ASU’s $14.5M Knight Center takes aim at journalism’s future

Julia Wallace is the Frank Russell chair at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She is currently serving as the launch director for the Knight Center for the Future of News at ASU.

There is no doubt we are at an inflection point, especially with two issues. One is technology. AI is changing everything. And the second is that people want to hear from authentic voices.”

Julia Wallace

Dr. Battinto Batts was preparing to welcome 300 aspiring journalists for the autumn semester at Arizona State University’s (ASU) Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication when he and his colleague, Julia Wallace, spoke with E&P about ASU’s new Knight Center for the Future of News, announced in June. The Center officially opened on July 1^st, made possible by a $10.5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and an additional $4 million in funding from ASU. The Center's mission: “to transform and strengthen the American news ecosystem.”

The Center's organizational structure will focus on an “Information Hub,” which will connect thought leaders, gather insights and share best practices with the broader industry. There will also be three labs:

• A “Journalism, Community and Democracy Lab,” which will study trust in news;
• A “Sustainability Lab,” which will keenly focus on revenue models for long-term viability; and
• An “Innovation in Reporting and Storytelling Lab,” which will experiment with storytelling and information-gathering tools, including Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“Our North Star is to accelerate transformation,” said Julia Wallace, the Frank Russell chair at the Cronkite School and the Knight Center’s launch director. She’ll lead the Center until a founding executive director is named. Dean Batts told E&P they’d already received four dozen applications for the role.

“There is no doubt we are at an inflection point, especially with two issues,” Wallace said. “One is technology. AI is changing everything. And the second is that people want to hear from authentic voices.”

Battinto L. Batts, Jr., Ph.D., is dean and professor of journalism and mass communication at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

How we produce news and how the public values, receives and benefits from that information is also evolving, Dr. Batts observed: “We’ve got to look at this — this field of journalism and news — much differently than we’ve looked at it in the past. We can’t come at this by defining success as restoring the days when we had 300 to 500 people working for a news operation. Those are the outliers, and we must recognize that. … I believe that the future is a return to the past when you had multiple people practicing journalism in a community, and they each served a particular voice or particular segment of the community. They were also part of the communities they served. They didn't just helicopter in when there was a story. They were people who were seen as being pivotal to the community infrastructure.”

“We will see the lines blurred between content and the business side, and I know that can be perilous and some people are concerned about that — and that’s still valid — but at the same time, we can no longer be in a space where people on the content side don’t understand the revenue side of the business,” Batts said.

The first planned publication to emerge from the Center will be authored by Leonard Downey, a former executive editor for The Washington Post and current professor of practice at Cronkite. To be published in August 2025, it promises a snapshot of the news landscape, encompassing both legacy organizations and startups.

“We have two things coming on artificial intelligence,” Wallace said. “We’re working on getting a convening going in January. We are also working on a report that examines the past three years — what has worked, what hasn’t worked and possible trends for the future. And the other project we’re looking at is board governance, particularly in the nonprofit world.”

“Fundamentally, at the heart of all of this is collaboration,” Batts said. The Center will collaborate with other higher-ed institutions, journalism associations and community organizations.

“For example, one partnership will be with the Center for the Future of Arizona, based here at ASU. They have done a lot of research in terms of journalism and news in the community — how the community consumes news, its relationship with news and what we can learn from that,” Batts said. “We want to base everything we do on audience research and understanding audience engagement.”

Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She's reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.