New Media, Enduring Values
Project Overview
This project was born at a bistro in Columbia, Mo. Against a backdrop of crisis in the journalism world, Esther Thorson, Bill Kovach and Geneva Overholser gathered at dinner on a May evening in 2006 to talk about the unsettled craft they loved.
New sources of information were springing up at a furious pace all over digital platforms — with wide variation in quality and reliability. There was a need to show “old” media leaders how journalism’s core principles could flourish online. Meanwhile, “new” media needed to understand the value of journalistic underpinnings.
Thorson, Kovach and Overholser represented two organizations that were to make a formidable alliance — the Missouri School of Journalism, the world’s first and one of its most important journalism schools, and the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the largest membership group of journalists in the country. Under the sponsorship of RJI, this collaboration would take three of the elements of journalism as set forth in the Kovach/Tom Rosenstiel book, The Elements of Journalism: What People Should Know and the Public Should Expect, and partner with three different kinds of media organizations to see how the time-honored values of the craft could be brought alive in the digital world.
The result was a year spent working in partnership with a variety of news organizations: WHO-TV, Des Moines; Minnesota Public Radio; and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Starting with WHO-TV, a series of accounts from each of these outlets will describe what went wrong, what went well and some of the lessons learned.