Franklin Hall will re-open in Fall 2007 as home to Kent JMC, a re-invigorated program committed to collaboration, convergence and excellence in digital communication.

The renovation of the 1926 structure began in summer 2005, and should conclude in mid-2007, and be ready for all classes and activities by Fall 2007.

Price tag: around $21.4 million. And, of course, there is a potential glitch.

As JMC Director, Jeff Fruit, notes: "State capital funding should pick up the majority of the tab, but we're going to need lots of help from our alumni, friends and media corporations."

First indications, Fruit says, are that the School will need private contributions in the area of $3-4 million.

About $1.2 million has been donated by FirstEnergy Corporation and the Gannett Foundation.

FirstEnergy and an anonymous donor have given $1 million for development of the FirstEnergy Interactive Auditorium, a wireless, interactive 150-seat lecture hall with multiple projection screens.

Gannett contributed $200,000 toward the Gannett Collaborative Classroom where teams of students will work on multimedia projects.

The School of Journalism and the Department of Radio/Television merged in 1987, but continued to exist under two roofs, in Taylor Hall and the Music and Speech Building. Faculty and students found true collaboration to be, at the least, inconvenient, and at the worst, impossible.

“It's hard to run a school well and serve students well from separate facilities,” Jeff Fruit, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, told the KSU Insider.

“We're not building bricks and mortar here — we're building a program.” Fruit added that university officials spent a lot of time researching similar programs, as well as getting feedback from students on their needs, as they prepared for the move to Franklin.

The Office of Student Media will join the School in Franklin.

Franklin Hall will be the last of the historic buildings on the old front campus to be renovated.

Besides the FirstEnergy Interactive Auditorium and the Gannett Collaborative Classroom, the building will have a forward-looking Converged Newsroom for the Daily Kent Stater and TV2.

The new studio, Converged Newsroom and interactive auditorium will be on different floors of the 20,000-foot addition at the south end of the building.

It also will have a striking combo foyer/Hall of Fame with large projection screens on the walls, a state-of-the-art studio for TV2 productions, research facilities, extensive video and audio digital editing facilities, an updated Carl E. Hirsch Laboratory, and more room for faculty and student organizations.