Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Arizona PBS will become part of Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the university said in a press release Thursday. It had previously been part of ASU’s public-affairs office.
As part of the school, Arizona PBS (known as Eight) will become “journalistic ‘teaching hospital,'” the release says.
Like a teaching hospital in medical education, these immersive professional programs provide intensive learning environments for students, important services to the community and the ability to experiment and innovate. In this case, the community service is providing critically needed, in-depth journalistic content to readers and viewers.
The Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton in 2012 called for a teaching hospital approach to journalism education. Tom Rosenstiel wrote in 2013 that “as a central idea for modernizing journalism education, the teaching hospital concept is too limited.” But, Rosenstiel wrote, “It works far better under the careful tutelage of an extraordinary practitioner such as former Washington Post Editor Len Downie at Arizona State University than some others.”
Later in 2013, Lauren Klinger wrote about how the University of Alabama’s journalism department used a teaching-hospital model.
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