Temple will be a senior fellow in the program, joining 20 Knight Fellows whose selection was announced earlier this spring.

As a senior fellow, Temple will play several roles that mesh with the Knight Fellowships emphasis on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. He will be a resource for the 2013-14 Knight Fellows, as well as work on special initiatives in concert with the Knight Fellowships directors. He’ll focus on ways to meet the challenges facing newsrooms, with a particular interest in newer platforms, such as mobile.

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with people at the forefront of journalism innovation and to be part of a program that has contributed so much to elevating the quality of journalism around the world,” Temple said.

James Bettinger, director of the Knight Fellowships, said Temple represented a major opportunity for the program. “His unique combination of big-newsroom experience and startup-mentality will be a major resource for the other fellows, and for journalism.”

Under his leadership and vision, the Rocky Mountain News won four Pulitzer Prizes. Until this spring he was managing editor of the Washington Post, and when he left that position, editor Marty Baron noted that Temple had “promoted a spirit of innovation, insisting on both excellence and speed.” In between those positions, he was founding editor at Honolulu Civil Beat, and helped develop it into an important news source.

While Temple was at the Rocky, he launched two online services, in addition to overseeing the paper’s main website: YourHub.com, an early experiment in citizen journalism that was the largest such hyperlocal initiative in the U.S. when it launched in 2005, and RedBlueAmerica.com, a national political/cultural site.

Before becoming an editor, Temple was a reporter at The Albuquerque Tribune and Toronto Star. He served as city editor and managing editor of The Tribune before moving to Denver in 1992. He was the Rocky’s metro editor and managing editor before taking the paper’s top reins in 1998. In 2006, Temple was named vice president/news of Scripps’ newspaper division.

The dozen or so developers aren’t journalists. They are media entrepreneurs at Matter, a startup accelerator funded by the Knight Foundation, KQED and PRX (Public Radio Exchange). It’s mission is to be a place where “the values of public media meet the mindsets of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.”

The teams at Matter were selected for a four-month program that gives them $50,000, training, mentoring and assistance as they develop and test their prototypes. Matter’s operations director is Jigar Mehta, the 2011 Knight Fellow behind the “18 Days in Egypt” crowd-sourced documentary and a former New York Times video journalist.

The event was the second for the newly formed S.F. Bay Area Knight Alumni Meetup, which brings together Knight alumni for mutual support, professional growth and to extend the mission of the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford — to promote innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership in journalism.

Each project team at Matter described what they were working on. Afterward, Knights gravitated to different team members for more personal conversations and brainstorming.

The media innovation teams currently at Matter are:

• ChannelMeter (Eugene Lee, Nimi Wariboko Jr.) is a professional video analytics platform for publishers and brands focused on maximizing and engaging their audiences in online video. 
• Inkfold (Daniel Davis, Garrett Groszko) is a daily news experience app esigned to inspire curiosity and spark conversation. 
• OpenWatch (Rich Jones, David Brodsky, Chris Ballinger) is an investigative network for creating a just society through radical transparency. 
• SpokenLayer (Will Mayo, Kevin Irlen) transforms the best of the web into narrated audio, making written content available anytime, anywhere.
• StationCreator (Jon Labes, Christy Gurga) democratizes television with a platform on which
 anyone can distribute their own 24-hour broadcast station online. 
• Zeega (Jesse Shapins, Kara Oehler, James Burns) allows you to use any media in the cloud to transform the screen into your playground and share your interactive creations with the world.

Jigar’s colleagues at Matter are CEO and partner Corey Ford, who built Runway, an incubator for entrepreneurs at Innovation Endeavors, taught design thinking at the Institute of Design at Stanford University and was a production manager for the PBS/WGBH series Frontline; and Jake Shapiro, founding CEO of PRX, the award-winning public media network, and former associate director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

For more information about the Knight Alumni Meetups, contact Robin Evans at revans1@stanford.edu.

We come to Stanford open and eager to expand the frontiers of journalism. But, almost unconsciously, we are also hoping to become the instruments for that transformation. We come here to gain skills we lack, to broaden our perspectives about the world, to explore and collaborate with each other in ways never imagined in a competitive newsroom. We look at the Silicon Valley start-up culture trying to see what disruptive elements we can take back to our own ecosystem. What I hadn’t realized was how much this process would impact me on a personal level.

