In 1911 a group of students formed the University Press Club and began lobbying University of Texas President Sidney E. Mezes to develop a journalism school. Mezes ran with the idea, hoping to capitalize on his connections with Texas journalists, and in 1913 he presented a resolution from the Texas Women's Press Association advocating a journalism school and requesting that William H. Mayes, the lieutenant governor of Texas and longtime editor and publisher of the Brownwood Bulletin, be named its organizer and director.

In 1914, 31 years after UT was founded, the School of Journalism was born. Mayes was named its first director and space was created in "J Hall" alongside the School of Institutional History. The old building, which sat where the West Mall Office Building now stands, was heated by coal-burning stoves and housed heavy, primitive printing machinery.

From those humble beginnings 100 years ago, the UT School of Journalism has grown into one of the nation's biggest and best, with more than 40 full- and part-time faculty, 850 undergraduate journalism majors, 35 Master's students and 69 Ph.D. candidates, housed in the state-of-the-art Belo Center for New Media. Nestled in the Moody College of Communication, the school offers cutting-edge opportunities for students, including sophisticated multimedia newsroom and classroom spaces and a transformed curriculum that emphasizes new media skills as well as critical thinking and ethical values.

But the modern, innovative school has evolved naturally from its simple origins. "It flowed from the idea, occurring around the country, that journalists needed to be professionalized," said Glenn Frankel, the school's director and G.B. Dealey Professor in Journalism. "The craft was changing from just anybody with access to a printing press, to actual standards of accuracy and fairness. There were things to learn and things to teach, and Texas helped lead the way. So the notion of a professional class of journalists, both to come up with the news of the day and to hold politicians and corporations accountable, flowed from there."

Journalism at its best has always been an unruly and rebellious craft, and it did not take long for William Mayes and the School of Journalism to become embroiled in political controversy. Between 1915 and 1917, tensions between Gov. James Ferguson and UT faculty rose steadily, until the governor demanded that Mayes and other faculty be dismissed. The university refused, prompting Ferguson to veto appropriations for almost the entire institution, which in turn sparked an impeachment movement in the Texas Legislature. In 1917 Ferguson was impeached and tendered his resignation, but in 1925 he staged a political comeback when his wife Miriam "Ma" Ferguson was elected the second woman governor in the United States.

Shortly thereafter, the conflicts between UT and the governor's mansion resumed with gusto. The new governor vetoed appropriations for the School of Journalism, causing the College of Business Administration to step in and offer alternative journalism courses. Journalism was moved to a new building, "T Hall," off Speedway near Gregory Gym. It wasn't until 1927 that a Department of Journalism was reauthorized – after Ma Ferguson left office. Mayes stepped down as director the same year, and Paul J. Thompson filled the position. He served as chairman of the department until 1958.

The Department of Journalism would move twice more in the next six years. In 1927 it moved into a ramshackle "B Hall," formerly a boy's dormitory named Brackenridge Hall, where journalism students shared space with Texas Student Publications and the Publicity Office. Claudia Alta Taylor, known from early child as "Lady Bird," worked there as a features writer for The Daily Texan; in her oral history written by Michael Gillette, she called B Hall "a great big old gothic, bat-ridden building, full of legends, much remembered by all the old news hands around the state." After earning a history degree in 1933 with a minor in philosophy, Johnson returned for a year to seek a journalism degree. She had fond memories of classes with DeWitt Reddick, a journalism professor hired in 1927 who spent more than four decades on the faculty, and she enjoyed exploring media and newspapers.

"I met a lot of newspaper people. I found that they were plugged in to the happenings of the day," she told Gillette. "They met the actors of the day. They really saw what was going on, and I liked the opportunities. I just thought I would like to sample that."

Lady Bird Taylor graduated with a journalism degree in 1934, the same year she met and married Lyndon Baines Johnson. The pair purchased a radio and television station, KTBC, and Mrs. Johnson would go on to help her ambitious husband win seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, serve as first lady of the United States, and take an active role in wildflower and environmental preservation.

Other noteworthy alumni helped shape the School of Journalism in its formative years. In 1928 Olin E. Hinkle became an instructor of speech after completing a business administration degree; he went on to train legions of debaters. Granville Price, the editor of the Daily Texan in 1927 and city editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, became an adjunct professor of journalism in 1933. The same year, the journalism department moved into a crowded Old Engineering Building alongside the Departments of Applied Mathematics, Germanic Languages and Geology.

"We were in a very old building that was near the tower, and if you were the Daily Texan editor and were working downstairs, you could climb out the window if someone was coming that you didn't want to see," said Dick Elam, a journalism graduate and Daily Texan editor in 1949 and 1950. Elam, who worked on some of the first articles on illegal immigration in Texas, said award-winning enterprise reporting was common at the Texan. He went on to become an assistant professor and associate dean. "I'd come in on Saturday nights and sit on the rim writing headlines, which I knew how to do."

