Long ago in a galaxy far, far away (well, up I-10 a few miles anyway), I transferred from a big school to a small one. People called me crazy (to my face) and wondered if I hadn’t made a career-limiting mistake. And that was my mother!

Others asked why I’d give up the vast array of opportunities available at one of those schools with 30,000+ students to take up residence at a tiny (by comparison) institution with admittedly more limited things to do, classes to take, professionals to connect with.

I couldn’t verbalize my reasons, but I knew in my heart I was doing the right thing. Looking back, I just wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. A small(er) school gives you a chance to meet more people, to make the types of personal and professional connections that help you throughout life. It creates an atmosphere where one-on-one learning is not only possible but happens every day.

A small faculty-student ration allows me to be able to tailor my advising recommendations to a student’s needs, to identify specific openings that a prospective intern is seeking, to share the right business cards with a graduating senior looking for that all-important first job, to get to know students as more than just assignments and grades.

A student from another school remarked recently how cool it was that Loyola professors know our students’ names and talk with them outside of class, whether it’s in the hallways or on the way to the Danna Center. This student said that doesn’t happen at many other schools (even small ones). It’s one of the reasons I love teaching at Loyola and why students flourish here.

I was reminded of this during the weekend; I rode along with Loyola’s Ad Team as they participated in the District 7 National Student Advertising Competition in Mobile.

After an outstanding performance by the team, I feel even more strongly that Loyola’s size and the resulting ability to forge connections between faculty and students help make this a very special place. It’s created a strong bond between Dr. Yolanda Cal, in her first year as Loyola Ad Team adviser, and her senior-level students.

The 12 students who comprise In the NO Advertising may be bone tired just now, but they’re also excited about the prospects for the future. They’re eager to start fund raising for a trip to a professional development workshop in NYC in the fall, and they’re already talking about next year’s District 7 competition. They’re ready to mentor those coming after them and pass along what they’ve learned to the next Ad Team.

I encourage you to say congratulations to the members of the Ad Team when you see them; they deserve it. If you don’t know who they are, just ask. You’ll get to meet some really interesting people. Ask Diego about being Cuban, even though he’s Panamanian. Ask Mallory if there’s more water. Ask Alysha to say “thank you!” Ask Kristin about Chick-fil-A. Ask Diane what a plasma car is. Ask Thomas about hair spray (the product, not the musical). Each team member has some great stories to share.

In the US, something called the “hot news doctrine” originated within a 1918 Supreme Court case in which the Associated Press tried to use copyright law to protect its scoops from being themselves scooped by other (competing and would-be) news agencies.

Normally, copyright law only protects the expression of ideas (or facts) — not the actual ideas (or facts).  However, in applying copyright law to “hot news,” the Supreme Court found reason to protect the ideas (or facts) themselves in circumstances where those ideas (or facts) had commercial and short-term value.

But that was then and this is now.

More recent cases have specified and limited the application of this hot news doctrine to direct competitors.  Yet the argument has been revived by those news organizations that would attempt (or wish) to prevent Google-like aggregators from appropriating their scoops (mostly their headlines) without their explicit permission.

This is all a bit ironic, however, in that news content is rapidly being gathered more easily, cheaply, and consistently by something other than news agencies.  For instance, no matter how many foreign correspondents the NYT or the BBC can put in, say, Iran, those correspondents are never going to be able to see and hear all the things that any one of millions of Iranians can see and hear with a cell phone.  Voila:  Neda.  Or, voila again (and more recently):  meteor flyby.

Therefore, if there is any value to be derived from the scoop, then that value should eventually and rightfully accrue more often to the public than to the middle-man news agencies that thereafter appropriate it.  For this reason alone, news agencies that continue to chase the scoop, whether through the hot news doctrine or some other, are unlikely to be successful.

In that same 1918 opinion, however, the Supreme Court also did a cute little formal analysis of the news that divided it into two parts:  the factual content part (i.e., the “hot news” part) and the “literary” form part (already protected by copyright law).

Unlike news content, the “literary” form of the news cannot be so easily or cheaply crowd-sourced.  Insofar as we still assign status and believability to traditional news sources, contextualizing the news remains an important and exclusive product provided by a relatively small group of media experts and pundits.  And this important value is something news organizations certainly wish to preserve:  the contextualization or form of their news.

But there are problems here as well.

Traditional “literary” news forms — news producers might call these “stories” or “packages” —  are more suited to please audiences than to distinguish between what is true and what is false.   Do we, for instance, really need more characters, stories, drama, and media “personalities” (à la Fox News)?  Or do we need, basically, data filtering and database management tools (à la Google maps — and the like)?

Tim-Berners Lee – who first developed the world wide web — is currently spearheading, in association with the U.K. government, a new sort of news contextualization and form built around and more dependent on news content than either audience preferences for folktales or the news industry’s preference for easily reproduced and commodified templates.

It’s really very easy to tell the difference between these two forms.

If the form of the news depends on the news content that it explicates, then that form will be, without that content, hollow and unappealing.  On the other hand, if the form of the news depends on something other than news content, then that form will, golem-like, walk and talk and draw our attention despite its emptiness.

Sort of, for instance, like this.

