Callahan is dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and vice provost of the university’s Downtown Phoenix campus.

DL: How do we best prepare students for the future?

Callahan: I would say the first thing we can do to prepare students has nothing to do with a skill set; it’s really a mindset. I believe that if we can get them to leave our journalism schools with the belief that they can make a difference right when they’re walking in the door to a newsroom—that they have a mindset that no matter what they’re doing today, it’s going to change, and they should be helping to lead that change, and they should be excited about changing, sort of working in a change-based environment—that’s probably the most important thing we can do.

We also obviously need to teach them the great values of journalism, and all the digitally related skills of journalism and digital storytelling, those are all incredibly important. But I would say the most important thing is turning out students who are highly flexible and who embrace being change agents.

DL: How do you do that?

Callahan: So the way we’ve structured Cronkite—and I can talk as much as you want to about the primary and intermediate courses, and I would say they are much more digitally focused than most, not all but most, journalism schools, but the kinds of things that are covered are similar, with more of a digital focus and more forward-looking—where we’ve really tried to differentiate is on the back end, in these professional immersion programs that our students all have the opportunity to participate in.

I came in 2005. It’s a key year, not because I arrived, but because that was the year the school became independent, and that meant a lot of things in terms of access and resources and profile. From that point, we started crafting a school whose signature was that we wanted to create these highly immersive, innovative, professionally oriented learning environments. There are different types, but what they all had in common is that they were for-credit experiences but they were in learning environments that were unique to us, and to most journalism education at the time. So we started building these, and we opened up one in the first full year, and then another and another one, all leading to where we are now, which is on the precipice of where we want to go.

We talk all the time about this, and I realize that it has become a sort of an inflammatory phrase with some people, but we talk about the analogy of the teaching hospital. … I do think the analogy is a useful one, but up until now they’ve been grown independently, now for the first time, we have a critical mass of these programs where we are going to make it a requirement for all of our undergraduates. You know, we’ve talked and talked about a teaching hospital, but we didn’t have a hospital, we didn’t have a singlelarge platform, we had small clinics. Now the acquisition of Arizona PBS has given us a hospital, taking all these professional programs all under a single umbrella and making one news organization.

DL: How will that change the nature of students’ experience?

Callahan: My hope is we’re going to have all these programs working together as one news organization, very much a real-life news organization on all different platforms, a news organization that by [the size of its staff] will be the second-largest news organization in the state of Arizona. We’ll be able to teach students in this environment how to be great journalists producing something of value for the community: serious, in-depth, public affairs, accountability journalism, and most important, we will be providing a platform for real innovation and experimentation.

When I go to newsrooms, there’s an innovation editor in most of them now, and those folks are almost always incrementalists; they’re moving the ball forward half a click at a time. But we have a different kind of luxury, we can try something next semester and it can be a disaster, something totally new that crashes and burns, we can learn from that, we can adjust, we can move forward. In a commercial environment, you don’t have the luxury of that boldness … so I think the third prong is that: We are creating an environment where you can truly experiment, not just on storytelling—we always fall back on our storytelling, we’ll fix journalism by telling stories better and people will come back. We want to do that, but it has to be much more than that: How do we engage audiences? How we communicate better? What about the business model? How can we do this all better?

DL: How do you operationalize that?

Callahan: Our TV newscast has been a TV newscast, reaching 1.9 million households every night. Our students have fantastic opportunities, and they get great jobs. It’s been pretty traditional. Now those students, and they’re still doing a newscast, are working side by side with our digital students who are doing the same story or different stories, they’re going out on the same stories, they’re in the same room at the same story conferences; they used to run independently, they had their individual story meetings, but now it’s the entire group, looking at it not just as the newscast or as the news service, but holistically.

From a learning environment perspective, they’re not just producing journalism on multiple platforms, they’re working with other students who are working across platforms, and they’re learning how it’s different, how the thinking from one platform to another is different. They’re doing that by being all in one news entity. It will be much more robust an educational experience and, quite frankly, we think they’ll be producing better, deeper, more engaging content.

For the morning meetings, for the daily news operation, we’ll have 35 people standing up in the newsroom. We do it quickly, they stand, we want to keep it moving, and they’re teamed by issues: so through the course of the semester, they’re working together, so we say, “Let’s hear from the environment team,” which might include a D.C. bureau reporter, a television reporter, a multimedia reporter. At some point, it’s a great learning opportunity for the students, but our directors are also pushing back, and together they’re defining the story menu for the day. It’s a bigger group than if you went into a traditional newsroom and attended the story meeting, we’re not sitting, there are more people, and they’re not all on the same platform. That’s just the starting point. The development of the news goes on through all kinds of individual conversations throughout the day.

DL: If the ecosystem is changing, how does your program morph over time to educate journalists of the future?

Callahan: What we haven’t built in yet is the next step, the experimentation. When you’re looking at it now, do we do more of these professional programs than anybody else? Yes. Are our students really good? Yes. Is the equipment great? Yes. But how is it different?

