College Media Convention – Day 2

Today was a full day for me at the College Media Convention. I spent most of the day in sessions related to software included in the new version of Adobe’s Creative Suite. I began by attending a session on one of the components of the suite I use the least: Adobe Illustrator. This vector graphics application has gone through a number of iterations during its history, and in earlier versions of the Creative Suite, Illustrator seemed to be one of the least integrated. The latest version appears to correct that issue, as Illustrator has become an integral part of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3.

Next was today’s plenary session. Unlike yesterday’s keynote speaker, today’s was rather ho-hum. You know you’re in trouble when a speaker spends the first five minutes asking the audience to “raise their hands if the think this will happen“ and ”raise their hands if they think that will happen.“ One or at most two questions like that are OK, but it gets old quick. Among other things, Sam Feist, CNN’s Political Director, spent a lot time talking about how important it was to be apolitical as a journalist. This from someone who holds the title ”Political Director“ seemed a bit odd. At times he sounded more like a public relations professional than a journalist, spending a lot of time extolling the virtues of CNN’s news policies. And although he tried hard to hide his political inclinations, he didn’t try hard to hide his distaste for Fox News Channel. I didn’t find myself disagreeing with most of Sam’s points, but I did find myself getting rather tired of his ”old school“ views of objectivity. One student tried to pin him down on whether objectivity was still possible today, a question he conveniently spun toward a critique of FNC. I really wasn’t surprised at Sam’s talk, as he works for one of the biggest names in the business. He has reason to play it safe and stick to the ”middle of the road.“ But is it any wonder why Fox, despite its obvious bias, is getting a lot better ”rating point per dollar“ return than CNN? When it comes right down to it, I think most news consumers today appreciate journalists who embrace their bias rather than try to hide it behind the increasingly thin curtain of ”objectivity.“ Even I would rather spend an hour watching Bill O’Reilly say patently stupid things than spend an hour in the ”Situation Room.“ Neither one is very good journalism, but at least the first is somewhat entertaining at times.

The rest of the day I spent attending sessions on the other components of the Creative Suite, including sessions on Flash video, Photoshop, In Design and Acrobat. I also had time to take in a session on blogging, which was quite interesting. I wish I could get more of my students at The Quad interested in blogging. Maybe someday.

After a full day of sessions, I took a group of editors from The Quad out to a place called ”The Reef“ for dinner. Although it looked a little iffy at first, it turned out to be a nice place to kick back and talk. The food was pretty good, and it was plentiful. And it gave me a chance to reconnect with some of my best students. Being on sabbatical, I kinda miss being around students, so it was nice to have the chance to interact with them again. What can I say? I guess I just like being around college kids.

National College Media Convention 2007 – Day 1

Since I’m on sabbatical leave this semester, I wasn’t originally planning on going to the National College Media Convention. But after thinking it over, I decided a couple of days before the convention that I would go after all. The convention was just a short train ride down to Washington, DC. And it would be good to see my student editors from The Quad, West Chester University’s award-winning student newspaper.

I’m glad I went. On Thursday afternoon, I enjoyed the keynote address by Rob Curley. I heard Rob three years ago when he was doing great things at the Lawrence, Kansas Journal-World. In particular, he was a pioneer in developing deep, rich content for the web, and saw early on the importance of the web for local newspapers. Last year he took a dream job as vice president for product development at Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive. In this position he has helped guide an extensive team of “convergence journalists” who create content for the Washington Post-Newsweek family of web sites, including most notably, washingtonpost.com.

I’m not sure how many in the audience truly appreciated how rapidly Rob Curley rose in his profession, or how amazingly prescient his advice was a few years ago when he spoke at the College Media Convention in Nashville in 2004. But I hope that at least some of the students who heard him speak Thursday afternoon take heed of his suggestions…

  • Local newspapers must own local breaking news. Newspaper staffs are typically the largest news staffs in any market, easily outdistancing the resources of local broadcast news outlets. Yet when it comes to breaking news, people often turn to broadcasters. Newspapers need to realize that the web can help them in the effort to be the authoritative voice for breaking news.
  • Newspapers should embrace platform-independent delivery. The most important part of the word newspaper is news, not paper. Most journalists today write for both print and web, and many create audio and video content as well. Newspapers can and should be the dominant sources of news content in any platform. Convergence journalism isn’t just a trend; it’s today’s reality.
  • Newspaper websites should be about dialog, not monologue. Too many newspapers ‘t just “shovel” their print content into a web template. But that’s not how the web works…at least not effective web sites. People want to be able to participate. Give readers a voice on the web. Use the web to connect with your audience.
  • Embrace change with the right mindset. There are plenty of people in the newspaper business who resist change, who pine for the “old days.” But change is inevitable, and those entering the journalism field would do well to position themselves for change. This means having both a broad skill set and an open mindset. Having a variety of talents can open a lot of doors, but having a bad attitude can close a lot more.

Although it was a very fast-paced keynote, and at times a bit overwhelming, I left feeling good about what I’ve been telling my students for years now. And it made me feel good about advising student media. Journalists really do make an important contribution to the world. I’m honored to work with students who may be someday become the next Rob Curleys of the world.

Could I be Frasier’s double?

So I was in a BestBuy store yesterday when one of the clerks there said “you are a dead ringer for a celebrity, but I just can’t figure out who it is.”  He suggested I go to one of the various celebrity look alike sites on the net and find out who is my “celebrity double.”

