Belo Center for New Media
Questions and Answers
GENERAL
1. What are you announcing today?
The Belo Foundation, Robert W. and Maureen H. Decherd, the estate of James M. Moroney Jr., and the Jim and Lynn Moroney Family Foundation have pledged $15 million to establish the Belo Center for New Media at The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication.
2. What’s the name of the new building?
The new building will be called the “Belo Center for New Media.” It is named in recognition of Alfred Horatio Belo, the original owner of The Dallas Morning News and among the first class, with three other industry pioneers, inducted into the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame.
The gift is being made by The Belo Foundation, Robert W. and Maureen H. Decherd, the estate of James M. Moroney Jr., and the Jim and Lynn Moroney Family Foundation. The Decherds and the Moroneys are descendants of G.B. Dealey, A.H. Belo’s protégé and founder of The Dallas Morning News.
The Dealey family descendants – each of them pioneers of journalism in Texas, many of them University of Texas at Austin alums – continue to support The University of Texas at Austin.
The College of Communication has three endowed professorships and one scholarship resulting from the family: the G. B. Dealey Regents Professorship in Journalism, the E. M. “Ted” Dealey Professorship in Business Journalism, the Joe M. Dealey Sr. Professorship in Media Studies and The Belo Foundation Scholarship Fund.
3. Who is making the gift?
Three entities are making this gift: The Belo Foundation ($12 million); Robert W. and Maureen H. Decherd ($1.5 million); and the estate of James M. Moroney, Jr. along with the Jim and Lynn Moroney Family Foundation ($1.5 million).
4. What does the $15 million gift fund?
The Belo Center for New Media will receive $14 million of the $15 million combined gift, of which $13.5 million will go toward construction and the remaining $500,000 will be used to create the “Maureen Healy Decherd ’73 Teaching Endowment for Journalism” benefiting the School of Journalism in the College of Communication. Robert W. and Maureen H. Decherd will create a $1 million “Maureen Healy Decherd ’73 Teaching Endowment for English” benefiting the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts. Both endowments will create stipends for non-tenured faculty and doctorate candidates engaged in teaching activities related to literature, American society or U.S. media.
THE BUILDING
5. What are some of the features of the new building?
The design and structure of the Belo Center for New Media will enable teaching, learning and research to cross traditional boundaries and create new forms of communication and collaboration.
Specific features of the building include:
• Multi-use classroom space to aid cross-disciplinary teaching
• New and expanded research and seminar space for use by the college, research institutes and professional organizations
• Specialized teaching labs to enable multimedia production
• Distance learning and teleconferencing facilities
• Expanded student and career services area to include interview rooms and resource centers
• Advanced production labs and studios for all departments
• Digital theater/auditorium
• New digital archive and exhibit space
6. What is the total anticipated cost for the new building?
Anticipated construction cost for the Belo Center for New Media is $45 million.
7. Where will the balance of the funds come from ($30 million)?
The university will borrow money to build the building and repay the loan over a 30-year period at favorable interest rates with monies available to the institution, which include among other sources student tuition.
8. Will naming opportunities be available in the new building?
Yes, pending University of Texas System Board of Regents approval. The new building will include classrooms and laboratories, lecture halls, student galleries and meeting places, as well as conference and research facilities. We anticipate that some of these spaces may involve naming opportunities through private gifts.
9. Where will the Belo Center for New Media be located?
The Belo Center for New Media will be at the northeast corner of Dean Keeton Street and Guadalupe Street. That space now contains a surface-level parking lot.
10. What is the square footage of the new building?
While we do not know the exact square footage, we anticipate the Belo Center for New Media being between 100,000 and 125,000 (gross) square feet.
11. How many floors will the new building have?
The new building will have four or five floors.
12. Is there a rendering of the building?
No. We have not begun the selection process for an architecture firm.
13. What architectural style will the new building reflect? Will it mirror the Jesse Jones Communication complex?
That will be determined after an architecture firm is hired.
