Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communication
November 2, 2017
J.A. Adande: Hello and welcome to the Northwestern University Leadership Circle Insider Series. My name is J.A. Adande. I'm the director of sports journalism at Medill. I was a 1992 graduate. We just had our 25-year reunion and Homecoming, and I was a Medill grad as well. Came back last year at the behest of the person I'll be introducing shortly, to run the sports journalism program and to take advantage of ... to combine both the prestige and the knowledge at Medill with the passion for sports that exists with so many of our students out there. I came back after 25 years in the field, starting at the Chicago Sun-Times, moving on to the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for 10 years. In the past 10 years, I was at ESPN.
This series gives members of the Northwestern University Leadership Circle an opportunity to have an inside look at the latest developments at Northwestern and a chance to engage with University leaders and faculty innovators. I'm a member of NULC myself as a previous donor. Now that I'm on the inside, it's a chance to see and to benefit from your generosity, something that we're all grateful for here at Northwestern. One thing I've seen is how many and how fortunate we are to have so many people like yourself, those of you joining us today, the alumni and friends who are giving at all levels to help us address the financial need and to make unique travel and experience opportunities possible for our students. We couldn't do this without you, and, as we will discuss later, we have so many unique opportunities that make Medill so special. It's not possible without your help.
Also excited to have recently established a scholarship for Medill undergraduates, thanks to the support of my long-time ESPN colleague, Mike Greenberg, and his wife Stacy, who are both Medill alumni. This year we'll be awarding for the first time the scholarship in his name. We're looking forward to growing the scholarship fund. We're also looking to establish a scholarship in the name of the late Craig Sager, who was my partner. We never worked together, but we certainly crossed paths many times on the NBA circuit. He wasn't a Medill grad, but we're interested in continuing his legacy in the name of Medill and in his honor at the graduate school level for students who are interested in pursuing sports broadcasting opportunities, much as Craig did after he left Northwestern. So that's something to keep an eye out as well.
Like to now introduce my boss, Brad Hamm, who since 2012 has served as the dean of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Prior to joining Northwestern, he was the dean at Indiana University School of Journalism. He also was the interim dean and associate dean of the School of Communications at Elon University in North Carolina. After starting his career as a newspaper reporter, we just spoke recently about his days covering the ACC Tournament in Greensboro. As a very young reporter, he got that assignment and was sent out there. He also has his PhD in mass communication research from the University of North Carolina, master's in journalism from the University of South Carolina. Got all the Carolinas covered. An undergraduate degree from Catawba College.
As Medill's dean, he's committed to training the best journalists and marketing professionals in the world, ensuring that a Medill education remains an invaluable asset in today's rapidly changing media world. Today Dean Hamm and I will be sharing our thoughts about the future of Medill and the vision for the school's sports media program. Several of you have already submitted questions in advance for us. We thank you, and we also give you the opportunity to submit questions today. If you're joining us via the internet and would like to submit a question during today's session, please do so by typing into the Q&A box in the bottom right corner of your computer screen.
It'll be about a 45-minute session. You will hear from the dean and myself, and we'll also get a chance to address your questions later. So let's get started. Dean Hamm, I wonder if you could talk a bit about some of your top priorities as the dean of Medill?
Dean Hamm: Sure. Thanks, Jay. It's important to note, I have an identical twin brother, who's also a journalist and worked with the Associated Press, worked with the New York Times chain, is working now with Landmark and at the Virginian Pilot, so for those of you who go to professional journalism conferences, we both might be there, and we do look quite similar at times, not as much as we did when we young, but still enough to confuse people at times. Jay, one quick question, because I'm calling you Jay, but you're famous as J.A. Could you tell us why J.A. and why Jay?
J.A. Adande: I started to start going by my initials. I was looking for a chance to change my identity a little bit and get a fresh start when I got here to Northwestern. I started using Jay when I wrote for the Daily Northwestern. I just didn't like the look of the Y leading into the A in the last name, so I went with the initials. My colleague that used to work with me, we used to check in IDs at the Sports and Aquatic Center when that was newly built, and we were sitting there one day, and I was going back and forth. She claims to this date that she was the one that came up with the J.A., but that's what was used for my byline for years.