Ready for all of work’s challenges

Raised by a “Type A,” workaholic-baby-boomer-immigrant mother in Brazil, I grew up prepared to face all the challenges in the work environment. I had a successful journalism career, having worked as a reporter, editor and editorial manager in respected outlets. I interviewed presidents, covered prison riots, elections, natural disasters, immigration, diplomacy and many other topics as a correspondent in Sao Paulo and Washington D.C. I taught classes at university. I earned a master’s degree. I was a woman and young manager in a male-oriented culture, and I had to be as tough as them to gain respect and my own space.

I also had to stay on the game to inspire younger women. For many years, that was my mission. Or so I thought. At Stanford, where my husband and four-year-old daughter and I settled in for the duration of the fellowship, I began to discover that my passion for journalism had pushed my “domestic diva,” if there was one, deep inside of me. All things related to a prosaic life did not interest me. I was always eager for adventures, to go out in the world and learn new things. This is my core, and it will always be. But as the months passed by, I started to see more of myself. A fig tree showed me.

A kind of work I took for granted

It is in the bucolic garden behind our little house near campus. It made me think of my Spanish grandma Francisca Gonzalez, or “Paca.” To me, Paca represented that “other” type of feminine, more related to daily chores and routines, nurturing and nature. Her backyard was a mystical place for me. It had fruit trees. She canned for the winter. Her love poured especially into the fig jams she prepared at the end of every summer. I remember fondly taking them home and being sure I was tasting a piece of paradise. Her emotional structure was so cohesive and her world so solid, I took it for granted, as if there wasn’t any hard work involved in taking care of the garden, her family, feeding the dog or preparing egg omelets.

Escaping poverty and war in her hometown in Northern Spain, she moved to Uruguay in the 1950s with her husband and two daughters. She never had the opportunity to finish school, something she regretted, so she devoted herself to becoming the perfect housewife. She cooked delicious meals. She designed and made beautiful dresses. She was always there to listen to and give advice. She was the owner of her domestic world, one in which she ruled with majesty. She told us to study and pursue our dreams. She never encouraged us to be the way she was. Cut to 30 years later and I arrive at Stanford for a great fellowship that I gained in part by following my mother’s example of hard work and dedication. I enter this house in Palo Alto and notice the big, beautiful fig tree. My only thought then was, “What a coincidence.”

Connecting to nature and nurture

By the end of August, the tree was full of ripe, delicious figs. I had to do something with them. So I called Paca, who gave me precise instructions. In the middle of meetups, prototyping and brainstormings at Stanford, I learned how to make fig jam. It was delicious. I felt proud of myself in a new, different way. I started to pay attention to my daily routines, trying to connect them more with my family life. I started baking with my daughter Martina more often. I devoted myself to trying new recipes. It was a difficult exercise for me, as I always find I have more “urgent” and “important” things to do out in the world. But as I became conscious of this other world, a world with a slower pace, more connected to nurturing and nature, I realized things can never be as they were before.

During this time, my grandma became very ill. Her health deteriorated quickly. I called every week, and noticed a tiredness in her voice and repetition in her speech. She was not the same. By spring, she was in a terminal stage of cancer. I had to go see her, to pay homage to everything she gave me in this life, because I finally understood how precious her world was to me.

By coincidence, a business meeting came up in Uruguay. I put my working blazer in my suitcase, took a 17-hour flight, met the people I had to meet and spent the rest of the week by grandma’s bed. We laughed, we hugged. I kissed her hand and told her how much I loved her, and how nobody had ever loved me the way she did. By then, the summer in the southern cone of Uruguay had come to an end. I found her last pot of fig jam. I ate it crying. She died three days after I left.

The honor recognizes his work on “In the Shadow of Wounded Knee,” National Geographic magazine’s cover story in August 2012. This multimedia project includes a story, photographs, audio interviews and an interactive storytelling platform that let’s the people who live on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation tell their story in their own words. 

