Callie Schweitzer

What does the future of journalism look like? Look no further than Callie Schweitzer.

The undergraduate print journalism major got turned onto the news as a writer for her high school paper. “I was supposed to track down famous alumni for the paper’s entertaiment section,” she says. “Some of them turned out to be actual celebrities.” She interviewed Kevin Dillon, and when she jokingly asked David O. Russell, the director of “I ♥ Huckabees,” to stop by the school, he showed up the next day in a stretch limo. “The story was my first-ever front page piece, and the interview I got with him filled an entire inside page.” She knew she was hooked.

She went on to become editor-in-chief of the paper and dove into hard news, becoming interested in investigative journalism “with a human element,” she says. When it came time to choose a college, there was no question of where she was going – “Annenberg had everything I was looking for,” Callie says. “I loved everything it had to offer.”

During her time at USC Annenberg, Callie has interned at The New York Times and People magazine, but when asked about her favorite school experience, she’s got one answer: Reporting a series of pieces she oversaw for USC Annenberg’s online news outlet NeonTommy.com. Using publicly available Los Angeles County health records, she and her fellow reporters showed the county was underreporting the number of deaths caused by swine flu. Some families hadn’t even known that their relatives had died of swine flu until NeonTommy.com reporters told them. The story was picked up by outlets around L.A. and across the country, and Callie was interviewed about the story on two local radio stations’ public affairs programs.

Putting the human impact of the story aside, Callie sees the story as an inspiration to her chosen profession. “This story is an example of the future of journalism,” she says. “We’re providing a public service with our reporting, we’ve put a human face on a global issue, and we held ourselves true to journalistic standards. This experience has shown me that anything is possible.”

NeonTommy.com is a good fit for an entrepreneurial journalist like Callie, who extols the virtues of print newspapers while talking about the possibilities of collaborative Google Maps projects. “Someone once told me to find a job at a startup,” she says. “I was looking for a place I could be from the beginning, because that would give me some unbelievable opportunities. Neon Tommy is that place, and USC Annenberg has provided it for me.”