New directors of Annenberg strive for diversity, cross-collaboration

It has now been eight months since Wallis Annenberg Hall first opened its doors, and along with the five-story, 88,000 square foot headquarters for the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, came the two women at its helm —Sarah Banet-Weiser, director of the School of Communications, and Willow Bay, director of the School of Journalism — who assumed their roles just before the start of the 2014-2015 academic year.

In their time since taking office, they’ve strived to steer the massive ship that is the Annenberg school into the unchartered waters of the rapidly changing media world.

“Every time you have a change in leadership, you have an opportunity to shift the direction of the department,” Banet-Weiser said.

TWO WORLDS, ONE TEAM

 Banet-Weiser first arrived at the University Park campus as an assistant professor in 1999. In the 15 years since then, she quickly became an integral cog in the Annenberg machine, one that has worked to surge the school’s reputation alongside the greater university.

In 2014, when Banet-Weiser’s predecessor Larry Gross chose to step down after 11 years in the role, he specifically sought out Banet-Weister as his successor. Gross believed she synthesized the innate benefits of an inside hire with a passionate commitment to diversifying the communication program, and lauded her first year in the position.

“She’s doing a terrific job, which is what I expected,” Gross said. “Sarah came up through the ranks, she knows the school well, she knows all the players, and my part in all of this was realizing a few years ago she was the best person to do the job.”

And alongside the communication director’s appointment was Bay, an outside hire with two decades of broadcast experience as an anchor and correspondent on ABC, CNN and NBC, as well as an array of other cable networks. Most recently, she was a senior editor for the Huffington Post and a special correspondent for Bloomberg Television.

Upon her appointment, then USC Provost Elizabeth Garrett remarked that Bay’s arrival “…mark[ed] a moment of transformation for our School of Journalism.”

But the most transformative marker of Annenberg’s past year is the synergy that has formed between the school’s two department heads, something unexpected considering the differing worlds between the academia and practice.

“I didn’t know Willow, so I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to partner with someone and it’s just been working out really well,” Banet-Weiser said.

The two shared how parents, students and alumni alike have witnessed, caught on and fed off the two’s energy. Banet Weiser jokingly refers to their appearances together as the ‘Willow and Sarah Show,’ and Bay affectionately calls Banet-Weiser her “academic advisor,” a modest nod in deference to the latter’s longtime Annenberg career.

“Sarah and I very visibly function as a team,” Bay said. “And I think, frankly, faculty and students just see that partnership and that sense of team work and it becomes the norm. I think that’s the new norm here.”

COLLABORATION AMONG FRIENDS

Ushering in a new era at Annenberg with their burgeoning partnership, both Bay and Banet-Weiser sought to expand the cross collaboration between their two departments early on.

“When you have two new directors who like working together and have very similar ideas, it makes a lot more sense to do cross-school collaboration,” Banet-Weiser said.

The duo has formalized classes into the curriculum that combine the faculty and knowledge of both schools. One class, for example, Bay and Banet-Weiser will be jointly teaching: a Maymester course which will take a group of students to New York City to study and visit the centers of communication, journalism and public relations. Some of the proposed stops are ABC News, The New York Times and NBC Universal.

One class that concerned navigating media and news in the digital age, Bay said, was so successful that it will likely be part of the journalism school’s revamped undergraduate curriculum in the near future.

And in keeping with Annenberg’s first year of having two women directors, the two have placed considerable stress on diversity, developing the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA), a research center which examines inclusivity across media industries.

“I think we’re a very visible framing of a new face and a more diverse face in what has traditionally been the senior leadership of the school,” Bay said.

The tandem between an outsider and an insider, they said, has often proved beneficial: Banet-Weiser’s background in Annenberg had her more equipped in navigating channels of hierarchy and knowing what is “allowed” within the school, while Bay has brought a new wave of thinking that Banet-Weiser says “challenge dominant traditions.”

Overall, the two shared that a feeling of great change has encapsulated the school, both in tangible and atmospheric means. Such a feeling can be expected in the face of new management and new infrastructure, but what has surprised them both was how willing their cohorts were to get beside them in this transformation, to follow the march of the school’s new direction toward media convergence and curriculum shifts.

“People were very eager to embrace change, more than I expected,” Bay said. “People were eager to seize the opportunity of the new building and the new program, to relinquish their fiefdoms, break through the silos of their individual platforms and collaborate.”

THE WORLD AHEAD

As Annenberg’s seniors graduate this week and enter the workforce, their degrees will undergo a more discerning eye. Banet-Weiser and Bay are confident recruiters will look favorably upon majors that they believe provide a transferrable skill set based in the most fundamental human activity: communication.

“Communication is seen as broad discipline because it is a broad discipline,” Banet-Weiser said. “But the opportunities it provides are very far reaching. It’s hard to brand communication, but the reasons why it’s hard to brand it as a discipline defines its richness.”

And the journalism world has faced an upheaval in the past decade, as print revenues sour and readers increasingly digest their news in rapidly changing ways. Media consumption is heavy through the use of computers, mobile and tablet, but often lacking in sufficient revenue. It has provided a consistent challenge for professional journalism schools to match their curriculum to this shifting media landscape, as well as prove to students and their parents that their school’s arsenal is a worthwhile investment.

Bay, however, is not scared. Confident in the degree’s worth,  she boldly noted the benefits of a journalism degree:  its skills of research, contextualization, verification, communication and dissemination to a global audience.

“You need to tell me what that doesn’t prepare you to do in this world,” she said.