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Knight Fellowships 2.0 (Beta)

Knight Fellowships 2.0 (Beta)

by Pam Maples
Knight Fellowships Innovation Director

This year was the first of the John S. Knight Fellowships' new focus on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. Nowhere was the change illustrated more clearly than by Knight Fellow Susanne Rust, who led a team to big wins at Stanford University's recent showcase of student software inventions.

Rust partnered with another Knight Fellow, John Duncan, and senior computer science students to develop HearSay, a mobile phone application that integrates social sharing and gaming with news consumption. "Think FourSquare for news," Rust says. (FourSquare is a mobile phone application/game that allows people to meet up and compete for discovery of new places, earning points along the way.)

HearSay is among dozens of projects that the 2010 Knight Fellows produced during their year at Stanford. Over the summer, details of their work will be published on the Knight Fellowships Web site.

Fellows have created iPhone apps, developed new websites, experimented with mobile user-journalist collaboration models and tools and, in some instances, built the foundation for new businesses they are now launching.

In a departure from more than 40 years of the program, where journalists spent a sabbatical year at Stanford to take a break from journalism, Knight Fellowship applicants this year proposed a project to pursue at Stanford that would restore themselves and journalism, too.

With the seismic shifts in journalism in the past few years, the Knight Fellowships felt a responsibility to make a bigger contribution to solving problems in the industry. Fellows would continue to spend an academic year taking advantage of the university's deep intellectual and educational resources and be responsible for setting their own agenda. But different from the past, the program would be open to a wider range of journalists and journalism entrepreneurs who would come with a great idea that would generate benefits beyond themselves.

Even though some of the projects seem like a different species when compared to traditional journalism, the program directors believe they have the potential to generate lively new tools and models – the kind of experiments that will help meet the challenges facing journalism in the 21st century.

Several fellows wound up working on multiple projects. Some ended up discarding their original ideas and doing something entirely different. Rust set aside her original project after quickly discovering from experts in the computer science department that the programming was possible, but realizing she'd need funding. She began exploring other ideas, which led her to the concept for HearSay.

"There's a synergy on campus that makes you start to think not like a journalist," says Rust, a former reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who will be working for the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco after her fellowship. "I'm 38 years old and I've never thought this way. Different, innovative thinking is everywhere in the air here."

She pitched the idea to a computer science class and four students signed on to pursue it as their senior project. Knight Fellow Duncan, a former senior consultant with Garcia Interactive in Florida, who is intensely at work on his own project to create an audio newspaper, collaborated with Rust. HearSay won top prizes from Google, Facebook and Garage Technology Ventures at the Stanford Software Faire.

Not all of the fellows' innovative work relied on technology. International fellows Alfonso Cuellar of Colombia and Lydia Lim of Singapore are returning to their news organizations with training programs they've developed that aim to change deeply ingrained journalistic norms in their countries. And Nadia Trinidad, a television journalist for ABS-CBN Broadcasting Company in the Philippines, is launching an initiative to address widespread journalistic corruption by addressing the underlying issue of extremely poor pay for journalists.

Lim, a senior political correspondent for the Straits Times newspaper, will be leading training and seminars tackling a tradition of journalistic self-censorship in Singapore.

Cuellar, editor-in-chief of Semana weekly newsmagazine, is convinced that decades of strife in Colombia are ending and that journalists need to make the transition from covering crises to "everyday" news. He says being at Stanford helped him test his theory and gain deeper understanding of the issues that face societies in transition.

"I think it would take decades to study all of these issues alone and come to see what I've been able to realize by being at Stanford," Cuellar says. "The thinking on post-conflict societies is always changing and here I could tap into all of these people who have spent decades working on and studying these issues. It was invaluable to shaping my thinking and my project."

Knight Fellowships Director Jim Bettinger says he was struck by the fellows eagerness to try new things. "That's what we picked them for, so it isn't surprising. But it was still very cool to see,'' he says. "And building on that, the willingness of the fellows to collaborate and help each other was very rewarding also. We hoped that is what would happen, but we didn't really know. The nagging fear we had before the year started – that fellows would keep their projects and resources close to the vest – never materialized."

Instead, fellows collaborated freely with each other on their primary projects, as well as on new ideas they often came up with during informal brainstorming sessions.

Deputy Director Dawn Garcia says it's been especially rewarding this year "to witness outstanding journalists seize opportunities to be creative and excited about the future of journalism in an era when we hear so much gloom & doom — and to watch them push the envelope to help journalism."

