Journalism accelerator

Imagine a Swiss Army tool that could slice, dice and splice the chaotic environment journalism finds itself. It’s not a Large Hadron Collider, but it is an online framework with promise to accelerate journalistic particles by several orders of magnitude. 

Lisa Skube

This project aims to produce an online gateway, poised to launch over the course of the 2010-2011 year of RJI Fellowship, in partnership with the Patterson Foundation. The project will provide an online composite of the new story taking shape across the digital landscape, reporting on and supporting those creating content on the public’s behalf.  This online gateway offers a digital framework that will learn, teach, help us associate, collaborate, cogitate, converse and bear witness to the collective experiments redefining the institution formerly known as news.

Journalism Literacy
Part of the year’s work will dive deeply into, and categorize, how the new day of digital journalism dawns across our nation’s colleges, higher-ed learning institutions, and where we find recent graduates as practitioners in the field.

Curious how journalism students of today and the institutional wisdom held across journalism learning institutions are divining a new digital “journalism literacy?” Documenting the new landscape of learning, technology integration, semantic implications, collaboration and distribution of content across learning institutions in recent years has gone largely unexamined.  The team on this project aims to change that.

With a couple key assumptions guiding our work

1. That an engaged democracy is sustained through a vibrant, independent and diverse press.
2. That a vibrant press produces information that permits people to act as citizens.

 At the conclusion of this year’s work; we’ll post our findings and share what we’ve learned.

One last sneak peek into the “Journalism Accelerator,” we’ll be slicing, dicing and serving up a collection of significant innovations including the innovators, inventors, and resources that are forming to support emerging news entrepreneurs. There will be plenty of posts offered here along the way so you can join us in this journey, and share in the conversation.