(Steve Duke)

I'm always excited about the start of a new school quarter to see what ideas and innovations each new group of students brings to class. This term's graduate reporting students are swiftly demonstrating what the future of journalism may be - and that it has one.

These men and women embrace core journalism values and the innovative approaches to story telling that will keep journalism vigorous and compelling far into the future.

Before I link to some of things that excite me, here's some context for their work. With only a couple of exceptions, these graduate students have no background in journalism. They received undergraduate degrees in some other area, and most have worked for a year or two or three in an unrelated field before being bitten by the journalism bug.

They enter my class after just one 10-week quarter of preparation, a boot-camp immersion that lays the foundation of basic reporting, writing, editing, visual storytelling, law and ethics.

When they enter our downtown newsroom for their second quarter, their heads are swimming and they have yet to produce anything for public consumption.

We immediately shove them into the deep end and make them swim with the sharks. They cover Chicago and its suburbs, competing with the professionals who staff the rich mix of TV stations, newspapers, news radio and news Web sites that serve the area. Their work is published on the publicly available Medill Reports Web site and is sold to local media outlets.

As of this writing, they have been reporting in this class for just one week. Already one student has beaten the other Chicago news shops by breaking news twice on a continuing local story about grade fraud involving high school athletes. First here, then in a follow-up here.

Another student, covering the continuing story of school closings, wrote a good explanatory piece in advance of an expected announcement about more consolidation.

Beyond this solid, traditional journalism, we're seeing students use current technology to enhance traditional storytelling or tell stories in new ways (and doing it within a content management system that is not particularly flexible).

We had three students in the first three days of reporting tell stories in alternative ways by using Google maps. Not enhance stories by adding maps, but tell stories using the maps. These approaches were suggested by the students, not the instructors.

Here's just one example. Chicago was socked this week with heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures, so one student told the commuting tales of five people by plotting their routes on Google maps, then embedded her interview quotes for each of them in the pins that identify their routes. You can see it here. It's a quick, interactive way to tell a traditional story, and implicitly invites the reader to compare his or her own commuting story by building it in the map.

Another student helped readers see a part of town undergoing new development by embedding a Google 360-degree photo at the end of her story. Scan to the bottom to see it.


This is just a sampling of the great work I saw this week from one group of 24 students. Other instructors are seeing equally promising efforts. I hasten to remind you, that they've done this work in their first week of reporting.

In a week when Gannett announced weeklong furloughs for virtually every employee, the Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy, and the respected 68-year-old newspaper consultancy Belden announced it is closing, it would be easy to feel disheartened about the future of journalism. But the work and vision of these smart, innovative, passionate young journalists gives me hope.


By Steve Duke (s-duke@northwestern.edu)
Steve Duke is managing director for training at the Media Management Center and Readership Institute, and an associate professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.