Fellow Christine Larson, a longtime freelance writer from Sacramento, spent her year focusing on ways to help independent journalists. She is producing the Future of Freelancing Conference, a first of its kind event, at Stanford June 18-19.

The fellows have pushed themselves to experiment and take risks, which runs counter to the perfectionist tendencies common to journalists. They have collaborated extensively with each other. Many of them enlisted Stanford students from other disciplines. Some got ongoing advice from faculty members or found informal partners at Silicon Valley technology companies.

"I came here thinking that to do my project, I needed to become a really top-notch programmer," say fellow Paul Radu, a freelance reporter and projects coordinator for the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism. "But I learned that that is not the case. There are computer science students who are very interested in journalism and in helping journalism and who are much better at this than I could ever become in a short amount of time. So I started to see that the key was to build these collaborations."

Faculty members say the Knight Fellows brought added dimensions to their classes.

"Not many students can enrich a discussion like a Knight fellow who has been a bureau chief in Tehran, or managed the Yahoo! Front-page news feed, or turned around a struggling news room, or unearthed a major Pentagon scandal," said Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior in Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

Dave Baggeroer, a consulting assistant professor at the Hasso Platter Institute of Design in the Engineering Department (known as the d.school), had several Knight Fellows in his courses. He says their journalistic skills of interviewing, reporting and synthesizing disparate information — what the d.school calls "needfinding" skills — were valuable to their class project teams. "One of the core principles of our teaching is being human-centered and gaining empathy for the people you're designing for. As journalists, the Knight Fellows bring an impressive set of 'needfinding' skills to their classes,' he says.

At the same time, Baggeroer says, the fellows struggled to get the hang of the rapid prototyping, testing and refining that is a hallmark of the design-thinking approach at the school.

"The idea that you can prototype anything and especially the idea that you can share a rough and incomplete idea early to make progress faster is a big shift for journalists,'' he says. "They are accustomed to getting the story perfect before sharing more broadly. This is probably one of the biggest hurdles from an instructor's perspective, getting the Knight Fellows to build — sketches, paper prototypes, digital prototypes— to answer questions and make progress towards a subsequent iteration."

But the fellows came to appreciate the "build to think" approach by working with students in product design, mechanical engineering and computer science majors, who are natural builders, Baggeroer says.

Indeed, over the course of the year, many fellows wound up pursuing multiple projects. "That's the result, I think, of lots of great ideas spawning other great ideas and experiments," Garcia says.

Fellow Krissy Clark, for instance, pursued her interest in developing "location aware" reporting with several experiments and projects. She produced a spatial history and audio tour of the 900 block of O'Farrell Street in San Francisco that uses cell phones and text messaging. The tour intersperses stories of a writer who lived on the block in the 1890s with those of young adult members of the neighborhood YMCA. Clark's partner for the project is Mobile Commons, whose CEO she met through work she did at the d.school.

Clark, a contributing producer for American RadioWorks, American Public Media in San Francisco, also did projects with two other fellows, Geoff McGhee, former multimedia editor at Le Monde Interactif in Paris and Justin Arenstein, publisher and CEO, African Eye News Service (AENS) and HomeGrown Magazines in South Africa.

Clark and McGhee teamed up to produce a data visualization project on the history of U.S. newspapers for The Bill Lane Center for the American West. She and Arenstein worked together on the Detroit Mobile Commons, an effort to develop real-time text messaging-based reader outreach and advocacy tools for community journalism.

Recently, Clark was invited to present at Ignite Google I/O in San Francisco, a prestigious developers gathering.

"The collaboration ranged from the daily and immediate to partnerships in projects, some of which may become journalism nonprofits or businesses in the future," Garcia says. "The Fellows and the new focus helped create a vibrant information-sharing culture, with Fellows helping steer contacts and information to each other every day on their email list and in their gatherings and team up to form some pretty exciting ventures."

For instance, Radu and Arenstein have joined to coordinate development of The Investigative Dashboard, http://investigativedashboard.org/ an online site to help investigative reporters around the world collaborate and share data. They bring to the effort their non-profit investigative organizations —the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Forum for African Investigative Reporters.

Bettinger says finding mentors for the fellows was more challenging than expected. "At Stanford and in Silicon Valley, pretty much everybody is already working on interesting and challenging projects of their own, so getting them to commit much time and energy to someone else's project can be difficult," he says. "This wasn't true in all cases, of course; where a Knight Fellow's project dovetailed with research already underway, the results could be striking. One of the challenges for next year is figuring a work-around for this problem."