As a photojournalist who had been working on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for nearly a decade, Huey was frustrated at his inability to capture the complexity of the Oglala Lakota story, and the effects of more than a century of relocations, broken government promises and heartache. An envelope full of letters from high school students at the Red Cloud Indian School after they had seen a photo story of his on Pine Ridge in 2009 prompted Huey to begin exploring a different side of the Reservation and different ways for its story to be told.

Pine Ridge is 16 miles from Wounded Knee Creek, where in 1890 some 150 Indians were massacred in the last of the American Indian Wars. The Oglala Lakota are one of seven tribes that make up the Great Sioux Nation. The majority of the Oglala live in Pine Ridge, the eighth-largest Native American reservation in the United States.

“This group of U.S. Knight Fellows is easily the most diversified ever, with fellows coming from daily newspapers, online publications, tech companies and even an academic institution,” said Knight Fellowships Director James Bettinger. “This wide range of backgrounds and specialties reflects the variety and depth of expertise and commitment that journalism needs right now.”

They will join eight international fellows who were announced earlier this month. The Knight Fellowships champions innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership in journalism by helping the fellows pursue their ideas to improve the quality of news and information reaching the public. Fellows also participate fully in the intellectual life of the university, through academic classes, lectures and symposiums, and individual research.

The 2013-14 fellows will explore proposals that touch on many aspects of journalism: improving accuracy in reporting on Islam, raising the profile of indigenous perspectives on the news, engaging citizens in local food coverage, helping the public better understand data visualization and getting news quickly to communities hit by disaster. They also will be developing tools to help journalists create high-quality animated editorial cartoons, blog live on mobile platforms, gain relevant coding and data skills, and better connect with millennials and the changing U.S. demographic.

The U.S. Knight Fellows are:

Umbreen Bhatti, co-founder, islawmix, Oakland, California.
Innovation proposal: A model for drawing on legal academic expertise to produce informed, relevant reporting.

Keli Dailey, staff writer, U-T San Diego, San Diego, California.
Innovation proposal: A platform to amplify the food beat using user-generated content.

Gus D’Angelo, game animator, TinyCo, San Francisco.
Innovation proposal: An open-source toolkit for producing and distributing interactive editorial cartoons for smartphones and tablets.

Tran Ha, editor, RedEye/MetroMix, Chicago Tribune Media Group, Chicago.
Innovation proposal: A digital pilot and toolkit to connect news organizations and millennials, the next generation of media consumers.

Andrew Losowsky, senior books editor, Huffington Post, New York.
Innovation proposal: A platform to create pop-up, need-based publications in crisis situations.

Shazna Nessa, former deputy managing editor, editorial products and innovations, Associated Press, New York.
Innovation proposal: Tools to help the public understand data visualizations and heighten visual literacy in news and media outlets.

Eric Ortiz, senior editor, new media, New England Sports Network, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Innovation proposal: A free, live-blog platform optimized for smartphones and tablets.

Martin Quiroga, systems architect, Jana Inc., San Francisco.
Innovation proposal: A content-ranking platform that delivers highly relevant, personalized news content based on an algorithmic notion of authority.

Cindy Royal, associate professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.
Innovation proposal: An open-source, online training platform for teaching coding and data skills to journalists.

Alexa Schirtzinger, editor, Santa Fe Reporter, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Innovation proposal: To use the innovative strengths and contemporary challenges of the modern alternative weekly newspaper as a platform for exploring new revenue models in local journalism.

Camille Seaman, photographer, Emeryville, California.
Innovation proposal: A website that applies indigenous perspectives and wisdom to current environmental stories and issues.

Danyel Smith, author and journalist, Brooklyn, New York.
Innovation proposal: A teaching platform that provides tools for journalists as they serve America’s new “normal” demographic.

The program received 100 applications for U.S. fellowships in the class of 2013-14. This will mark the 48th year that Stanford has offered journalism fellowships. Financial support for the U.S. fellows comes primarily from an endowment provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The U.S. fellows were chosen by the Knight Fellowships Program Committee: James Bettinger, director, Knight Fellowships; Eavan Boland, Stanford professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program; Theodore Glasser, Stanford professor of communication; Sarah Stein Greenberg, managing director, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford; George Haj, senior editor, local news, the Houston Chronicle; Bruno Lopez, digital advisor to the news division, Univision Interactive Media; Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford and research fellow, Hoover Institution; Marcia Parker, West Coast editorial director of Patch.com; and Raul Ramirez, executive director, news and public affairs, KQED.

