New Dean Will Leap Into Journalism's Reinvention

After a lifetime of working for newspapers and radio, Kevin Klose will take on an entirely new challenge: rethinking journalism's future as technology transforms traditional media.

Klose will be the next dean of the nearly 600-student Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. At 68, he has covered everything from street crime to the former Soviet Union for The Washington Post, written books, overseen U.S. radio broadcasts to foreign countries and led National Public Radio through a decade of dramatic audience growth and fundraising success.

He comes to the school at a time when journalism is changing rapidly. It is decentralizing from traditional sources to the hands of countless individuals able to record video or send text with cellphones and BlackBerrys. Newspapers are closing, and many media outlets are sharply downsizing as readers move online.

"Everyone is looking at it in horror," interim dean Lee Thornton said of the layoffs and newspaper closures. "It's just a drumbeat, isn't it? It's frightening. Yet our applications here at Merrill are up. Students want to come to journalism."

Klose said he doesn't know yet where people will get their news in coming years. "It's like the early days of radio," he said. "There was a tremendous amount of feverish invention, trial and error that went on in the 1920s and 1930s. . . . The outlets or platforms are unclear now -- they're being invented."

When he joins the school in mid-April, Klose will jump into what he described as the ongoing experiment to find formats for the independent journalism a democracy needs.

What will endure, he said, are the standards of accurate, ethical reporting. "There's still going to be, and always will be, a need for edited, fact-checked, archived, verifiable journalism," he said.

He'll bring his grounding in traditional newspaper journalism -- Klose worked at The Post from 1967 to 1992 -- as well as his experiences as president of NPR, where he ushered in the switch from tape to digital and other technological advances. He restructured Radio Free Europe for the post-Cold War world.

"I'm good at setting a transformational course," Klose said.