Marching to the drumbeat - Dow Jones News Fund

The American Society of News Editors (the old American Society of Newspaper Editors) did it.

The Radio Television Digital News Association (the old Radio-Television News Directors Association) did it.

The Society for News Design did it. So did the Online News Association (which only a few may dimly remember started as the Online Newspaper Association).

And now the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund -- that longtime home of the Dow Jones copy editing and reporting internships -- has done it. Henceforth, it shall be known as the Dow Jones News Fund, according to the missive that came to my e-mail inbox this week. And it has a new online address, newsfund.org instead of newspaperfund.org. As the release put it:

The new name reflects outreach to news services, websites and digital media in the past few years and a projection that there is more to come as the industry evolves.

Boy, now there's some kind of understatement, huh: "and a projection that there is more to come as the industry evolves." But then, again, the Dow has always been conservative.

You'll get no hrumphing or hand-wringing from me. These are changes that probably need to be made if for no other reason than to reinforce the idea of broadening perspective and thought.

Still, you might want to get out of the way of the stampede.

(One group, the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, seems inextricably bound to that name. Two years of rather robust discussion have failed to come up with alternatives, partly out of institutional constraints. Converting to "News" division would potentially step on a lot of other divisions' and interest groups' toes.)