Stanford instructor Dan Klein, who teaches acting and improvisation — and how to give great talks — recently asked the 2013 Knight Fellows what things got in the way of them enjoying a talk. Their list included a speaker who: 

• Recites or reads his talk
• Doesn’t make eye contact, makes eye contact with just one person, or tries to make eye contact with too many people
• Speaks in a monotone, speaks with no pauses, or speaks too fast or too slow
• Presents content that doesn’t match audience needs
• Doesn’t have a point 
• Delivers the talk without any physical gestures at all

Meeting audience needs

Klein said the simple solution for anyone planning to give a talk is to prepare, with three essential elements in mind: content, delivery and psychological state. Being successful is more than just being heard. It’s moving people to action, he said.

So one of the first things you want to do to prepare your talk is think about what outcome you want. Do you want your audience to donate time or money, modify their behavior or think differently about something? The next step is pinning that outcome to the needs of your audience. Why should they do what you are advocating? What will they get out of it? Will it help them do their jobs better, for example?

This is also where the psychological component comes in. What emotions might your audience have toward the subject? What do you want them to feel? Fear? Hope? It’s best to start out with a positive, but blending in a little fear doesn’t hurt, Klein said, such as: “‘if you don’t stop eating cheeseburgers for every meal, you’re increasing your risk of a heart attack.’” Once you answer these questions, you can start structuring your talk with a beginning, an overview, a middle and an end.

A winning structure 

Pay special attention to the beginning and ending, Klein said. “If you don’t get their attention in the beginning, they may not follow you to the end.” Statistically speaking, the best measure of success is what they remember at the end. “The ending is at least half the game.”

The Start: This is your chance to grab audience attention and ramp them up to hear more. You can start with something surprising, a great joke, or a story. But the best is something that shows them how your topic relates to them and why they should care. “It’s got to be about the audience,” said Klein. Speakers sometimes address an audience as “we” in order to relate, but even more pointed, he said, is to address them as “You.”

The Overview: Let them know what the main point of your talk is, and what you hope to accomplish — that is, what you hope to motivate them to do.

The Middle: Identify three key things you want them to know and provide statistics, anecdotes or other information to back each of them up.

The End: Restate your main point and the three key things you want them to remember. At this point you could open your talk up to a question and answer session. But don’t let your talk end with the last question. You never know when it could be a mood killer. You want them to go out the door feeling upbeat and inspired. So, give them some:

Dessert: Bring it back to whatever you started with, whether an anecdote or story or statistics. Leave some interesting element to share after the end.  As Klein said: ”The key to the end is that you can have the summary, and the Q&A, but don’t end there. Dessert is the very last thing, and it reinforces the main point.”

The NABJ Board of Directors selected Johnson, an associate professor of practice in mulitmedia journalism at Boston University, to be recognized along with other top honorees this summer at NABJ’s 38th Annual Convention and Career Fair in Orlando, FL, the largest gathering of minority journalists in the world.

Student newsroom mentor

“Michelle is an exceptional journalist, a gifted teacher, a natural mentor, and an innovative thinker. All of which make her a valued resource for students and faculty alike,” said NABJ President Gregory Lee, Jr. “We are proud to honor her for her work in the classroom and for her continued work with NABJ Student Projects.”

“I appreciate being recognized for doing work that means so much to me. I’d like to thank NABJ, my home organization, for your support over the years, and in particular my colleagues and the students who rock the student newsroom every year,” Johnson said. “I’m so proud and honored to be a part of such a great team.”

Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She began her professional journalism career as a copy editor with The Evening Press (Binghamton, NY). After that stint, she joined The Boston Globe starting as a copy editor on the night desk, then moved up to layout, assistant political editor to senior assistant night editor and then to copy desk supervisor.

While in this position she was one of 12 journalists chosen for the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 1993. This opportunity opened the door to her fascination with personal computers and marrying it with reporting.

Fellowship jumpstarts new job

Upon returning to the Globe as assistant business editor, Johnson jumped at the opportunity to be on the team to launch boston.com, an award-winning regional website.

