It hit us sometime during the fall of 2005: The creative disruption of journalism was an order of magnitude greater than anything before. And the
Knight Fellowships program at Stanford needed to embrace this disruption to stay effective.
We had seven fellows from U.S. daily newspapers in 2005. During the year, five were offered buyouts and two had their newspapers sold -- twice (Knight Ridder to McClatchy to MediaNews Group). Neither had happened even once before.
This occurred in the midst of a striking change in the demographics of fellowship applicants. Ten years ago, more than 60 percent of the U.S. applicants came from daily newspapers, and two years ago it was more than half. In the last application cycle (2008-09), it was barely more than a third.
These events jolted our 40-year paradigm: Outstanding midcareer journalists come to Stanford, with the blessing of their news organizations, for a year of professional growth and personal rejuvenation. They return to their news organizations, ready to do dramatically better work for the rest of their careers. We thought of ourselves as improving journalism, one journalist at a time.
But now we couldn't count on that model into the future. And so we launched the many-layered strategic planning process that generated the
major changes that we announced last month, keyed to the selection of our 2009-10 fellows. (Disclosure:
Poynter's Jill Geisler was a consultant and facilitator for our strategic plan.) We have decided to build upon the existing program, to generate benefits that go beyond the individual fellow, and to focus on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. And we'll be asking our fellows to create something that contributes to those areas.
The key decision was to fundamentally examine the program rather than tweaking it around the edges. We briefly considered not changing -- one valuable role for a program like ours is to resist faddish change -- but decided that the challenges and opportunities were too great to sit tight.
A second fundamental decision was crafting the planning process. With the help of a grant from the Knight Foundation, we created a
12-person Strategic Plan Task Force and posed three questions to it:
- How can the Knight Fellowships program select fellows who will lead journalism for years to come?
- How can the program be instrumental in meeting the challenges transforming journalism?
- And how can it enlist Stanford and Silicon Valley in meeting these challenges?
We foresaw some obstacles, including the fact that ours is a very good program with a very good reputation, held in high regard by our alumni. A Knight Fellowship is a wonderful year, and we thought many fellows might hope the program that produced their experience could be preserved in amber, never to be tampered with. More than that, the kinds of changes we contemplated carried the risk of diminishing a valuable program without creating anything better.
The group met three times, with research conducted between meetings. Some people find this way of planning unwieldy, but we found it invigorating. Our Task Force members brought seriousness and a heartening level of engagement. The discussions were spirited, but not mean-spirited. It was a hoot.
And remember that this process unfolded against a backdrop in which those disruptive forces kept swelling. I think Task Force members leapt at the chance to help create something new and important instead of being consumed by gloom and doom.
The obstacles that we foresaw didn't derail us. We were careful to involve our alumni at every stage, and they told us overwhelmingly (not unanimously!) that we were on the right track: The Knight Fellowships had a major contribution to make.
We settled on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership because they play to the strengths of Stanford, of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area -- and they focus on an area of prime need.
But that presented us with more decisions: What would stay the same, and what would change? We settled on three key immutables. Fellows would spend an academic year at Stanford. They would be responsible for setting their own agenda during their year. And rich interaction among the fellows would continue to be a major element of their experience.
The most animated discussions revolved around what fellows should do while they were at Stanford. For years, the program's hallmark was nearly complete freedom. Fellows did whatever made sense to them to improve their own journalism. There was a sense that a fellowship year was a refuge from deadline and publishing pressures, and, by extension, from journalism itself. Did that make sense now? And if not, how should we change it without losing the key element of fellows setting their own agendas?
Our solution is to expect fellows to come to Stanford with a coherent proposal that will lead to a tangible result -- perhaps organizing a symposium, or beginning a creative plan for journalism innovation, or a way to use new storytelling tools, or even a proposal to fund journalism. We want to use our fellows' intellectual firepower and passion for journalism to address these challenges and problems.
Other elements of our changes are detailed on our Web site -- a broader applicant pool, an emphasis on international fellows who can directly help develop an independent press in their countries, engaging Stanford and the region more fully, and enlisting our alumni more deeply and broadly.
There are other changes that we are trying to get our heads around. "Mid-career" has been part of our DNA for decades. But in this chaotic environment, who can say what that term means any more?
We're in sort of a quiet period now while we wait to see who applies and what they propose. We do know there's been a lot of interest in our announcement (a 48 percent spike in visits to the site and a 36 percent increase in unique visitors, compared with a year earlier).
As we worked through this process, Sandy Rowe (chair of our board and of the Task Force) and I kept returning to one mantra: Change is hard. It's hard when you thought it would be easy, and it's hard when you thought it would be hard. It's hard because it's important. We've got some significant work ahead, particularly as the economic downturn accelerates everything. But we're excited, and we keep trying to keep in mind something John Gardner once said: "We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."