The next step, if you will, is how do we bake in real, substantive experimentation into all of this? And we’re doing a couple of things. We’re really at a changing point right now … this semester we’re pulling all of this together, it’s the first time we’ve had the PBS platform, and it’s all under one roof. I was originally thinking we needed one person to be driving all of this, someone in charge of the whole news operation. It will be a new hire, and as I originally conceived of it, I knew I need two things: I need a true newsroom leader, someone who has done this at a high level with great success, and I need a bold innovator, not an incrementalist, but someone who will try bold, different things. I’ve been talking to lots of people, and people will say there are lots of people out in the world like that. And I say, my pencil is ready; name one. And the more I talked to people, the more I came to the conclusion that those two characteristics are in opposition, that people who have had great success running newsrooms were not the bomb throwers. The bomb throwers are fantastic but they haven’t led anything.

The conclusion I came to is that this is two people. Now we’re going to be bringing on board a newsroom leader to oversee the fully integrated news organization. And we’re going to be bringing on a chief of disruption—not sure what we’re going to call it, exactly, but basically it will be somebody whose job is going to be not just to come up with her or his own ideas, but to find different, really interesting innovations that are going on, and really importantly, somebody who’s going to be tasked to go out into what is the largest research university in the world in terms of scale and go into every single college and every single department, to look [for] those experts and tap that expertise.

We do it already but in a very traditional way: We go to the business school, we have partnerships with content specializations like Latino Studies program and the like; we have partnerships but even then, they are fairly conservative. I want this person to be going out and going to the computer engineers, not just partnering with them but bringing these people into the hospital. What can the folks who do computer engineering be doing here in this live model, and can we get embed some of their faculty members and students here in the hospital, can they become part of this program? The same with graphic artists, business analytics, let’s go to the art school. There’s no place on campus we can’t tap into. Let’s see if we can get them to come into our hospital, let’s bring their students into our programs. There’s no place on campus that can’t add to this model. I think that is going to lead to the kind of experimentation that we’re talking about.

DL: Why would your colleagues think that’s a good idea? Why should they be willing to do that?

Callahan: We think we have something to offer them that they need and they want and they can’t get, and that is profile. These are people doing fascinating work, but they all believe the same thing: They have fantastic people, great students, innovative programs, and they all think that they are not nearly as well known as they should be, both internally and externally, and we can bring that to them. That’s a real, actual, tangible benefit.

DL: Are you talking about doing this just within your own campus?

Callahan: No. I think of it both as within the university, outside of journalism, and then externally as well. Proportion? I don’t know. Half and half? Hard to say. The university part of this is really interesting. I was having this conversation with my boss the other day, I told him that we’re all worried about journalism, about what’s going to be happening: Can it survive in a way so that it really provides the functions we think are necessary in a democracy? If we came from a different planet and were given the task of figuring out a way to make journalism great and sustainable in the long term, where would you set up shop to start doing that? I think one of the answers would be at a major research university that has all these different disciplines and all these different ways of thinking. I think one of our biggest problems in both journalism and journalism education is that we have been so insular for so long, our solution to everything is “let’s figure out a way to write a better story.” That’s not working.

DL: Does all this presuppose that journalism isn’t going to change much over the next 20 years?

Callahan: The key purpose of journalism should remain the same. Whether that’s through different kinds of storytelling, or much more use of data and engaging communities, all these other different tools that are available to us, right mix? I don’t know. I do think it’s paramount that the purpose of why we do journalism in the first place—forget the forms, forget the technology, forget everything else—I think the core values of journalism need to be held and held firm. We can come up with a media model that I’m sure will be successful, but if it’s not performing those primary functions of journalism in a democracy, then to what end?

DL: How does narrative analytics or robo-journalism fit into what’s happening at ASU?

Callahan: I think you need people who are single-minded who say, “This is the answer, this is what the future is going to look like.” When you have those innovators, that becomes part of what is going to be a complex, nuanced conflation of ways to inform. Is this going to be a part of what we’re doing? My opinion? Absolutely. Is it going to be part of what we do? Absolutely. Is it going to be the only part? I would say that’s just as narrow-minded as the folks who say it’s only about writing. It all matters, and what we need to do is have this sort of thought scaled. This kind of thought on steroids. These ideas, where I think you can go out and find these both inside and outside universities, and bringing those in and applying them and experimenting with them, that’s exactly what we should be doing. The one notion of narrative analytics is it? No. But boy, it’s exciting, and it could be a part of this as we continue to morph and grow, but again it goes back to the mindset. It’s about producing people who are going to be leading this field, who embrace this, who see this and say wow, this is really cool, I need to know more about this, as opposed to that’s not the way we do it. That’s not really journalism.

DL: Are you measuring any of this? How are you assessing it?

Callahan: We really haven’t placed the proper emphasis on measurement to date other than looking at it qualitatively, where they go, how often they change jobs, startups, etc. But we plan on making this an important part of the future.

The next faculty position we’re about to meet on and craft an ad is for getting back to measurement, getting back to audiences, digital measurements, measuring audience and then using data to inform your digital storytelling, video storytelling, whatever it’s going to be. We think that needs to be an integral part of what we’re doing in a journalism school. Obviously Medill has done the audience metrics thing for a long time, but getting into and taking advantage of the power of predictive analytics, that’s our next hire. We’re not doing it as much as we need to be doing in a more fundamental way.