Johnson has a legacy of being an effective team member and team leader. During her professional growth, Johnson reached back into the classroom to “teach” as a NABJ Student Project mentor.

“NABJ has been a touchstone for me since I began my first newspaper job about a million years ago. NABJ was there for me as I transitioned from print to digital to freelancer to educator. In fact, I credit my work on the Student Projects with leading me toward a career as a journalism professor,” Johnson said.

And her higher education career remains on the track of embracing technology and online dissemination.

Giving back – on campus

Along with her NABJ Student Project dedication, she took on the role of technology manager at the School of Communication at Emerson College, serving as an adjunct professor at Boston University, and guest faculty at Maynard Institute Multimedia Editing Program.

After three years as journalist-in-residence at Emerson, Boston University brought Johnson—and her multimedia and print experience—back to its campus, not as an adjunct, but as an associate professor.

“Because I didn’t get to where I am alone, I strive to honor my mentors by giving back by helping to prepare the next generation of journalists of color to excel and innovate,” Johnson said. “But truthfully, it’s also a lot of fun! It’s tough to get too jaded working around enthusiastic, energetic young people every day.”

Johnson’s commitment extends to journalism organizations such as NABJ, including as past editor of the NABJ Journal; member of Boston Association of Black Journalists; founding national board member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and co-founder of its New England chapter; and a member of the Online News Association.

Reprinted from the NABJ, the largest organization for journalists of color in the nation. It provides career development as well as educational and other support to its members worldwide. For information about NABJ’s 2013 convention, July 31–Aug. 4 at the 
Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Kissimmee, Fla., please visit here.

Securing enough money to grow a business is one of the first goals of every entrepreneur, and perhaps the most difficult. Thousands of small companies vie to attract the attention of venture capital firms, but only a fraction of them make it to the next level. In the case of media companies, the bar is even higher.

John Glynn, founder and managing director of Glynn Capital management, sat recently with us to talk about the industry, the qualities every entrepreneur should have and why journalistic enterprises are a hard sell in Silicon Valley.

Potential for scale

Venture capital firms are funds that invest in small companies that have the potential to scale and become businesses with $50 or $100 million in annual revenue “and that number is going up, not down,” noted Glynn. Besides money, the funds provide support and expertise to the entrepreneurs in exchange for equity, shepherding the business to a public stock offering or a sale to a competitor.

Glynn, who through his fund has invested in companies like Electronic Arts, Intel, Peet’s Coffee and Tea, and Sun Microsystems, characterized venture capital as a “pattern recognition business” where opportunities and risks go hand in hand: “You have an intuitive feel when you see something that is good, that could work, then you do due diligence on the people, on the financial aspect and the market itself,” said Glynn.

Venture capital firms were instrumental in the growth of companies like Google, Twitter and Intel, but they haven’t been involved with media businesses. For Glynn, that has to do with the fact that most media companies started as family businesses, with personal fortunes funding their growth.

The venture capital industry doesn’t have the collective experience and knowledge to feel comfortable investing in the media business. “You invest where you can bring knowledge to the table,” he added.

Glynn, an experienced investor who also teaches several courses on entrepreneurship at Stanford, also acknowledged the technology and healthcare bias at the core of venture capital. “[The industry] feels there is more intellectual property and more inherent profitability in a successful tech company,” he said.

The DNA of entrepreneurship

Stories of successful entrepreneurs are well documented in the media, but the reality is that most businesses fail. Glynn believes that in many cases the problem is the entrepreneur. “Very few people, men or women are cut out to be entrepreneurs. It is a tough road,” said Glynn. “It takes an unusual person with the perseverance, patience, risk-taking ability and constitution to undergo the stresses and challenges that he or she will encounter.”

For those interested in following that path, Glynn offered some advice: do a thorough self-assessment, analyzing your strengths and weaknesses. If you still want to be an entrepreneur after that, “you have to find a market opportunity, not just a good idea that maybe has a global component to it. And you have to figure out how to launch a business, product or service that can gain some kind of competitive advantage that allows you to grow in a reasonable fashion for a period of time.”

