This website is supported by a grant from the Carnegie and Knight Foundations, through the Kennedy School at Harvard. It is designed as a resource for faculty and students interested in expanding the boundaries of journalism education. It features the ideas and methods of dozens of inventive instructors and was produced by Professor Mitchell Stephens of New York University and by Sarah Hart, a recent graduate from NYU.

Creating a Better Journalism: New Ideas for Educating Journalists


Mitchell Stephens is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press intended to raise the ambitions and expand the range of journalism education.

Most other academic disciplines force their students to be humbled by the demands and inspired by the accomplishments of truly outstanding work. In journalism classrooms, however, run-of-the-mill articles are too often distributed; Wolfe, Baldwin, Didion, Hersey, Pyle and Paine are too rarely read, let alone emulated. This book will try to change that.

Other models of journalism – besides the just-the-facts model that currently dominates American journalism schools – are currently mainstream in democracies elsewhere in the world. Other models of journalism have been mainstream at other times in the history of this country. And other models can be found here today not too far from the mainstream – in our best magazines, in serious documentaries, increasingly on the Web. But such alternatives are infrequently introduced in our classrooms. This book will try to change that.

Most other professional schools – in art, architecture or drama, in creative writing – encourage their students to rethink, to try new approaches. American journalism programs are so concerned with protecting the profession against incursions by the frivolous or dishonest that they have dedicated themselves to the tried and true. In other words, while most professional schools – in law, in medicine, as well as in the arts – try to position themselves in the avant-garde of their professions, American journalism schools seem content to lag behind in the rearguard, defending standard practices. In this field the profession often tends to be more adventurous than the professors. If the journalism we have, if the methods we are defending, were more perfect, maybe this resistance to experimentation would be less of a problem.

This book will not only be open to but will encourage new, more searching, more engaging approaches to writing and reporting stories. Journalism educators realize the technological means by which journalism is distributed are currently being transformed. They have been slow to realize that there is an opportunity now, too, to improve the method, style, forms and subject matters of journalism. This book will be devoted to that effort.

In other words, many of the ideas introduced on this website will find a place in this book, which should be available in 2009.

Mitchell Stephens is the author of A History of News, an extended history of journalism that has been translated into four languages and was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” (A new edition was published by Oxford University Press in fall 2006.) His well reviewed book, the rise of the image the fall of the word, a historical analysis of our current communications revolution, was published in 1998 and is available from Oxford University Press. Professor Stephens is also the author of Broadcast News (now in its fourth edition), the most widely used radio and television news textbook, and the co-author of Writing and Reporting the News (a third edition of this book was just published by Oxford).

He is a long-time professor of Journalism at New York University and has served three terms as chair of the Department of Journalism there.

Prof. Stephens’ current projects include a history of disbelief, from ancient India and Greece to America and the world today, which he is completing for Carroll & Graf (now Perseus), as well as a book on the future of journalism education for Oxford University Press.

Over the years, Professor Stephens has written numerous articles on media issues and aspects of contemporary thought for publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Columbia Journalism Review. He was one of five editors of the book Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11. In a recent cover story for the Columbia Journalism Review, Beyond the News, he called for increased analysis in news stories as a way to compete with the Web.

In 2001, Professor Stephens completed a trip around the world, during which he reported on globalization for the public radio program “Marketplace” and the webzine Feed and wrote essays on travel for LonelyPlanet.com. His commentaries have aired on NPR's “On the Media”. He has been history consultant to the Newseum.

Professor Stephens has been involved in a number of media development projects overseas since 1993 – including two large State Department University-Partnership Grants with Rostov State University in Russia. Professor Stephens has also taught or organized exchanges in Ghana and India. He is director of the Russian-American Journalism Institute in Rostov.

In 2006, Professor Stephens won a grant from the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education toward research on new models of journalism education. This website is a product of that grant.

Sarah Hart is a recent graduate of New York University's Graduate Program in Journalism.

Peng Zhao is a graduate kid currently messing around at interactive something master's program at NYU.

Sarah Hart: sarah.j.hart@nyu.edu

Mitchell Stephens: mitch.stephens@nyu.edu