Walter Cronkite also arrived at UT in 1933. After flirting briefly with a mining engineering degree, Cronkite became a writer for the Texan while juggling coursework and a packed social life. After getting start writing calendar entries, Cronkite scored a coup of an interview with author Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas at the Driskill Hotel. "Miss Stein Not Out For Show, But Knows What She Knows" was the highlight of Cronkite's early career in journalism, according to Douglas Brinkley's Cronkite biography. The young reporter used clips from the Texan to leverage freelance work with the Houston Press, and his career took off. Cronkite left school in 1935, unable to reconcile the combination of expensive tuition, his penchant for partying and his growing attraction to professional journalism. While he went on to a glorious career as a war correspondent and legendary television news anchorman, Cronkite said he regretted leaving school early, and gave back to UT in a number of ways, including narrating commercials for the university.

"Cronkite also didn't have the patience to sit still in UT classes. He preferred toiling in the newspaper field full time, but later in life he told his daughter Kathy that he was embarrassed because he hadn't earned a degree at UT," Brinkley wrote. "Kathy pointed out that without a college diploma he had nevertheless become the best TV broadcaster in American history. ‘Yes,' Cronkite shot back, ‘but if I had gotten a formal education, I could have been the Kaiser!'"

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland enrolled in 1938 and took every journalism course she could with her future husband Les Carpenter, enjoying in particular those taught by Reddick. She became the first woman elected as a Vice President for the Students' Association.

"Although Liz was fascinated by politics on any level, her main love was journalism," wrote Betty Wilke Cox in her biography Liz Carpenter: Girl from Salado. "She believed that as a journalist she could go anywhere, see everything, ask anybody any questions. ‘A press card,' Dr. Reddick told her, ‘is your passport to the world.'"

Liz and Les enjoyed reading the Austin Sunday American at a favorite restaurant on the Drag, and over burgers and root beers one Sunday they read about coach Dana X. Bible and the Longhorns football team demolishing the Oregon Ducks 71-7 the day before. It was December 7, 1941 – just minutes before news of the Pearl Harbor attacks reached Austin on the radio. She graduated in 1942 with a journalism degree and moved to Washington, D.C., beginning a career as a political reporter and later as a spokeswoman for Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson.

Dolph Briscoe, who graduated a year after Carpenter, split his time between the Cactus yearbook, where he was editor, earning a degree in business administration and courting a classmate named Betty Jane Slaughter, whom he married in 1942. After graduating in 1943, he served in the United States Army in the Pacific, returning to Texas to serve as a state representative in 1948 and the 41st governor in 1973. He and Betty Jane were married for 58 years, until her death in 2000.

 

In 1948 the Department of Journalism was accredited by the American Council on Education for Journalism and became the School of Journalism once again. The designation was disputed a year later, though, when the Student Court ruled that the University Regents had named the School of Journalism a school "in name only." The name ultimately remained, but the School stayed under the jurisdiction of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Whatever the name, the school continued to churn out colorful, high-profile alumni. Liz Smith, a Fort Worth native who graduated in 1949, went on to New York City to become "The Grand Dame of Dish" and had a long career writing gossip columns and entertainment news for Hearst newspapers, Cosmopolitan magazine, the New York Daily News and Fox News. Ronnie Dugger a Daily Texan editor graduated a year later and went on to become founding editor and publisher of the liberal Texas Observer and author of Our Invaded Universities. Two years later, the university completed a new journalism building" on the corner of Whitis Avenue and 24th Street. Today the facility is called the "Geography Building." It's the building where Griff Singer studied journalism and learned to copy-edit the hard way – by reading a professor's stinging critique of the Daily Texan every morning.

"It looked like an old war map of China, it was so marked up with red and so forth. It was done not in a sarcastic way, but we found out we really had a lot of flaws," Singer recalled. "It was really a great teaching tool."

Singer learned to pay meticulous attention to copy-editing and fact-checking, and t6o peer behind the party lines and ask tough questions of politicians and corporate executives. After graduating in 1955, he went on to practice those skills at the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle before returning to UT to teach and inspire a new generation of journalism students.

Bill Moyers moved to Austin in the mid-1950s to attend UT and work for KTBC – the television station owned by Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. The income helped him graduate and gets married.

