Newswise — The Online News Association (ONA) today has awarded the Georgia News Lab, a collaborative investigative reporting initiative housed at Georgia State University, the $65,000 Challenge Fund Grand Prize for Innovation in Journalism Education.
The News Lab was one of 24 finalists for the prize, selected from nearly 200 applicants over the past two years.
The grand prize is awarded to the project “most likely to change either local newsgathering, journalism education or both,” according to the ONA.
The Georgia News Lab is a partnership among four of the top college journalism programs in Georgia and two of the leading news outlets in the Southeast. It is dedicated to training young investigative reporters and helping to increase diversity in professional newsrooms.
The partners in the project are the University of Georgia, Georgia State, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and WSB-TV.
“We are honored by this award,” said News Lab Director David Armstrong, a journalist in residence at Georgia State. “And we are grateful to ONA and the backers of the Challenge Fund. We hope that this award can help bring attention to potential solutions to two of the major challenges facing journalism.”
The News Lab started last fall after being named one of 12 first round winners in the Challenge Fund competition. Since then, select students from the Lab’s partner schools have learned investigative techniques, worked side by side with professional reporters and editors, and produced a string of stories in collaboration with the AJC and WSB.
“The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is proud to support the Georgia News Lab,” said AJC Editor Kevin Riley. “We believe investigative journalism, and the people who dedicate themselves to it, represent all that is important about American democracy. Welcoming students into this work guarantees that this important work will continue.”
The Challenge Fund was established to encourage universities and professional news organizations to collaborate and experiment with new ways of producing news. It is backed by a group of philanthropies that includes the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund. The Challenge Fund is managed by ONA, the world’s largest membership group of digital journalists.
The News Lab also receives funding from the Cox Media Group, parent company of the AJC and WSB, as well as the Gannett Foundation and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
The second-place finisher in the Challenge Fund competition was New Mexico News Port, a student journalism project at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
The awards were announced at ONA’s annual conference in Los Angeles on Thursday.
A Columbia Journalism Review article about the News Lab is here:www.buff.ly/XLlCmE
Selected News Lab stories and additional articles about the project are here: www.tinyurl.com/GNLstories
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