Grabowicz is the Bloomberg Journalism Chair and director of the New Media Program at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley.

DL: This is not a research project. I’m just talking to as many people as I can about what journalism is and what it will look like in 2025. At least some recent graduates say they wouldn’t start a journalism school and would rather learn from experts across campus.

Grabowicz: I think that’s a totally legitimate criticism. Part of the problem is that internally, a lot of journalism schools do not have the expertise they need to teach the topics they are trying to teach. There’s no question about that.

DL: What’s the solution?

Grabowicz: We’ve hired enough people [at Berkeley] so that we can teach a lot of it, and for the rest of it, we find lecturers and bring them in. What we don’t try to do is bring in people who only know a little bit, and then try to turn them into experts. They have no credibility and can’t teach at the depth we need. That’s one of the struggles we are having a little bit. The faculty are coming around to needing to do digital, but they want to do it on a level that is [very basic], and it’s really starting from zero. The wrong thing to do is to decide to take a magazine and make it a digital magazine, or I have a radio station so I’ll do a podcast, or I have a bunch of video so I’m going to do some YouTube. Or you are the NYT and going to do Snow Fall; Snow Fall is print that is dressed up with multimedia. It’s well done and elegant, but it’s not the future of storytelling. It’s like Black Hawk Down. You can look at Black Hawk Down and then at Snow Fall, and it’s the same thing. Multimedia is embedded in Black Hawk Down and you just click on it. They didn’t have the fancy scrolling or popcorn, and that’s why Snow Fall is more elegant. But it’s not a new form of storytelling.

I showed students that, and then I showed them the Serengeti Lion that National Geographic did, because that’s a completely visual experience; it’s photos with video with a grand total of 26 words unless you click on the captions. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum. Or I tell my students that I am going to make this story a game. Not a frivolous game, but an adventurous game. Or do a traditional cultures story using a map. The point is, the options are almost unlimited. None of them have to do with taking what we have done in the past and converting that to digital. It’s starting from scratch and matching them to the story. What does that mean?

DL: But you have the expertise you need to do the work well?

Grabowicz: We are also just a graduate program, so that’s a huge difference. We change the curriculum every semester. New classes, different sequences, etc. We don’t have to go through some committee on courses or go to an AVP [associate vice president] for approval.

DL: You don’t have to go through anyone?

Grabowicz: We have a curriculum committee of the faculty. We have 10 courses now in digital. The number of the students is increasing who are interested in digital. All of our students get the boot camp, which is an intense, weeklong exposure to new media and multimedia and the tools. They may spend their first semester working for one of our online sites. There’s a parallel visual journalism course where we push them more on their video and photo skills.

We have three sections. One of them is a little different if you are continuing on in digital, but they are very similar. Then we do a Web skills thing, where we teach them all HTML and CSS. We want them to do a portfolio site, but that gets complicated. They all get that. After that first semester, there’s an elective of Advanced Visual Journalism if they want to get more video and photo stuff. There’s a News Packages class, which is a little bit of query and thinking more about design and layout of news stories. They have that as an elective, but that’s it. We don’t try to force them the rest of their two years, it’s up to them. About [half] want to do digital, and that’s a shift that has been occurring every year. It’s been going up.

DL: They must realize that this is the future of journalism.

Grabowicz: Some who have been through the boot camp have been posting that they have been inspired to go digital. We don’t know what we will do if they switch, because we don’t have enough faculty. I’m going to have to go outside and hire more lecturers.

[In some of our classes] the kids will start wanting to do things beyond the capabilities of the instructors. We have now hired a lecturer from the outside that is a helper for the students who want to do more multimedia on whatever platform. We add enough to get them what they need.

I worry that the students who are being shortchanged are the ones who come in and say they want to be writers. They take these classes with these great writers, and then there are no jobs in the marketplace. They can go work for a trade publication, but that’s not what they want to do.

DL: So some students do digital, some want to write. Is there anything they all need to do?

Grabowicz: They all need to do reporting. This is the part where I agree with the traditionalists; that’s where I would say that you can’t lose sight of that, and you can’t layer on too much of the digital stuff if they are not actually learning how to report and understand how to get information and how to talk to people. That’s why I still teach public records. I still have a foot in that world and that’s more than I do [with] the digital stuff, because I can see how they apply that immediately and their stories get better because they know where to get the information.

