On a side note, Arizona State University seems to be on the move these days. I have quite a few colleagues who’ve joined the faculty and staff there to work on innovative projects in journalism, including Retha Hill, who runs the new media lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication; Jody Brannon, who directs the Carnegie-Knight News 21 Initiative, Jason Manning, director of student media; and Len Downie, Weil Family Professor of Journalism.

Another friend and former colleague of mine, Steve Fox, took the plunge into journalism education last year, too. Well for Steve, it was more like a graceful dive. While an editor at washingtonpost.com, Steve taught in the journalism program at the University of Maryland for several years and has lectured at many other universities during the time I’ve known him.

Steve spent the better part of the last decade as a senior editor at post.com, leading, at various times, the politics, nation and newsdesk teams. At the end of 2006, he teamed up with Jay Rosen, of New York University, and others to launch Assignment Zero. Now he spends his days molding the next generation of journalists at the University of Massachusetts.

See what Steve says motivated him to make the transition and where “true innovation” can be found.

How long were you in journalism and why did you make the transition out of the newsroom and into the classroom?

Why is a bit complicated.

My first editor back in Peekskill, N.Y. told me in 1984 that I would burn out, that no one lasts forever in daily journalism. I told him he was nuts, that I had always wanted to be a journalist, why would I ever leave?

That, of course, was before the 24-hour news cycle and the dominant corporate bottom line within newsrooms.

When the 2000 election debacle happened, I thought “this was the biggest story ever and I’m a part of it…”  Then 9/11 happened, anthrax, the DC sniper, the midterm elections, the Iraq War….and on and on.

It seems that the news cycle since the 2000 election has been continuous.  I don’t want to say that I burned out but the combination of a news cycle that never takes a break and a news company that became more and more about the bottom line and less and less about true innovation was what pushed me to make the transition.

Unlike corporate journalism, academia makes you feel like you’re having a real impact and allows you freedom to experiment in methods of delivering journalism as well as subject matter.

What are the biggest challenges facing journalism schools?

The challenges facing journalism schools mostly lie with the pace of change.  Many schools are struggling with how to revise their curriculum to deal with multimedia reporting and convergence.   Some schools understand that the concepts need to be developed across all classes, while some are creating silo.  Many are struggling with hiring.

Journalism schools need to understand that they need to hire experienced professionals to come in and help bring change to their departments — yet many departments remain fixated on the notion that new hires need to have experience AND doctorates.  That is slowly changing as schools make “professional hires” but the pace of change needs to speed up.

What advice do you have for new graduates trying to get their first new media job?

What I tell my students is to be an expert in one delivery form yet be familiar and have a working knowledge of many.  One of my students really likes video editing, yet can also write and put together a decent package.  She’s ready for the new media newsroom.

The other big thing is mindset.  I try to tell my students to go into the profession with an open mind.  We may not know much about the future but we do know that the industry will continue to change and change rapidly.  The “next big thing” is out there and we have no idea what it is.  Amazingly, at The Post, some of the folks least resistant to change were the young reporters.  You have to have an open mind.

What are the biggest challenges facing online newsrooms?

It’s against my nature to make vast statements about news operations I haven’t been a part of, but speaking generally I think the focus on the bottom line is forcing talented journalists out of many online newsrooms — and will continue to do so.  The end result is partly good news for journalism schools but also means that many MSM journalists and editors are going out into the open marketplace to act as bloggers, citizen journalists, etc.  And THAT is where the true innovation is taking place.  Until online newsrooms realize that they have to start being pro-active and less reactive, this bleeding will continue, and with it less users going to the respective Web sites for their information.

Do you see any potential for online newsrooms to partner with journalism schools? If so, what are the possibilities?

Yes! I think the possibilities are endless!  But, again, whether online newsrooms will take that innovative leap remains to be seen.  On the upside, online newsrooms get free labor, but I can already hear laments about quality issues.

How is teaching different from or similar to what you were doing in the newsroom?

The similarities lie with the teaching aspect of editing.   Unlike newsrooms, you most times don’t see an immediate result with teaching.  There are more subtle results and they can be much more fulfilling.   As I mentioned earlier, the lack of a corporate bottom-line and the inherent academic freedoms that come with teaching allow for much more innovation and explorations of “true journalism” than in corporate newsrooms.

