Suppose the journalism program at California Polytechnic State University was a home on the real estate market. In that case, the ad might read something like this: Sturdy home with good bones in a historic neighborhood. Recent updates. Smart home technology throughout. Room to expand. The lot includes a large shop for inventing things.
Cal Poly, as it is known, is positioned at the threshold of the Artificial Intelligence era. Its data science experts helped build, along with Cal Matters, a potentially revolutionary tool called “Digital Democracy,” which, among other things, uses AI to create searchable transcripts for every meeting in California's state government.
In the classroom, professors are working to equip students with the tools to do good journalism and the knowledge of how to go into newsrooms and help them innovate.
“I’m proud of both our legacy and our future,” said Brady Teufel, the department chair and professor. “We’re a journalism school consisting of about 350 or 400 students as part of a College of Liberal Arts at a polytechnic institution mostly known for architecture, engineering and agriculture studies. So I think that's given us an identity of scrappiness and pride. So, despite being a small-ish department at Cal Poly, we have a long legacy of providing important news to both the campus and the Cal Poly community.
“I'm also really proud that we have our eye on the future here. We just introduced a new concentration in media innovation. We are one of the only schools in the nation leaning into media innovation as a field of study for journalism and PR students. The expectation is that we will be able to graduate students prepared for jobs that don't exist yet. So, we are trying to predict the future in a lot of ways and seeing where journalism, public relations, innovation, technology and community engagement — are all coming together. News gatherers, reporters and PR practitioners of the future are going to have to know a little bit about a lot.”
Kim Bisheff leads the innovation concentration as an advisor. She explained that the media innovation concentration was added to acknowledge the business challenges facing the industry.
The media industry will always need good journalists, but it also requires new tools, ideas and techniques to chip away at solving some big challenges.
“There are whole areas of the news industry now that didn’t exist 10 years ago, and so it's exciting to look to the future and create a curriculum that addresses that,” Bisheff said. “The main course anchoring the media innovation program is Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship. And in that, we teach the science of problem-solving. This process came from the business and tech worlds of creating products that engage your target audience because that audience drove them, and not how the decisions traditionally happen in newsrooms, which is top-down within the organization.”
Bisheff said students form teams to identify and solve a news industry problem. They brainstorm solutions, build a prototype, test it in focus groups, bring it back for changes and try it again. The students discuss business models and marketing plans, and then the final product is presented in “Shark Tank” style.
“It can be an internal newsroom workflow problem or a problem that the news audiences perceive,” Bisheff said. “One of the common [complaints is] ‘There’s too much information coming from too many places. I don’t know what to trust, so I’ve opted out of news altogether.’ So how do we get audiences back when they want the endless scroll of social and don’t want to go directly to reliable news sources?”
She added that students came up with a solution common in newsrooms with high turnover — such as college newsrooms. One of the teams is working on a solution that helps organize sources, creating source cards with notes on the source's preferences such as what kind of communication they prefer, when they’re most likely to be available and a bit of background. This system will help future reporters hit the ground running when they need to reach sources for their beats.
Another group is working on quizzes to engage readers more for certain news coverage.
“They created this interactive quiz,” she said. “We had a computer science student who helped us custom code a quiz that asks you questions about your priorities and matches you with a candidate, with links to the candidate profile.”
One of the challenges of working in an innovative journalism environment is doing so in a way that respects journalism ethics. That’s something that is discussed quite a bit at Cal Poly, both in the innovation concentration courses and in the more traditional news training spaces.
To that end, the school’s publication is called the Mustang News. The students produce fresh content for the website and publish some of their more in-depth stories in a monthly print publication. Patrick Howe is tasked with guiding journalists in their news production. He sees a bright future with technology.
“I’m sort of a technology optimist in this way,” Howe said. “I’ve written some papers on this topic, and I worked on a project with a computer science professor to help develop some AI tools that help people cover the state legislature. So [I’m] really interested in having students explore these tools — and go into a workplace where they’re familiar with them but be certain to keep the human — the reporter — as the decision maker. My goal is always to help foster more public affairs-oriented work and, to that degree, tools that can auto-summarize city council meetings, tell you who talked at the city council meeting, or tell you what’s coming up at the next one. I think those are really helpful.”
Howe acknowledged that they’re rethinking their print strategy now that the Mustang News print product is monthly. It’s taken on the functionality of a magazine, so they’re using the medium to publish some of the more investigative or topical work. The publication is supported by instructionally-related activities fees from the university and advertising, led by a “phenomenal team.”
“For two or three years in a row, we’ve won best student media business organization of the year, nationally,” Howe said. “It’s a big part of what we do, and we work with the business folks closely. It keeps us fresh and in tune with real-world industry demands.”
Cal Poly certainly introduces a spectrum of business-related coursework and offerings into its journalism program.
Teufel noted that the department leaders about a dozen years ago decided to “blow up some of these silos” as it relates to public relations and editorial tracks. Both types of classes are taught under the same journalism school umbrella.
“Every company now needs a storyteller, and every media outlet could use good public relations and good marketing tactics,” Teufel said. “And at the same time, we’re seeing a growth of individual journalists and reporters carving their own paths. Based on the work they do, they’re not anchored in a legacy media organization. I’m thinking of a few like Taylor Lorenz, who started with The New York Times and then branched off on her own and is now kind of her own brand in a lot of ways. That is a great example of bridging the gap between new-generation students, young folks, legacy media readers, and news consumers leveraging social media really well. I think it will be individuals in the future who will be building audiences and credibility. It’s going to be their reporting and individual reputations that stand for themselves. So, that being said, entrepreneurial skills and the ability to start up a news [channel] or the ability to market yourself, collaborate with other entities, come up with new products, and know a little bit about how to [conduct a] focus group and how to market. I think the entrepreneurial mindset is an antidote to the overarching trend of people not trusting news and media organizations.”
Howe sees the potential and is optimistic about what today’s students will be able to accomplish with their increasing skillset and traditional journalism values.
“They want to improve the world,” Howe said of student journalists. “They want to push back against forces they think are harmful to our society. I think what’s going on right now is terrific training for developing journalists. So, in that sense, I’m very hopeful. I’m one of those people who believes that journalism done well is necessary to a well-functioning democracy.”
Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.
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