Looks like someone at Columbia agrees with their colleague Michael Schudson’s argument that universities should get more involved in creating original journalism.
The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media — which is attached to Columbia’s Teachers College — is announcing today the beginning of The Hechinger Report, a new foundation-supported outlet for in-depth reporting [...]

Not long after I landed my first reporting job at the Raleigh News & Observer in 1988, the publisher and primary owner, Frank Daniels Jr., walked into the newsroom one day, handed the cop reporter a speeding ticket he had just received on Interstate 40, and told the reporter to write about it for the [...]

More knowledge is a good thing, especially when it comes from top-flight research institutions. But the launch of Futurity, a nonprofit news service specializing in science and medicine, underscores what Dan Gillmor describes as the challenge of the “almost journalist.”
Futurity was created by universities frustrated by the disappearance of newspaper reporters and column inches dedicated [...]

Here’s a press release headline that’s likely to be recycled many times: “Nonprofit Institute Hires Investigative Journalist.” Just add the names of the nonprofit and the journalist, and you’ve got another story about the future of watchdog journalism in the post-newspaper era.
Now here’s a test: What if the institute in question is a right-wing think [...]

Journalism nonprofits have been operating in the shadows of major metro dailies since the dawn of the newspaper age. In 1846, a handful of New York newspapers created a cooperative to pay for dispatches from the front lines of the Mexican-American War. That effort became the Associated Press, and it remains a nonprofit.
But what [...]