It's interesting, we'll talk about the transition into broadcasting. It didn't translate so well onto TV. It's a little awkward to say and introduce, but I was stuck with it. It was a legacy of my print days. People informally call me Jay. It's easier. People that know me a little bit better call me Jay, but formally, for byline purposes and what it says outside my office here at Northwestern, it's J.A.
Dean Hamm: It's great to have you back at Medill and at Northwestern. There's no doubt, as Jay and I talked about coming to Medill, that his passion for teaching, his passion for Northwestern, his passion for Medill, and his passion for journalism is extremely high. One of things that I think is worth knowing, obviously, for people who are Northwestern alums and friends, Medill is famous. It is one of the most famous schools of its kind in the world. Wherever we travel, there is incredible recognition of the school name, the kind of quality that it stands for. We are almost 100 years old. We will celebrate our centennial in 2021, and we just admitted the undergraduate class that will graduate in 2021, which is wonderful. So we're focused a little bit on that.
And also, how do you take a great school and try to make it better, and try to ensure that its future will always be strong? We start with a very simple goal, and it's a goal we talk about with the president, the provost, with the trustees, with others. Our goal, Medill's goal, is to be and to be recognized as the best school of our kind in the world. It's ambitious. It takes a lot each morning when you wake up to try to achieve that goal. We try to achieve it in very specific ways. We train undergraduate journalism students and graduate journalism students. We train graduate integrated marketing communications students. And for those of you who knew Medill from an earlier time, that is really the advancement of the advertising program that was here for many, many years.
Our strategic goals as we try to take on this challenge to be the best; our first goal that we've looked at is to design and build facilities in Evanston, Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco that strongly support, and are reflective of, a top program in the world. Evanston obviously is our home base, and we are looking forward to a renovation of Fisk Hall, our signature place. Chicago has been our home really for about 50 years, and we're a leader in urban journalism in particular and social justice journalism there. We created a wonderful new location, a dynamic location at 303 East Wacker that really is the kind of teaching and study research facility for this century.
Washington, DC, we've been there for more than 50 years. Obviously, Medill is famous for political journalism, and probably the leader in this field. We have so many leading political journalists. We also run, started the first program of its kind, national security journalism, there. This is a goal for us, and we're undertaking that this fall to identify new spaces, so that we can have a great, great location for the long term. Many of our students cycle through here, undergrad and grad, and Medill is highly influential in Washington, DC in politics and political coverage.
San Francisco is the grand experiment that we just started, and we wanted to be the leader at the intersection of innovation and technology in our field. We think it's crucial that Medill be a partner with tech companies and that we also train our students to be part of that world, what is a kind of innovation in journalism going forward, and media and integrated marketing communications. So we have this new site. We started it, and we partnered with McCormick, wonderful partners with Dean Julio Ottino and his team. We decided that we would go to San Francisco, and the University joined in, and it's now branded as Northwestern San Francisco. I encourage those of you who travel to San Francisco to go there.
All of these have been supported by gifts. We support students in many ways, and one of the things that funding provides is the ability to help students with high need go to our DC program and go to our San Francisco program. It allows opportunities for people that they might never have. So those are our facility goals, and as you can see, Medill is coast to coast. We also have an affiliation with the Doha program in the Middle East, and we have a fairly strong presence in Asia.
Second is to build and retain the best faculty in the world, with key resources and investments. This has been a huge initiative in the past year or two, and going forward this year. As part of that, we got Jay. We were looking for someone to lead our sports journalism program. We got Patty Loew, who is a terrific faculty member from Wisconsin. We were seeking a national leader in Native American and indigenous studies, crossed with journalism, and Patty joined us for that. She also is running the University's new center, funded by the Mellon Foundation.
We went after Tim Franklin, who was the leader of really the world's largest journalism training center, the Poynter Institute. He joined us in June. A terrific guy with an endowed chair at Indiana in sports journalism, but also was the editor of the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel, and worked at Bloomberg as the managing editor. And then we also look at Doreen Weisenhaus, who's a global media expert, legal expert, joins us from the University of Hong Kong and has really, I think, had an exciting run now. She's a joint appointment between Pritzker and Medill.
Going forward, we are searching for really the first endowed chair of its kind, funded by a great donor in LA, which is an endowed chair in journalism and sexuality. And we are also looking at a partnership with McCormick to do what is called a CS plus X, computer science plus another school, initiative by the University, again supported by donors. And we are hiring those positions now. So how do we build the best faculty in the world? I think we have a fairly aggressive model for that now.
