By Paola Iuspa

The Chips Quinn Scholars reunion at John Quinn’s Florida beach house was bittersweet. The cold weather kept us inside, but there was nothing bitter about that. We enjoyed sitting around Quinn’s semi-circular editor’s desk in his living room at “The Folly.”

Rather, the bitterness had to do with the frustration aired by some Chipsters who recently lost their newspaper jobs and by those who say they feel stuck and uninspired in newsrooms with low morale.

But how sweet it was to have Quinn listen to us and say that he and the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute were committed to helping us re-tool for success, whether inside or outside the newsroom, in print or online.

Photos by Mae Yousif-Bashi

“Because of this discussion, tonight I am going to sleep better,” said Quinn, who with his late wife Loie founded the Chips Quinn Scholars program. He added that as a result of the discussion, he better understood the needs of Chipsters as they work in an industry in the throes of change.

Most Scholars agreed that journalists leaving newsrooms need to learn entrepreneurial skills so they can use their investigative, reporting and writing talents to start their own business, either writing for nonprofits or starting blogs and online publications. Quinn said he would like to see the Freedom Forum become a catalyst for making that happen and be at the forefront of the next big thing.

Adapting to the times seems to come easy to Quinn, who was part of the Al Neuharth team that gave birth to USA Today. Quinn recounted that groundbreaking effort.

CQS Career Coach Mary Ann Hogan said journalists from diverse backgrounds are finding business opportunities by creating content and writing articles for nonprofit and other organizations that increasingly are using social media to communicate with donors and supporters.

Yet, she said, reporters need help identifying revenue sources to make the big step and create sustainable businesses. She suggested that Scholars hold seminars to exchange ideas and information with former reporters who have started innovative businesses using the principles of journalism. She referred us to the winning projects of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge to understand where journalism is heading.

Some Chipsters suggested that we share information about job openings and freelance opportunities on the Facebook page that Karen Catone, director of the Chips Quinn Scholars Program, and Jack Marsh, vice president of diversity programs for the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, are about to launch for the Scholars.

To help reporters become more competitive in today’s market, the Freedom Forum offers fee-based multimedia boot camps. Some Chipsters who have attended the training said they are putting the training to good use in their jobs. Others said they aren’t because only online reporters, not beat or general assignment reporters, are allowed to provide multimedia content in their newsrooms.

The brainstorming session brought us closer together and helped us to realize that we Chipsters are a community of involved journalists – no matter what. Circumstances beyond our control can remove us from a newsroom but they cannot take the newsroom out of us. We are grieving the loss of what we had as print and broadcast journalists but we are willing to take the lead in transforming ourselves to bring journalists into new fields and new forms of media.

“We can’t die. … the world needs journalists,” said Frank Gonzales, a 1995 Chip Quinn Scholar. “We have to stay alive, and that has to be our goal.”

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The reunion prompted some reflection among Scholars, who later shared the following thoughts and ideas.

In considering the Freedom Forum’s mission, I think it would be beneficial if we could find a way to bring more software and technology-application developers into our field. Mary Ann (Hogan) mentioned Adrian Holovaty, who created EveryBlock.com and helped develop Django, the (open source) programming language for Web sites. We need more people like him. Maybe you could recruit computer science majors with an interest in journalism to CQS or expand the internship placements to places like Ellington (a content management system created by the Lawrence World-Journal in Kansas) or to the operations side of news outlets.

Another idea is to offer some kind of journalism boot camp for Web developers and technology professors to help them develop the new platforms without leaving the old ones out.

I work on the Web everyday, and I’ve found that it’d be really helpful for me to have more than basic input-content skills. We need more folks out there who understand the ethics of news but also know enough about creating technology so that they can come up with new ways to present news. That’s the only way legacy media will survive — we won’t if we’re constantly playing catch up.

—Daniela Velazquez (in an e-mail to Jack Marsh)

Paola Iuspa is a reporter for the Daily Business Review in Miami. A graduate of Florida International University, she was a Summer 2000 Chips Quinn Scholar at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.

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Mae Yousif-Bashi is a reporter/photographer for The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., where she was a Spring 2005 Chips Quinn Scholar. Yousef-Bashi is a graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit.