I am a theater writer and editor who went into my fellowship in 2005 from a longtime staff position, arts editor at the New Haven Register, to which I knew I was not going to return. Like me, many of us - whether by choice or by corporate design - are leaving the safety of staff jobs and trying, as freelancers, to redefine our relationships with arts journalism.

As the NAJP redefines itself, it, too, may need to think less in terms of a cushy home base and more in terms of decentralization: forging relationships, as it once did, with a number of universities across the country, which might welcome smaller numbers of NAJP fellows. The fellowships are key; they, above all, are the NAJP's contribution to a field that otherwise offers almost nothing in the way of professional development. For this, we will need to raise some serious money: a difficult task, but also a cause to which the names of the program's numerous highly accomplished alumni and friends will lend great credibility.

I believe the program must continue as an advocate for distinguished arts journalism - by educating editors and other news executives, yes, but also by deploying alumni as formal mentors to younger journalists. I would like to see the NAJP formulate some concrete strategies for navigating the industry-wide confusion over how to adapt our messages to a new medium. And I want the alumni network - made up of intellectual and creative peers who challenge each other, who push and pull each other in new directions - to be the kind of vibrant community in which excellence thrives.

For arts journalists, particularly young journalists, who hadn't been in the NAJP, a hope for the future was obliterated when the program crashed and burned at Columbia last year. We need to restore that hope. We need to make the program real again.