Stewart is director of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens.

DL: You responded to the survey, which I appreciate because it took a lot of time. The essence of what you said struck me, because it recognized the fluidity, change and multiple audience needs and platforms now. Can you talk to me about that, and what you see journalism is now, and what it is becoming?

Stewart: Journalism is what is has been in the past. It’s informing people so they can make a decision. It will entertain them, some. It will make them cry, be upset, anchor them, amuse them, but it’s all focusing on what is really happening. It should be focused on a journalist’s take on what’s happening. Whether it’s entertainment, sports, politics, government activities, a war or whatever, it’s still a journalist’s take on what is going on. It’s always been that, and it always will be that. It’s fixed. There was something that The New York Times posted recently, a re-creation of a lawyer taking a deposition. Is that journalism? I thought that stretched the boundaries quite a bit.

DL: Why did that stretch the boundaries?

Stewart: In the sense that you were watching people who were not the people who actually did it. They were acting it out. The transcript was true. That part of it was accurate, but we don’t know how they said it. We know how the actors said it. I doubt the actors know how the real people said it. A lot of body language and nuance was fictionalized. It was highly entertaining and informative, but was it journalism? I don’t know. I am saying that it stretches what I think.

DL: You don’t see documentaries as journalism?

Stewart: It stretches the boundary. When I say “stretches,” I’m not saying it crosses the line, but it’s definitely not in the mainstream of journalism as we teach it. I don’t think it’s out of the question that we will be showing the examples and saying, “This may be coming and may be good and let’s explore it,” to let students wrestle with it. As a school, I don’t think we are sitting on top of the mountain saying, “This isn’t journalism.” We are saying, “This appeared in The New York Times, and what do you think about this and how comfortable are you with it? You are probably going to go to work in an environment where this is the norm, and how should you consider that going into it?” I love that kind of conversation about it.

It needs to be labeled, beginning to end, not a little five-second graph at the beginning. It needs to be clear that it’s not a “War of the Worlds” situation where you can jump in the middle and think the aliens are coming. I think it’s a fascinating example of what media is playing with. We are in a sandbox, which is awesome. There is interplay now, with what the Times did in that case and what we are going to talk about on campus this fall. I teach a class of 200-plus freshmen, the course is named The Future of Media. We decided when we changed our curriculum that our survey course would not be Intro to Mass Comm, but we would actually call it The Future of Media. Our students have tremendous choice as they go through our curriculum, so how do we guide them to make wise decisions? In the News and Information track, which is two-thirds of our students, out of the 12 courses they take in journalism, four are specific and the others are wide open.

DL: So the role and responsibility of journalism education is to prepare students to go into an environment where what you describe is fixed, but nothing else is.

Stewart: And to learn to be thoughtful about what they are doing. What are they being asked to do? Are they comfortable with that? Are they considering what they are doing as opposed to just doing it? I think they are going to have to be very good at critically analyzing what they are being asked to do as media organizations are exploring other ways to attract audiences.

DL: So you have four courses. What are they?

Stewart: The Future of Media, which is first semester of freshman year, which the director teaches so they all get to know the director. A multiplatform news writing and reporting class, which is the old writing class with video added to it. Media Law and Ethics. Everything else for the News and Information track students is negotiable.

DL: Are they required within those courses to go in a specific order?

Stewart: They are required to choose between News and Information versus Strategic Communication. If they choose News and Information, they are going to take three courses out of a list of ten that are skills-oriented. There are no prerequisites for any of them other than that they have taken the multiplatform course. They could take magazine-oriented courses, they could take broadcast-oriented, online-oriented, or they could mix it up. We let them decide for themselves. Basically treating them as adults. We tell them where we think things are going, and then they decide. Then they take a capstone course that is from the News and Information capstones. There’s a list of options, so there’s no set capstone, but they can’t take a Strategic Communication capstone.

DL: The Strat Comm kids, do they take those same four courses?

Stewart: Yes. They are all getting a Bachelor of Science in Journalism. Their track is a little more specific. They’ve got three specific courses. This is a mashup of advertising and PR, and those faculty members said they could create three courses that have enough of a common ground. There was no way we could do that in News and Information, so we let them choose. I really like it.

DL: How big is the school?

Stewart: We have about 850 majors, freshmen through senior. I call it a boutique degree, especially in News and Information. I’d be hard-pressed to find two snowflakes alike on graduation day.

DL: Can you talk to me about, in general, the skill sets and outcomes that the program produces?

Stewart: In some ways, they are very traditional. You can write a story. You can tell a story using video. You can write a long-form piece. You can produce a website and add to that the entrepreneurial aspect. We make those courses available and encourage students to take them. I don’t know if this is a confession or what, but you could take our curriculum and make very traditional choices and have a degree that looks like what we were doing 10 years ago if that’s what you chose. Or, all of the Strategic Communication track courses are available as electives to the News and Information students, so they can take those if they choose. They could easily cross-train. Depending on where you want to go, you will pick the courses that you think will help you. You’ve still got to be able to write a story, whether for the paper or the Web or whatever, and newspapers are paying a premium for video online, so that’s a core class that everyone has to know basic video shooting and editing in Final Cut. They all have to know law and ethics, regardless of the track. It’s traditional-plus.