And entrepreneurship: We have that. Alan Mutter teaches that. He did a couple of startups in [Silicon] Valley, so he knows what he’s doing and has some credibility. Should we be doing that class? I don’t know about that. You need someone who has done startups to come in and teach it, but I’m not even sure if that belongs in journalism. Maybe it is a business school thing, or maybe a partnership. But even business school professors haven’t always actually done it.

DL: Should all students in a master’s program know what it is like to work in or be part of a startup?

Grabowicz: No.

DL: OK.

Grabowicz: It’s the difference between going to work for a startup and creating your own startup company. Most of the students we are graduating are not going on to create their own companies. Some of them have. John Battelle, for example, launched Wired and is a graduate of our school. He had it in his DNA to do it. Back then, there were no entrepreneurial classes. I’m not so sure about that one. I don’t know how to teach it effectively. I don’t know how many students are going to doing anything like that.

DL: Do you have any students asking you about it?

Grabowicz: Not very often. Maybe one or two a year. Usually that’s because they have some idea of something they want to do. But back to what we should be doing? It’s very difficult to change in this environment, especially at the undergraduate level. All that said, there’s also an incredible amount of movement. Usually it’s one out of three faculty members who are driving something. There’s a lot of interesting things going on, though some of it is hype. Frankly, I see a lot of smaller schools doing a lot of interesting things. A lot of them are real hustlers.

Look, I think I should retire most days. I look at what my skill set is, and I think I have a broad understanding of all of this stuff. Could I teach jQuery [a JavaScript library for easy scripting]? Probably. But I can’t learn it at the depth that is needed. Or maybe I don’t want to learn it at that depth. You’ve got to bring in people who are specialists. Another one is programming—that is a big one. If we didn’t have Jeremy Rue, then I would probably be arguing we should be sending [students] to Computer Science. He’s a journalist who fell in love with coding and taught himself. He thinks about what is the journalism application here, and that’s why the courses work so well. His courses are packed, and most of the people in those courses are women. That’s one of the things we are the most proud of, I think, is that we are training all of these females. One of them is the Web developer for Mother Jones. Another one is a Web developer at KQEP. They are the ones who are driving us.

DL: What about the data part of it?

Grabowicz: Numeracy and understanding statistics have to get better. We teach it in the intro class in the fall. It’s been all over the place. It started at two weeks and then it was expanded to five weeks, and that was too much. This year we’ve scaled it back. There’s just some base level understanding of working with numbers. You should know it even if you don’t do data journalism. That’s built in.

DL: Do you find that your students don’t want to learn math?

Grabowicz: Yes. There’s always a resistance. Or they feel like they are being talked down to or being told they’re stupid because they don’t know how to do it. Then, there’s a data journalism class, which is more about “Where do you get data sets? When do you need to file a FOIA request? How do you open the data set and put it into a program to start to analyze it? How do you look for outliers? How do you do pivot tables?” That’s an elective, but what we found was we had to split it into two sections and hire another faculty member because the demand was so big.

DL: So you are doing a lot of things.

Grabowicz: And that’s not even data visualization. That’s the other elective class that has a huge demand as well. We thought we would just teach them off-the-shelf stuff like Fusion Tables. Two guys from the NYT came in and taught D3 and R, which are both really common things. They loved the class and ran with it.

DL: That was for everyone?

Grabowicz: No, that was also an elective. And now we have a new guy because the NYT guys couldn’t do it again. He’s doing really well, and he’s also teaching that kind of thing. So about one-quarter to one-third of the students are taking data visualization as an elective. Probably one-third is taking data journalism—that’s a sequence. Data journalism is first, then data visualization, but first everyone gets numeracy their first semester. We are always tweaking it and trying to figure out how much exposure they need to have to databases, as opposed to just doing means and averages and understanding polls.

DL: My observation across the country is that enrollment in master’s programs is down.

Grabowicz: Our applications are down, but enrollments are up. I was worried about that, but they still seem to be good. I think the quality is starting to kick in.

