The Media Equation: Columbia’s New Journalism Dean Looks Ahead in a Digital Era

Entering Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism on the Upper West Side of New York, there is academic majesty wherever you look.

Past the lamps with the iron claws and the statue of Jefferson (“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press“) lies a 100-year-old redoubt that has trained the likes of Robert Caro, Molly Ivins and A. J. Liebling, among many, many others. It’s Hogwarts for wizards who type.

The announcement that a journalism school has a new dean usually elicits yawns in most quarters — Hey, there’s a new headmaster at the buggy whip academy — but the news that Steve Coll had been named to replace Nicholas Lemann, effective this summer, was greeted as if a new Dumbledore had been named.

Sure, Mr. Coll has some qualifications. A former managing editor of The Washington Post, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for the remarkable achievement of “Ghost Wars,” which explains how the seeds of the attacks on the World Trade Center were planted over many years. Like his predecessor Mr. Lemann, he is a staff writer at The New Yorker and continues to do serious, deeply reported work.

But not everyone was impressed with the new wizard. In USA Today, Michael Wolff was very underwhelmed. Mr. Coll’s sin? He “has never tweeted in his life.”

That and he is a “boring” writer with “little or no career experience in any of these epochal changes.” (Capital New York echoed the skepticism about his “limited digital experience”)

Mr. Wolff and I can disagree about the centrality of Twitter to journalism (my boss likes to point out that I tweet constantly but Twitter never sends me a check) but the suggestion that Mr. Coll knows nothing about the current epoch is audaciously wrong.

In fact, Mr. Coll lived through much of the early days of the great disruption at The Washington Post after arriving there in 1985 and going on to serve as its managing editor from 1998 through 2004.

Whatever its mistakes in coming to the grips with the Web, The Washington Post was early and engaged in the question of creating journalism that would survive in a changed world, and Mr. Coll was at the vanguard of many of those efforts.

And he was parodied at the time for his utopian notions. After he led the effort to develop a virtual afternoon edition of The Washington Post with an emphasis on video that might include reporters with portable cameras, one media wag suggested Mr. Coll was envisioning “a fleet of electronic chapeaued Max Headrooms who will mix it up with angst-ridden hoi polloi and beam digitized mayhem back to the screens of people killing time between check-ins on the progress of their stock portfolios.”

Three things about that critique: Mr. Coll turned out to be more right than wrong; I was the one who was making fun of him, writing at The Washington City Paper; and I have since worn a hat cam. (It’s not a good look on anybody, by the way, but the video was impressive.)

We now work in a future he thought a lot about. I was chatting with my colleague John Schwartz, who had just been working as part of The New York Times’s multimedia blitz on the Supreme Court’s consideration of gay marriage by doing Web updates, explanatory annotations to audio excerpts and video spots. “None of the things I spent the last three days doing existed when I came into the business,” he pointed out. That goes for me as well.

In a phone call Friday morning, Mr. Coll, who will continue to work on articles for The New Yorker and books, said the part of his new job that excited him was getting back to the work he was doing at The Post.

“We are in the second phase of disruption, and I think this job is a great place to think about and participate in some of the ways we go forward,” he said. “I think the great digital journalism of our age has yet to be created. The cohort that is at Columbia now is the one that will be making the journalism that is going to shape our democracy: working on mining data sets, creating video that is not 2012, coming up with much more powerful ways of accruing and displaying information.”

Despite his lack of Twitter activity, Mr. Coll has a track record here. In his last administrative job, at the New America Foundation, he spent time looking at what the shift has meant to streams of information and managed to tap Eric Schmidt of Google, among others, to sit on his board to help him figure it out.

The future of the business, he said, “is an ambition I share with much of the faculty that is already there.”

“I’ve always done my best work when I am part of something larger, and being around self-selected young people who understand intuitively what is going on around them is that part I look forward to the most,” he said.

I agree with Mr. Wolff and others who have suggested that given the state of the industry and the paucity of opportunities, journalism education is something of a confidence game. Having seen many journalism programs up close, I can say that most are escalators to nowhere. But while the price of Columbia’s Ivy-encrusted approach is especially dear, under Mr. Lemann’s leadership, the school has moved swiftly to confront an evolving future with aggressive moves into new forms of journalistic expression.

Even in a shrinking industry, journalism schools may become more important — becoming sources of actual journalism and not just pedagogy. In a huge, well-considered report by the school’s own Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the end of last year, the authors suggested that the profession had entered a “postindustrial” phase, stating, “On present evidence, we are convinced that journalism in this country will get worse before it gets better.”

Mr. Coll takes over a school with institutional momentum dedicated to an industry looking for some momentum of its own. He will need to set an agenda, engage the various stakeholders and, like any modern dean, shake the money tree. Come to that, he may think about activating that Twitter account after all.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

twitter.com/carr2n

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/business/media/columbias-new-journalism-dean-looks-ahead-in-a-digital-era.html?partner=rss&emc=rss