Despite rapid growth in the number of non-profit investigative centres in the United States and many fine examples of quality journalism by such centres, uncertainty remains over the longer-term sustainability of philanthropically funded journalism.

There is a well-founded concern among senior non-profit centre editors that the next few years will see a consolidation in the number of centres, that foundations will shift their funding to other areas, and that there are limited alternative sources of revenue available despite significant and increasing income generation by several nonprofits.

These concerns stem from a growing recognition that paid advertising will be much more limited than once thought and the long and unexplained delay by the Internal Revenue Service in granting tax deductibility status to several start-ups.

The closure in 2011 of the Capitol News Connection, the recent management upheavals at The Bay Citizen and the suspension of operations due to funding issues at the Chicago News Cooperative have sent cold shivers through the sector.

Despite this, non-profit investigative centres continue to produce award-winning projects and have energised a watchdog vibe in sections of the media. Indeed, some of the lengthy investigations conducted by the bigger centres look similar to the work of muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell and others in the early 1900s. But while their publications were financed by advertising and circulation jumps, many nonprofits today rely totally on foundations. And the foundations are telling them they need to develop alternative revenue streams. Read more »

EDITOR'S NOTE: Teresa Bouza, a Knight Journalism Fellow attending the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conferencein St. Louis, Mo., interviewed Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News at The New York Times, in advance of his talk on Friday (Feb 24).  Pilhofer, who is on IRE's board of directors, leads a team of journalists and developers who build data-driven applications to enhance The Times reporting online.

The term “data driven journalism” has suddenly become popular. Yet data illiteracy among journalists is high, according to Aron Pilhofer. But it's not rocket science,” he said, and insisted it is “critical” for reporters to acquire at least some basic skills.

In his opinion, it is still hard to get reporters to think about using data as a source, to consider different ways and angles to tell a story. But the real barrier to data-based stories is that “at the highest level,” the importance of data journalism has “only gone so far,” he said. At the top level, it's a skill that's "been undervalued.” So, it's not only a matter “of how important to you as a reporter these skills are” but “how important does you boss and your boss’s boss think they are.”

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EDITOR'S NOTE: The d.school’s flagship class, Design Thinking Bootcamp, consistently draws students from every school and program to work together on team-based approaches to real-world challenges. Justin Ferrell, the Director of Digital, Mobile and New Product Design for the Washington Post and a Knight Fellow this year shares his experiences as a Bootcamp student, and distills a few principles he plans to apply to his work.

The chance to study at the d.school is the reason I applied for a journalism fellowship here, and having read design thinking books by Tim Brown and Roger Martin — and being a professional designer myself — I thought I’d come to Stanford to “polish” my practical team-building style with some high-brow academic theory.

For sure I had a lot to learn — just not what I thought. Design thinking is anything but a theory. The d.school is officially called the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, but Workshop might be a better moniker. Instructors preach a “bias toward action” and students physically tackle real-world problems (sometimes with chainsaws and glue guns). As a design director at The Washington Post, I tackle problems, too. But there’s a big leap between doing your best within your opportunity and reframing that opportunity entirely.

That’s what I call the d.school SMACK, which hit me the first week of class. No doubt it shakes you up, especially if you’re an industry pro who’s worked very hard for very long, more so if you’re proud of your insular achievements. The upside is, if you endure the SMACK and turn loose your assumptions, the d.school instructors teach you HOW to reframe. Your bruised ego heals. And you begin to see problems, no matter where they are, as innately solvable. One of the great benefits of design thinking is that the need (or problem, if you prefer) is never a bridge too far: the process applies if you apply yourself to the process. Here are some of the lessons I've learned:

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Phuong Ly was a Knight Fellow in 2010-11. She has specialized in immigration issues as a freelance writer and for the Washington Post. She is the founder of Gateway California, a platform to better connect journalists and immigrant communities. She gave this talk to the Knight Fellowships Board of Visitors on Jan. 26, 2012.

Before my Knight Fellowship, this was a metaphor for my life - lined paper. I was good at following set guidelines and had very defined ways of seeing myself, journalism and my career. I always bought lined journal paper to write daily notes and schedules and at the stationary store, I would always wonder, who were those people who bought the blank journals? After all, the two notebooks were the same price. So for the same money, I could get lines.

But during my year at Stanford, the need for lines began disappearing. I think now this is the new metaphor for my life. When I was here, I noticed that many of the kids around me used blank paper. At Stanford's Institute of Design, especially, they work on whiteboards and colored post-it notes.

Whiteboards and blank pages represent three values that I learned during my Knight year and have continued to live by. Read more »

Three John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships alumni recently described the ongoing impact of the year they spent at Stanford working on projects in innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. Phuong Ly and Paddy Hirsch, members of the 2011 class, and Burt Herman, of the 2009 class, spoke during a dinner for the fellowship's Board of Visitors, current Knight fellows and guests from the university and Silicon Valley.

Herman is co-founder of Hacks/Hackers, which now has meet-up groups in cities worldwide, and Storify, a social news startup. Ly founded Gateway California, a platform to connect journalists to immigrant communities. Hirsch has used design thinking tactics and ideas he developed here to help launch new initiatives at Marketplace, where he is a senior producer.