Support and develop the kind of powerful journalism and IMC projects that only Medill, within a great university, can do. We have a great journalism and communications IMC school, within a great university in a great city, and then also with Washington and others, and I think that's made a big difference. Examples of this, Ted Spiegel of the Spiegel family, Spiegel Corporation, Spiegel catalog ... many of you remember that ... was a faculty member of ours, and he left an estate gift to create really a revolutionary research center, taking key issues in business and trying to solve them. And so we're working, for example, with media companies to try to help them figure out on sustainability of journalism and other issues like that. Spiegel has many other areas of focus.
The Justice Project, obviously we're famous for, which is the ability to check and see for people who feel they are unfairly convicted. We investigate cases with undergraduates and graduate students. It's been incredibly successful. Only a courageous university can do that. One of the things I often say about alumni is, when people say can they volunteer, we also look for pro bono help. Medill is one of the few schools that we sue people, they sue us. Ours is primarily FOIA requests, Freedom of Information Act. There are very few schools in the world that can take on a project like that. And national security, which I mentioned, which involves incredible amounts of coverage, difficult projects.
Another goal is to be the top school in the intersection of innovation and technology, and you can see how that matches with our San Francisco space. It develops from what was a partnership from the Knight Foundation to build a laboratory for innovation and technology in Fisk Hall, partnered with McCormick. It's worked out extremely well, and going to San Francisco really is the expansion of that.
Become the standard in our field for unique need-blind experiences for all Medill students. We have the ability to change students' lives. There are students who can't do certain things. As you might know, Northwestern is incredibly successful in helping need-blind students come to Northwestern. Our position has been, once they arrive, we want the experience to be the same.
So this is talking about internships, professional conferences, reporting projects, study abroad. The students go abroad for the first time during their college years. They become much more worldly. It changes their lives, it changes their families' lives. We've made a huge commitment and had incredible donor support to make these kinds of life-changing experiences possible. And it also helps, as I said, for our students to be able to go to San Francisco or DC and participate there.
Those are the five major goals, and the sixth one really is to develop the financial resources necessary and possible through fundraising and strategic budgeting, to be the top school of our kind in the world.
J.A. Adande: I have a question that hits close to home for me, as you lay out and detail so well the broad vision for Medill. How does the sports media program fit into that?
Dean Hamm: I think, Jay, you know I came in 2012, and one of the things that I think about of seeing Medill, you come, I think, as the dean because you see possibilities. You don't want to just simply manage an already successful ... at least, I didn't want to just manage an already successful organization. You also have to understand that your reputation comes from your continued success at a high level. So we decided if we were going to be the best, we should pick areas where we could specialize to be the best. Some of those areas we were already doing, social justice reporting, investigative reporting, other things like that. We specialize on both sides, IMC and journalism.
One area, as you know, where we didn't really teach that much, but actually had the most famous sports journalism people and sports media people in America, if not the world, was in this field. And so we created it, and we needed a leader, and that's where you and I talked. We're in science journalism with incredible projects, science and health. We're in business. We're one of really the world leaders in business journalism. And there are others like that, but sports, we came back to and just said boy, we really have to do this one too.
J.A. Adande: It is funny how so many people were able to come through here and go on to experience such great success in the sports media, without any type of formal sports-specific training while we were here, and also without much to cover, by the way, in terms of football and basketball team. When I was an undergraduate, for example, my sophomore year, the football team went 0-11, and that was followed up my junior year, after the entire class of basketball players transferred, the basketball team went 0-18 in the Big Ten.
But it actually did teach you creativity. You have to come up with numerous ways to say the team lost once again. But more important was the foundation that we learned, the journalistic principles that we learned while we are here. I maintain that in a very evolving and constantly changing sports media environment, it is the basics that prepared you for things that you couldn't even anticipate. Many of the things and the positions that I've held in the last few years didn't exist when I was at Northwestern. You didn't have social media. You didn't have, basically, internet-based reporting. You didn't have so many ... this proliferation of sports writers on television, opining away, being paid pretty well to do so.
