Journalism Program Unveiled

Troubled by a public “crisis of confidence” in print and broadcast media, administrators from Harvard and four other universities unveiled a three-year, $6 million initiative yesterday to revitalize journalism education.

At the four other participating schools—Columbia, Northwestern, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Southern California—a key component of the plan is to integrate graduate journalism schools with other academic departments.

This part of the plan will not impact Harvard, which has no bachelors or masters degree journalism track. But the initiative will yield lucrative summer jobs for several students at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and potentially at other Harvard programs.

Additionally, Harvard will host a task force of educators and former reporters who will “aspire to speak with one voice on issues of importance to journalism,” said Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the KSG.

Two KSG students—Stephen D. Grove and Hsing Wei—already have been selected for a pilot investigative reporting project this summer at ABC News in New York, where they will join counterparts from the other four schools participating in the initiative.

The ABC program will kick-start a broader effort, called “News21,” to establish on-campus centers—or “incubators”—where students will spend their summers producing news reports that will be distributed to media outlets.

Harvard will not host an “incubator,” according to Susan King, vice president of public affairs at the Carnegie Corporation, who coordinated the development of the initiative. But four Harvard students, chosen each year through a competition at the Shorenstein Center, will participate in “incubator” programs located at the other four participating schools.

King said that the competition for Harvard’s four slots most likely would not be limited to KSG degree candidates. Students selected for the 10-week summer “incubator” internships will each earn $7,500, according to King, who is also a former White House correspondent for ABC.

The effort announced yesterday will be bankrolled by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation for the first two years. Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers and the chiefs of the four other participating universities have pledged to provide funding for a third year if there are clear signs that the initiative is achieving its goals.

At a news conference yesterday in the Carnegie Corporation’s Manhattan office, administrators from the five schools and officials from the two sponsoring foundations delivered dire warnings about the state of the journalism profession.

The news industry finds itself in an “untenable situation”—plagued by “malaise you can cut with a knife,” said Hodding Carter III, president of the Knight Foundation and formerly an Emmy Award-winning reporter for PBS’ “Frontline.”

Yesterday’s initiative was in part crafted on the recommendations of a pro bono report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which conducted interviews with top media executives and high-profile correspondents.

Several executives said that media outlets have condensed and sensationalized their coverage to capture the attention of “distracted, fickle audiences.”

The McKinsey report said that “great newspapers and television networks—pillars of the industry—have suffered damaging blows to [their] credibility.”

McKinsey’s list of interviewees included leaders of several of the media organizations that have been rocked by recent reporting scandals, including New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., CBS News President Andrew Heyward, and Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker.

With print and broadcast media organizations facing a slew of threats—from cost-cutting pressures to cut-throat competition from online outlets—the Shorenstein Center-based task force will face the initial challenge of “deciding what our primary focus or two should be,” Jones said.

The task force’s membership will initially include Jones and the deans of the four participating journalism schools, but it may expand to include other leading figures in the media industry, King said.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.