Rutenbeck is dean of the School of Communication at American University.

DL: How should we be thinking about the future of journalism and journalism education?

Rutenbeck: We’ve got to have some friction here because if we just left the industry of journalism to find its own way, game over. We have to restore some of the conversation about why journalism and accountability matters, why we should think about journalism as an activity instead of an industry.

DL: How do you do that?

Rutenbeck: I was working on another project and writing down some ideas this morning. I’ve charted out five pillars or ideas that I thought were important.

Engagement design. This is something a lot of people are talking about: How can we more effectively engage in our work with our publics as the systems of communication and techniques for storytelling evolve so quickly? Synonymous phrases would be to compete for attention, to secure investment on the part of readers and users. Engagement design is, I think in some ways, the new rocket science. It’s very hard to figure out, and once you tap something, it’s very hard to replicate it or find it the same way again, which is why I think design sensibility is useful, but only up to a point because you can’t structure it or predict it.

You could argue that in the old economic and systems thinking, that it would predictable and there’s simply a reorganizing effect taking place right now. I disagree. My persistent feeling is that we have embarked on a path that is perpetually reorganizing. There is no stabilization mechanism. What we are really building is complexity management mechanisms.

If you look at journalism as a complexity management activity, you would say that through innovative practices, through emerging technologies at various stages, journalism has been at that flashpoint. One of my favorite periods to study is the rise of the telegraph and news services and how that all completely reorganized the news operation and redefined what news was. It feels like we are going through that constantly every day. What was different then was that all of the moving parts were gigantic, but once they were established and set in motion, they stayed more or less on track. Now we’ve got the digital paradox, which means things can be gigantic and miniature at the same time; size doesn’t determine the nimbleness or the responsiveness. Now, will Google turn on a dime tomorrow? Probably not, because they are making too much money—so profit is the inertial force that hasn’t changed. That means the ability to disrupt is still there: Google can’t buy every competing idea or everything that threatens its future. It’s just not possible. I’m of the mind that we are in this new river, and it’s flowing faster and not in predictable directions. Engagement design to me seems to be an area that would be worth several decades of investment. That’s part of why I have worked hard to bring a program in game design in persuasive play here; I think game designers have some unique and powerful mindsets and skill sets to bring to this engagement design question.

DL: Do you look at game design as an adjunct to or as a central thread of journalism?

Rutenbeck: Journalism has had the luxury of not having to ask itself the existential question of why should anyone pay any attention to us at all, and it’s had that luxury for so long. It was well beyond constitutional prominence; it was a system of a society and economy that relied on it to intermediate, and that position is no longer available. It hasn’t necessarily been filled by anything else; it’s just gone. As the evolution takes place, and as journalism becomes a more complex behavior and a part of a more complex organism, game design becomes yet another mindset and skill set that is available. It’s not one that you use all the time; it’s one that can be misused and is rarely used well now. I would argue that has always been the case [with new technologies]; if you study media history, you always see all the fumbles and clumsy acts.

The bottom line is the system. [Journalism] will either function effectively within the system or it won’t. The system won’t embrace it because of the First Amendment or the tradition of fill-in-the-blank. In a way, the reality is colder and harsher than ever.

So how can journalism turn that to its advantage? One comparative segment would be library or information professionals. Depending upon whom you talk to, it’s either been the best or worst 20 years. The ones that are still around are the ones that thought it would be the best 20 years and made the most of it. I think journalists could learn a lot from hanging around with successful librarians.