A few weeks ago I reached out to some journalists I know who have made the transition from newsrooms to classrooms. First up was Retha Hill, who left BET.com for Arizona State University. This week, I’ll share what Ryan Thornburg had to say.

Ryan is an assistant professor at UNC-Chapell Hill, where he is helping the journalism school integrate new media throughout its curriculum as well as teaching a couple of classes of his own. He also the former managing editor of usnews.com and CQ.com. Ryan and I worked together at washingtonpost.com, where he led the Politics team.

How long were you in journalism and why did you make the transition out of the newsroom and into the classroom?

I hope I still am in journalism, at least as much as a physician at a teaching hospital is still in medicine. But I was in newsrooms for 10 years. I made the transition because there’s a great untapped opportunity for journalism schools to be on the cutting edge of tapping that opportunity. And, on a personal note, my wife grew up in Chapel Hill and we both received our undergrad degrees here. With our young family, it was a great opportunity to live near family and friends.

What are the biggest challenges facing journalism schools?

It’s probably not the same for all journalism schools, but I’d say one of the first big issues is attracting the university’s best and brightest students — those who are intrigued and excited about this historic moment in democracy and communication. Not all of the best journalists, after all, come out of journalism schools. Why not? Most schools also probably face issues not unlike the industry — funding, speed to innovation, cross-departmental collaboration, generational change in personnel.

What advice do you have for new graduates trying to get their first
new media job?

Understand your prospective employer’s needs with great specificity, then be able to clearly describe how you fill that need. The biggest need I see right now is for people who understand data-driven online journalism. There’s also a need for people with strong copyediting skills and seasoned news judgment. And a need for beat reporters who just really love reporting and who are adept at working in a variety of media and formats.

Choose your first job as carefully as your pocketbook allows. Seek the ability to work with a good editor in a shop that has demonstrated real commitment — not just jargon — to online operations. And be sure that commitment is motivated mostly by a positive vision and not just fear — OK, maybe a little fear. Commitment to online operations does not mean cutting staff at the print operation, and it does not mean asking fewer people to do more work at lower quality.

Ask smart questions that help you understand how the organization’s audience is responding to their innovations online.

What are the biggest challenges facing online newsrooms?

Irrelevant and boring stories. Same as all news media.

Do you see any potential for online newsrooms to partner with journalism schools? If so, what are the possibilities?

Oh, huge. Research, development and continuing education.

Research: Understanding more about audience behavior and preferences. Understanding more about credibility and trust online. Developing standards of ethics and models of leadership. One way that journalism schools could be helpful immediately is helping newsrooms define success for their online projects, and developing techniques for learning from failure. We have all this new ability to measure performance, but there’s no real agreement going in to most projects on what metrics will define success. Newsroom constituencies spend too much time seeking evidence to support their position about whether a project “worked” or not. Academics are in a perfect position to be a neutral third party that defines goals, measures activity and articulates lessons learned. Newsrooms are not — and shouldn’t be — equipped to do that kind of navel gazing.

Development: Schools can develop editorial products before there is a market to support them. In fact, schools should help figure out how and whether markets will support concepts such as “journalism is a conversation, not a lecture.” They should help figure out how news organizations can use Facebook and the iPhone. The development role is an editorial, technical and business collaboration — and the best j-schools will figure out how to work across departments to make it happen.

Continuing Education: Our graduates’ skills are becoming outdated so fast that we probably should put them on some sort of service plan. (Hey, now there’s a money-making idea.) On the other hand, the values that we teach our graduates are eternal. Writing for a general audience. Legal and ethical guidelines. Brevity. Precision. Accuracy. Curiosity. Fairness. Journalism schools should also be reaching out to the burgeoning field of amateur journalists and providing resources for them to obtain a grounding in these values.

How is teaching different from or similar to what you were doing in
the newsroom?

After a semester in, I barely know what I don’t know.

Photo by Aaron Roberts

Over the next week or so, I’ll share their responses to questions about their current roles and the challenges facing journalism and journalism schools.  

Let’s start with Retha Hill, director of the new media lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Retha is the former vice president of content at BET Interactive, where she launched BET.com seven years ago. I know Retha from her days at washingtonpost.com, where she was an executive producer for special projects and an editor for local news and arts and entertainment.

What are the biggest challenges facing journalism schools?

