Schneider is the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University.

DL: Talk to me about your ideas about journalism education.

Schneider: When we started this school here in 2006, we took a major departure. We made an important decision, and the decision was that in the 21st century, journalism schools had to take on a second mission. It wasn’t sufficient for journalism schools to just train the journalists of the future. That’s obviously a prime mission. Given the fact that we are in the most profound communication revolution probably in 500 years, it was just as essential for journalism schools to prepare the next generation of news consumers and citizens. The implications of this revolution are that (a) we are all information providers; (b) journalism is becoming a smaller and smaller part of a media world that is intended to proselytize, amuse, divert, confuse, sell, and that we need to recognize that journalism will not thrive unless there is an audience that will be able to recognize and separate what is journalism and what isn’t, and then be willing to support it. For all of those reasons, we had to think differently about the school.

DL: Yes. And so you did.

Schneider: We did. We started the school with these dual missions: one is to train the next- generation journalist, and the other is to train the next-generation news consumer and citizen. We created this news literacy program. It’s grown considerably. This semester we will teach our 10,000th student here at Stony Brook.

DL: That’s fantastic!

Schneider: Knight gave us a grant to get it off the ground so we will have completed that. The course has spread through several dozen other universities that use either part of this course or this entire course. In the last 18 months, it’s being taught in China, Russia, Vietnam, Poland, Australia, Israel and Bhutan. That’s been a big surprise, but there is a lot of interest in this course elsewhere. I went to Beijing last December to the Communication University of China that’s beginning to teach it. There’s no free press or level of concern about how they may use this course. They are not teaching elements that we teach: the First Amendment and journalism as watchdog. They are teaching the core of the course in terms of critical thinking and how to judge what is verifiable information. Of course, they approach it from a certain kind of perspective, but there is information anxiety everywhere about the audience. We are all overwhelmed in every society, and in China social media has exploded. This concern—that their population is being overwhelmed with information and disinformation and rumor and how do their citizens and students deal with this—has become a universal concern. This notion of news literacy really resonates. When I refer to News Literacy, I refer to a new tributary of Media Literacy.

Media literacy is a broader discipline that looks at the impact and creation of media on society and individuals. Everything from gender stereotyping to violent video games to social media, whereas news literacy focuses like a laser beam on news because we believe it is the currency of citizenship. Especially in the U.S., the course is obsessed with using news as a way of making this course come alive. This is about critical thinking as applied to news. We are teaching a couple of things at once: We are teaching critical thinking applied to news. But it’s also civic education at the same time.

It is not designed primarily for journalism students. Our journalism students here have to take this course. It’s a requirement, but 90 percent of the students who take it are not journalism students. This gets me to the second point, and this is why I was intrigued by your mission to pull together something. I know you are really focused on how schools are dealing with disruptive technology and new media forms, but it struck me that journalism schools are here to serve a much broader audience than might be imagined. They are no longer professional schools residing on the fringes of great research universities. If you look at the revolution we are living through, it is the job of the journalism school to prepare all of the students on the campus for this tsunami of information and disinformation that is descending upon us. It is a core competency in the 21st century, a civic competency, and it is the role of the journalism school to fulfill that. That is a very different notion of what a journalism school is or isn’t from 20 or 50 years ago.

DL: And it’s very different from what many people would say the role of a journalism school is today.

Schneider: That’s correct. I would tell you that is what we are doing that is radically different from most other journalism schools. I think we see ourselves differently.

DL: I’m familiar with the program, but is it one course or a series of courses?

Schneider: It’s one course. Three credits, 42 hours. Other universities, however, have taken this course and insinuated it in statistics, reading, social science, English. We have a professor at a local community college who makes it part of his statistics course. It’s being used in different ways. We teach it as one course. We are thinking of adding a second course in news literacy, a more advanced course. The other thing about this is we always thought we would scale this course horizontally. I mean we would spread and share this course with other universities and colleges because that was the easiest way to scale it. We do it in two ways: We have a summer institute here in which teachers come to us and study the course, and we have a weekly feed. We digitally distribute our content each week. Lectures, materials, backup, examples from the news. If this is really going to be successful, we need to scale it vertically. We need to push it down into the high schools and even the middle schools. We have high schools and even middle schools that are beginning to use the material and incorporate it.

