Knightline is written by Jim Bettinger, director of the John S. Knight Fellowships program at Stanford. It focuses on changes in journalism and the news media, and on innovative and entrepreneurial efforts to solve the problems and recognize the opportunities presented by those changes. The Knight Fellowships program has retargeted itself to meet the new realities, and Knightline will chronicle the changes in the program. Comments, challenges, ideas and debate are welcome.

Jim Bettinger
Director, John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists

I’ve been in the world of journalism since 1967, when I wrote my first rock music review (of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, no less) for the UC Santa Barbara El Gaucho. For the first 20 years of my career I worked for two daily newspapers - the Riverside Press-Enterprise, in Southern California, and the San Jose Mercury News. At the P-E I was a reporter, editorial writer and city editor. At the Mercury News I had several editing positions, ending up as city editor of the morning edition.

In 1989 I came to Stanford to work at the Knight Fellowships program (I’d been a fellow myself in the early 1980s). I was deputy director for 11 years and then in 2000, when Jim Risser retired, I became director. The Knight Fellowships has been around for more than 40 years, giving nearly 800 journalists the chance to use Stanford University to improve their journalism. Recently it shifted its emphasis to journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership, a shift that will take full effect in the 2009-10 academic year.

I have several specific interests in journalism. I’ve been interested in high-quality story telling for years, and have taught classes in Feature and Analytical Writing, Creative Non-fiction and Literary Journalism, as well as serving as a writing coach. As you’d expect someone who spent much of his working journalism career on a city desk, I have a keen regard for local news and the quality of information reaching cities and regions. And largely because of the influence of International Knight Fellows, I care deeply about journalism outside the U.S., and believe that the Knight Fellowships has an enormous contribution to make. I’m chair of Stanford’s Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Internship Committee, I’m on the boards of New America Media and the Navajo Times, and I’m on the Advisory Council of the Inter American Press Association’s Press Institute.

My journalistic headwaters couldn’t be more old technology. We typed on manual typewriters, using triple sheets of paper inter-leafed with carbon paper, which were then pasted together with rubber cement, edited with thick pencils, sometimes trimmed from the end with a pica pole (also useful for scratching one’s back), sent to a composing room by pneumatic tubes, and turned into lead type that was placed in metal forms that became newspaper pages. Something of the romantic in me remembers that fondly. But I much favor what technology allows us - even encourages us - to do now, and that’s what I want to focus on.

The changes in journalism are about much more than technology, of course. They’re about changing patterns of accessing news, about potentially innovative new ways to financially support the kind of quality journalism we need, as well as about fostering free and independent journalism in countries and societies that don’t have a long history of this. They’re specifically about enlisting and engaging Knight Fellowship alumni is solving these very real problems and challenges that we face. And more.

So what’s consuming me now is the future of journalism, and keeping it the vibrant, strong and honorable institution that society needs. There is much work to be done - and much opportunity as well.

Jim Bettinger

Twitter:  http://twitter.com/jrbettinger