None of these things were really options when we were here, but how are so many, including people that were here at Medill long ago, how have so many people been able to adapt? It's because more than ever, it depends on accuracy, good reporting, fast analysis, the ability to distill things down quickly and get to the essence of what a story is and how one should feel about it. And I keep going back to fairness. That's a journalistic principle that has been lost in many cases, but something that was instilled in us here at Northwestern. Those traditional Northwestern values, Medill values, have preserved, and they've maintained, in many ways more important than ever.
Now that you're in an environment where you don't have editors overseeing your work, you don't have a large amount of time to review what you're saying and writing before it goes out to the world, so it is more important to have those things developed deep within you. Where do we go from here? How do we develop the sports program? You have to look at the landscape today. More than ever, I think we do need to be television-based and broadcast-based. Those were almost dirty words when I was an undergraduate at Medill. Medill in the interim has really come along and come up to speed, everything from you see our television studios, particularly the new facility in Chicago. So we're up to speed with the technology, and I think the mindset has changed dramatically too since then.
So what I would like to see now is for us to be competitive and for us to provide the opportunities and the experiences in live event production, because if you see where sports entities, ESPN in particular, FS1, Turner even, where they're investing their money, primarily through rights fees, is in the broadcast of live sports. So can we put our students in position to take advantage of those opportunities, both in front of and behind the cameras? Can we be analytics-driven, data-based reporting, which is so important in sports now. There's more information available than ever. If you watched the World Series, you saw exit velocity and launch angles and all these things that were discussed, that weren't a part of the lexicon as recently as five years ago. Can we prepare our students to be conversant in that language, in this language of numbers and analytics? That's something that is important to me.
We've gotten off to a good start. We're very fortuitous. Last year Chris Herring, who had been at the Wall Street Journal, was hired by the 538 offshoot of ESPN. That's their analytics-based subsidiary. And he came back to his home town of Chicago, and that enabled him to join us as an adjunct professor. Chris is one of the premier writers when it comes to using numbers in a very human way, in a way that doesn't hit you with this deluge of data. He has a great way of converting the data into something that's understandable. He starts with the principle and from the premise of what do I see, and then how can I quantify that? That's the approach I want our students to take.
One of his most famous examples of that was when he was describing the impact of New York City's nightlife on the then-Knick, J.R. Smith, and through his data, he was able to discover that J.R. Smith was one of the worst performers on Saturdays, in particular, Sunday games, which indicated that after partaking in everything that's available in New York, it was having an impact on him when he tried to perform in weekend games. Weekdays, he was fine, but weekend games was when he ... and that's just having the intuition to search for ways that you can quantify these premises, these observations that you have.
Just as Medill has come to incorporate IMC, integrated mass communications, it's very important too that we embrace, for example, the public relations side of sports, because that is where numerous opportunities exist now. Things that weren't there before. When you were coming up, you would never have the idea that you might write for a team, but the team-based websites and the team-based social media accounts now are presenting a lot of opportunities for employment, so that's something to keep in mind, and that's something that's something that's slightly different and requires a slightly different perspective and background that we hope to be able to provide as well.
So those are three prongs, three areas that I really desire to attack as we build up our program here, in addition to, of course, providing the basic Medill foundations that generations of students that have come through have enjoyed.
Dean Hamm: That's great. We've had questions on what are you looking for, and how would you design this program, and I think you've answered that. And also how analytics has become such a big part, and we even see the discussion last night on Houston, saying about a coach who embraced analytics, and other teams hiring people who embraced analytics. I think it's fair to say, sports media companies hire people who embrace analytics too.
We've had a couple of questions for you, and then also, I think it's important to say something that President Schapiro has mentioned before too. Jim Phillips always says sports can be a front porch for a university, and you get a lot of attention, and President Schapiro had said that Northwestern is unique in the sense, because it has so many public sports media people who are known for Medill, that it gives us this incredible front porch, because every week, thousands of people hear Medill, see the Northwestern football helmets behind you, all of those things. I think that is special.
Dean Hamm: Christine Brennan, Michael Wilbon, Rachel Nichols, so many it's hard to even list. Certainly, Greenberg and others, and his new program, it gives you great visibility. One of the questions is, today anyone with a smartphone can be a reporter, and sports journalists have knowledge and skills to craft stories. But is there a strong market or a need for stories versus visual, in the sense of what can be posted, what can be read? Is it a loss for us if that is not part of the future of sports journalism?
