News21 is a student reporting project created by the

Carnegie Corporation of New York The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world. Carnegie Corporation has endowed or otherwise helped to establis ...

and the

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also known as the Knight Foundation, is an American non-profit foundation that provides grants for journalism, communities, and the arts. The organization was founded as the Knight Memorial Education ...

, and based at

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...

Walter Cronkite School of Journalism The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (often abbreviated to The Cronkite School by its students and faculty), is one of the 24 independent schools at Arizona State University and is named in honor of veteran broadcast jo ...

. The project aims to, according to Coburn Dukehart, support and encourage "new forms of investigative reporting and storytelling."

History

Carnegie and Knight established News21 in 2005 as part of their joint "Carnegie-Knight" initiative at 5 universities. The program is now open to all journalism schools in the United States, and has also included fellows from Puerto Rico, Canada and Ireland. Since 2008, the Cronkite School has been the recipient of nearly $10 million in grants from the two foundations to support the News21 program.

Structure

News21 is based at Arizona State University, but includes other "incubator" universities where the student members of the project learn journalism skills. The universities included in the program change every year. During the spring semester, students take part in a News21 issues seminar taught by News21 Executive Editor Jacqueline Petchel. The seminar immerses students in the topic to be investigated by News21 in the summer and students do preliminary reporting. Completed articles are then published by local news organizations and major media outlets, including The Washington Post, NBC News and USA Today.

Projects

News21 reporter works on the State of Emergency project

News21's projects include one about

gun control in the United States Gun politics within American politics is defined by two primary opposing ideologies about civilian gun ownership. Those who advocate for gun control support increased regulation of gun ownership; those who advocate for gun rights oppose increas ...

called "Gun Wars: The Struggle Over Rights and Regulation in America." The results of this investigation were released on August 15, 2014, after five months of research. They also analyzed more than 2,000 reported cases of possible

voter fraud Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of ...

in the United States from 2000 to 2012 and found that only 10 of them were for

voter impersonation Voter impersonation, also sometimes called in-person voter fraud, is a form of electoral fraud in which a person who is eligible to vote in an election votes more than once, or a person who is not eligible to vote does so by voting under the name ...

. Other subjects they have investigated as part of such projects include the lives of veterans in the U.S., the experience one family in

Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is borde ...

had after the

Deepwater Horizon oil spill The ''Deepwater Horizon'' oil spill (also referred to as the "BP oil spill") was an industrial disaster that began on 20 April 2010 off of the coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, considered ...

, and the variation in

medical cannabis Medical cannabis, or medical marijuana (MMJ), is cannabis and cannabinoids that are prescribed by physicians for their patients. The use of cannabis as medicine has not been rigorously tested due to production and governmental restrictions ...

laws from state to state. News21 also produced a report on hate crimes in the United States, calle
Hate in America
In 2019, News21 investigated federal and state responses to natural disaster, which culminated in the projec
State of Emergency
The project included a four-par
documentary
series,
podcast
an
Faces of Disaster
a multimedia package that profiled survivors across the country.

References

External links

* {{Arizona State University Arizona State University