New Frontiers in Journalism

As we’ve all heard — and possibly lamented ourselves — traditional journalism is rapidly going the way of the dodo. Rounds of buy-outs have ravaged newsrooms across the country. The Tribune Company, which owns eight major dailies, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, declared bankruptcy last December.

For my part, I was dismayed to recently find that the price of the Washington Post at my local sidewalk newspaper dispenser has popped up from 35 to 75 cents.

What’s to be done? Should we devise some way to prop up the failing industry? Wring our hands over the downfall of one of the most important pillars of our democratic system?

Or perhaps, as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has decided, we should get on with it and move our newsmaking into the 21st century. The Foundation announced a new initiative — with a respectable price tag of $15 million — to develop economic models that will enable investigative news reporting via digital media.

The initiative is aimed at supporting investigative reporting that keeps citizens apprised of local, regional, and national developments that will impact them and their communities.

The three newest grants are all going to exciting projects:

California’s Center for Investigative Reporting will use a Knight grant of $1.3 million to start a multimedia project that will promote ways for print, digital and student journalists to work together and reinforce each others’ efforts.New York City-based ProPublica received $1 million to work on establishing a sustainable business model for nonprofit news sites. The Sunlight Foundation in Washington, D.C., will use a grant of $565,000 to enable public access to information about lawmakers’ activities and contributors via innovative Web tools.

Other projects are ongoing, such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting and a project by the NGO Investigative Reporters and Editors to establish an endowment to train reporters in watchdog and computer-assisted journalism.

The Internet has opened up new frontiers in journalism — the changing news business is today’s Wild West (albeit with BlackBerrys in place of pistols). With the Knight Foundation leading the way, it looks like we’ll all be settling some new territory soon.