New Academic Home Expected To Help Maryland Update Journalism Education

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – University of Maryland officials last week dedicated Knight Hall, a $30 million state-of-the-art home for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Ten years in the making, the striking grand glass enclosure embodies the innovation of a changing media landscape, officials declared of the facility, the construction of which was funded from public and private sources.

Equipped with the latest digital and green technology, including a camera in every lecture hall, professors are expected to lead their students into the unchartered territory of multi-platform and entrepreneurial journalism.  

“This building is of course bricks and mortar, but it symbolizes a powerful partnership between the public and private spaces and interests of our civil society,” said Dean Kevin Klose during a dedication ceremony Wednesday in  College Park, Md. “Journalism is by its nature a pursuit very similar to the pursuits of a great public university in that the core values are a constant search for provable, carefully observed, and carefully witnessed … facts, events, ideas and beliefs.”

The $30 million project was funded in part by private donors like the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation amounting to $14 million and supported by $16 million in state dollars. The new building is double the space of the journalism college’s former home built in 1957, and students said their “less ideal real estate” barely accommodated their growing needs much less their emergent ideas.

“This building represents the university’s commitment to journalism,” said senior journalism major Steven Overly during the ceremony, adding that the turbulence of the industry could have been a deterrent to investment.

Klose, formerly the president of National Public Radio and an editor at The Washington Post, said that the world is a much different place since he was a reporter but that journalism pedagogy has to change with it. The college has moved away from traditional tracks of journalism like broadcast and print, instead inaugurating a “multi-platform” approach that will accommodate recent and coming innovations.

With more than 650 students, the College has struggled with diversity both among students and faculty, but Klose pledged to change that using his experience as a diversity advocate at NPR.