J.A. Adande: It's not going anywhere, and things that really splash and hit remain these well-thought, well-researched, well-produced in-depth stories. There was a great example recently on ESPN, taking you behind the scenes of these player-owner meetings in the NFL with regards to the protests during the National Anthem, and what was the league going to do about it, and what were the repercussions? One of the things that emerged from that reporting was this faction that's growing within the NFL of this lack of support for Roger Goodell, the commissioner, from the ownership constituency. It was kind of interesting that throughout his mishandling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, he didn't lose any support then, but now that the bottom line is being affected, now the ratings are being hurt, sponsors are grumbling, now you see there's some discord among the owners.
That came out of a classic old school report. You know, it didn't have fancy graphics or anything like that. It was just words on the screen. You think of these Tom Rinaldi stories that he's become famous for, including one before Monday Night Football the other night, in which he's describing this relationship that formed, this bond between a cancer-stricken young boy who really loved Carson Wentz, the Eagles' quarterback, and he had a chance to meet him before he passed away. You learn that Carson Wentz took the field that night with a rubber wrist band that had been given to him, a kind of a motivational wrist band that the boy wore. Carson Wentz wore one of those when he played the game. So it's not just the data, and I would hope that we would never just become so enthralled by the numbers that we lose touch with the business side of sports, the business aspect of sports, and also the humanity and the stories behind that.
So everything from that in-depth story looking at the meeting to the very touching story of Carson Wentz and this young boy, those continue to be well received and well done and frequently done. Before we move on, I do want to get to touch on a point that you brought up about global travel and travel in general and the experience of getting out and about. That's something the sports ramifications of the Medill Explorers Program, which is when we basically take our graduate students, shut down the school for a week, and take them various places around the globe.
That's enabled in recent years for our sports students to have experiences, for example, at the Super Bowl in Houston last year or in New York, meeting with every media entity you can think of, from Bleacher Report to the Players' Tribune, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, ESPN. This year our students will be going to the Olympics in South Korea, the All-Star Weekend in LA. They'll be going to Orlando and getting a chance to utilize the facilities and get professionally-produced reels out of the Golf Channel, in addition to checking out the track at Daytona and going to an Orlando Magic basketball game.
So all these things, and that's one of the ways that Medill can distinguish itself, is experiences. It allows a knowledge that's going to be the same, regardless of where you go. How to write a lead, certain basic principles are going to be taught the same regardless, but can we provide unique experiences that our students will be talking about that will put them ahead of other candidates? You know, how many other schools will be able to say they're producing graduates that have covered an Olympics or covered a Super Bowl, even in a short period of time there? So that's one of the implications of your emphasis on travel and how it relates to sports.
Dean Hamm: A quick question. How many social media followers do you have on Twitter?
J.A. Adande: 620,000, I think.
Dean Hamm: 600,000.
J.A. Adande: Kind of varies, depending on how many I block. I don't think I've lost many. I've had to block a lot of people this year, so I might have been at 630 if I hadn't blocked so many.
Dean Hamm: So you're blocking 10,000? Good. That's more than almost all other people have. But it's changed, in many ways, journalism, and that's a fairly involved answer, but the simple way. How did it change you? How did it change your reporting?
J.A. Adande: It's hastened it, and it's also, for one way, it's kind of killed the game story, the classic traditional game story. I remember once reading a story in the Columbia Journalism Review that said the best thing about sportswriter remains a reporter going to a game and telling you what happened. Well, that's not what people are looking for the next day at this point. It's really not even what they're looking for 10 minutes after a game, because all of the analysis is played out in real time on social media, for example. We're having a panel, actually, that we're putting together in conjunction with Kellogg next week, and we've got three people from the field who are going to talk about the change between broadcast and the growing threat, you could call it, or the rising prominence of streaming and digital broadcast of games.
Part of that aspect is, it's changed what we look for in games, People aren't necessarily invested in the entire two and a half or three hours, or in the case of one of these World Series games, five hours and fifteen minutes, of a game. They just care about the moments, these meme-able moments, these things that can be passed around social media. That's what people are going to be talking about, sometimes even more than the actual outcome of the game itself. They're going to be talking about these snippets, and so social media has changed that, the real time reaction.
