Idea Lab

More Thoughts on TimesOpen

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to. It was a day well spent, but not a day spent hacking. Fair warning: I wasn't trying to capture the essence of the day so much as taking notes that struck me as relevant to my own work, with an emphasis...

• February 23, 2009
• 6 comments

Journalism Education's Broader, Deeper Mission

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Accepting an award from Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably "the best general education that an American citizen can get" today. Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar bragging rights; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great value. Still, there's no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student's future.Even if McNeil overstated...

• February 7, 2009
• 8 comments