Incubating innovation for today's community newsrooms

The Innovation Incubator Project has created a contemporary Petri dish – collaborative, innovative, and dynamic -- for the development of original solutions to the challenges facing journalism in a digital age. More than a single event or product, the project's deliverable is an effective, efficient system with the capacity to generate, develop and execute entirely new ideas about and approaches to community news.

Uniquely, the project is itself comprised of a learning community of seven academic programs: Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael’s College, the University of Kansas, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Western Kentucky University. It is in the process of creating original and relevant models under which news organizations can make new connections with their communities. And in the process, it is serving the academy as a virtual field site to challenge how we approach – indeed, how we define – journalism education itself.

The project has created an “innovation incubator” at each institution, charged to produce a new form of community journalism that is scalable, replicable, affordable and effective. That model has taken a variety of digital formats and approaches – from a Web site, to a news application, to a wiki news platform for young news consumers. Each is unique -- but each also is adaptable and relevant, useful to real people and real communities.

A group of 36 students from seven different institutions have collaborated within and across their school-based groups. They met in June for a three-day in-service on innovation, team work, and “defining the news”; they returned to their home institutions to develop their projects; they gathered again in August to merge and synthesize, to leverage “best practices” and great ideas, and to reduce the number of projects from seven to three; and they presented their projects at the national conference of the Online News Association in Toronto in October.

Today, the project is moving from conception to execution, developing those projects into working prototypes that will be launched, tested and tracked with three real news organizations in communities as diverse as Topeka, Kansas and Burlington, Vermont. We will report our progress here, mapping its challenges and the lessons it will teach us. We will distill those insights into a series of tutorials that will be published on this site, in hopes that other journalism schools will adopt our model, fostering a new and – perhaps for the first time – truly valuable synergy between the academy and the industry it serves. And we will make the projects available for adoption by any news organization interested in integrating new kinds of technology and new kinds of connections into its newswork.

Project Links coming soon.

Leveraging the power of participatory media for the common good

A safe space for social networking

Because everybody has a story to tell

Links

Knight News Challenge
News Ideas Project Blog

Participating schools:
Ithaca College
Kansas State
Michigan State
Saint Michael's College
University of Kansas
University of Nevada-Las Vegas
Western Kentucky

Group blogs during development:
Team 1
Team 2
Group 3
Team Awesome
All Knighters
Voltron
Chanticle
Innovation Incubators Faculty
Team Devastator
Rockchucks
Team Kansas

John Battelle's Searchblog
Larry Lessig's blog
The FastForward blog
Creative Class blog
Edge Perspectives
Edge Perspectives blog

Creation Nets:
Harnessing the Potential of Innovation

Videos:
Media Giraffe Project