DL: When you talk about entrepreneurship, what are you offering and why and who’s teaching it?

Stewart: Hans Meyer is teaching the course. He’s got a Missouri Ph.D. He took part in the ASU entrepreneurship workshop, as did Hugh Martin. We’ve got two faculty members who took part in that. Hans has been the leader of that. There’s a course, it was called Online Journalism Development, but the idea was entrepreneurship. ASU requires you to put “entrepreneurial” in the title. We had a huge discussion among faculty about that, about what it means and whatnot. I don’t think that word is actually in the title of the course, but it took about a year and a half to sort through it. The idea behind it is that everyone who takes that course is developing some kind of media product idea.

Michelle Ferrier has joined our ranks as associate dean. She’s a journalism faculty member but not teaching yet. The goal is for her at the college level to help supervise our contests so that the culture is more oriented to innovative thinking. There is that one class and everyone in that class takes part, but not everyone in the school takes part. I’m not sure how I could take 200 students and turn it into an entrepreneurial class.

DL: In terms of your program, you say we can’t get all 200 students in this entrepreneurship course, but do you think that’s a wise move?

Stewart: No. Honestly, what I really love about our program as it is currently structured is that students take the classes that make the most sense to them. We’re saying, “Here’s the menu, it’s a la carte, you’ve got four years, and you pick what you want to do.” I don’t know if we are unique in this, but I don’t hear many people talk about trusting their students to make the right decision.

The coursework is a small part of the whole thing. The other thing that we have is a culture of encouraging students to create new media platforms and outlets instead of working at the student newspaper. It’s over 100 years old, and it’s good in some ways and not great at some things. They just launched a new website, and it was like pulling teeth. It’s an independent student newspaper so there’s not much we can do, and I don’t want to take over so I try to build relations with them and encourage them. We just gave them a bunch of used computers for the first time ever. The university changed the inventory rules to raise the dollar value on what you have to keep track of. All these computers are all below the threshold and I could just give them. They thanked us for the gifts, and I said they paid for them with tuition dollars. I told them I was going to put them on the curb, and they came to get them. I want to encourage them in ways I can, and this will help.

If you look across the front of the school’s Web page, you will see a ton of student media outlets, which I think may be unique. This started about 2005, so we are almost 10 years in this culture. We had an informal student ONA [Online News Association] chapter. They went to an ONA meeting, and they were challenged at this meeting to create media. Essentially it killed our ONA chapter because they wanted to do this instead. No more chapter meetings. The young lady that created that is now at The New York Times as a multimedia producer for the investigative unit. That culture has continued and snowballed, so the newspaper has to scramble to get students to work for them. And the broadcast outlet has to scramble to get kids to work for them. When you step on campus as a freshman, everybody wants you and there are a million opportunities. If you don’t find something you like, the director says to create it. It’s not that hard to do if you find some friends. Things die, but that’s OK.

DL: Isn’t that entrepreneurship?

Stewart: I think it is. It’s not money making, although the Backdrop magazine, a print magazine, and the students that created that had to sell $5,000 in ads to print issue one and that was four years ago. It’s continued under new management every year.

DL: How many publications at any given time?

Stewart: Fifteen to 20. That includes the broadcast outlets, student newspapers, traditional things and all the new pieces. I would say at least 15.

DL: How does academia produce the students the industry needs? That’s what you believe you are doing. Do you get feedback on that from the industry?

Stewart: We have a professional advisory board that meets twice a year. Mike [Philipps] and Sue [Porter] from the Scripps Foundation are on it because of the relationship. I’ve known Sue since I joined the faculty in 1987. Her history at the foundation more or less parallels mine at OU. As the director for the last four years, I’m putting those meetings together and hearing the feedback. The members of the board range from managing department dispatch, people in advertising, a lot of alums in the media, I’ve got some really young people and super senior on there, so a nice mix of people, and they gave us a lot of feedback on the curriculum as we were going through this. They give us feedback twice a year on whatever we want to put out there. All the faculty have their colleagues and professional associations, and we have a pretty active society of alumni and friends. I’m on a conference call with them once a month. They do a nice activity called Senior Saturday in February for our seniors to get them ready for job interviews. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to hear feedback.

DL: Let me come back to something else. Your faculty talked for a year and a half about whether they were going to put “entrepreneurship” in a class title.

Stewart: It was just the word. It can be misconstrued, etc.

DL: I get that. Given the rapid change of the industry, and this is an opinion well supported by evidence, the snail’s pace at which academia, not courses, but academia moves, and the resistance to change at that level, is there another academic structure that would better serve the industry?

Stewart: Part of our mission is to serve the industry, but part of our mission is to help students become educated for society. Liberal arts, know about the world. I personally think that the way it’s working now meets both those needs. I’m not smart enough to come up with a better option than that. We punted by giving the students the choice because we don’t know. We give a lot of advising. We haven’t talked about this yet, but internship is a big part of our culture. We require an internship.