The biggest challenges facing journalism schools is preparing students to enter a vastly different world than the one many of the professors are familiar with. Newspapers and broadcast news are facing market loss, and the younger demographic is simply not that interested in news as we traditionally define it. Not only are they not reading newspapers or watching the nightly news, but only 29% of them regularly get their news from traditional news dot coms. That 29% has held steady for the last 6 years. If NYTimes.com, washingtonpost.com and the rest are to grow their audience they need new ways of reaching that audience; and the new journalists really need to be adept at getting information to this largely disinterested demographic. That means knowing how to create compelling content online — so j-schools have to teach them both the fundamentals of reporting but also the fundamentals of web page design, flash, video production, etc. But it goes beyond that to teaching these students to be innovators. To constantly think outside of the box – not to build a better news site but to reinvent news sites and think about how to reach younger people where they are.

What advice do you have for new graduates trying to get their first new media job?

Get as much experience as possible in the real world — whether that is building your own web site, volunteering at a local web site and definitely having your own Facebook or Myspace page. And you have to learn the craft. There is nothing that makes a hiring decision maker salivate more than a young person with good news and online experience.

What are the biggest challenges facing online newsrooms?

75 million gen-yers aren’t interested in their current product. That begs for change. Newspapers have done this before — going from party-affiliated rags to independent newspapers, going from yellow journalism to investigative, muckraking papers, replacing prejudiced reporting with reporting that better covers the entire community. This one is harder because of the technology and fickleness of the under-26 crowd — Myspace is hot today and cold the next; Facebook is the bomb now and will probably go the way of Friendster in a few years.

Do you see any potential for online newsrooms to partner with journalism schools? If so, what are the possibilities?

I think there is much potential. AT ASU, journalism students work at azcentral.com (the online site for the Arizona Republic and News Channel 12), doing the news updates, for example. They get the experience and the news site gets a supply of reporters who can rapidly update breaking news. I could see this being replicated in TV and newspaper online sites. Online news sites could also use the university journalism programs as sounding boards for new content applications.

How is teaching different from or similar to what you were doing in the newsroom?

Before coming to ASU this semester, I spent most of the last 13 years working with younger new media people or training traditional journalists to be online journalists, so I’m still doing that here. At the New Media Innovation Lab, I have students who have worked online and some who haven’t, but they are all open to news ways of doing journalism and that’s great and refreshing from some of the newsroom types who resisted change or are reluctant to truly embrace, say,  user-generated content.

Many of them had blogged on occasion, but most admitted to letting their blogging lapse. I understand being busy — in fact, this blog has been on my to-do list for quite some time. However, I have a job in new media, and because some of them want to get one, my first suggestion was to dust off those blogs and start writing again. Online managers, I told them, would appreciate some evidence that they were familiar with certain tools and techniques of the Web.

Other suggestions:

1. Pick up a video camera. They’re cheap these days, and a little experimentation goes a long way. Projects such as washingtonpost.com’s onBeing prove that there is power even in simple interviews that allow the subject’s voice to be heard above all else.

2. Take supplemental classes. Some of the students were graduating this semester; others, in the spring. But because their curriculum isn’t heavily focused on multimedia yet, I encouraged them to seek out classes at community colleges or other institutions.

3. Self-teach. The cheapest, if not easiest, way to pick up new skills is to teach yourself. When I began my foray into online journalism nearly nine years ago, I didn’t know html or much else about producing content online. However, I was convinced I could pick it up, so I bought a copy of “HTML for Dummies,” and the rest is history.

4. Learn more about the Web. I talked to them about different ways to approach online journalism, but my point was that they should do more than use the Web, they should become students of it and all the ways the Internet and technology are changing journalism and the discourse between the producers and the consumers of news.

5. Make use of free tools.  There are many free tools and tutorials on the Web. Tools such as Audacity, for audio editing, provide students with an economical way to learn new skills. There are a host of tutorials on html, css and flash, and most multimedia programs will allow a 30-day trial period. A resourceful student can get a feel for just about any technology out there. 

6. And my standard refrain whenever I talk to students or academics remains the same. Know the basics: Memorize AP style, keep honing your reporting and writing skills, brush up on grammar, understand the basic tenets of journalism. All the technological savvy in the world doesn’t compensate for a journalist who falls short on the basics.

 Have any other suggestions? I’m sure the students would appreciate them.