The local news crisis matters for the simple reason that news provides the facts people need to govern themselves. If we lose local news, everything that follows is bad: less community debate, fewer candidates and voters, more expensive government and more corruption. When local journalism works best, it helps people understand each other and solve […]
Article · July 16, 2024 by Eric Newton
Heard of the Internet of Things? I met a lot of those things last week in Las Vegas. Self-driving cars, smart homes and smart appliances, wearable fitness sensors — thousands of digital products glinted and gleamed at CES, the giant annual international consumer electronics show. Flashy prototypes grabbed headlines, but, as I’d hoped, the show […]
Article · January 9, 2017 by Eric Newton
Above: Photo illustration by Jessica Hodder. Today, Knight Foundation announced its largest journalism grant ever in creating the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The institute will seek to understand and explain what First Amendment law is and should be in the digital age, but more than that, it will go to court to […]
Article · May 17, 2016 by Eric Newton
Not all that long ago, a Florida state law told newspapers what they could publish. A political candidate could have equal space in a newspaper to reply to criticism. It did not matter if the criticism was true and the reply was false. Equal time was the rule on TV. Florida thought it should apply […]
Article · April 21, 2016 by Eric Newton
Our experimental project calling for faster innovation in journalism and journalism education, Searchlights and Sunglasses, is approaching its second birthday. So it’s just about time to destroy it. I know. That sounds ridiculous. Something does well, so you blow it up. Welcome to change in the digital age. Out with comfort; in with strange. For […]
Article · August 6, 2015 by Eric Newton
Journalism is ripe for reinvention. The right journalism schools can become engines that drive innovation. Creative minds at forward-facing research universities can rise to the challenge of renewing the role of journalism in society. Take those three statements, sprinkle on what I say below, and you’ll see why I’ve decided that Arizona State University’s Cronkite […]
Article · May 27, 2015 by Eric Newton
I’m in St. Petersburg, Fla., at the 10th birthday of News University, celebrating the more than 325,000 journalists, students, teachers and communicators who have signed up to use it and get better. We once thought the target for registered users should be 1,200. Really. But more on that later. In 2003, Knight Foundation gave its […]
Article · April 10, 2015 by Eric Newton
A panel during Sunshine Week 2014 at the National Press Club. Photo by Sunlight Foundation on Flickr. Cross-posted with permission from the American Society of News Editors. Each spring for 10 years now, a vast media conspiracy has rolled across the hills and plains of this nation. Journalists of every stripe – cartoonists to commentators […]
Article · March 12, 2015 by Eric Newton
Journalism educator and Stephens College President Dianne Lynch spent the last 10 months talking with journalists, students, scholars and professors about the future of journalism education. RELATED LINKS “Report: Above & Beyond: Looking at the Future of Journalism Education” by Dianne Lynch, 02/19/15 “Universities need to shed some of their most basic approaches to teach […]
Article · February 19, 2015 by Eric Newton
Way back in 1938, Agnes Wahl Nieman’s bequest launched a fellowship program at Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” Even then journalists wanted to know more, not just about the skills of our craft and the issues of our profession, but about the complexities of the topics we cover in trying to […]
Article · November 19, 2014 by Eric Newton
This week at the Online News Association convention in Chicago, we’ll do a “lighting round” on our update of Searchlights and Sunglasses, the free digital learning resource Knight Foundation offered up last year to journalism education. “Searchlights and Sunglasses” by Eric Newton Related Link “Meet Knight Foundation at the ONA journalism conference” by Marie Gilot […]
Article · September 24, 2014 by Eric Newton