DL: What kind of data have you collected all these years over the difference between what students think, know and feel that have had the course versus those that haven’t? What’s your conclusion about the outcomes?

Schneider: We have done two longitudinal studies so far and will probably do another one. We took a sample of the students before they took the course and after, and then a year later against a control group. The results were kind of mixed in the following way: We looked at attitudes toward the press and the news media and then their ability to critically evaluate content. In the area of attitudes and habits, the students who took the course compared to the students who didn’t take the course, when you measured what they were like three months later, the students in the course were radically different. They consumed more news, they thought news was more important, they had a more robust support to the notion of the watchdog function of the press. They had a more nuanced view of the news media overall. When they come into the course, consistently 80 percent of the students believe the news media have a systemic bias. When they complete the course, that number is closer to 40-50 percent. … There’s changes compared to the control group.

When you look at that a year later, you find that some of the things stick and some of the things don’t stick. In terms of news consumption, it begins to dwindle. In terms of keeping up with the news is crucial, the gap really begins to close. The attitudes toward the press stick. Even a year later, the students who have taken News Literacy have a greater appreciation for the press as a watchdog, they have a more nuanced view of whether the press is doing a fair job and trying to do a fair job. Some of the attitudes stick, some of the habits and news consumption begin to disappear. When you look at their critical thinking skills, when you measure them after the course, the News Literacy students in some regards, not all, in some regards are able to better critically evaluate information. Especially in video, when they look at news on TV, they are able to better assess if they can trust the reliability of the information.

Our benchmark is not whether the information is true, but whether they feel the information is reliable. Reliability is actionable. Is there enough reliable information in this news report to make a decision, take an action or make a judgment? That’s our benchmark. In some areas, a year later, again the gap begins to narrow. Some things stick, some things don’t stick. One of the implications for us after doing these studies for three or four years is that one three-credit course in your freshman or sophomore year in college is not sufficient to be transformative. Some of the students are transformed. Renee Loth was a director of the editorial pages at The Boston Globe and then went to Shorenstein and then came to our program and spent some time here. On her own, she surveyed some of our students three years after they took the course and did a piece for Shorenstein in which she finds that the students who take the course report that they are much better able to negotiate through this maze. They are careful what they retweet if it’s not verified. They feel more empowered, they feel they are stronger news consumers. Anecdotally, there is certainly some evidence that this is going on. We are not convinced one course is transformative. This is why we think ultimately News Literacy needs to be introduced and embedded much earlier in a student’s education and pulled through the education system. Given the change in Common Core, we think, and other people outside of Stony Brook think, that there is an intersection between Common Core and News Literacy.

DL: To circle back on my core questions, should all journalism schools be doing this (a) and (b) is it the role of journalism schools going forward to become more of that kind of critical thinking centers for academia rather than the professional practice that they have long been.

Schneider: I would say yes and yes with the following caveat. Yes, they should take on the second role. It’s not an “instead of” role, it’s an additional role. The role essentially is that the school should be responsible for the audience. They should be responsible for the demand side as well as the supply side. The demand side, the audience, needs to be educated and trained and prepared as much as the supply side if we are going to have, in my view, a robust, successful press and a successful democracy. Charlotte Grimes at Syracuse says all the time that journalism is an act of citizenship. It is. If you embrace that, then you need to embrace both sides of the equation. I think that’s absolutely the role of a journalism school.

DL: And so as you think about what journalism is likely to become, what other skill sets should come from the school?

Schneider: There’s more need now for a journalism school than there has ever been. It’s funny because when we started the school in 2006, some of my former colleagues at the newspaper would tease me that I would get sued for educational malpractice. We would be training students who could never find a job. Absolutely wrong. Of our students, about 60 percent of our students have a job in the news media within a year of graduation, 10 percent go to law schools and the other 20 percent go to a nonprofit.

