Andrea Hickerson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism at Rochester Institute of Technology. She conducts research on journalism routines and political communication. This is her second grant from Knight Foundation to fund a project related to innovation in journalism education. Above: Andrea Hickerson and Vic Perotti.

At Rochester Institute of Technology, we believe journalism is a collaborative endeavor.

While we agree that our journalism students need competencies in a variety of technical skills, including photography, coding and entrepreneurship, we want to see what happens when student experts in all these fields engage in collaborative digital storytelling.

This spring I am thrilled to work with colleague Vic Perotti, associate professor of business at our Saunders College of Business, to launch a new course, Digital Journalism Incubator. It will bring students from computing, journalism, photojournalism, design and business together to build original digital publications relating to education in our city, Rochester, N.Y.

We selected education as our topic because it perennially interests our community. Our city’s schools are burdened by poverty and segregation, while local suburban schools are some of the top in the state. 

The topic is sufficiently broad so students can focus on a particular audience demographic or niche, if they so desire.  For example, students might create a news site intended for students. Perhaps they will create a site for parents to learn about teaching methods in their district. The possibilities are many, but all have the potential to have a positive impact on a central area of concern in our community.

Students will experiment with the benefits and constraints of using cutting-edge digital technology to tell stories, but they will have the added responsibility of trying to make their news products sustainable and profitable. Ideally, some of our projects will mature into businesses after the course ends.

It’s a tall order, but we believe an educational setting is the perfect place to test what seems impossible.

Here at the Rochester Institute of Technology we believe that journalism instruction should model our value of collaboration through co-taught courses. For example, many students in our program—and many other traditional journalism programs—are encouraged to double major and/or minor in a related field. This leaves the burden on the student to figure out how to integrate these fields. In the Digital Journalism Incubator, students will gain practical, applied experience in blending skills from journalism and beyond. 

Last spring, we piloted the co-teaching model. Jeff Sonstein, associate professor of information sciences and technologies, and I led a class of 28 students that developed three alternative Rochester Institute of Technology sports news websites, each built with different technological constraints. One group relied only on resources available in the cloud, the second used a content management system, and the third hand coded everything. 

We were greatly impressed by how the interdisciplinary teams negotiated the typical work processes and vocabularies of their respective fields.

This spring, and during the academic year 2014-2015, we look forward to adding an entrepreneurship component and focusing on education. We hope that our team approach to journalism can produce impactful stories that reinforce the importance of collaboration in the field and in our community at large.

In that spirit, we hope that you follow along as we pioneer the Digital Journalism Incubator at Rochester Institute of Technology. Check out our blog and follow the hashtag #ritdji to see how we prepare for the class and keep up to date with student projects. We welcome your feedback.