Glynn also emphasized the importance of surrounding yourself with a team that shares your vision. When the fund considers an investment, one of the first things they look at is the composition of the management team: “We ask ourselves: ‘Can these people build a culture that can attract and retain people? Is there a value proposition and a need in the marketplace for what they want to do? Is it the kind of place where you would feel comfortable working?’”

Hit and Miss

Venture capital is a risky business, Glynn said. In average, only one or two investments out of 10 pay off; the rest of the money is lost. However, the investments that succeed more than compensate the losses.

The industry in general is highly susceptible to fads and bubbles that can wipe out a firm when they burst. As a survivor of the dot-com crash in late 2000, Glynn reflected on the mistakes that caused the fall: “Frankly, we confused luck and brilliance. We thought we were smart because we invested in those companies, but the truth was that we were lucky that we hit an upswing in the public market that made even our losers successful.”

The media also has a part on the creation of bubbles, he said, because it is easier to sell a positive story than a negative one. “Sometimes you tell people what they want to hear, not what they should.”

The only difference Glynn sees in the Silicon Valley and venture capital business of today is more people hoping to cash in. “We have a lot of seed stage companies being funded that a year or two later can’t attract a significant amount of capital on a round of financing. There are a lot of businesses being funded, but only a small percentage of them have a chance of making it. I can’t tell you why, but the success rate in the entrepreneurial world has never being high. It’s just we have more people today trying to launch a business than we had 20 years ago.”

They will be researching a range of ideas to improve journalism, from bringing news to Pakistan’s tribal areas and fostering innovation in China and East Africa to training female reporters in Afghanistan and strengthening press freedoms in Myanmar.

The Knight Fellowships program fosters journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. Each year, we give 20 outstanding individuals from around the world the resources to pursue and test their ideas for improving the quality of news and information reaching the public. Twelve U.S. fellows will be announced in late April.

The international fellows selected were among 216 applicants for the international fellowships. Knight Fellowships Director James Bettinger and Managing Director Dawn Garcia made the final selections with assistance from the International Center for Journalists. Financial support for international fellows comes from sources that include the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Journalism Fund, the Enlight Foundation and Yahoo! Inc.

The 2013-14 International John S. Knight Fellows are:

Tayyeb Afridi, radio development manager, Internews, Peshawar, Pakistan (Yahoo! International Fellow). 
Innovation proposal: A radio news agency rooted in mobile technology to provide news to Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Aela Callan, freelance news correspondent, Yangon, Myanmar.
Innovation proposal: Developing an online platform for local and international media in Burma to strengthen press freedom.

Ana Maria Carrano, editorial projects chief, Cadena Capriles, Venezuela.
Innovation proposal: A audio-based collaborative website for Latin American topics.

Amie Ferris-Rotman, senior correspondent, Thomson Reuters, Kabul, Afghanistan (Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Fellow).
Innovation proposal: A sustainable platform of training, global networking and mentoring opportunities for female Afghan reporters.

Kennedy Jawoko, freelance journalist/adjunct lecturer, Toronto, Canada.
Innovation proposal: A portal that facilitates connections and helps incubate ideas among East African journalists.

Martin Kotynek, investigative editor, Die Zeit, Berlin, Germany.
Innovation proposal: Find new tools to make fact checking more open, collaborative, and credible.

Carlos Martinez de la Serna, health & data journalism/media consultant, CartoDB/Second Read, Madrid, Spain. 
Innovation proposal: A platform to bring disruptive civic media tools and practices to Spanish-language health journalists.

Qian Kejin, editor/writer, Yangcheng Evening News, Guangzhou, China. 
Innovation proposal: An online forum for journalists and academia to share ideas for improving journalism.

The value of a place like Stanford isn’t just the caliber of teachers, the intensity of the research, or the whip-smart intelligence of the students, just about all of whom are brighter than me. It’s not even about the fact that so many talented and ambitious — and let’s admit it, privileged — people are thrown together in a single spot, slammed up against the pressure of time, though that’s certainly part of it.

In the first week of my third and final quarter here, I began to see just exactly what it is that Stanford offers that other schools, including the state schools from which I earned my bachelor’s and law degrees, can’t.

Tackling big problems

Let me explain by talking about two courses I am taking this quarter. Both courses have brought together graduate or professional students from a wide range of disciplines — physicists with poets, law-students with MBAs, and economists with computer scientists.