"We were the first station in Texas to buy a red station wagon, paint it red, and christen it – what else? – Red Rover, so that I could wheel around town in style, broadcasting from crime scenes and accidents and the state legislature, which some people said was the biggest crime scene in town," Moyers wrote in Moyers On America: A Journalist and His Times. He also followed "with a good deal of admiration and some envy" a scuffle between Willie Morris, a friend and editor of the Daily Texan, and university regents over the Texan's editorials about state politics and collusion between state officials and the oil and gas industry. Morris graduated in 1957 and became a prolific author of My Dog Skip and North Toward Home, among other works, as well as editor of Harper's magazine.

In November 1963 when the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas stunned the nation, one UT journalism alumna, Lady Bird Johnson, stood beside her husband aboard Air Force as he took the oath of office. Two others, Bill Moyers and Liz Carpenter, were aboard the plane; Moyers witnessed the oath, while Carpenter drafted the brief but moving speech Johnson gave upon his return to Washington. Another Longhorn journalism graduate, Mike Quinn, covered the assassination for the Dallas Morning News. His coverage is on display in the Smithsonian.

The School of Communication opened in 1965 as a grouping of three divisions: The Department of Speech, a new Department of Radio-Television-Film, and Journalism, which was returned to a department. A year later the Daily Texan rose to prominence covering Charles Whitman's on-campus shooting spree from the UT Tower.

Shortly thereafter, a pair of prominent graduates returned to join the faculty and teach a growing population of journalism students. One was Quinn, who became a professor and specialist on media law and ethics; he eventually became an associate dean of the College of Communication before retiring in 2004. The other was Griff Singer. He went on to become a tenured professor and leader in the School of Journalism for more than three decades. Among his students was Wanda Garner "Fluffy" Cash, a longtime community newspaper editor and publisher who is now associate director of the School of Journalism and first fellow to hold the S. Griffin Singer Professorship.

"I remember being in the first journalism building, and we had the Daily Texan office in the building with us, and the press was in the basement," Cash said. "I remember that when the Texan would go to press the entire building would shake, and it was a great sensory experience to walk in and smell the ink and feel the building shaking. I knew that news was being produced."

Also in 1965, UT hired its first professor to teach photography exclusively: Russell Lee, who was actually employed in the art department. Three years later J.B. Colson arrived; his partnership with Lee helped build the photojournalism program, and he worked to expand photojournalism courses to "a broader concept of photography as communication," wrote Sherre Lynne Paris in a dissertation. Slowly, Colson was able to secure additional equipment and classes for students, building an emphasis on photography while expanding and deepening the range of journalism taught and practiced.

"Colson made his intent clear in the basic course from the first class day," Paris wrote. "…Colson wrote that the main objective of the course was visual communication and that photo technique was ‘minimal'. He wrote that the course was ‘not an art course in terms of beauty/personal expression … not a craft,' but that it was ‘pictures for people and publication'."

The photojournalism department would ultimately produce a score of Pulitzer Prize winners and transition into the current visual storytelling and multimedia programs. Colson remains on the faculty as a professor emeritus 44 years after penning those notes.

Recent years have produced a number of noteworthy journalism alums. Karen Elliott House, who was managing editor of the Daily Texan in 1969,became publisher of The Wall Street Journal and president of Dow Jones International. Ben Sargent, a 1970 graduate, went from Daily Texan cartoonist to a 30-year career at the Austin American-Statesman and a Pulitzer Prize. Martin "Red" Gibson, a former writer and editor for the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle, started teaching at UT in 1969, earned his Ph.D. in 1973, and wrote several journalism textbooks and a monthly column for the Texas Press Association. He was chairing a national task force on media coverage of the Branch Davidian crisis in Waco when he died in 1993.

Jane Chesnutt, who worked for the Daily Texan and graduated in 1973, went on to become Editor-In-Chief of Woman's Day. Her arrival at UT coincided with a fascinating moment to learn and practice journalism.

"It was such an exciting time, it was the early 70s," Chesnutt recalled. "You had the Vietnam War going on, the whole Civil Rights Movement was still going on. The campus was often in an uproar, the whole counter-culture kind of thing. It was a thrilling moment to be in school."

A few years after the founding of the School of Communication, construction began on a three-building Communication complex at the corner of the Drag (Guadalupe Street) and East Dean Keeton Street. Buildings included the CMA academic center, the CMB media studios, and the Texas Student Media building. The complex was completed in 1974, just as Karen Tumulty began her studies in journalism with what she considered a close-knit group of faculty and students.

"People think of the University of Texas as a big impersonal place, but that could not have been further from the truth in the journalism school. I think that all of us developed really close relationships with the professors," said Tumulty, who graduated in 1977 and is now a National Political Correspondent for the Washington Post. "They really wanted to shape us, not just so that you came out of the school knowing how to write a headline that fits in a certain space, but so you came out of the school with the right kind of values for journalism."

