The University of Missouri is opening a new think tank that it hopes will lead journalism into the digital future and reconnect it with audiences.

An excerpt from the AP story on globetechnology.com:

The institute broke ground Sept. 1 and will be fully operational in time for the 100th anniversary of the university's journalism school, the nation's oldest, in 2008.

"The best journalism is going to emerge with new and closer relations with the public," said Pam Johnson, the institute's executive director.

While completion of a new building on the Francis Quadrangle and renovation of two more is nearly two years away, the institute is already well on its way to "help invent new forms of journalism," said Dean Mills, the school's dean.

EmPRINT, an electronic version of the daily Columbia Missourian that uses magazine-size pages to preserve the traditional reading experience, will increase publication to twice weekly later this month. The product is the brainchild of Roger Fidler, the Reynolds Institute's inaugural fellow who has been hired as its director of technology services.

The university is exploring a commercial option of EmPRINT that would allow other newspapers to use the technology developed at Missouri while also creating revenue, Mills said.

Yet from the outset, the bequest by the estate of medial mogul Donald Reynolds, a 1927 graduate of the journalism school, was also designed to build — if not restore — public confidence and increase citizen participation in what textbooks sometimes refer to as the fourth branch of government, he said.

"From the birth of this idea, the central concept is to reconnect citizens and journalists," Mills said. "That remains very much at the heart of it."