At Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the curriculum is being revamped.

At the University of Missouri-Columbia’s J-School, a new building is being added.

Here, at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, the leadership has followed both of its competitors in an attempt to ride out the wave of a changing media landscape.

Newhouse III will have its official opening on Wednesday when the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John G. Roberts visits campus to speak.

A new curriculum will begin a slow rollout starting next fall when a new dean replaces David Rubin, who will retire at the end of the year.

His retirement comes at a time when newspaper circulation is declining and investors are breaking up historic chains of ownership. TV stations put their content online for free. The economic backbone of broadcast television – commercials – are skipped over with DVRs. The differences have been blurred between a movie theater and a top-of-the line home entertainment system.

As industries struggles to answer the questions of where to go next and how to adapt, they turn to the schools, havens for ideas, to give them answers.

‘Everybody knows that the best ideas will come from the 19- and 20-year-olds,’ Rubin said. ‘And then we’ll play around and we’ll see what it is we can create online, and then see if it will be of use to the industry.

‘They are looking to us to provide some of these ideas because we’re the ones that have the smart 20-year-olds. They don’t.’

As the newest building on the Syracuse University campus, Newhouse III boasts rooms with names such as ‘Digital Convergence Suite,’ ‘Collaborative Media Room,’ ‘Center for Inquiry, Innovation and Imagination’ and the experimental news lab.

There is a theme here.

Rubin identified four challenges that will confront schools of mass communications in the next 20 years.

• attracting the best and brightest students to study the field
• luring a diverse student body
• keeping the work satisfying
• finding the right balance between teaching traditional skills and ensuring students are technologically literate

The balancing act of combating these challenges and continuing to provide a top-notch education is the work cut out for the leaders of both Newhouse and the nation’s other top schools of journalism and mass communication. It is work all three schools are embracing.

Rubin says that making students technologically literate and integrating technology into the classroom is important. But there is a catch-22.

The technology must be taught without ‘losing sight of the fact that how well you write and how much you know matters far more. And while I know that, I think a lot of young people don’t,’ Rubin said. ‘They think it’s more about the technology – and it’s not.’

Rubin has obtained this far-sightedness in his 17 years as the dean at Newhouse. But he will give up his spot as top dog when he leaves at the end of the year. While he will remain a member of the faculty – his biggest influence, and effect on the future, could be through the advice he instills on his successor.

‘Don’t change the school’s emphasis from teaching to research,’ will be Rubin’s message to his successor. He added: ‘Research is important, but we’ve always made teaching come first and therefore, the direct needs of the students first. And I would say don’t touch that.’

His advice is broad and touches on many of the Newhouse subsets that built the school’s stellar reputation.

Rubin said he will tell the next dean to maintain the infrastructure designed for students – including the alumni network, career center, donor network and dean of student affairs office – as well as the ties to the industry.

‘Because that’s how the industry knows about Newhouse and knows about Newhouse students,’ he said.

As Newhouse feels its way into the realm of the 21st century media education, the Medill School at Northwestern is already encapsulating the new millennium spirit with its updated curriculum, which has a title: ‘Medill 2020.’

The revised curriculum – the result of an 18-month in-house review – sends sophomores out into the Chicago streets to learn from real-life experiences. There will be more online components weaved into the Medill education and interaction between the disciplines of integrated marketing communications and journalism, according to the school’s dean, John Lavine, in an online question and answer session.

The training will be aimed at getting Medill’s graduates jobs beyond the ‘traditional media,’ which he calls an inadequate term.

‘Newspapers, magazines, radio and television are changing. Virtually all of them have a Web site, and soon they will be on wireless platforms,’ he said. ‘Our graduates will be skilled at creating stories for podcasts, SMS, RSS and other emerging channels.’

The new curriculum’s guarantee is ‘that employers will hire more of our graduates and pay more for them than for students from other schools. That will happen when the students from Medill give them a far higher return on their investment.’

Rubin supplies confidence to the 1,800 Newhouse undergraduates, 200 master’s students and 15 doctoral students looking to receive the leading mass communications education for their ever-increasing yearly tuition.

‘I know that Medill is focusing a lot on multimedia work. And we are, too. We are actually following their lead on this,’ Rubin said. ‘I don’t think there is any school – any of the big ones out there – that are doing anything all that different from each other.’

Newhouse is looking at a new curriculum, too.

At the core will be an expanded freshman year for Newhouse students. Instead of the current six-credit first year, the school would add a storytelling course and retool COM 107: Communications and Society.

‘A storytelling course for everybody, where we would explain what a story is and how you construct stories, why stories matter. Because no matter what part of the industry you go in to, everybody is in essence in the story-telling business,’ Rubin said. ‘In the second half of the course, freshmen would have the chance for the first time in a multimedia way to actually tell a story of their choosing.’

