Future
: Yesterday, at a press conference to announce a new initiative to improve journalism education, Hodding Carter, head of the Knight Foundation, said:
The great dirty secret in journalism and journalism education is that we are inherently conservative in the way we do things.
Preach it, brother. Yes, change is feared and resisted. He also said:
What has struck me is not that things are changing but that the change is cascading… We are in the midst of an absolute revolution.
Amen.
The initiative is funded by Carnegie and Knight and involves five universities: Northwestern, USC, Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia. It will place journalism students at news organizations to work on reporting projects without the pressure of deadline or bottom lines — this to be led by my friend, Merrill Brown. It will help establish programs in specialized journalism (e.g., science and engineering journalism at USC). And it will create a task force to speak out on issues in journalism.
