Got pulled off my regular job a couple months ago to work full time on the Carnegie-Knight “Initiative for the Future of Journalism,” an aggregate effort by five of the top journalism schools to revamp and renew approaches to journalism, and ultimately to transform the way journalism is taught.
As part of the planning for the initiative, the five participating deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history.
Online now is a starter/brochure site, and currently all of the advance reportage is happening through external blogs. But a compadre and I (yes, we have two webmasters at the jschool now!) have been hard at work building a custom content management system* to meet the project’s fancy multimedia and nested template needs — the largest pure programming job I’ve ever been involved with, and the first time I’ve done any kind of team programming — a very satisfying experience. We’ll be rolling out the “official” site on top of our CMS later this summer. For now, the reporting fellows are scattered all over the globe, gathering material.
The project was recently blogged at Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media, at Boing-Boing and also at Utterly Boring, though the interesting stuff is yet to come, once the story packages are completed by the fellows and we wrap up the CMS.
* Will have to post separately sometime on the old build vs. buy CMS question.
Yah – I’ll be very interested to hear the buy/build discussion…
Ditto.
P.S. someone should tell the kids that if they want anyone over 30 to read their blog posts, they need to up the font size :-)
Good feedback for the designers Tim, thanks (this is one of those sites that has to be approved by 5 deans, 10 coordinators, etc., but I’ll pass it on).
[...] A few months ago, I posted about the newsinitiative site I had spent most of the summer working on*, and mentioned that we had decided to build our own content management system for it from scratch. Promised to say more about the CMS “build vs. buy**” decision process we went through, but never got around to it. After installing Search Meter for WordPress a month ago, discovered that people have actually been searching this site for more info on that decision. [...]