In October 2007, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Missouri School of Journalism, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and three news organizations shared the results of an innovative project aimed at testing whether important journalistic principles can survive in the quickly evolving digital news environment.

CCJ and its partners advised and collaborated with the news organizations on incorporating values presented in The Elements of Journalism into various digital news projects.  The Elements was written by CCJ co-founders Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel and forms the foundation of CCJ's Traveling Curriculum newsroom development program.

Besides providing guidance on incorporating the values of verification, creating a forum for public compromise and criticism, and making important news interesting into their online projects, CCJ staff helped the news organizations imagine, and then manage, change. Among other things, CCJ offered consultation on:

• How to leverage current content expertise onto a new platform (the Web).
• How to become more audience-centric.  We asked project participants to think about what their audiences need and want and how new technologies can be used to provide it in useful and interesting ways.
• How to make trade-offs.  We guided participants in setting time and resouce priorities so that important routines would be reatined while new initiatives were encouraed.
• How to dream.  How to do important work in interesting and creative ways so that it is fun and, especially, rewarding.

October's event was just the beginning - CCJ and the project partners and participants will continue to study project results and assimilate new lessons in hopes of coming to new insights about organizational change and retaining values in a digitial news future.

And this is a beginning of sorts for CCJ as well.  We are now featuring the type of customized, values-driven consultation we provided to the participants in this project as a part of our newsroom development services menu.  Interested?  Email us here.