This whole debate about internships now has me very nervous. I don’t know if it is just a pendulum, so we are approaching the far end of the pendulum and then rationality will set in and sort of come back. I was at a panel yesterday because I was curious about opinions about unpaid internships. The word “unworkable” kept coming up. Eventually, the pendulum will recognize that way over here is unworkable. Not everybody is going to get a paid internship. This industry won’t pay 850 of my students to do an internship. We have pushed multiple internships as another form of punting. If we aren’t going to teach you something, they will. Between us and them, you will get enough stuff sticking to you, skills, networks and contacts, that people will want to hire you. That’s what we are trying to help the students do: become wanted and have multiple job offers. We are only part of the answer. If they pull the rug out on the internship thing, that will erode part of that answer.

DL: There are some schools that are paying students to do an internship.

Stewart: Where are they getting their money?

DL: From tuition.

Stewart: That’s a possibility. The model that has been successful for us but is not going to work is students sign up for credit in the fall, not paying us anything, it just gets added onto the fall and that doesn’t cost them any money because it’s a flat rate up to 20 credits. It does feel like the noose is tightening on how to help our students. On the other hand, the lawyers and agreements from big media companies want us to sign things, and we say we can’t sign them, so they go away because it’s unworkable.

DL: I asked a very smart and successful and brand-new undergraduate grad working at a major news organization what a journalism school would look like if she could start one from scratch. She said she would never start a journalism school because everything a journalism student needs to learn is on a campus and you will learn better from experts in those areas than generalists. What you should do is hand the student a sequence of courses taught all over campus by disciplinary experts. What do you think of that?

Stewart: I hope that’s not my school. Twelve courses out of 40 are journalism courses. One reason we did that was to give students some room on a specialization choice—in the past they couldn’t have chosen visual communication. By keeping the journalism side to 36, they can do nine credits of visual communication, but most don’t. They are still choosing history, business, etc. When we went through the curriculum change, we voted on how many courses we would require in each area. That took a long time because of the detail involved. For example, faculty didn’t think we could have students take only one history course instead of two. We had a calculator to show what the total was to stay within the quota, but every decision was voted on and it worked. We ended up with a product that has a strong liberal arts orientation. I’m happy with it. I would start a journalism school, and it would look like mine. I can sit down with any prospective student and their parents and explain it, and it makes logical sense, even in this day and age.

DL: What do you do about big data?

Stewart: We have a course in computer-assisted reporting, and the freshman class has that faculty member come in to talk about data and the importance of understanding it. We also are pushing on the Strategic Communication side more analytical data. Not big data, but we are touching it. We aren’t doing enough to give every freshman a real understanding of big data, but what should I take away to add that? A writing course?

DL: There are people who would say yes.

Stewart: That’s what I’d have to do. We kind of gutted our broadcast area when we switched to semesters. Under quarters, students had a lot more choices. I loved quarters. We would have never changed to semesters if they’d asked my opinion. Since we had to, we cut back on live broadcast opportunities in class since we have those on WOUB, but we’ve second-guessed ourselves and now we are going back halfway, with one class a year of a live broadcast experience. We didn’t feel the kids were getting enough. We are always having to reassess because this new curriculum was such a big change. This is one area where I think assessment, assessment, assessment, and it’s not for show. I need to know.

DL: The language of media is changing. The argument around big data is that a reporter needs to be able to prove his assertions; you can’t assert something, you have to have proof. You wonder what you’re supposed to give up. That goes back to the rapidity of change in the marketplace, and the intentional stability of academia, and how do you bridge those two things?

Stewart: I do think that the next thing on the list we will be asked to do is cure cancer. I think it’s a little irrational to think that we can keep teaching how to write a lead and a great headline that is clickable, and do big data and do video and all these other things, and be a good citizen. We have a bit of a handicap, which the change in accreditation has helped. Before I joined OU, visual communications was spun off to a separate school. It’s not always been easy for our students to get into those courses. Now, because of enrollment shortfalls, they are happy to take our students and we have a few double majors. When we created our new curriculum, we created space for visual communication as a second specialization area, and they welcomed it. Now we are all going to be in the same building and it’s going to be fantastic, but it hasn’t been easy to get there. Being next door to each other will help the students and the faculty.

DL: One last thing. One thing I hear about is that the way video is working now is not being an intermediary to the visual image. It’s about getting there and making it possible for the reader to be as close to the event as possible without you talking about it, like YouTube.

Stewart: YouTube has changed what the audience expects, tolerates and wants.

DL: So do you and the visual communication people teach that?

Stewart: They do some. In the basic multiplatform class, they aren’t doing stand-ups. First off, there’s no time. It’s almost simpler to say you don’t have to write a voiceover. Just do a sound bite and add it to your story. They’re learning basic composition and editing skills. I think we are doing it, but I don’t know that we’ve thought it out. It’s more organic.

DL: That’s great, but next time, you can just say you’ve removed the intermediary.

Stewart: The ten-dollar-word change. Thank you.