Ito is director of the MIT Media Lab and sits on the boards of Sony Corporation, Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The New York Times Company and The Mozilla Foundation.

Ito: I think that the traditional pathway to journalism schools came through the liberal arts­—which are still important—but today’s journalists also need to have a high comfort level with math, data analysis, and computers. Technology has to be part of any good journalism school’s DNA. I think that’s a key challenge. Part of it is about open access, but part of it is also about the technical skills; the “newsroom” has changed quite a bit.

One of the questions I’ve come up with is whether journalism schools or journalism majors are really the best way to train future journalists. Maybe what we really need is more diversity. Think about a newsroom that also has a data scientist, a lawyer, a biologist and other “journalists” who have very different backgrounds.

Good journalists are people with a certain degree of passion, with a certain compass setting: They want to advance social change, similar to the way a social entrepreneur instigates change. Social entrepreneurs can be very different, depending upon what they want to do—they may be engineers or doctors—but they are all social entrepreneurs. I believe that journalists also want to reveal the truth in order to make social change—or to use Knight’s words, to inform and engage. There are so many ways to do that, as we see from the Knight News Challenges. I can see a journalism minor, but it would be much more interesting if the students in journalism classes were physicists, mathematicians, lawyers, and human rights activists rather than six people who just finished the same courses in economics, law and news writing.

DL: So what does that mean for journalism schools?

Ito: I’m on the board of The New York Times, so it’s not that I don’t think there’s a place for good, traditional journalism, but I think the J-schools are like newspapers: They have faculty, a structure, and a system that train people in a traditional way. It’s OK to have some of that, especially until we figure out what we’re going to do next. But it feels like it’s time to start experimenting with new faculty and new students with innovation on the edges of where we used to be. I think more and more of the really interesting journalists aren’t coming from J-schools. If you start thinking about where people are coming from and how they learned what they learned, you have to ask, “Do we need J-schools?”

I think a smaller number of J-schools focus on certain crafts that you need to become an editor or a certain category of journalist. I do think there’s an art to investigative journalism that you can learn on the street, but it’s great to learn from people who know a lot about it. I think that makes sense—like the way the Nieman and Shorenstein programs bring together people who are at various stages of their careers and get them to work together; those are interesting programs.

I guess that’s the thing: It feels like instead of needing the generalist, you need to have journalists who have one or two things to contribute that nobody else has. And what’s the structure within the educational system that can facilitate this? That’s a question more than an answer.

DL: What might journalism look like in 2025 that would be the underpinning for what students need to know?

Ito: I don’t think [journalism schools] will be traditional, but instead will be reinvented. I think the role of journalists in our society is a very important one and must continue. I think the business model will be very different, the way that people become journalists will be very different, and the tools will all be different. Journalism is a field in the process of reinventing itself, and where and how people learn to become journalists is being reinvented. The real question is whether journalism schools and education more broadly will be able to reinvent themselves together.

The Media Lab is 30 years old. When Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner came up with the idea of the Lab, they had the benefit of perfect timing: creating the Lab when the world was just becoming digital. They were able to pull the right people together and design the curriculum and research agenda around what was extremely relevant and exciting at the time. I think there will be some optimal moments similar to this, when we can create a new kind of journalism school—one that is practice-oriented and interdisciplinary.

Nothing against our senior people in the field, but like any other academic discipline, journalism programs are challenged by a tenure system that, unless you increase the number of faculty slots, requires more traditional senior faculty members to retire before you can bring in new people who think differently about all of this. The field is just moving more quickly than the speed at which senior faculty retire. And that’s a challenge. I think starting a new school is easier because you go out and you get the Jonah Perettis and the Nate Silvers, and you’re done.

Maybe you change the model altogether. The Media Lab grew out of the Architecture Machine group in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and now has faculty members who are scientists and engineers, but we don’t report to either MIT’s School of Engineering or School of Science. And we have a director who is a college dropout. It’s about creating a journalism school that’s kind of a hack. It’s about creating a journalism school that is nontraditional.

DL: Is journalism in 2025 all about data?

Ito: I think for a huge percentage of stories, data will become more and more important. I think it will trend that way until it reaches some equilibrium. I think it will be as important as—if not more important than—understanding the law. It’s a category of fact. It’s not just the data, but the statistics and a mathematical logic so that you can also do your own research and critique others’ research. And even do simple computer coding.

By the way, I think everyone will have to be more technologically literate, but the tools will become easier to use, like blogging and email are so much easier now. I think the technology will meet people halfway; you just have to get started.

As a topic, I think science in general—like synthetic biology—will become important stories for which we will need to build literacy, and that journalists will need to play an important role in developing the public’s scientific literacy. I believe this will become more and more pervasive. I think we might think about it like word processing. Some of the basic tools have become so easy that if you don’t want to do it, you’ll be that person who still writes on a legal pad.