students built an interactive News21 Faces of Faith web site (http://newsinitiative.org) packed with content that registered more than 3,600,000 page views in that one year.

Each school took a different angle on these stories so as not to “bump into each other,” Calo explained. In 2006, Columbia’s take was to examine which corporations were profiting from homeland security contracts. Northwestern looked at surveillance and privacy issues, USC examined immigration and border issues, and Berkeley sent fellows with video cameras to U.S. military installations in Muslim countries around the world to chronicle the lives of young soldiers.

Calo said that with the web, “a bottomless pit,” the young journalists had “definitely overdone it at times,” producing as many as 30 articles and 50 web features on their topic. He said future News21 teams need to learn “how to be discriminating and make choices about what’s on a site.” Another problem is that the News21 crews “roll up the tents and turn into pumpkins at the end of August,” just as their stories are still circulating and generating responses, he said. They are looking at how to “expand the length of time we’re in play.”

“One of the things we learned is that if you want to build a web site for people to come to, you’ve got to give them something to do,” said Calo, who pointed out several interactive features on the Faces of Faith web site.

Judy Muller, the former ABC News correspondent who is now an associate professor at USC and who coordinated News21 there for the first two years, said, “It is the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved in as an instructor. I think it’s going to save our profession.” But some faculty “are not quite on board” and feel threatened by the new techniques the News21 journalists are using, she said.

Asked by University of Texas professor and Knight Chair Rosental Alves if the News21 work had been documented in a way that other campuses could learn from, Calo said, “we blogged it” and posted a thousand photos, but there was no systematic research beyond the measurement of web visitors. “Obviously, the media liked what we did,” Calo said. “You tell me when was the last time a news network put an hour of what used to be student work on in prime time?”

University of California at Berkeley professor Lydia Chavez expressed curiosity about what impact News21 was having on the journalism curriculum at other schools.

Abigail Foerstner, a lecturer at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism said, “We have a News21 seminar that precedes the actual newsroom environment of News21. The curriculum of the News21 seminar allows students to build on the expertise of their university and other universities.” Medill’s new class of fellows will be visiting both Berkeley and Harvard this May, she said, “so we are building on the resources of the academic and scholastic community all around us.” Medill is attracting graduate students who are switching careers “because they feel journalism is a field that can make a difference,” she added. “They came into these seminars with an immense amount of momentum and an immense amount of interest in utilizing the whole university as a forum to help them build these stories over the summer.” As an example, she introduced Medill graduate student Brad Flora, who put together Medill’s extensive web feature on young Christians displaying their tattoos at a music festival (see “Christian Tattoo: The Needle for the Nail” on http://newsinitiative.org).

Toni DeAztlan, a Berkeley alumna, said she traveled the country interviewing people for her News21 story on “God, Sex and Family,” which examined how religious beliefs affect people’s personal life choices, and now finds herself carrying out similar assignments as a producer-editor at NBC News. “It’s something they have never done before,” she said. “They have me going around the country with my camera, reporting, then I come back and edit my footage, which gets broadcast to six million viewers. NBC wants to know how can we expand this? It really is like the future of journalism. It’s been a very cool experience.”

Karla Bruning, a News21 fellow from Columbia who had concentrated on print journalism, said, “Everything I know about multimedia I learned during News21. I produced long- and short-form videos, a Flash web site, and learned how to edit in Avid.” She added, “Most of that I learned from my fellow fellows.” She added, “News21 gave the fellows an assignment and a budget and said, ‘Go to it.’ And we did. That was the really exciting thing about it.”

paulene Bartolone, a Berkeley fellow whose story on polygamy among U.S. Muslims ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “I learned that I really like to be working in big teams and to produce large, multimedia projects.”

Calo closed the second of the two breakout sessions he conducted on News21 by reading a letter from another fellow who said News21 had showed the young journalists “how to make powerful stories” for print, broadcast and the web. “print students shot video, broadcast students made slide shows, everyone blogged and published. They thought about things in new ways,” the fellow wrote. “That’s the easy part. The hard part is how to make it happen. How do we make digital reporting successful? How do we penetrate the communities we cover?”