News21 has pulled together more 90 students from university newsrooms across the country to produce a number of deep multimedia reports, freely available to newsrooms everywhere. Funded by the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, the initiative expanded significantly over the last year, now including students from 12 different newsrooms who have produced more than 60 in-depth projects to be syndicated across the country.

From the release:

“Our strategy with the News21 students is to task them to tell complex stories in ways other young people might find interesting and relevant,” said Jody Brannon, News21 national director and a Cronkite School professor of practice. “This summer, in a short 10-week period, their experiments produced some approaches that do just that.”

Photojournalist Jose Castillo, an associate fellow from Texas who joined the University of Maryland’s summer program, studied voter data to see what it reveals about race and identity in America.

“In 2008, we elected a black president, and I was intrigued by how this speaks to who we are and how we’ve changed over the last 100 years,” he said.

Castillo settled on telling the story Allensworth, Calif., a community founded in 1908 by a black man seeking his fortune, which has evolved into a town with a majority Latino population. To tell the story over time, he used an experimental interface that lets the user to ‘step to the side of the story’ while providing a biographical sketch of the video subject.

You can check out the students’ work at News21.com. More work will be added as the summer winds down.