A journalism feature from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation annual report, looking at how the foundation’s endowed Knight Chairs in Journalism had begun collaborating with each other and with other Knight journalism partners — including The Poynter Institute‘s News University. The piece opens in St. Petersburg and traces the Knight Chair program back to 1990, when then-foundation president Creed Black announced its creation, saying it would strengthen the quality of American journalism education:
“by bolstering core curricular values and encouraging innovation.”
The story lists examples of that collaboration — Rosental Alves in Latin America, Jim Detjen at Michigan State, Charlotte Grimes at Syracuse, Melinda McAdams at Florida, Jacqui Banaszynski at Missouri, and Haynes Johnson’s work on the Knight-funded study Newsroom Training: Where’s the Investment? — before turning to what the report calls the largest gathering ever of Knight Chairs, who traveled to Poynter in 2004 to learn about News University.
a five-year, $2.8 million project to develop an e-learning program for journalists. The program is a partnership between Knight and Poynter, rated the nation’s top journalism training organization by the Where’s the Investment? study.
At the Poynter meeting the chairs brainstormed course ideas — how to analyze government data, how to understand scientific claims — and the article notes that work began immediately with William Gaines, the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, on an investigative documents class. The individual web sites of the Knight Chairs were to be promoted through the Learning Links page at NewsU.
The feature describes the official launch at the April 2005 American Society of Newspaper Editors convention, designed to make the case that NewsU is not just informative but a fun resource — “like thousands of journalists at a dinner party” — featuring material from 18 Knight Chairs in Journalism, a Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies and a Knight Professor in Constitutional Law and First Amendment. Elsewhere in the report, Reznet’s Dennis McAuliffe Jr. describes his own project’s plan to work with NewsU on a distance-learning course.
The photo caption identifies the NewsU development staff at the time — Elizabeth Ferris, Howard Finberg, J. Paige West and Casey Frechette. The story ends with a line that gave the feature its title:
“Journalism,” Finberg said, “is a world full of connections.”