Rieder: Journalism innovation lab may be 'game-changing'

In recent years, as the journalism industry has been thoroughly disrupted by the Internet and traditional news outlets have shrunk, the notion of journalism schools as teaching hospitals has gained traction.

The idea is that J-schools should focus heavily on professional skills and have their students produce actual journalism, just like the pros. And, in fact, student work increasingly is showcased by legacy news organizations hungry for content as a result of their diminished staffs. There's also hope the schools can be incubators for innovation in a field that desperately needs it.

Often, though, the hospitals are really more like clinics, valuable but one-off programs like bureaus covering the state capital.

Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is about to take the concept to the next level.

Starting next Tuesday, the J-school will own and operate Eight, Arizona PBS, the PBS outlet in Phoenix, the nation's 12th-largest media market. It will take over news and public affairs programming on the station's three TV channels and its website. And, more intriguing, the school will offer the station as a venue for professional news outlets to experiment as they try to reinvent journalism in the digital age.

"This has game-changing potential," says Christopher Callahan, the Cronkite School's dean and the university's vice provost. "The combination of a large PBS outlet and a university that prides itself on disruptive innovation is very powerful."

Callahan says the PBS station will emphasize producing valuable content for its Arizona audience. But it's the national journalism lab that will make the venture stand out.

"We want to be a hub for ideas for a practice reinventing how we do what we do," he says. "It will be a lab in real time in a big market. It's something the news industry really needs as it rapidly adapts to the digital age."

It's an opportunity to try to make headway in the search for new revenue models, new storytelling techniques, new ways to use social media.

Sometimes news outlets have creative ideas but fail to pursue them because of internal constraints or financial risks. Callahan will invite them to try them out in the desert. "If they have an idea, they can bring it here and beta test it," he says.

For many years, the ASU journalism program hardly ranked among journalism education's elite. But its stature has soared in the past decade under the leadership of ASU President Michael Crow, who was determined to create one of the nation's top J-schools, and Callahan, a former Associated Press reporter and associate dean at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Now an independent college housed in an 8-year-old campus in downtown Phoenix, the Cronkite School features a wide array of professional programs. They include a news service that covers state government for 30 news organizations, including The Arizona Republic (like USA TODAY owned by Gannett); a nightly television newscast; bureaus in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles; a new-media innovation lab; and the Carnegie-Knight News21 Initiative, in which students produce deep-dive, multimedia investigations that have appeared in such venues as The Washington Post and on NBCnews.com. Coming soon are programs in business and sports journalism and a Mexico City bureau.

Up to now, the programs have functioned as independent outposts. Soon they will be combined into a single, good-size news organization. There are about 100 students each semester in ASU's panoply of professional programs.

The PBS outlet has been based at ASU since it debuted in 1961, but the university's role has been largely administrative, as is often the case with university-based public broadcasting outlets. Crow, who has a deep interest in disruptive innovation, and Callahan had been talking for quite awhile about using the station more aggressively. (It has been airing a newscast on one of its lower-tier digital channels.) Ultimately, says Callahan, "The stars aligned."

After Eight, Arizona PBS moves from the School of Public Affairs to the Cronkite School next week, officials will spend the summer determining how to integrate the two institutions.

Once things get rolling, Callahan hopes to develop partnerships with other schools at ASU, working on, say, new approaches to market research or Web development.

So congratulations to the Sun Devils. Journalism needs all the help it can get as it retools in a daunting, yet exciting, time. This lab has the potential to be a great addition to the roster.