The dangers that can come, as we've seen with Jemele Hill, that's something in some ways I'm uniquely positioned to educate our students about, because I have been at ESPN, I've seen the progression of the social media policy that went there. I was able to give our students a perspective, okay, why was Jemele Hill suspended for talking about the sponsors when she wasn't suspended for what she said about President Trump? Well, as I've learned, they take tweeting about sponsors very seriously. I told them the story of the time I was upset at a certain airlines, and I tweeted my displeasure and named the airline, and I got a call from my boss, because he'd gotten a call from that airline. And so I promptly learned that you don't talk about the sponsors on social media, that that's forbidden.
So being able to provide that perspective, the warnings that we can give our students, lessons that they can learn from a guy like Darren Rovell, our business sports reporter who graduated from Medill and has 1.9 million followers on Twitter. He came and spoke to our grad students a couple weeks ago, and they can learn insight from somebody like him, who is very proficient, clearly, at social media.
We have some questions, and one is how much of a focus on writing is there in the undergraduate journalism curriculum? I've been at three universities, and also a student in North Carolina and South Carolina. The writing at Medill is as much as before, students write constantly. We do have to pay attention to things such as social media or other issues. We obviously still are a program that covers ethics and law and issues in journalism and many others, but there is a heavy focus on writing.
Dean Hamm: I think the thing for people who were trained as journalists 30 years ago versus now, is that it is natural to tell stories in so many different ways, and journalism schools have had to solve how to put all of that in without reducing. So if you threw all of those things in, you would reduce the writing, and Medill has made a choice, as other journalism schools have, that we're not going to reduce the writing. There are many ways we can do this outside of class, workshops, other experiences. So the writing is a crucial part of really the Medill education, and why we're known for strong writers, and why so many people hire from here.
With newspapers struggling financially and an economic model for news delivery changing so fast, how can we be sure that Medill journalism graduates will find gainful employment? I think there are many answers to that, but we have high placement rates. We don't have a problem with placing our students. We have really any number of organizations that are now in journalism. An example that I think people forget is that political coverage in Washington might have been the Post and a couple of other newspapers, those of you who remember a city with three newspapers or two newspapers. Now there's Politico, now Bloomberg. There are hundreds of jobs at these places. Bloomberg has enormous number of Medill alums around the country, around the world. The DC space is focused on politics and policy.
And there are enormous jobs in sports. The expansion in sports journalism and sports media from 20 years ago has been extraordinary. The expansion, really, I think, in business journalism, in entertainment, in science, specialized publications. And so sometimes I think students are placed in organizations that perhaps the average person might not know, but people who have subject expertise clearly know, and these are leading publications in the field. So placement, we have incredible placement, and I think other schools do.
The other thing about newspapers is, while they are struggling financially, I think as you see things about the New York Times, The New York Times has a huge number of journalists, and while they announce some layoffs, they announce layoffs and then then replace them with other kinds of journalists going forward.
Can we talk about how we collaborate with other schools? Kellogg, McCormick, others? We certainly have a strong partnership with McCormick, as you can see in San Francisco in our innovation lab and other projects we do together. We built the first database of its kind for shaken baby syndrome, and that database is shared around the country for any journalism organization. We do work with Kellogg, particularly on our IMC, integrated marketing communications, side, and their faculty work with our faculty on projects. We certainly work with the NU-Q Program in Doha. We have a great relationship with them. Obviously, we've always had a relationship with the School of Communication. Weinberg and Medill are looking at the DC program, and Dean Adrian Randolph and I just had a lunch in the last week about that. So there are many programs as we go through. Pritzker, we share a faculty member.
And then a Medill alumnus, James Foley, lost his life reporting on the civil war in Syria. Journalists face dangers around the world. Absolutely, and at home. How does Medill educate students to pursue difficult stories? We do actually train students, particularly in our DC program. Some of our training is best practices, how to go in. So if you're in Chicago and something suddenly erupts, what's your way out? What's your level? We cover this in politics, election coverage, event coverage. We're constantly advising students on this. In DC, we actually do sophisticated training of hostage training systems, so we do that for any student who comes through that program.
