Interesting move,  and my intial reaction is “good for you , UCol”.  We need to reconsider how journalism is ,  or must,  evolve.

Berkeley started its Berkeley Center for New Media in 2004. In recent years, the Cronkite School at Arizona State University has launched its New Media Innovation Lab for research and development of multimedia products, and it is part of News21, an experimental program that trains students to present news in innovative ways.
It’s a wrap for CU’s journalism school in current form – The Denver Post

The trick,  as always,  is to actually DO the stuff you are proposing as needed change.  I haven’t followed the activities of these particular schools,  but the fact that they have “Labs” suggests to me they are actually using the technology and involving actual people using the new tools ad analyzing the results.

It does take a more serious move than making announcements about how “we’re looking at retooling ourselves for Social Media”.  I’ve seen such announcements,  and I watch and look at their websites,  and I see no movement whatsoever. 

Folks,  this is an R&D issue.  You have to take a look at what your audience is and what data they seek (included in this “data” is the “social graph” data,  which is the connective tissue between people and the resources they seek.  To develop these things,  you have to demonstrate and carry out experimentation with existing tools and develop your particular hybrids;  considering how the data your audience seeks is “graphed” ;  in other  words, (using the example of church organizations)  — taking the massive amount of “content” and resources people seek and hooking these into what will eventually become a “social graph”—the resources can be presented to conversations in progress,  and those resources should also spin off their own conversations.  But the publishing arms are clueless about “social graph”.  Facebook is a secular example of a company that gets it.  Church publishers are still stuck in old marketing.  They scoff at the value of conversations.  They are completely out of the loop,  and seem to insist that we listen to their marketing spiels;  most of them fashioned for them by outside secular marketing agencies.  I find myself thinking about this and visibly shaking my head and rolling my eyes when there’s no one else around but me.  It’s that galling.