Jason Forman / News21 News21 journalist Laura McGann covered an Education Dept. investigation of financial aid and college enrollment records in search of terrorist names supplied by the FBI.

One of my major projects this summer was to serve as multimedia coordinator for Medill's piece of the News21 project.

News21 is an experiment funded by the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. We used their money to pay 44 grad-student journalists (atNorthwestern, Columbia, UC-Berkeley and Southern California) to create original work pegged to the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Our funders hoped the students' work would:

    
• Be distributed through traditional media partners    
• Use innovative presentation techniques to engage non-traditional audiences    
• Provide lessons for journalism education overall

  Much of the students' work has gone live at newsinitiative.org. The debate over whether we achieved our goals has already begun. For instance, see Mark Glaser's article at PBS.org, and journalism educator Mindy McAdams' blog (which includes a follow up post).

  Of course, given my involvement, I can't be completely objective about the students' work. However, quite a few of the students' pieces have been distributed widely through traditional media channels.

  For instance, Northwestern student Laura McGann's article about a program to mine information about student loan applicants to seek out terrorist connections was picked up by AP and mentioned by the New York Times (paid archive) and the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). Similarly, Columbia students' work landed in the New York Times and Forbes, among other outlets. USC students' work is airing on TV stations in Southern California. And original video stories about the U.S. military abroad, created by News21 students at Berkeley, are supposed to be aired Friday on CNN (Anderson Cooper 360).

  Tidbits readers might also be interested in some of the pure interactive projects produced by this initiative, including Columbia's elaborate info graphic on Homeland Security Department spending, and Northwestern's interactives on digital trails and government data-mining programs.