Talk about a media Renaissance man: Adam Clayton Powell III has been a TV station manager, TV commentator, CBS News manager/producer, vice president for news at National Public Radio, ABC cable news director, vice president of technology at the Freedom Forum and is now the director of the Integrated Media Systems Center in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. (And that list leaves out several other old and new media interests.) He is the son of famous parents: Hazel Scott, jazz and classical pianist, singer and actress and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., civil rights activist and U.S. Congressman.

AE: You’ve been described as a “creative technologist.” What, exactly, is such a person?

ACP: I’m not certain I’d agree that I am such a person, but I would say that any good technologist is creative. Research and invention are creative acts. Technology is the new jazz (if you Google that phrase you will see I wrote it in the 1990s in a very different context). As with jazz, there is more hard work than most fans appreciate. But great technology - think of the first time you used the Web - is like Paul Gonzalves’ legendary 27-chorus tenor sax solo at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival: It’s electric, it changes the course of history (in this case, it brought the Ellington band out of eclipse) and it changes your perception of what is possible and what is human.

AE: As technology races forward, how do the technology-savvy communicate with the technology-challenged? Even computer literates are being left in the dust.

ACP: The pace of technological change is continuing to increase, so this is becoming more and more of a problem. A few years ago for an assignment for the USC Online Journalism Review, I interviewed John Markoff, technology correspondent for The New York Times, and he said he is having difficulty staying abreast of what is happening. If John is having trouble, what does that mean for non-experts?

AE: You have described the Integrated Media Systems Center as the intersection of engineering and creative content media. How do you explain, in layman’s language, what the center does?

ACP: IMSC conducts research that will help invent the future of how we work, learn and play. IMSC technologies use audio, video and haptics [tactile data] to augment reality and present the illusion that you are somewhere other than you are - with no goggles or earphones. John Seeley Brown, a member of the center’s board, describes IMSC as “sensing the edge.” It’s a nice three- or four-way pun: IMSC is out on the edge, and we work with technologies that intersect with the human senses.

AE: In a year, how much do you spend on electronic and wireless equipment and gadgets? What’s your favorite device?

ACP: Friends will tell you that I’m a minimalist. I had a Blackberry and turned it in: I don’t need to be that connected. I don’t even have a television set in the office or at my apartment, because there isn’t anything I want to watch that I can’t see on a computer. I do have a very nice home theater, courtesy of the previous owner who thoughtfully left it behind, and it has totally changed - and almost eliminated - my use of “television.” Television doesn’t translate well to large screens, other than movies (thanks, TCM!), the “Lost” pilot and sports. The only television I’ve watched this year for more than five minutes was the Rose Bowl, the Super Bowl and the George Mason games in the Final Four.

This is L.A., so you get invited to screenings and premieres all the time, but those social events aside, the last time I went to a movie theater was June of 2004. That was in Cape Town, where USC grad students were raving about a new South African film, “Forgiveness.” It was terrific, and when the producer and director came to L.A., we invited them to have the U.S. premiere here at the USC Annenberg School. The student interest was so high that we had to show it three times. But as with so many interesting films, it has not been distributed, to my knowledge, in the U.S.

AE: You’ve had a varied career and being a media Renaissance man has been a springboard to the digital future. Do you feel it’s important for journalists be as multidimensional as possible?

ACP: Journalists should be as informed as possible and as curious as possible. Journalists should also step back and have some perspective. And, finally, journalists need a sense of smell. Some stories just don’t smell right, and after a while you know it. Just before an election, or a critical vote in Congress, you’ll be pitched partisan stories by all sides, Republican, Democratic and supposedly disinterested observers, and most of them are at best misleading.

And don’t get me started on anonymous sources, the crack cocaine of journalism. Now when I was running NPR news, I OK’d some big ones, including the story that killed a Supreme Court nomination before we were off the air. But those had to meet such a high threshold of proof - in the case of the Supreme Court story, we had material on tape that we never used that, as they say, gave us confidence in our reporting. After I killed one story, longtime CBS News president Dick Salant said they should give out awards for keeping bad stories off the air. Maybe so, but it doesn’t win you any popularity contests when you look your reporter - or your source - in the eye and say they don’t have what it takes to support the story. And in a town as small as Washington, you may be sleeping with your source: Just map who is married to whom and who is going out together and you’ll see what I mean.