Another pillar concern is the sheer complexity of the communication system. How do you maximize the use of it, but how can you also shape it? You don’t want to just understand it. You want to be a player. Never before have you had the opportunity to be a player. Who would have thought a tiny little Texas nonprofit journalism entity [The Texas Tribune] would become the top of the town? Pick any of these sort of shiny, local or small-scale projects that people start paying attention to and learning from. The influence these individuals can have on a larger system, it starts to feel like 1999 all over again, where the little guy in the garage startup or the people in Ottumwa, Iowa, can come up with something that ripples through the system. The fact of the matter is that it still happens a lot, but the system has grown exponentially in size and complexity. We are our own big bang in process. We’ve unleashed this algorithmic torrent of change that doesn’t need human energy to keep going. Like [robo-journalism]. That amplifies the scale and pace of everything, but it amplifies the scale and pace of human agency and human impact, too. We’re never going to conquer or harness it; the best we can do is participate in it and treat it more like a basketball game and less like a soccer game: the lead changes hands all the time, and people makes baskets all the time, and you just hope the whistle doesn’t blow. In watching the World Cup, all that tension gets released and managed in one pivotal moment that determines the outcome. That’s the way we’ve written history or think that is the way things have happened. The literary tradition wants us to believe that. One person will figure this out. That’s not the reality. I think that we should be tapping into the disciplines that understand complexity and begin to embrace it. I would say that is decidedly not in journalism. Journalism has been taught and delivered and practiced as a presumption that everything boils down to a few basic facts.

DL: The tradition of three sources.

Rutenbeck: The world is rejecting journalism in part—maybe not rejecting but questioning it—because journalism isn’t doing its job. We now need to understand complexity and be able to use it. That’s the impact measurement and analytics part of this. If you think of what the impact measurement and analytics of journalism was—pick a decade in the past: 1872. 1920. 1975. Whatever. One level would be economic indicators, although the die-hard journalist would say that is the ugly side or the business side. I think journalists would point to these moments. What matters and how we can measure what matters are pivotal questions.

Another pillar for me is transformative storytelling. Through all of this, what everyone still values most is a good story told, an important story told, a personal story told, told well and told with impact. Journalism—as it sheds this ball and chain of objectivity and gets back to the realization that journalists are trying to influence the world like everyone else—is like the Oklahoma Land Rush. Everyone is lined up there at the starting line: Journalists are right there with high school kids and the housewife in Mumbai, and they all have stories to tell. They know stories, and they’re filmmakers, they’re strategic communication practitioners, and the list is endless. So how do we create a new industry around transformative storytelling? How do you start telling stories in ways that matter and ways that actually positively impact the world? Journalists, as a stereotype, don’t strike you as the “let’s make the world a better place” kind of people but deep down, they are. The catch is, there’s no way to corner that market and harness it and challenge it. What do you do when Hollywood gets involved in journalism? What do you do when government gets involved in journalism (even though they’ve been involved since the beginning)? Transformative storytelling is still the magical art; it’s still there and still matters. I suppose it’s the one thing you can point to and say it’s been constant. The catch is, what counts as storytelling and what has impact of storytelling is changing. I think it’s changing for the better. Is BuzzFeed journalism? Parts of it, yes. Do I look at it? Yes, I learn a lot through BuzzFeed, and I get distracted a lot, and I get horrified regularly.

The last pillar for me is leadership and accountability. If I go back to the core of what has typically been the case with journalism enterprises is that those who are running them have been in significant leadership positions going way, way back. I think it’s still true today. I think Jeff Bezos made that statement in buying the [Washington] Post: I’m a different kind of leader and different kind of entrepreneur. I’m an influencer and shaper. I’m a respecter of the democracy. That reconnection of leadership and accountability is, I think, a core function of what journalism has always done through the various epochs and periods. I do think that the stakes are higher than ever before, in terms of the power and impact that leaders have and the kind of checking mechanisms that need to be in place to keep everyone alive and safe.

Outside of religious school, journalism is the only “ism” you can study in higher education. It’s kind of funny because if you think about how it’s grown up in higher ed and how we’ve tried, I can’t sum up what higher ed has tried to do with journalism, but we’ve kind of lost touch with the fact that it’s a practice and more than just a mindset. Journalism exists by being done; it’s not a belief system. One of the many things (media scholar John) Merrill brought up in “Existential Journalism” was that in the end it doesn’t matter what you say you believe in or think is important; it’s what you do. That’s its own harsh and cruel message about media today. We are now in a 24-hour news cycle, and it takes microseconds to generate an algorithmic BuzzFeed. … There’s a part of big data that is not very human-centered at all.