Oftentimes, people who lose their lives are often, and particularly in the case of Jim ... and we have a relationship with his mother and give our courage award in his name ... but in that case, you often have people who are sort of alone as they're covering wars, and that's the most dangerous kind. So anyway, Jay, you had a question for me?
J.A. Adande: Yes. With Medill recently making the decision not to apply for accreditation under the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications ... that's reason alone, that long name's reason alone not to be affiliated ... That's the organization that evaluates college and university journalism programs. Can you explain that and share your thinking behind that decision?
Dean Hamm: Sure, absolutely. I think as you think of the larger context, a lot of major schools are going this route. If you look at computer science, Stanford decided not to do this. If you look at music schools, a number of them have decided not to do that. We are part of the larger picture. Some of it's inside baseball, and we talk about it if anybody wants to talk about it on the road. There's really no measurable difference for Medill. I think that we are seeking certain things, that if you're going to spend 18 months studying yourself, you should have a high return on that. One of the things that we find is that many of the standards are fairly general and really have no clear measures, which is unlike law, business, medicine, chemistry, lots of accreditation programs. Some are mandatory. In our case, it's voluntary. People might not know that Berkeley, one of the signature journalism programs in America, pulled out the year before we did.
Medill gets a lot of attention, because it gets a lot of attention. I mean, it's just a famous school, and so when we did it, it might have been newsworthy for people outside of the field. It was not a surprise to people inside of the field. Certainly a number of schools have considered it. A number of schools have advocated that the big schools take this on, so that there can be change in an organization that I think a lot of people felt like had not changed to keep up with the times. And there are many things that we could discuss or examples of that. I would say, we do believe that our decision will influence change at the organization. It will spark change, and we are seeing that now.
In fact, the organization just announced that instead of doing its usual 10-year review of best practices and what it should do, they announced in the last couple of weeks that they will expedite the review, actually having it starting effective immediately, that it will be a presentation in the spring, and they hope to implement it by the fall. I think that's a clear indication of Medill and others saying, top schools, privately and publicly have said that they will not continue down this path if it doesn't change. Medill is willing to be a partner; at times, we have to be a leader, and we have to be an influential leader. That's part of our role, and in this case, we made a strategic decision that there is no cost to Medill, but we believe that there is a grand opportunity to make things better for all the schools in our field, and also for Medill itself.
One note about what's new with the Medill Justice Project, I would simply say that we've expanded it. We share everything that we have. We want to encourage others. We partner with other organizations. Journalism for many years has done its own research and its own stories, and then saved all of its data and never shared it. We've reversed that model with the Justice Project, and we're reversing it throughout Medill, and that is we share everything, and people can use that data. But we also teach through the site. If you look about how to make FOIA requests, Freedom of Information Act requests, that's on our site. We have the ability to direct people to how to do their own kind of investigation, and we also go around the country, and sometimes invited around the world by people who want to set up their own kinds of projects. I think that's really the future for Medill.
J.A. Adande: I'll finish on the final question, what I see as the future for Medill grads who are interested in sports writing, as brief as possible. It's important to be versatile more than ever. I had a student who asked me, "I just want to write." Well, that's not enough, and while I value that desire to write, you will be asked to appear on video or to record podcasts. So versatility is the most important thing, and again, looking and realizing that it's a different landscape. You won't be working for newspapers. You have to take into consideration all the different outlets that are there, and also take advantage of the fact that you can now publish yourself, you can broadcast yourself, opportunities that weren't available before.
So there are better opportunities, but it's also more challenging landscape. And there is still a desire for Northwestern graduates. Medill still has that brand power that will always interest employers, because they know what they're getting when they get a Medill grad.
This brings us to the end of our time here, so I'd like to thank Dean Hamm, and I'd like to thank you, our listeners, for your participation. The next installment of the NULC Insider Series will be Thursday, February 22, 2018, when our speaker will be Teresa Woodruff, dean of The Graduate School and the Thomas J. Watkins Memorial Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern. We'll send email invitations to you early in 2018. Hopefully you'll save the date, and we hope you plan to participate. Recordings of previous NULC Insider sessions are available online at wewill.northwestern.edu/nulcinsider. One final detail, please take a moment to complete the survey you'll receive via email later today, so we can make the NULC Insider Series even better in the future. Thank you for your commitment to Northwestern. Have a great afternoon.