I will be leaving my role as Founding Director of the Montclair State University School of Communication and Media (SCM) at the end of the week after working with a dedicated, expanding team, a faculty and staff group that I’m proud to have joined in 2012. The school launched then with 550 majors in our programs, a figure that has now jumped to over 800 students.

This has been my first full time role in higher education although I was the Founding National Editorial Director of News 21, the educational program now headquartered at Arizona State University that was launched in 2005 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of America. The chance to do another startup in higher education at a rapidly growing, large public university proved to be every bit as exciting an opportunity as I hoped it would be when I was fortunate enough to be named the school’s Director.

Of course there are all the challenges of a large, public institution at Montclair State, which as the state’s second largest university now has about 21,000 students. But I’ll save my reflections on higher education for another time. What I do want to reflect on, briefly and broadly here, is the School of Communication and Media, the faculty and staff, the quality of the student population and the importance of programs like this one in the current environment.

The school’s eleven academic programs are broken into three general fields — Communication Studies, Filmmaking, and TV/Radio/Digital Media/Journalism and the school offers one graduate program, an ambitious master’s in Public and Organizational Relations. I’m particularly proud of the fact that we developed over the first two years the university’s first Journalism major, a program with extraordinary full-time faculty, adjuncts and rapidly growing numbers of students. That program is now in its third year.

Uniquely, the entire student population all learn within a core curriculum that cuts across disciplines and give students access to rich programs, solid skills development and a faculty from multiple fields eager to work with them. We believe that this combination of those basic cross discipline approaches and refined specific major programs is preparing our students with both academic grounding and the skills they need to compete in the New York regional communications marketplace. The feedback we hear from those bringing on our students either as interns or full time employees is that our students are well prepared both intellectually and with state-of-the-art research, production and fact-gathering skills. It’s extraordinarily satisfying seeing our graduates move into promising career opportunities and then hearing from them and their employers about their successes.

All of our students will benefit from this year’s completion of a new $53 million learning center and production facility. We’ve started teaching in the new building this semester and it’s already clear that the facility, with four production studios, a multi-platform newsroom, a presentation hall and a variety of other teaching facilities, creates an exciting opportunity for students, faculty and for the University community.

We have also developed another unique piece of the media puzzle at the SCM, the thriving Center for Cooperative Media, which is among the most important initiatives in the country focused on addressing the problems facing localities as news coverage of their communities shrinks. We’ve created within the Center the NJ News Commons which publishes a daily newsletter and brings together nearly 160 media partners from around the state, working together to solidify and expand the state’s news and information ecosystem. Funded by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund and Montclair State, the Center is doing vital local work and on May 4–5 will throw a critically important national conference, The Collaborative Journalism Summit, providing workshops with industry innovators focusing on ways news organizations can effectively work together.

But for all this activity what’s most important in terms of what’s up at Montclair State is our diverse, motivated, and focused student population. Just the other day I had the opportunity to present five of them on a panel at Borrell Associates’ annual national advertising conference in New York City. There at the Local Online Advertising Conference 2017 in front of over 400 media pros, those students shown below and in Gordon Borrell’s tweet laid out for media leaders a clear vision of the changing nature of millennial media consumption. Nothing else at the conference was quite like our session and I have no doubt that the attendees will remember the wisdom of our students just as they will recall the presentations of media executives. They were clear, sharp and on point and I’m proud to have been one of their teachers. It is just one example of the important community opportunities our school creates for our students.

It’s hard to top that in terms of kinds of memorable, practical learning, real world activities that students in schools like the SCM experience. I’ll move forward with memories like this week’s conference and many others.

But I’m also moving forward into a news and information environment that’s quite obviously at a critical, perilous juncture for both business and political reasons. It’s a time when interest in news coverage is overwhelming, when investment is needed more than ever and when product development and filling market gaps couldn’t be more critical. I’ll be participating in efforts to help solve those problems, engaging in the field in a number of ways going forward. Those of us who believe in the power of the First Amendment, who are committed to creative expression, who believe that informed citizens are critical to the future of democracy and who are committed to pushing journalism forward by balancing traditional values with new ideas, products and approaches need to be engaged and focused on the business model and policy challenges at hand. I am committed to doing what I can to help address those kinds of challenges. I know our students, graduates, faculty and staff at Montclair State will also share in addressing those challenges as the school moves into the second half of its first decade.