Armed with a $25,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, O’Brien, a Duke alum, will help his alma mater design a new media center for The Chronicle, the five-day-a-week student paper.  He hopes that this “next newsroom” will serve as a model for other news organizations, particularly small scale and local publications, to bring their newsrooms into the digital era.

In addition, O’Brien will launch a website featuring interactive communication tools, as a focal point for discussion and collaboration on the creation of an “ideal newsroom.”  With original research on newsroom convergence, O’Brien hopes that the site will become a resource center for news organizations as well as a hub for collaboration on the “next newsroom” project.

Following next spring’s planned conference to attract more input and discuss the newsroom of the future, O’Brien hopes to present the final proposal to Duke by May 2008.

Source: Poynter Online