Today Knight Foundation and Carnegie Corporation are announcing new support for News21 and the Carnegie Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism Education that will take the project from a successful experiment to a field-wide initiative which any journalism or mass communication program can nominate students.

News21 — the name stands for 21st Century news — was a demonstration project launched in 2005 to show journalism schools have a role to play in the future of media. The project teaches special digital and topic knowledge to students and brings them together to investigate major stories and innovate new ways to engage people in the news. Today’s grants, together with significant contributions from Arizona State Unviersity, will help the national News21 project continue there for at least another decade.

It’s part of the Carnegie Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism Education – a more than six-year, $20 million initiative – focusing on helping journalism schools transform themselves to lead in the digital age.

An independent evaluation commissioned by Knight this spring shows how key schools have changed the way they teach journalism, adding more digital work, incorporating topic knowledge, creating ways to innovate. Most of the news industry leaders surveyed believe journalism education is improving. The evaluation documented the success of the 2010 national News21 investigation undertaken by 11 students from 11 different schools. “Breakdown: Travelling Dangerously in America,” was appeared in the Washington Post, MSNBC.com and NBC Nightly News – with 5 million page views from 1 million unique visitors in just 18 days. This is student journalism at the highest levels. At the same time, though leading schools are changing, many are not. So opening up News21 to additional schools makes sense. We hope schools will contact Arizona State to learn how they might participate.

Campuses interesting in learning more about knowledge-based journalism should visit the Journalists Resource page hosted under Carnegie Knight Initiative by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Learn more about Carnegie Corporation’s higher education work.