Just as newspapers are shrinking, journalism’s presence has grown on Mayflower Hill. This is the second year of a three-year grant from the Knight Foundation to promote news literacy on liberal arts campuses. The grant includes a Jan Plan course, internships, a visiting journalist program in the name of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Colby Class of 1826, and—new this year—a news literacy blog (www.colby.edu/lovejoy).

Goldfarb Center Director L. Sandy Maisel (government) tapped journalist-friends of Colby, including many alumni, to write about how news is created and consumed in this changing media landscape. Bloggers include high-level journalists such as trustee Rebecca Littleton Corbett ’74, deputy Washington bureau chief at the New York Times; Gerry Hadden ’89, Europe correspondent for Public Radio International’s The World; Brian MacQuarrie ’74, general assignment reporter at the Boston Globe; and Hannah Beech ’95, Southeast Asia bureau chief for Time magazine. Posts from about two dozen contributors create a dynamic site that often examines current events from the perspective of those covering them.

While blog posts have covered topics ranging from a post-Cronkite world to using unnamed sources, the difficulties facing the news business are a recurring theme. And, judging from the size of the crowd at a September lecture by Lovejoy Visiting Journalist in Residence and ProPublica editor-in-chief Paul Steiger titled “How Newspapers’ Decline Will Affect Citizens and Democracy,” students are interested in this issue, too.
 
—Ruth Jacobs