I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived in Baltimore last month to participate with eight other journalists as Dart’s Ochberg Fellows. I did anticipate, though, that the collective experience of discussing how we cover trauma and disaster was going to be heavy fodder, especially coming from 20-plus months of continuous, on-the-ground work as a Knight Fellow in Haiti following the January 2010 earthquake.

I’ve crisscrossed the African continent over the past five months, clocking more than 27,000 miles as I’ve helped newsrooms come to grips with the new digital era. And wherever I go, I meet two to three journalists per day who think they have a solution to the malaise that paralyzes much of the continent’s traditional media.

How do we define journalism in an era of sweeping change? In a speech to students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Knight Foundation's Eric Newton ventured far into the past—and far into the future—to try to answer that question.