Back on Top:
The Journalism School Reinvents Itself
Turns out, stories about the death of the University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the 1990s were not greatly exaggerated. “We were ready to be shut down,” journalism professor Kathy Hansen says.
Years of budget cuts, loss of teachers, and a divided faculty took their toll. The problems caused accrediting teams in 1989 and 1994 to place the school on provisional reaccreditation. Their reports concluded that conditions at the school “won’t get much better very soon and could well get worse.” What had happened to a school that had been a pioneer in journalism education since it began in 1916?
 |
| Learning to tell stories in Murphy Hall's new Digital Media Studio. |
The school’s own answer, documented in a 2000 self-study, is sobering. “Collective egos, superior arrogance, and the enormity of the school’s reputation may have ultimately collided to explode the school from within,” the study states.
But now, only about four years since the darkest days, the school has been transformed. “I think what turned it around is that people realized it was either going to die or be reborn,” Campaign Minnesota cochair for the school and former Pioneer Press editor John Finnegan says. “And we weren’t willing to let it die.”
This fall’s accrediting team found a stunning shift from the last visit. “It’s a different world. I have not seen this level of change anywhere,” says Gerald Baldasty, University of Washington, who chaired the team. “We’re talking about a sea change here, a new direction, new money, and an infusion of a new spirit.”
The first glimmer of hope shone in 1997 when Mark Yudof became the University’s new president and outlined his top five priorities. They included training students for media jobs in a digital age. “It was extraordinary to find a university president give this much attention to a communications program,” Albert Tims, the school’s director, says.
Being a top presidential priority helped the school’s operating budget grow and it added urgency to the work of a task force formed to recommend changes in communication studies at the U. The school also received funding from the legislature to add faculty and renovate its home, Murphy Hall, thanks in part to an unprecedented lobbying effort from alumni
and members of the professional media.
The legislative backing and improvements undertaken by the school also helped in raising private funds. The school has raised $16 million —including a $10 million gift from Hubbard Broadcasting to enhance the ways technology is used for teaching and research and for new media studies. One million of that gift was also set up as a matching grant to encourage additional gifts from alumni.
The renovated Murphy Hall has state-of-the-art computers and fiber optics for the highest speed Internet connections. The once separate labs for reporting, graphics, and photography can now accommodate three classes at once, allowing faculty and students in print, broadcast, and Web to work together.
“There’s going to be a strong emphasis on people working in groups—the writer, editor, video person creating stories together,” says Joel Kramer, Senior Cowles Fellow and former publisher of the Star Tribune. “It’s very much like a professional setting.”
“We’re really not about the technology,” Tims says. “We’re about telling stories. The new technology merely allows us to tell stories in new ways with new tools.”
Another emphasis is connecting students with media professionals. Now, a news-reporting course is taught at the Pioneer Press. Another course on arts reporting met regularly at the Guthrie Theater, where students talked to the actors, watched a play, and wrote reviews. And the school has created an annual work-shop on economics for working journalists with the help of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Attention-drawing experts, like Nora Paul in new media, Jane Kirtley in media ethics, and media economist Dan Sullivan, have joined the faculty of the resurgent school.
Word of the recent faculty hires, a rebuilt school, additional funding, and a new vision has spread around the country. “The school is really a model for programs around the country who realize they need to change or die,” Hansen says.
by Pat Mack
An open house at Murphy Hall will be held on Friday, April 27, from 4 to 7 p.m. All alumni are invited. |
