The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications
K-State School of Journalism and Mass Communications Wins Knight Foundation Grant
$25 Million Awarded to Winners of the 21st Century Knight News Challenge
Director Angela Powers and the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications were named winners in the 21st Century Knight News Challenge, a worldwide contest designed to find new ways to gather and distribute news. Students from the Miller School will present a prototype for news at the Online Newspaper Association, October 2007.
The year-long project will be coached by Professor Sam Mwange, who will lead a team of six K-State, journalism students who represent one of the 25 winning proposals that received a total of $25 million in prize money from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help invent the future of journalism. The K-State team of students includes Tina Deines, Heather Hickerson, Scott Douglass, Matt Sundberg, Rebecca Perez and Shane Howard.
Other winners include the Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MTV, VillageSoup in Maine, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation’s President and CEO, said the worldwide contest is designed to create new ideas for journalism. “We want to spur discovery of how digital platforms can be used to disseminate news and information on a timely basis within a defined geographic space, and thereby build and bind community,” Ibargüen said in a statement. “That’s what newspapers and local television stations used to do in the 20th century, and it’s something that our communities still need today. The contest was open — and will stay open next year — to anyone anywhere in the world because ‘community’ is something we all can define.”
The winning entrants will do everything from blog to invent new products.
The K-State students are part of a seven-college collaborative network that will use an incubator process to come up with innovative ideas for gathering and distributing news in specific geographic communities.
The incubator project, which received a $230,000 award from the Knight Foundation, was spearheaded by Dianne Lynch, dean of the H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. Besides K-State, the other schools in the project are: University of Nevada Las Vegas, Michigan State, University of Kansas, Western Kentucky University and St. Michael’s College in Vermont.
“It’s time to leverage the creative and intellectual capital of the next generation of journalists to spur innovation in our newsrooms and our communities,” said Lynch.
Powers, director of the A.Q. Miller School, said the K-State students were chosen through a competitive process based on class contributions and dedication to community journalism. Powers has published more than 25 articles, chapters and books on news content and media convergence. She was a reporter for NBC and CBS affiliates before receiving her Ph.D. from Michigan State University.
For additional information about K-State’s role in the incubator contact Dr. Powers at apowers@ksu.edu or Professor Mwange at scmwangi@ksu.edu.