“We’ve had to adjust our mission,” says Neil Henry, who’s led Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism on an interim basis since mid-2007 and enters the fall semester as its first permanent dean since the departure of Orville Schell.” It used to be you could just educate students for a career track,” then send them off to work at one of the nation’s roughly 1,500 daily newspapers. Now not only are those papers retrenching, but the future of the industry itself is in question.

His answer includes the creation of a half-dozen online news sites — staffed by students, with editorial supervision by instructors at the school — devoted to coverage of San Francisco’s Mission District, North and West Oakland, West Berkeley, and much of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties.

Here’s a link to an interview of Henry on UC-Berkeley’s site.