Then in 1979 the School of Communication officially became the College of Communication, and in 1982 the CMA and CMB buildings were named the Jesse H. Jones Communication Center. In 2000, the Department of Journalism was renamed the School of Journalism and has retained that title ever since.

 

The rise of the internet and multimedia journalism has brought new challenges and opportunities to journalists and journalism educators, and the School of Journalism has worked to stay on the cutting edge of technology and education.

News has migrated online and fragmented dramatically in recent years. Media are shedding circulation and jobs while investing in online ventures and social media as modern distribution methods. These transitions present challenges for newly minted graduates and longtime professionals alike, but they also offer intriguing opportunities for clever entrepreneurs and capable journalists.

Gone are the days when Journalism departments could be a "conveyor belt to the industry," said Tracy Dahlby, the Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Chair in Journalism and a former director of the school. Journalism education must constantly evolve to meet that reality.

"We've positioned ourselves on the front line as media have changed," said Dahlby, who leads the school's Reporting Texas project, in which students report, edit and produce professional-quality journalism that is published on its own website (reportingtexas.com) and has appeared in news publications throughout the state.

"Newsrooms can't do the same kind of job that they could in an earlier period of educating their reporters, and I think partly that's because of the downsizing of newsrooms, but also because of what has grown up around the newsrooms, the new media. A lot of these startups and interesting new media enterprises simply don't have the resources to train young journalists in the way that we were trained."

The School of Journalism does have those resources, Dahlby said, thanks to a series of generous grants, curriculum reforms and a brand new building.

The opening of the Belo Center for New Media in 2012 has greatly enhanced the school's ability to teach and practice multimedia journalism. The $54 million, 120,000-square-foot center for digital media houses a multimedia newsroom, computer classrooms with advanced equipment and a pair of auditoriums with sophisticated audio and video capacity. It also houses KUT-FM, Austin's public radio station, and offers cubicles and study space for graduate students. And it is home to the Texas Program in Sports and Media, the VOCES Oral History Project and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

The Belo Foundation and other members of the family that built the Belo Corporation's newspaper and television station empire provided the lion's share of funding for the new building. And the company's flagship newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, has embarked on a series of cooperative projects with the school, including fellowships at the Washington and Austin news bureaus for recent journalism grads and a new professional-in-residence program at the school.

Coinciding with the opening of the new building, the School of Journalism launched a new, digitally-oriented curriculum. The new curriculum, which is the first complete overhaul in two decades, introduces students to multimedia and web design skills in their first classes, where students design and build their own personal digital portfolios that become the repository for their work over their four years at the school. Students are exposed early and often to WordPress, InDesign, Twitter, Facebook, Audacity, Photoshop, Garage Band, Final Cut Pro and a range of new media and software that have become centerpieces in news production. Digital skills courses are taught concurrently with reporting and ethics classes, and digital photography and video production have become mainstays of the undergraduate experience. Graduating seniors can email their digital portfolios, complete with resumes and work samples, to potential employers and graduate schools to demonstrate their new media proficiency.

"I'm excited about this brave new world myself, and I think the students are, too," said Eli Reed, an award-winning global photojournalist and clinical professor. "I push a lot of students to be able to look beyond the pale, to try to go for a different element, not to just be different but to inform, to be able to pass on what you're trying to cover."

The most recent development, in 2013, was a $50 million commitment by the Moody Foundation to the College of Communication – the largest endowment of any public communication college in the nation. The gift to the newly renamed Moody College of Communication includes $13 million for graduate student recruitment, $10 million in support for a network of research and outreach centers, $10 million for an "idea fund," and $10 million for research and community outreach centers like the Knight Center, Reporting Texas, the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life and the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy. A sky bridge connecting the Belo Center for New Media with the newly renovated Jesse H. Jones Communication Center is also part of the package.

Alongside its large undergraduate and professional master's programs, the School of Journalism also boasts one of the nation's most recognized graduate studies programs. Its students produce dozens of scholarly papers each year and the program awards doctorates to a dozen or so students who go on to join the faculty of journalism schools around the country. "Our school is somewhat unique in that we have not just the professional training, but we also have the scholarly writing," said Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a 1976 journalism graduate and an associate professor who directs VOCES, the U.S. Latino and Latina Oral History Project. "Our faculty does lots of creative research. We also produce textbooks, we produce journal articles and books that not only are about journalism, but use journalism skills to produce deep studies of the world at large. It's research that looks at the world in a very deep, journalistic way."

As Director Frankel points out, many challenges lay ahead. The school hopes to develop a program of innovative high-end courses to supplement current offerings in data visualization, media entrepreneurship and mobile apps development. It also hopes to forge more partnerships with news organizations following the model it has developed with the Dallas Morning News. "The only thing certain is change and innovation," he said. "That's the legacy we've inherited from our alumni and the promise we've made to our students."