DL: That’s what robo-journalism is all about.

Rutenbeck: What is the existential part of that? Where are you identifying yourself as a journalist, a citizen, a participant, a leader? I go back to “Is this a basketball game that never ends, or is this a soccer game with a penalty shootout?” Humans have to hope this is the game that never ends because from a score-keeping standpoint, we need sleep and food. We take breaks and vacations. The algorithmic part of this doesn’t do all of that. It is like that scene in “Terminator” in the garage with Sarah trying to impress upon us what is going on. They never eat and sleep and don’t care, and all they want to do is destroy you. That’s the less sunny side of technology.

We say the Pulitzer Price is the ultimate prize in journalism. Why is that so? Why can’t the ultimate prize in journalism now be something that my friend’s grandmother just won because of what she is able to do in Boise, Idaho, related to some journalistic activity? Is she a journalist? Is she part of a journalistic enterprise? I don’t know. It seems like the systems of journalism have gotten off track to the point we are not even recognizing the leadership and accountability urgencies that are there in front of us. Other fields are paying attention to this. Business is paying attention to it. How many crashes have they had? They’ve had a lot of existential models, and there is a lot more money behind that stuff. We are dealing with corporate partnerships now that are complex and really perplexing for me. I think they are relevant to this set of pillars. Twenty-five years ago I would have been chased out of town with torches and pitchforks if I, as a dean, were talking to the people and potential partners I’m talking to [today]. In a way, it is like the apocalypse. The meteor has struck, and now everyone is making new friends and figuring things out.

DL: What does success for you look like here at American?

Rutenbeck: In five years, if I look at this list of the five pillars and I can look back and say, “I know how journalism and strategic communication, film and media arts, and game design are all part of the same school.” Right now they are separate degree programs, separate research centers and separate faculty appointments. There’s sort of the geek dean or higher ed administrator side of things that will look back and say, “I’ve been successful because we’ve given people access to each other and allowed them to do great work.”

What has to be important for us is are we attracting people who have the right potential and who then are able to tap into that potential in ways that engage, measure, transform, believe at the highest level. This is the amazing thing about being in Washington. It’s such an exciting place to be.

The internal victory would to be to get a school that does justice to where it’s at and who is with us. Something that is realizing that potential to play a very influential role, and to create and sustain conversations that no one else can do. So, in some ways, the measure of my job here will be can I bring this school to its historic potential.

Let me add another brick in the backpack. So it’s also not necessarily the most attractive option our students have. This is the crazy part. We have a fully funded Washington Post fellowship. Dianne Lynch, come get a master’s degree at AU, full ride plus stipend, 20 hours during the week [at the Post] during the year and 40 hours a week in the summer. We can’t fill it.

DL: What!? Why can’t you fill it?

Rutenbeck: Because the students who are the most talented are getting sucked into other opportunities that are not at regular places.

If I go back to the partnership strategies that I’m working on here, not naming names, a couple of large financial institutions, one or two media organizations, and a nonprofit with a large endowment are all equally competing for our best students. Remember, we have more than just journalism students. I have students thinking that I have a job offer from AP in New York, but there is this really cool strategic communication company in, I don’t know, pick a city, Austin, Texas, or whatever, and [they are] taking the non-journalistic next step. With a lot of our partners and our partners’ energy, we are getting more from our non-journalism, non-media partners. If there is a message to deliver, it’s to get better at partnering. Going back to where I think journalism is still struggling, it has been knocked off the top of the totem pole and it’s back to scraping elbows with everyone else, and they need to catch onto that fact.

If you take contemporary challenges as the problem, you set that on the table and ask, “What is the best way to approach the problem?” and not ask what my school, discipline, profession, or industry should do. There are people doing that all over the world, putting the problem first and structuring the solution to the problem.

DL: So the problem drives the solution.

Rutenbeck: Absolutely. And as we learned in the late ’90s, when everyone thought we turned the world on its head, that nothing was the same anymore, and the economics were different. Guess what?

DL: They’re not?

Rutenbeck: I think that’s probably the most interesting part of it all.