This is the agenda I circulated for the Interactive Learning Steering Committee meeting at Poynter, four months or so before News University was formally introduced to the industry. It is a short document, but it captures the state of the project at a moment when NewsU was still being assembled in public view.
To: Karen Dunlap, Keith Woods Paul Pohlman, Bill Mitchell, Leslie Pelley, Chip Scanlan
The agenda moves through the usual pre-launch worries: registration, course development, the third phase of the NewsU technology, the transition to our own servers, a working fee payment system, a site redesign. There is also an item I remember well — the internal challenge of getting Poynter‘s own faculty to try the thing. At that point:
Half of faculty has registered
Launch planning was aimed at ASNE, in April, 2005, with marketing elements being lined up for 2005. And the slogan, which I still like:
Slogan: It’s All About U
The “on deck” list of courses shows how broad the ambition was, and how much of it depended on partners and Poynter faculty: Drinking Water Quality with the Society of Environmental Journalists, Beat Basics and Beyond with Steve Buttry, a second version of Clean Copy with Vicki Krueger and ACES, Sound Storytelling with Andrew DeVigal, Understanding Numbers with Debbie Wolfe, Plagiarism with Kelly McBride, Revisions with Chip Scanlan, Video Story Telling Ethics with Al Tompkins, Better Listening with Jill Geisler and Writers Toolbox with Roy Clark.
The outreach list is just as telling — AAJA, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Education Writers Association, the American Copy Editors Society, the Dart Center, REZ Net and the Kaiser Foundation. NewsU was never going to be built by Poynter alone.
Attached to the agenda were the numbers, snapshotted at noon on the day of the meeting. The ONA Training Project led with 410 students, followed by Language of the Image at 260 and The Interview at 249. Users were reported by country — the United States first, then Portugal, the Philippines, India, Canada, Brazil, Australia and a long tail down through Afghanistan, Albania, Nigeria, China, Poland, Romania, Chile and Ireland. Most people said they heard about NewsU from the Poynter Online Web site, or from a colleague or friend.
Reading this in 2026, the numbers look tiny. They didn’t feel tiny then. What strikes me now is how much of what we were arguing about — payment systems, server ownership, whether the staff would use the platform, whether an international audience would show up unbidden — turned out to be the durable questions of online learning, long after NewsU itself ended.