The heads of five of the country's most prominent journalism programs have announced a three-year, $6 million initiative to try to elevate the standing of journalism in academia and to find ways to better prepare journalists, the New York Times reports.

The goal of the initiative, which is being funding by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is to revitalize journalism education by jointly undertaking national investigative reporting projects, integrating journalism programs more deeply with other disciplines, and providing a national platform to try to influence the discourse on media-related issues.

The joint effort by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Policy will work to develop, with the help of the best students, national investigative reporting projects, written and broadcast, in collaboration with major news organizations. The group also plans to create a media policy task force at the Shorenstein Center to conduct research and coordinate the views and voices of the deans and university presidents in debates over media issues, and to develop more innovative curriculums by pairing journalists with scientists, historians, economists, and other scholars on their campuses.

According to Knight Foundation president Hodding Carter III, more people are becoming journalists by way of journalism school than "through any other portal." But journalism programs are insufficient, he said, in preparing students for the real world. "Virtually everything in journalism is, at the moment, insufficient and in a state of flux," said Carter. "Basic principles do not change, but the environment in which they must be applied is changing radically. So should the education of those who must work within that environment."

To launch the project, a summer incubator program has been established at ABC News, where ten students, two from each school, will help produce a program about the September 11 attacks. In subsequent years, the "incubator" program, to be called News 21 for the 21st century and the perspective of people under 21, will be hosted at each campus, with a national manager coordinating student reporting and working with national news outlets to get projects on air, in print, or online.