On the tail end of a student’s Newhouse experience, there will be a series of one-credit courses on grammar, information gathering and presenting in public. There would also be a required course in every major where students from different majors are in a class together. Rubin’s examples included classroom combinations of advertising and public relations, print journalism and broadcast as well as magazine and photography.

‘Every major would have to have that kind of blended class,’ said Rubin, adding that a capstone course would also be required to make sure students had a project to take into the field with them.

‘None of this is set in stone,’ Rubin said. And in any case, it would not be fully integrated until next year’s freshman class are seniors (the class of 2012), though current students would have the opportunity to transition in.

Public relations students will be getting a retooled curriculum and they have Eric Hansen to thank.

Last spring semester, Hansen, a dual major between Newhouse and the School of Information Studies, created a program titled the Newhouse New Media series. It was a supplement to the current public relations curriculum that brought students up to date on topics such as the role of blogs, YouTube, RSS feeds and podcasts in modern public relations.

‘In fact, that series has pushed the public relations faculty further down the road toward thinking more about new media and its impact on the public relations practice,’ Rubin said. ‘It was an important thing to do.’

Public relations department chairwoman Maria Russell was on the same page as Hansen, after she read that schools were behind in teaching new media. She said the program was supposed to be a leader, not a follower. And she wasn’t going to be accused of not providing students with a new media education.

Students are now asked by their internship sponsors for help because they are more ‘tech-savvy’ than the people in the industry, Russell said.

Russell said the traditional writing skills are the same whether a press release is being sent by e-mail or any other way.

‘In the old days, traditional media was so much more important to us,’ she said.

And as the public relations department looks to add these skills into their permanent curriculum, it can thank the new media seminars.

‘The purpose was to help us jump start the curriculum,’ Russell said.

Newhouse III contains more than just trendy student lounges and a new and improved Food.com. There are laboratories for trying to discover the means for how people want their news and information delivered. And while the First Amendment is wrapped around SU’s school for journalists, Missouri-Columbia’s new building, The Donald W. Reynolds Institute, has a different premise, but many of the same goals.

The theme at the country’s oldest school of journalism is bringing media professionals, scholars and citizens together. Despite the mismatched slogans, the agendas within the new buildings and the broader direction of the schools are in sync.

The Reynolds Institute will focus ‘on innovation and problem-solving across the diverse specialties within journalism: media convergence, news content and methods, new approaches to advertising, innovation in management, the impact of new technologies and new developments in law and regulation,’ according to its Web site.

‘I think a university is a great home to provide a research center like that,’ said Dean Mills, dean of the Missouri-Columbia journalism school.

Mills said there would be a featured laboratory with an experimental news gathering center. Sounds familiar.

One focus at Missouri-Columbia, which Newhouse has not embraced, is media aimed at cell phones. Ring tones alone earned companies billions of dollars in 2006, and Mills said every news organizations his school has worked with have had cell phone-based programs.

Rubin, on the other hand, said he thinks media focus on cell phones is a fad. And while it is taught somewhat in the television, radio and film department, there is no concentrated focus on it.

‘I don’t think it’s actually possible to communicate anything of much value on a cell phone screen,’ Rubin said. ‘It’s a time filler, it’s a headline service, it’s advertising, it’s a two-minute entertainment feature, it’s pornography.’

Yet one area in which Newhouse and Mizzou are seeing eye-to-eye is on the need for collaborative projects across the areas of study.

‘I think everyone is excited about the new interactive lab and the new collaborative spaces,’ Russell, Newhouse public relations chair, said. ‘All of that talent will have space now and facilities so students can work together.’

Melissa Chessher, chairwoman of Newhouse’s graduate program in magazine, newspaper and online, said conflict resolution and being able to work with others is essential to a successful media career.

But she said there is currently not enough of this interaction at the school.

‘One of the great faults in this school is there should be more chances for people with different interests and different talents to brush up against each other and to work together,’ Chessher said. ‘It’s great practice and an exact replica of the real world.’

‘I think there has just been an inherent blending of all the media, so it only makes sense that as a writer you get to work with a photographer,’ she said. ‘That happens every day in the real world, even before everybody started talking about convergence.’

Rubin said he is most proud of three statistics: Newhouse’s 92 percent employment rate (within six months of graduation), its 92 percent graduation rate and the fact that there were 3,550 applicants this year for only 330 spots.

‘It wasn’t that way 20 years ago,’ he said.

The question is no longer: how good of a school is Newhouse? The question is: how good of a field is mass communications?

Published on September 16, 2007 at 12:00 pm