Partnerships are the lifeblood of a journalism school like Carolina’s – a school that strives to have an impact in the state.

Thanks to the work of Jock Lauterer, director of our community media program, and the generosity of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, we can announce a new project with North Carolina Central University. Partnerships are making this project possible.

Professor Mai Nguyen of UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning, UNC journalism students, and faculty and students at N.C. Central are working together to produce a community newspaper for Northeast Central Durham.

The newspaper will be staffed by local teens to provide neighborhood news, information, videos, photos and features. With both an online and print edition, the publication will offer this often overlooked community a home-grown, timely source of information unavailable anywhere else from a single source.

The year 2009 represents change for the country, for the media industries and for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In his inaugural speech, Barack Obama challenged citizens to embrace “a new era of responsibility,” recognizing that “we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

The media industries, journalists and communicators for the future, also face a new era of responsibility and difficult tasks. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, in its “State of the News Media 2008,” reports that newspaper advertising revenue fell 7 percent during the year. Earnings were down 10 percent, and stock prices for public companies plunged for a third straight year. The economic woes of the automobile and real estate industries exacerbate the problem for newspapers. Online revenues are growing, but not as fast as media companies had hoped. Broadcast stations and networks are feeling the pinch now that political advertising has evaporated.

Is this a report of gloom and doom? It does feel gloomy for many who have thrived in traditional media companies. But for the school, the current situation is a baseline for innovation. We are introducing a new curriculum, with heavier emphasis on multimedia. This emphasis permeates the print and broadcast journalism programs as well as the advertising and public relations areas.

We also are focusing increasingly on media economics, entrepreneurship and leadership. We are working to build a generation of leaders who will be able to innovate in the information business. People want information. We know that patterns of news consumption change, attention spans change, demand for video versus print change. The need for information remains.

We hope, through our participation in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative and other innovative projects, to be in the forefront of examining and testing new business and information models.

Meanwhile, we hope students and parents will support our efforts. My greatest concern is that parents will read headlines about a declining newspaper industry and will encourage their children to steer clear of journalism and mass communication education.

Please heed these words: this is the information age. Our country and the world needs, more than ever, young people who have the power to communicate and who understand the impact of their words.