AE: What “content” is a must-read for you – digitally or in print or video?

ACP: Every morning I have the same routine at 6 a.m. All of my computers on both coasts have Google News as the home page, because it’s clean, fast and gives me multiple sources for every story. After 60 seconds or less there, I spend 5-10 seconds at the KNBC weather page to see whether there are any surprises. Then I spend a total of 60 seconds scanning three pages: the image of The New York Times front page, to see what the establishment is reading; the image of the Washington Post front page, to see what most people in government are reading; and the image of the Washington Times front page, to see what the rest of the people in government are reading. And I make notes of any stories I want to read later. Then I go to e-mail and look for messages from seven people to whom I pay attention, and I check my half-dozen Google News alerts based on specific search terms.

It’s now 6:05 and I go back to nytimes.com to read John Markoff, Michel Marriott and a couple of other tech reporters who are usually found back in the Business Day section. Then I spend some time at CNET’s news.com for its terrific tech coverage, and I scan the entire Wall Street Journal at wsj.com because its organizing principle is money, and we do live in a capitalist society. It’s now 6:15.

Then I go back to read Howard Kurtz and Lisa de Moreas at washingtonpost.com, Eric Deggans at the St. Petersburg Times [www.sptimes.com/blogs/media/], Brian Lowry at Variety, and Michele Greppi at TV Week to catch up on media. It’s 6:20 and time to check Dan Gillmor, Virginia Postrel, blogdex and technorati to see what I might have missed in the blogosphere. And I always check my guilty pleasure, Matt Drudge, and Cory Doctorow [boingboing.net], for the truly far out.

Spending 10 hours or more on airplanes every week means I can block out that time to read, so I download journal articles and put them in a queue for the next plane ride. In print, Aviation Week has been required reading for me for decades, because it’s really about technology and commerce, and the Economist is as well. Then there are Wired and the other tech periodicals. And I set aside time for books: most recently I read “Ghost Wars” and “The Path Between the Seas,” both about the intersection of technology, politics and history at the end of the 20th and 19th centuries, respectively.

AE: There is virtual 3-D modeling of almost any spot on Earth, and live video can place a viewer directly there. You called this “painting with live video.” What are the applications of this technology – and are there ethical complications that will arise?

ACP: The applications and the ethical issues are identical to those of photography 150 years ago. The difference is that it’s live - Walter Cronkite called it “You are there, for real.” And it’s digital, so it can be manipulated. Instead of worrying about truth in photography, it’s time to worry about truth in reality. You will swear you saw it - and that you were there.

AE: Virtual modeling relies heavily on surveillance cameras, traffic cameras and satellite pictures. Do you think that individuals should be able to “opt out” of public surveillance?

ACP: This question is moot: Opting out is no longer an option in modern society. What lawyers call the “expectation of privacy” is rapidly becoming an anachronism.

AE: There are two Adam Clayton Powell IVs. What are the odds of the name continuing to the fifth generation? And what are the perks (or pitfalls) of having a famous name?

ACP: There already is an ACP5.0: He’s my brother’s son. He’s a champion swimmer, so maybe there is something to this heredity business: All six of us ACP’s take to the water. The name certainly is useful for getting phone calls returned - for good or ill. Twice I was told I couldn’t be hired because of my name, and one CBS News executive told me I had to change my name if I wanted to be successful. I disagreed, and things turned out well. Of course I have been able to get great access, invited to closed meetings on Capitol Hill or in Hollywood wearing my “ACP” hat or, even though I’m 60, as “Adam’s son” or “Hazel’s kid” - as opposed to my CBS or NPR or now USC hat. You learn to compartmentalize. But there are often concerns, as first voiced by my father when I had my first job at CBS News in 1964: “You’re not going to tell them what really goes on [in politics], are you?” I laughed and replied, “If I did, they wouldn’t believe me.” Well, now, maybe they would.