Alum to make global impact through sustainability

January 17, 2014

After a very busy year and a half being a graduate student in Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, Karen Kao celebrated her achievements as the graduate speaker at the school’s fall convocation this past December. With a background in psychology, Kao is very interested in the behavioral change behind sustainability, which led her to the school’s master’s degree in sustainable solutions.

“The program is an applied degree, so anything that I learned in the academic field of psychology, I could learn how to translate into practice,” Kao says. “Graduating as the first student from the program, I feel well-equipped with the strategies and thought-processes that help build solution options, and I take with me a practical skillset that’s transferrable to almost any subject in sustainability.” Download Full Image

As a student, Kao served as a research assistant on projects implementing practical solutions to sustainability issues, ranging from economics to urban planning. As part of her capstone project, mandatory for the master’s degree in sustainable solutions, Kao conducted community engagement workshops in Phoenix to collect public opinions for Reinvent PHX. The project, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Sustainable Communities Grant Program, aims to develop a new model of sustainable urban development, where public transit, housing, jobs and services improve the quality of life for all residents.

“In that role, I had to figure out how to talk about sustainability to the general public,” Kao says. “We wanted to see how we could holistically improve the city for the people living there by having informed conversations with them, an important process that is often left out.”

This past summer, Kao traveled to Washington, D.C. and London to compare how the different governments implement sustainability policy as a Global Sustainability Studies Program Scholar. The study abroad program is a project under the Global Institute of Sustainability’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.

“The biggest thing that struck me was how different people think of sustainability,” Kao says. “In the UK, there’s not really a question as to whether there’s global climate change; rather, it’s what do we do about it? Here, it’s still a bit varied. This difference leads to very different viewpoints in perspectives for uncertainty and problem-solving.”

Bringing her global perspective back to Arizona, Kao became a project manager for the Sustainability Solutions Services, also part of the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives. She researched economically viable scenarios for forest thinning for The Nature Conservancy. Kao also investigated the impacts of healthy buildings on employee productivity and performance, using Park 20|20 in the Netherlands as an example. Park 20|20 is the “first cradle-to-cradle working environment” in the Netherlands, incorporating human-centered design that empowers employees through comfort, nature, non-toxic materials and sustainability.

With a lot of experience under her belt, Kao is now a sustainability program coordinator for GreenerU, a university sustainability solutions provider. There, Kao coordinates partnerships with university clients, helps provide solutions for campus sustainability and collaborates with GreenerU’s engineering team and campus stakeholders on energy efficiency projects.

Says Kao, “I look forward to helping universities make positive change through sustainability.”

Real journalism in the digital age: looking back to move forward

A Jan. 23 presentation, "Woodward and Bernstein Revisited" highlights the importance of accountability journalism and the role ASU can play.

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Real journalism in the digital age: looking back to move forward

January 17, 2014

The news business today may bear little resemblance to the time 40 years ago when Woodward and Bernstein were chasing down Watergate. But that doesn’t mean accountability journalism is any less important than it used to be, according to two journalists-turned-academics.

Leonard Downie Jr., longtime executive editor of The Washington Post who helped direct the Watergate coverage, and journalism dean Christopher Callahan, both of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will address the evolution of the news media – for good and bad – during a discussion Jan. 23, at the Cronkite School on Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix campus. Leonard Downie Jr. Download Full Image

Titled “Woodward and Bernstein Revisited: How universities and nonprofit newsgathering organizations are filling the gap in accountability journalism coverage,” this presentation by the Cronkite School, in partnership with the ASU Foundation’s Presidential Engagement Programs, is the first PEP event of 2014.

Downie, who is now Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Cronkite School, and Callahan, a former Associated Press political reporter who is the founding dean of the school, will discuss how digital access to news and other information means more access and more choices, but also means it’s more difficult to find and discern trustworthy sources. Both have been vocal advocates of accountability journalism – the kind of journalism the Watergate coverage represents – that provides a check on power.

The two also will discuss how journalism educators can prepare students for the rapidly changing digital media world, and how universities, nonprofits and others can help fill the gap in accountability reporting that is being created as traditional news organizations retrench.

Here, Downie shares his perspective on journalism today and what its continuing evolution means for the Cronkite School.

How has the news business changed since the days of Watergate?

Watergate happened before the digital age. The news media since have greatly multiplied in number, and their audiences have fragmented. As advertising revenue for news media has declined steeply, their news staffs have shrunk. And there is more competition for information on the Internet and social media.

Are those changes better or worse for the news consumer?

More choices and digital access to news media and other information from around the world are good changes. The unreliability of much of that information is a challenge for news consumers, who must sort through the cacophony to find trustworthy sources of news.

The title of your Jan. 23 presentation refers to “accountability journalism.” What is accountability journalism, and how do we know it when we see it?

Accountability journalism holds everyone and everything in society with power and influence accountable to the rest of us. It should be part of the news coverage of every subject. It is what will increasingly separate real journalism from all the other sources of information and images in the digital age.

How have changes in the news business affected the way journalism schools prepare their students – here in the Walter Cronkite School, for example?

Dramatically. Journalism students must become completely proficient in multimedia skills while still learning how to report thoroughly and aggressively, and to tell stories vividly, regardless of medium or platform.

(Callahan, in a January interview with Public Relations Strategist magazine, described the Cronkite School’s “‘… teaching hospital’ model of journalism education. Similar to medical education, we are creating professional environments – in our case, newsrooms and innovation labs – led by first-rate journalists and PR practitioners who serve as the editor/professor. Students are immersed in these unique learning environments for a full semester. The result is unprecedented learning, with the byproduct being important news content.”)

Without giving too much away before your PEP event, what opportunities does today’s news business offer to university and nonprofit news gatherers?

Collaboration with universities and nonprofits provides news media with more journalism than they could otherwise produce by themselves, while providing nonprofit and student journalists with much wider audiences.

Downie and Callahan will present “Woodward and Bernstein Revisited” from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., Jan. 23, in the First Amendment Forum of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, 555 N. Central Ave. in downtown Phoenix. The $25 admission fee includes parking validation. Registration is recommended, but admission may also be available at the door. Visit asufoundation.org/pep.