So this morning I visited a few of these sites, including the one at myheritage.com, where I was able to create the following “morph movie.”  What do you think…if I shaved off my beard, could I pass for Kelsey Gramer?

I’m on Sabbatical…I think

This semester I’m officially on sabbatical leave from my faculty position at West Chester University. I’m supposed to be spending my time working on my sabbatical project, and that’s what I’ve been doing…at least part of the time. But during the first two weeks of this semester, I’ve found myself responding to a lot of situations at school that aren’t directly related to my sabbatical project.

For example, last week I spent quite a bit of time helping faculty colleagues with their computers. One of my colleagues had a computer that wouldn’t boot on the first day of class. A few had problems connecting to our departmental server. And there were a host of small issues that I was called upon for advice.

Not that I’m complaining. I appreciate being useful, and it gave me an excuse to keep in touch with my colleagues. But it was making me wonder if I was really on sabbatical…or just “sort of” on sabbatical.

This week I’m happy to say I’m making more progress on my sabbatical project. I’m hopeful that by the end of the year, I’ll see some tangible results. Much of the work I’m doing will be coordinated with our departmental intranet, which I’ve recently developed at communication.wcupa.edu/myCOM. I’m building myCOM using the open-source learning content management software Moodle, which I’ve used in the past for maintaining course web sites on our departmental web server. Eventually, however, I would like to have the content I’m creating integrated into an iTunes U site, something that West Chester University was supposed to have launched a year ago.

EndNote X1 released

Today Thomson ISI ResearchSoft released EndNote X1 for the Mac.  EndNote is a bibliography program that is used by many scholars to format citations, search online databases and manage reference libraries.  The Windows version of EndNote X1 was released in June.

I’ve been using EndNote since the very first version was developed by Richard Niles at Niles Scientific.  The early versions of EndNote were such a pleasure to use, as they were clearly and simply designed to provide quick access to references while writing.  I remember writing most of my journal articles and convention papers in the early 1990s with EndNote, and building up a massive library of references “the hard way” by entering in the data myself.  While manually entering references took a lot of time, the process helped me feel much closer to the articles and authors I was citing.

My early love affair with EndNote started to fade about eight years ago.  I used to be a regular upgrader, buying every new version as soon as it was released.  But when EndNote was acquired by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1999, the product started to gradually deteriorate.  Like many other software ventures started by a small group of passionate individuals, EndNote lost a lot of its charm when it was gobbled up by a large company with widely divergent interests.

Philadelphia-based ISI was a big company with a long history in the reference library industry, perhaps most famous for the Current Contents series of bibliographic indexes, and of particular note for communication researchers, the Social Sciences Citation Index. ISI had been purchased by publishing giant Thomson in 1992, which added another layer of management on top of an already large company. ISI had developed its own bibliographic software, Reference Manager, which used to compete with EndNote.  The year before ISI acquired EndNote, it bought another popular reference program called ProCite from Personal Bibliographic Software. 

So when ISI added EndNote to its software stable, the company had three different bibliographic  programs: Reference Manager, ProCite, and EndNote.  Rather than merge the three programs together, ISI has continued to market them as separate products to this day. During the last eight years, development of EndNote has become slow and incremental. Upgrades have became more expensive, while the value of features added to each upgrade has declined.  And the Mac versions of EndNote have been particularly lackluster, consistently lagging the Windows versions.

I may begrudgingly upgrade to the latest version, if for no other reason than to see if it is any better than the rather buggy EndNote X.  But sometimes I wish I could just turn back the clock to the early days of EndNote, when the program was such a joy to use, and just plain worked.

Honoring the memory of Leo Thompsen

This evening I had the honor to speak at the memorial service for my uncle, Leo Thompsen. He was a kind and generous man, with an irresistible smile and an impish sense of humor. He had a genuinely positive outlook on life, with an unshakable faith in God and in the fundamental goodness of humanity.

Leo2.jpgLeo Thompsen was born in Brooklyn on June 1, 1924. He proudly served his country as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division during World War II, and was one of the last remaining survivors of the Battle of the Bulge.  After the war, he attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute (more commonly known today as Virginia Tech) where he received a degree in civil engineering.   He moved to Alaska in 1953, where he lived most of his life, first in Juneau and then later in Anchorage. He survived Anchorage’s famous Good Friday earthquake of 1964, which to this day was the most powerful recorded earthquake to hit North America. He was happily married to Harriet, his wife of 41 years, who passed away in 1997. He had three children: his son David and daughters Karen and Joann. During the later part of his life, he spent considerable time in the summer months in Kodiak with his good friend and companion Ileen, and often traveled to Oregon during the cold Alaskan winters. He passed away on July 24.

Although I had to endure a lengthy journey to attend his memorial service, I’m glad I did. I had a good visit with my cousins, and was happy to share some of their memories of their dad at the memorial service. The program also included some fine violin music from Kathryn Hoffer, who also played at Leo’s 80th birthday party, which I attended in 2004. Leo received military honors at his memorial, including a touching honor guard salute.

There were well over a hundred people in attendance at his memorial. Leo made numerous friends in his life, and it was good to speak with many of them at the reception following the service.

To read more about the life of my uncle Leo, please read his online obituary. And if you knew Leo, please considering signing his online guestbook.

I’ll miss you Leo! You were truly “one of a kind,” a special person who touched the lives of many. I consider myself fortunate to have been your nephew. One couldn’t have asked for a better uncle.