Christopher Callahan, Dean, Professor

Christopher Callahan is the founding dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He came to ASU in August 2005 from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where he served as associate dean.

In his first years at the helm of the Cronkite School, Callahan led the successful redesign of the undergraduate and graduate curricula to focus on digital media and journalism values and started new specializations in Latino coverage and business and economics journalism. Two major programs were brought to the school – the Carnegie-Knight News21 Initiative and the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism – while others were created, including the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Cronkite News Service, the New Media Innovation Lab, the Stardust High School Program, the Arizona Republic Multimedia Reporting Program, the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute and Cronkite NewsWatch. Under Callahan’s leadership, a series of privately funded positions also were added, including the Reynolds Endowed Chair in Business Journalism, the Carnegie Professor, the Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence, the Arizona Republic Editor-in-Residence and the Edith Gaylord Visiting Professor in Journalism Ethics.

Callahan led the design of the school's new home – a $71 million, state-of-the-art media complex that opened in 2008 on ASU's new downtown Phoenix campus.

Callahan also doubled the size of the full-time faculty, recruiting top journalists such as newspaper editors Leonard Downie Jr. of The Washington Post, Tim McGuire of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Rick Rodriguez of the Sacramento Bee and Linda Austin of the Lexington Herald-Leader; former CNN anchor Aaron Brown; and digital media leaders Jody Brannon of MSN.com, Dan Gillmor of the University of California, Berkeley, and Retha Hill of BET.com.

He co-teaches the freshman class "History and Principles of Journalism" each fall.

At Maryland, Callahan led the Capital News Service programs in Annapolis and Washington, spearheaded moves to bring the National Association of Black Journalists and the university’s television station to the college, recruited Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists to the faculty, led successful efforts to launch a Web-based newsmagazine and a nightly TV newscast and assisted in the college’s major fund-raising efforts. In addition, he taught a dozen different courses. Callahan also served as a senior editor of American Journalism Review.

Callahan is the author of “A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet,” now in its third edition, and in 2004 he led a joint study by Maryland and UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc. that explored the lack of racial diversity in the Washington press corps.

Before entering journalism education, Callahan was a correspondent for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C.; Boston; Providence, R.I.; Augusta, Maine; and Concord, N.H. He specialized in political and government coverage. He received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University’s School of Public Communication in 1982 and a master’s in public affairs from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1990.

A New York native, Callahan and his wife, Jeanmarie, live in Scottsdale with their two sons, Cody and Casey.