We are pure journalism school with no advertising or PR. One, if you are really looking at a narrow perspective, which is not my perspective, even from a vocational perspective, there are jobs out there and they need people. Two, it’s clear that the news organizations for a variety of reasons are not places where students who are not tutored in journalism can land and learn a lot on the job. There’s not a lot of mentoring going on, the news organizations have lost a tremendous amount of institutional memory, there’s not a lot of professional growth and training, and the ethos of being your own journalist and entrepreneur, which I don’t endorse, suggests that we are working in isolation. If people don’t leave here with good training and skills in ethics, history, and context I don’t think they’re going to get the job. In talking to the graduates I am talking to, they are not getting much of that. They are pretty much on their own and being thrown into the pool. So that kind of grounding they need to get here. A grounding in standards. A grounding in what makes journalism special.

I have to tell you that we have just revised our curriculum after five years. We have a multiplatform curriculum. The culminating course here is the student goes out and finds an original story idea and writes 2,000 words about it. A text piece for the Web, newspaper or magazine. She then converts the piece into a video that could stand alone as its own TV segment on this subject. You script it, write it, shoot it, edit, and then build a website. Then you aggregate the video and text and add three to five other interactive elements. That’s their senior project. What we discovered after a couple of years is that this is very ambitious and we said if students can do this, they deserve to get out of school. They can do cross-platform stuff and add value. We discovered the technical stuff was easy for them, but the hard part was the reporting. Getting beyond the obvious. Asking more questions. Challenging authority. Not accepting information on the face of it. That was the hard part.

We went back and redesigned our curriculum with much more emphasis on reporting. Our first course now is called The Mind of the Reporter. That’s the very first course we are now teaching. Even before they go out to do anything else. Journalism schools are more important than ever from a journalism perspective: teaching the next generation of journalists. If they don’t learn it here, I’m not sure they’ll ever learn it the right way. Two is the audience equation. I’m not sure, especially in a siloed universe, that anyone is taking any ownership for the next generation of citizens who get most of their civic information from the news media. Who is responsible for educating those people? No one is taking ownership. That is a tremendous opportunity for journalism schools to reposition themselves and become more important in the university environment.

DL: That’s an interesting idea. Jan Schaffer is incredibly articulate about how this is an opportunity for the journalism school to become the essence of the new liberal arts.

Schneider: I’m amazed when I talk to other deans. Some of them get excited about News Literacy, and others have reservations. If you want to be self-interested, journalism schools are being consolidated and being folded into other schools. This is an opportunity to grow and be expansive and to think differently about ourselves and to become central to the mission of a major research university in the 21st century. I think this message resonates with college presidents and everybody else because everyone is experiencing firsthand what it is like to be faced with this kind of tsunami of information and to sort through it and make intelligent decisions. I’m not sure we have even thought this through in the way it is probably a much more expansive idea. I think one way is to marry this with some of the other disciplines on campus, like psychology and political science. I think we could come together and do something really special in terms of liberal arts.

DL: If that’s the case and there’s a broader, more expansive, liberally grounded role for the journalism school, what about the other end of the spectrum, where journalism is becoming all about data and technology?

Schneider: You are talking tactical stuff. You can incorporate big data into the flow of a journalism school without radically altering its central mission, which is producing the next generation of reporters who can find stories that no one else can find or are not willing to look for. People who can get to the bottom of stories that no one else can get to the bottom of and people who can respond authoritatively to misinformation. Data is a tactic. It’s another way, another skill set, another critical aspect of how you teach journalism in the 21st century. It doesn’t replace journalism. It doesn’t radically alter its mission. It doesn’t change its nature. We are incorporating, like most universities, more of that kind of thing into our curriculum but it’s not a radical departure from our central mission, which is to get information into the hands of people who we can verify and provide context to and empower them to make decisions. It’s just another way to do it.

DL: How does a school like yours or any other school continue to provide students with what is a rapidly changing skill set that they need?

Schneider: You need to be dynamically attentive to two things at the same time: the changing landscape and the constants. So you keep your eye on both things. What’s constant? Reporting, writing, critical thinking, the audience are all constants. None of that will change or be altered dramatically by technology or different jobs. The hard part is not losing your core values, your nerve, your courage, and not abandoning that on the basis of what’s trendy. And running away from that on the ground.