14. What are the next steps toward breaking ground on the new building?
Our hope is to break ground in January 2009 and to complete the project two years hence.
THE COLLEGE
15. Why does the College of Communication need a new building?
The three-building communication complex was completed in 1974 to serve 1,000 students. Today the College of Communication includes more than 4,200 students, 125 faculty members and 140 staff. Many of its offices, labs and research spaces are scattered across campus, and more than 40 percent of communication classes are taught in other buildings across campus.
16. How many faculty and students are in the college?
There were 3,635 undergraduates and 670 graduate students during the spring 2007 semester. Fall 2007 semester numbers will not be available until the 12th day of class (Sept. 13).
17. What departments compose the College of Communication?
The College of Communication is composed of five top-ranked academic programs: advertising (including public relations), communication sciences and disorders, communication studies, journalism and radio-television-film.
18. What “centers and institutes” will be in the Belo Center for New Media?
Existing units that would be housed in the Belo Center for New Media include:
• The Documentary Center – will support documentary production and research in photographic, video, audio and interactive non-fiction works.
• University of Texas Film Institute – (UTFI) is committed to a new model of film education. UTFI provides hands-on specialized skill training, fosters individual and collaborative creative growth, and serves as a testing ground for the application of emerging film technologies
• Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas – Initial funding for this center was provided by the Knight Foundation. The center's main objective is to help journalists in the Western hemisphere to develop self-sustaining training programs that will raise the ethical and professional levels of journalism, contributing to the freedom of press and democracy.
We are proposing some new units and look forward to a dialogue with the president and the University of Texas System Board of Regents. These units include:
• The Center for Childhood Communication – a comprehensive, state-of-the-art facility to study the full spectrum of communication disorders in children with the goal of translating research findings into effective treatments.
• Executive Communication Institute – a facility where faculty can share the latest insights on presentational skills, workplace interactions, media techniques and crisis communication with the Texas business community. The center will offer a variety of certificate programs to help executives advance in the workplace.
19. Will the Belo Center for New Media be open to other units on campus?
State-of-the-art classrooms, advanced labs, informal meeting places and centers of innovation will encourage cooperative teaching and learning not only among the five departments of the college, but also among other university programs and areas of study.
For example, students in Communication Studies may join with the LBJ School of Public Affairs to analyze how political candidates’ messages play in a world of digital sound bites and blogs. Journalism students may collaborate with law students to study intellectual property rights in an era of widely dispersed news formats. Advertising students may join with the Department of Human Ecology to learn how portable media devices affect children’s learning patterns.
NEW MEDIA
20. What is “new media”?
Definitions of the term “new media” vary. It refers to new forms of communication resulting from new technology – the Internet, mobile phones, iPods, video games, etc. These new forms of communication are transforming every industry and discipline. The way people exchange information has changed forever. Yet while the underlying technologies become more complex, the foundation of communication remains simple: interaction among people.
21. Why is it important to study “new media”?
“New media” and the new forms of communication it brings, is challenging every aspect of our lives. From family and community to education and the workplace, media convergence presents as many dilemmas as it does opportunities—ethical, legal, psychological and tactical.
By studying “new media” we can answer a range of questions, including:
• How will parents and children maintain common values when each family member is glued to a personal information device?
• How can citizens become broadly knowledgeable when exclusively reading Web-based newspapers tailored to their exact tastes and preferences?
• How will the “teleworking” and “virtual teams” now found in modern corporations affect an employee’s job quality and life satisfaction?
• How will digital archiving and distance-learning techniques help colleges and universities spread knowledge beyond their physical campuses?
Examining — and understanding — how new technologies and new processes affect our world requires a shift in how we study communication. The University of Texas at Austin will create the model with the Belo Center for New Media.
KUT RADIO
22. Will KUT Radio move into the new building?
It is hoped that KUT Radio will move into the new building, although no decision has been made about that possibility. We do not have renderings of the building, nor an exact size; there is much more to be determined.