View slideshow at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/knightfellowships/sets/72157629105404365/

18 Days in Egypt, a collaborative, interactive documentary project that began last year in the living room of 2011 Knight Fellow Jigar Mehta, recently launched its public beta in Cairo - just as new confrontations between police and protestors erupted, posing a real-world test of the project. The 18 Days team, led by Mehta and co-founder Yasmin Elayat, plunged into producing stories from streams of photos, videos, tweets and other material created on mobile devices. 2011 Knight Fellow Hugo Soskin also is a member of the team.

Mehta and Elayat are trying to raise $18,000 for a fellowship program to hire and train 20 Egyptian university students, who will fan out across the country to collect and document stories of the revolution. You can support this effort via their Kickstarter campaign.

18 Days in Egypt is using GroupStream, a platform developed by Elayat and Mehta to enable collective, rich storytelling. In recent months, their work has been recognized and supported by major new media and technology accelerators.

I recently talked with Mehta about his Knight Fellowship and the evolution of his project. (You can also watch 3 minute talks by Mehta and Soskin.) Read more »

Spend some time in the Silicon Valley and you will inevitably find yourself (or at least your view of the media business) transformed by it. The mantras here are many, and they are ubiquitous: Dare to fail. It’s better to try and fail than to be afraid to try. Innovation is king. Be the disruptor, not the disruptee. Innovate or die.

There is, to be fair, a buzzword-alarm going off inside my head when I hear yet another epilogue on the culture of failure and innovation. But still, it makes me think: Wouldn’t traditional media and journalists be wise to embrace innovation and optimism?

One obstacle is a strange paradox I call “The Newsmakers Dilemma.”  I have met many people in the last months who are exited and full of innovative ideas about journalism, its future and implications for society. Very few were journalists. On the other hand, I have met many people who are convinced the future of journalism will be worse than its past, and that it was innovation (the Internet, to be exact) that killed the good old media biz. Nearly all of them are journalists. People in the media seem to be more aware of the challenges than the options. Although they love journalism and think it is an important job, many can’t seem to overcome their skepticism toward the future. A dilemma, really.

That brings me to a question I have been asking myself for some time now: Are we journalists an especially pessimistic breed of people – or are we just realists? Is the media industry in itself especially avers to innovation – or does economic pressure make it conservative? Is my brain simply malfunctioning because I really believe that the golden days of journalism are ahead of us rather than behind us?

I asked those questions of journalist friends and on social networks. One answer that came up several times was actually a counter-question: “How could we not be pessimistic?”

And there surely is a point in that.

Why is pessimism bad?

How can one blame newspaper reporters for not seeing the sunny side of media? Many have lost their job or know many others who are unemployed. Or they work in an increasingly stressful environment with increasingly smaller wages, hearing day by day that their business is dying? Still, I think we should look for solutions instead of blame. Pessimism is not the ideal mindset for adapting to changing environments and creating the journalism that will be there to last – whether it’s on paper or in pixels.

A necessary step would be to find ways to infiltrate the media world with the hunger for innovation and optimism that exists in many start-ups and big Silicon Valley players. One of the major necessities I see for doing that is to bridge the gap that apparently exists between the old journalism world and the new “Internet” business world. If there is an abundance of engineers that like journalism, why not let them take a bigger role in it?

(Note: I think that the collaboration between Stanford Engineering and Columbia Journalism School could be a very powerful step toward that direction). Traditional media has long let online innovation be an asset of social media and new media businesses – we were much too focused on staring in horror at shrinking ad revenues. And before that, we just did not see a need for innovation: Why change things when everything is going well?

If we want journalism to survive and to thrive, we will need to change that mindset: There will be new alliances to forge, experiments to conduct and changes of direction to accept. Crying over Google’s or Craigslist’s successes is crying over spilled milk, and we surely did enough of that. Next step: Regain optimism and use it for innovation.

“Go, you wild bedfellow, you cannot soothsay.” 
- William Shakespeare, Antony & Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 2

Brainstorming the future

We all wish we had the power to predict what the world will look like in five, 10 or 50 years.

As a sector currently undergoing turbulent change, the media industry is frantically shaking a cloud-filled crystal ball in the hopes of figuring out what the future holds.

On Jan. 18, 2012, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford had an opportunity to toss the crystal ball around as guests at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). IFTF is a Palo Alto-based nonprofit research group whose stated mission is to help organizations “make better, more informed decisions about the future.” Read more »

One of the most asked questions about journalism is whether the big players in media today will still be the big players tomorrow. Will the New York Times, Der Spiegel and Le Monde still exist in 20 or 30 years? Or will businesses like Google rule the journalism world? Richard Gingras, head of News Products at Google, talked about this and other questions regarding the future of media at a recent Knight Fellowship seminar.

“We are going through a disruptive period, and that means that old leaders are replaced by new institutions. The disruptors often win,”  he said. The reason for that lies in their flexibility to adapt to changes. “They start with a clean plate, and therefore can build something completely new.”  Read more »