Idea Lab

Over Time, Students Recognize Value of Incubators

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been more than a month since the students and faculty in the Innovation Incubator project presented their projects to an audience of reporters and editors at the Online News Association in Toronto. Before that event, we surveyed the students about their expectations, their impressions, and their conclusions about the process. It was, without a doubt, a lot more difficult and time-consuming than they'd expected -- in fact, probably more than any of us had expected. I was probably as surprised as they were. I came into this project with a set of operating assumptions about what this carefully selected...

• December 2, 2007
• No comments

What We're Learning About What Journalism Students Don't Know....

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It seemed reasonable, as we first started talking about the innovation incubator project 15 months ago, to expect that journalism students would be more technologically adept and experienced than we were. After all, we are a bunch of college administrators, women who (for the most part) have spent our careers in legacy newsrooms and scholarly environments. We figured that students who grew up with the Internet -- or, more accurately for this cohort, grew into adulthood with the Internet -- would come to the task of creating new approaches to community news not only with great ideas but with the...

• October 15, 2007
• No comments

Innovation Incubator Heads to Toronto for the Online News Association Conference

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been an extraordinarily challenging five months, and the students who have been working on the Innovation Incubator project are about to find out whether it's been worth it. About thirty-five students and faculty from seven journalism schools around the country are headed to Toronto tomorrow to present their projects at the ONA's annual conference. They've been working on them since June, when the group first gathered in Ithaca to talk about creation netting, the process we adopted to develop some new and original thinking about -- and approaches to - -community news. We figured there was nobody better positioned...

• October 14, 2007
• No comments