I’m late.
I’ve been invited to the Hardly. Strictly. Young. conference on alternative ways to implement Knight Foundation recommendations at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri [More on that later]. One of the fun precursors to the two-day event later this month has been participating in the Journalism Carnival of blogging, shepherded by conference organizer, Spot.Us founder and leather jacket-wearer David Cohn.
In January, I wrote about the role universities should play in creating journalism, and in February wrote about two ways to grow the number of news sources. In March, I was supposed to write on what the Knight News Challenge should do next and how the RJI fellows program could be a part of curating that innovation.
Fortunately, in being late, I can point to others who already did it better than I would. No, Cohn, this isn’t a cop out, this is cutting my losses. The undercurrent on both of these questions for me is that I’m not worried about the craft as much as I’m worried about sustaining the craft.
For the first prompt, Dan Gillmor has having already hit on exactly what I would suggest for the future of the Knight News Challenge:
In fact, back in November, I wrote something somewhat similar, in highlighting what the News Challenge could learn from venture capitalists.
For the Reynolds question, Steve Outing nailed that the best, from what I saw:
Focus, yes, something I noted was my goal for 2011 and one I thought the future of news conversations could take on.