Rieder: Developing an innovation culture for journalism

That journalism desperately needs innovation has been clear for quite awhile.

The digital age has thoroughly disrupted traditional business models, and creative new approaches and techniques are essential.

Because what hasn't changed is the need for robust journalism that enables people to make informed decisions in a democratic society.

When Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication took over the Phoenix PBS outlet last year, dean Christopher Callahan said he planned to use that development as a catalyst to turn the school into a national journalism laboratory, a place where news outlets could experiment with new ways of doing things.

Now Cronkite has signed up a figure closely identified with journalistic transformation to accelerate that process.

Eric Newton is leaving the Knight Foundation, where he has long championed — and funded — journalism innovation, to become Cronkite's innovation chief. The idea, says the school, which has a wide array of professional programs including digital news bureaus in Phoenix, Washington and Los Angeles and an entrepreneurial innovation lab, is to "serve as a test bed for news industry innovations and experimentation."

Newton, who will continue to consult for Knight, sees Arizona State as a perfect fit. For 30 years, he says, he has been interested in the idea of journalism schools as teaching hospitals, where students learn by doing. In recent years, as traditional news outlets have cut back, more and more J-school have established news bureaus, and more and more of their work is showing up in professional venues.

But, quoting Callahan, Newton says many of these J-school forays are more like clinics than hospitals. What is too often missing is the laboratory component from which creative solutions can emerge.

"ASU has the right combination of people, leadership, resources, ambition and humility to do what others would consider audacious," he says.

Humility? Really? By that, Newton says, he means that after an impressive decade of growth, ASU dean Callahan is hardly declaring "mission accomplished." Instead, he acknowledges that much more remains to be done, with the lab initiative a prime example.

To build that full-fledged teaching hospital, "you need a school that's on the move and moving fast," says Newton, who dealt with many J-schools during his 14 years at Knight.

At the foundation, Newton and President Alberto Ibargüen were early apostles of the need for transformative change in journalism. A foundation created by the newspapers of Knight and later Knight Ridder developed a laser focus on supporting digital innovation.

Says Newton, "Journalism schools can also reinvent themselves and be engines of change like the foundation did."

While Newton says he was always "suspicious of the status quo," he became sensitized to the need to be open to change when he was managing editor of the Newseum, the museum of news in Washington. He was struck both by how frequently cycles of change arrive and also by how each development — the telegraph, photography, radio, TV, the Internet — was widely seen as the end of Western civilization as we know it.

"The people who have had trouble are those who tried to stay the same," he says, adding, "What hasn't changed is journalism's mission. People need to know."

So what will he do in the new gig? Newton says after awarding "more grants than I care to count," he knows the terrain and "will be able to help bring an understanding of what is going on in other places." He'll keep tabs on what's going on elsewhere on campus that might be helpful. And he'll try to help the professors "be as creative as they can be."

"I hope that being exposed to a steady stream of new tools and techniques will help the J-school incorporate innovation as rapidly as possible," he says.

"It's OK to disrupt," he adds. "I will do that."

On that you can rely.