Both courses tackle very large problems. One is about financial engineering and the role complicated financial products, like derivatives and credit swaps, played in the 2008 financial crisis. The other is about the way foreign investors’ surging interest in the enormous mineral wealth in war-ravaged and impoverished Sierra Leone has so far failed to enrich anyone but middlemen and, sometimes, the investors.

These are both very complex topics, as you would expect at the graduate level of an elite university. They are both taught by deeply experienced teachers who can bridge the worlds between academic research and on-the-ground impact. They also both rely on a tremendous amount of interaction between the students and practitioners who deal with the problems daily.

In the Wall Street class, we’re taught by Tanya Beder, chairman of SBCC Group and a Wall Street luminary, and we will be hearing from top government and private-sector officials throughout the 10-week term. The deputy chief of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve will be in, as will the primary author of the Dodd-Frank legislation — along with a host of others.

On-the-ground learning

The Sierra Leone class is taught jointly by renown political scientist Jeremy Weinstein (a former member of the National Security team for President Obama) and Jenny Stefanotti, a fellow at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. It’s only bringing one major expert over to talk to us. But eight members of the class, including me, were invited on a nine-day, fact-finding trip that took us to meet a host of top government officials in the West African nation’s capital. From there, we headed deep into the nation’s interior to meet the miners, farmers and landowners that are so deeply affected by the exploitation of the diamonds, gold and other underground wealth.

We saw need so raw that is hard to put into words. Babies with bellies distended from hunger and disease. A village where cholera had claimed 15 victims just three months before. Chiefs on the take and some fighting, fruitlessly, for the interests of their people. Investors with big dreams, and often big promises — most of which went unpaid.

In meetings with the top government officials throughout the capital and in a half dozen villages deep into the malaria-plagued interior, we came away with a visceral sense of how human beings are being impacted by the problems we’ve been asked to study.

I think a lot of very good universities would take us this far, though many would lack the resources to bring students into such close encounters with the people making policy or living with its results.

Framing around real solutions

What I think makes Stanford special, however, is its commitment to frame these courses as project-based efforts to find real solutions.

We’re not going to undo the financial mess from 2008 in our class in the law school. But the expectation is that the project teams will come up with not just a description of what went wrong, but also a recipe for what how to change things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

And then — the crucial step — the students are expected to pitch their ideas to government, investors and others willing to bet on change. What could happen next are policy changes, or maybe a company or technology changing the way Wall Street works. The examples of these kinds of real-world impacts are all over the campus.

In the end, it’s that confidence that is the real difference-maker at Stanford.

In the Sierra Leone course, we’re working with Simeon Koroma, a lawyer who founded a civil society organization in Sierra Leone that has trained scores of paralegals in some 19 villages — places where no lawyers come and few citizens had anything like access to justice. Now their disputes are mediated, their grievances heard and negotiations with mining and agricultural companies can be observed by skilled advisors.

He is looking at ways to take these efforts to a large scale and attack head-on the injustices that have attached themselves to the exploitation of the wealth beneath the surface, deep in the interior of the country. In the coming weeks, 16 of us will be working with Simeon to develop potential tools he and his allies can use to improve the lives of villagers. Along the way, it’s a way to test whether early enthusiasm for human-centered design can find wide-scale utility in the social sciences. It’s an experiment that other scholars and civil society groups will be watching closely as we progress.

Knowledge and action

I don’t whether our rebooting government class will actually make things better in the villages, but as I think of the faces of the poor but smiling children I met there, I feel very good about the fact we are going to try, and that the university has expended enormous resources to make sure we have every opportunity to succeed, if success if possible.

So now that the end of this year at Stanford is near at hand, I can answer the question of what does an elite university do that other, more ordinary places don’t: It demonstrates to its students, and its faculty, that understanding the world deeply enough can lead to actually changing it. By rejecting the old city vs. tower divide, the gap between doing and thinking, Stanford is a place that shrinks the distance between the real world and the academy. It insists that knowledge and action are linked, best understood as two sides of the coin we call wisdom.

I hope that’s a lesson I take with me back into the world of journalism when I leave here.