The School of Journalism and Mass Communication is now part of the Carnegie-Knight Journalism Initiative, a consortium of twelve universities that receive funding from the Carnegie and Knight foundations to create innovative curricula and to produce quality journalistic products.

The deans of the twelve schools met in New York this week to discuss broad outlines for a journalism project to be conducted across ten weeks this summer.  Ten graduate students and a few select undergraduates at Carolina will receive stipends to create content–stories, photos, infographics–and use them to produce innovative multimedia packages to be widely distributed.

The general topic will be the changing demographics of America.  Once again, JOMC is leading the charge.  To see work already done by our students on changing demographics, check out Carolina del Norte on the website.  This material is free to any media outlet willing to give a byline to the student who produced the material.

The Journalism and Mass Communication School is addressing a challenge for PR professionals.  Nearly one in ten U.S. counties have more than 50% minority residents, according to U.S. Census figures.  PRWeek’s Kimberly Maul suggests that the “general market” focus of PR pros soon will represent just another market segment. 

At JOMC professors and students are ahead of the game.  In 2008, we offered a professional development program on marketing to Hispanic audiences.  Our public relations writing courses focus on services to non-profit groups, many of which are targeted to minority groups.  Our public relations and advertising faculty are participating in the Latino Project, a school-wide effort to identify Latino groups, to provide information about them and to them, and to conduct research that informs us about what North Carolinians think about the growth of the Latino population.  We also recruit students and faculty from all segments of society.

If we are to be communication professionals, we have to understand the fundamental aspects of the audiences we serve.