I think we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of judging ourselves harshly because students haven’t mastered social media during their first 15 minutes at the school. The great differentiator will not be technology. All of the students are able to use social media, all build websites, all edit on video, or at least many of them. The other stuff, the reporting and writing, are what you need. It’s finding original stories and knowing how to do that. One is paying attention to those constants and making sure they are enriched and paid attention to. The other part is staying dynamically attentive to the landscape. This is where reaching out to other professionals and being involved in partnerships with news organizations and having people on your faculty that are terrific scouts for you and staying in touch with your alumni. Those are all essential for you to begin to say you are falling behind and need to change.

DL: There are a lot of people who agree that basic courses in writing, reporting, editing, law and ethics are core, but beyond that, why would students come to journalism schools to learn literacy and other things? Why not just learn from the masters, disciplinary experts in departments across the university, rather than from journalism “generalists”? What’s your response to that?

Schneider: You put your finger on a reason to have journalism schools in great universities. Journalism is incredibly promiscuous. We can marry with anyone. One of the great values to me of being at a big research university like Stony Brook is that our students should be able to take journalism and all the other things they want, like dual degree program, dual major programs, workshops, electives. You’re absolutely right. They’re not mutually exclusive. We have a comprehensive program here; they take 49 credits, and at least 75 credits outside of journalism. We’ve been thinking recently, because we have a small master’s program that focuses on medicine, science, technology and the environment here in journalism. We want to create a five-year program with global studies in it for international reporting. We want to create a five-year program with sustainability studies and environmental reporting. There are so many possibilities to marry journalism. I don’t look at them as exclusives. Journalism students can get both if they go to the right university and program. They can get all of that expertise and journalism.

… Should students be taking economics? Absolutely. Should students be taking government and political science? Absolutely. Should they be taking statistics? Absolutely. Should all of our students do that? Absolutely. And we will demand all of that, and they will be grounded. Then they can take lots of things: environmental studies and physics or whatever they want to take. But the core journalism program, it seems to me that you can’t pretend that three or four courses are sufficient for journalism education.

There are people who say we don’t need journalism education: Why don’t you become a liberal arts major, study political science and then become a reporter? I think that’s very hard these days. I think you do need to understand what journalism is, how it works, and that it is an art and science. I think you need to be inspired by others who do it extremely well. I think you have to recognize what is excellent and what isn’t. I think having experiences in which you can go out and work as an intern is very crucial in making life choices and critical thinking choices and networking with people. I think recognizing possibilities you never imagined even in journalism is crucial when you are in journalism school. All of those things are important, and I don’t think you can do that casually in three or four courses.

DL: The argument has been around forever that you don’t need to have a journalism degree to be a journalist.

Schneider: Going back to Missouri in 1908 when the legislature agreed to grant a journalism degree, there was a great deal of resistance on the ground because it was a vocation and craft and was not worthy of a degree at the university and that argument still lingers. In the ’50s, we moved toward media, so journalism schools expanded to include communications and Ph.D. programs. Now we have the third wave that is raising questions about the function and need for journalism schools in the digital age. In my view, this is the third iteration of this rethinking of what journalism schools should be and do.

DL: The purpose of this exercise is to consider what a journalism school is and what does it do and what should it do. It is about capturing people’s best ideas around that. I have been surprised by the lack of consensus. I think people recognized that there are fundamental skills that a journalist needs to know. But if you look at the emerging journalists, they didn’t go to journalism schools.

Schneider: Who are the emerging journalists?

DL: People point to Ezra Klein.

Schneider: I am not sure those people are really the kind of journalist we are talking about.

DL: There you go. Let’s define our terms.

Schneider: Nate Silver is not a model of what I consider the future of journalism to be. He’s great with data, he mines it, he’s a subset of a skill set, and he’s a smart guy. He’s not the be-all or end-all of what journalists are going to have to be in the 21st century. We are in a period of destabilization. People are anxious. I think it’s good we have lots of models. I think what you are finding is very healthy, and it’s a product of the disruption and destabilization. I think the best thing for journalism schools in American now is to have divergent and multiple models. I think in many ways this is very healthy.

DL: I agree. The wonderful thing about it is that people feel passionately about it. It’s a very interesting time to be having these conversations.

Schneider: The fact that we can have multiple models competing in different ways working side by side is wonderful.

DL: It absolutely is.