We are also a two-year program. I saw that USC just changed to one year. I understand what’s going on there, but I don’t understand the value proposition of a one-year program.

We are more focused on the skills that you need. For me, it’s in that basic reporting, interviewing, public records, understanding what a story is, how to develop it, all of that. The basics of how to construct a story, which is writing. Even script writing. What does a narrative look like? And then there are a bunch of digital add-ons that go with that, too. And then take a radio course or a TV thing, go and do it. Then you can get into specialties or topics, or are assignment reporters going away?

What I told our dean is we have to stake out those areas that we think we can hire people or have a partnership to teach. We have to say that these are the areas we think we can have people teach some classes, and there are classes on campus you can take. If you want to learn how to be a business reporter, you can do that, in addition to learning the basics of reporting and the digital skills you need. But there’s no way you can do that in one year. In one year, I could give them a piece of paper and say they have networked and some job leads. That’s not what I want to do. I want to be able to say that if you come here, you will be a solid reporter, you will have the digital skills and have the depth of understanding about topics and have the ability to go and shine somewhere.

DL: You are structured in a way that continues to change as the environment changes, but how do you get ahead of the environmental changes?

Grabowicz: You’ve got to add another layer. We will add a course. Whatever comes along. Sometimes it comes and goes, and you make mistakes. The Innovation Lab thing that I’m talking about is about me trying to figure out how to reach out to other places on campus and bring people together to form research teams to do what you are talking about. And to work with news organizations but not necessarily the traditional ones; I want to work with CIR [the Center for Investigative Reporting] or maybe public radio, because they turned out to be innovators. I think public radio is an innovator because audio doesn’t work on the Web. They can’t just take the stuff they’ve been doing and stick it up on the Web and say this counts. They have to experiment. I have come around to working with them because they are doing interesting things.

DL: Is the academy staying ahead?

Grabowicz: No.

DL: Is the academy keeping up?

Grabowicz: Depends on where you are. Here, again, and this is a unique advantage, you are next to the Valley. We feel more behind than anyone else because of our location. On the other hand, we can tap into it. So if you are near some hot bed of activity and reach out to those folks, yes, you can keep up, but it requires a lot of effort.

DL: A lot of energy. And your faculty?

Grabowicz: There are three of us in digital. There’s one guy in TV who is on Al Jazeera on sabbatical. He’s at AJ+, where they are doing videos for Web. He wants to blow up TV programs and turn it into multimedia. So the kids that have a good understanding of visual, they are going to go work for the visual side of networks. I align myself with them.

DL: What should the academy be doing about staying current?

Grabowicz: The answer to that question is that I would tear the whole thing down. It would all have to go. The whole curriculum and the way it’s structured do not make any sense. The only thing that makes sense is to train students to work for digital platforms. And you need to assume that every faculty member has those skills.

And then we try to figure out where it’s going. You have to just blow it up. All the silos. You have to be saying that all we are thinking about here is how the kids are going to work in digital—not in newspapers, not in broadcast. I read the NYT Innovation Report from cover to cover and thought, “You have to be kidding me.” I can see that there is no multimedia going on anywhere in that newsroom. They are so far behind.

I finally came to realize that what they were arguing was that they need to do a separate unit outside of the legacy thing. Maybe then you’ll have a chance of surviving if you do that. You’ll be poised with all the things that are left. We’ve convinced the dean to do this. There’s a suite of offices that are at the far end of the building. We all hang out there. We put in an editing bay. We tore out the newsroom so we have a collaborative learning environment. We basically said, let them do it.

DL: That’s the answer then. The last question I ask is: What does it look like if you could start a program from scratch?

Grabowicz: There’s a whole skill set there. Part of it we know, and part of it will be evolving. It’s not like the old days when you didn’t have to pay attention to that. Maybe down the road, it will be like that again. I am not sure about that. For now, they have to learn a broad range of skills, but the traditional reporting also. What isn’t there anymore are the traditional publishing platforms. That’s what has to go. That’s the piece that makes no sense anymore. Part of [the new industry] we already know, and part of it will always be evolving. It’s not like the old days when you didn’t have to pay attention to that. You can’t plant your flag in the old world and then add the digital stuff on after as a layer. It’s got to be digital first.