Every time I tout citizen journalism, I say it is an opportunity for people to get their own voices heard and not have to depend on mainstream media, and it is happening.

PBS and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today debuted the MediaShift Idea Lab blog a group blog featuring 36 wide-ranging innovators reinventing community news for the digital age.

Each Idea Lab blogger won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The writers will use the Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the online community.

You know a lot of the names Jay Rosen, Adrian Holovaty, Dori J. Maynard. Should be an interesting new site. It is all taking place in conjunction with Mark Glaser’s MediaShift blog. Read the full press release here.

My first reaction to reading Faces of Faith in America was, my god, the central tenets of public journalism have seeped deeply into the elite bastions of journalism education. Change is possible. Everywhere I clicked the Faces of Faith in America linked me directly to yet another everyday person speaking.

The elite voices were in short supply, and were not missed. Deena Guzder’s search for her Zoroastrian roots in Iran was more blog than journalistic in nature. It was first person and conversational.  What a relief not to hear more bombastic elite punditry or daily rants of politicians taking us closer to war. If we could only hear these voices more often, and have constant cross-cultural communication, maybe we would have less war mongering and more peacemaking. Maybe, with deliberation and tough debate, we would discover our differences and similarities.

However, to get to that cross-cultural communication we need to get beyond just amplifying voices as this project did so well. We have to discover ways of getting these everyday people involved in the conversations with the journalists and among themselves. This project gets very close to that goal. It even provided a space for people to upload their own stories.   

However, I would love to see students and newsrooms take another step forward. Wouldn’t it have been nice if they worked to have a conversation, let’s say, between the lesbian couple in Nebraska and the Baptists in Tennessee. Wouldn’t we all benefit by a conversation with the people in Iran?

I emailed David Cohn, a graduate student in the Columbia Unversity Graduate School of Journalism, to see if social networking was part of that curriculum, and he answered:

“There is little to no discussion about getting audiences to connect to each other or with the journalist. There is talk about sources — managing relationships with sources in a traditional sense. Weighing whether to burn a source or the ethical issues involved in being too close to a source, etc etc. But if you are talking about a general relationship between the audience and journalist to the tune of  ‘my readers know more than I do,’ then there is little discussion about that.

“Columbia is producing traditional journalists and doing a great job of it. They are also teaching new skill sets and storytelling techniques, such as flash and video. But they are not necessarily addressing the new mind set of community management, or using the web to communicate horizontally among the audience.

“Funny enough, however, the students seem to do this on their own. Columbia’s 2008 Journalism Facebook group is already really active.”

Cohn has been a central player in the pro-am movement especially at Jay Rosen’s Assignment Zero, where he was a primary editor. So despite the people running his journalism school, student-generated change is occurring, which is extremely important.

Buzz Merritt writing about public journalism once said it takes a generation for change to happen in newsrooms because students will come into power when they are in their 40s and 50s. However, that dynamic has changed. The digital world, which youth understands better than their bosses, has pushed decision-making power onto recent graduates. They bear a heavy responsibility. So yes, we need to teach them how to make video and podcasts, but we must let them experiment with new ways of practicing journalism, including that horizontal approach, which Cohn both speaks of and practices.   

Last year, when I wrote about News21 I said, “The last thing that journalism schools need is more of the fortress mentality.”  So this year the students were pushed out of the physical fort and roamed the world in search of stories. Now they have to be pushed out of the mental fortress to find new ways to help us all share our stories, our similarities, our differences just as we would if each of us could walk the streets of Iran, India and the low income neighborhoods across town.