If there's anything today's newsrooms value, it's innovation and original thinking -- particularly when it comes to reaching new audiences and serving new communities. And if there's anything college students are good at, it's thinking creatively and reinventing the status quo.
      That's the premise of the Innovation Incubator Project, a collaboration among seven journalism schools around the country designed to harness the creative energies of college students to produce original, affordable, and executable new applications for and approaches to community news. Under a grant from the Knight Foundation's News Challenge program, more than 40 students and faculty have been working since June in an "open-innovation" process to develop three online news projects that meet those standards.
      They'll present those projects at today's session, invite newsrooms to adapt and adopt them, and describe the incubator process as a model for similar partnerships between newsrooms and their own local journalism schools.
      The Innovation Incubator is a joint project of Michigan State, University of Kansas, Kansas State, Western Kentucky University, Ithaca College, University of Nevada-Las Vegas and St. Michael’s College.