Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Arizona State University
Arizona State University
Christopher Callahan
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E-mail: Christopher.Callahan@asu.edu |
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 year at the helm of the Cronkite School, Callahan brought to campus the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, created the New Media Innovation Lab, expanded the school’s student television newscast, hired six new full-time award-winning faculty members, led the design of a new undergraduate curriculum, established the Edith Kinney Gaylord Visiting Professorship in Journalism Ethics, raised more money than in the previous nine years combined and began planning for a new building in downtown Phoenix.
In his second year, Callahan launched Cronkite News Service, started a multimedia reporting program with azcentral.com that is led by the school’s inaugural Arizona Republic Editor-in-Residence, created a minority fellowship program with CBS5 and the Meredith Corp., established the Paul J. Schatt Memorial Lecture series, hired more top faculty members, vastly expanded the Cronkite School’s high school journalism programs and broke ground on the school’s new 102,000-square-foot home in downtown Phoenix.
At Maryland, he 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 that reaches 500,000 households 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 second 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.