Maybe it’s the pollen in the air and the circuitous routes I’ve had to take to get around campus that have me thinking about the Yellow Brick Road. Or it could be that the Emerald City is on my mind after reading the announcement of the death of Meinhardt Raabe, who played the Munchkin coroner in “The Wizard of Oz.”  Of course, it’s probably that I just saw “Wicked,” the upbeat musical version of Gregory Maguire’s considerably darker book of the same name. But I’ve been singing, “Oh what a celebration we’ll have today.”

And there’s lots to celebrate here in the School of Mass Communication. The 2010 Bateman team, taking on the U.S. Census as a client, was named one of the top 3 teams in the nationwide competition put on by the Public Relations Student Society of America. Those who know Loyola’s history in Bateman competition understand that it was almost a given that they’d be among the best of the 68 teams that competed in the first round. Dr. Cathy Rogers, PRSSA and Bateman adviser, has led teams to national glory as first place winners in 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2009. As Christine Minero (account executive), Jodi Forte, Kate Gremillion, Dominic Moncada and Marimar Velez head to Washington, D.C. in mid-May to do their live presentation, they take our congratulations and support with them.

The Loyola Ad Team is putting the finishing touches on their presentation for the District 7 American Advertising Federation round of the National Student Advertising Competition, whose client this year is State Farm. Katy Villavicencio, Margaret Sanders, Laura Sanders, Diane Rama, Thomas Froehle, Diego Morales, Brendan Minard, Justin Ross, Mallory Smith, Cyrille Brathwaite, Kristin Sutton and the team’s account executive, Alysha Jean-Charles – led by Dr. Yolanda Cal, AAF adviser –  head out Thursday to Mobile. We know they’ll soon be celebrating their success, and we send them off with our best wishes.

The SMC celebrated a year of success at Thursday’s annual Spring Fiesta in Dixon Court. With the Thelonius Monk Institute musicians adding a note of musical class to the event, Dr. Sonya Duhé, SMC director, recognized our outstanding mass communication students and award winners, as well as next year’s student media leaders.

It’s been quite a year for the SMC. Among our reasons to celebrate:

Dr. Duhé came aboard in August to direct the SMC. Dr. Leslie Parr led the Center for the Study of New Orleans through its inaugural year of programming and created a minor in New Orleans Studies. Dr. Sherry Alexander celebrated her selection as a photographer in the Fourth Juried Loyola International Photo Contest. Dr. Larry Lorenz was named the 2009 recipient of the Dux Academicus Award.

And there are many others in the SMC – and among our talented alumni – who’ve made us proud that they’re part of our school. Check out the SMC’s Web page to see more about our successes. (http://css.loyno.edu/masscomm/)

And one more reason to celebrate: Harold Baquet sent positive news from his bedside at M.D. Anderson. Get well soon, Harold.

While you were trying to figure out if it was time to turn over so your back would be as brown as your front, some of your fellow students were getting a taste of the “real world,” and I don’t mean the MTV show.

Members of the Spring 2010 Ad Team, also known as the Loyola University American Advertising Federation National Student Advertising Competition team, spent part of the first weekend of break locked in a computer lab, busy putting the finishing touches on their plans book for a campaign for State Farm insurance, this year’s competition client.

No Coppertone and cocktails for these Ad Team members. Think pizza and cold coffee. These students wrote and rewrote copy, thought and rethought strategy, added and re-added budgets. They put in long hours while others were enjoying free time and fabulous trips.  Just like “regular” ad professionals. And like regular ad pros, they can now step back and feel a sense of accomplishment.

But they’re not done yet. In April they’ll head to Mobile to defend their campaign in a live presentation, competing against 9 other teams in AAF District 7, all hoping to win the chance to go to the national competition in Florida later this year.

Friends, coworkers, roomies and family members have spent the last three months asking team members where they disappear to for hours at a time, why they always seem to be “in class” and why they never seem to answer their phones, texts or e-mails. And, supportive as they are, these friends just can’t appreciate how a 32-page book and 20-minute presentation could consume so much of their significant others’ lives.

But it is. If you’re not convinced, just ask Alysha, Mallory, Kristin, Thomas or Diane. Or Margaret, Laura, Brendan or Justin. Or Cyrille, Katy or Diego. And don’t forget Dr. Yolanda Cal, the SMC’s new advertising sequence head and adviser to the Ad Team, who’s been there every step of the way, also giving up part of her spring break to guide the team.

While you’re at it, wish them good luck as they head out to Mobile. We know they’ll do us proud!

Just some questions/thoughts concerning our new Social Media class being offered during the Fall 2010 semester…

• Should educational organizations and institutions attempt to control social media activities – e.g., blogging – as threats to marketing and promotion?  The National Merit Scholarship Foundation, for instance, already has.
• Should educational organizations and institutions institute a social media policy for faculty and staff?  Ball State, for instance, already has.
• Should student-run university newspapers plug away at reproducing print newspaper models?  Or should those newspapers be replaced by student bloggers blogging?  At Penn State, for instance, things are already happening.
• Should you really consider your followers your friends?   Is Farmville really the future of play — or the future of work?  When do social media turn into the sort of club that you don’t want to enter?

Prof. Zemmels and I will be discussing these questions and others next fall as part of an experimental offering of CMMNA394, Social Media, a course we hope will become a permanent part of our new Media Studies sequence within the School of Mass Communication.

***

ps.  Check out Owely.

I’m sure Buck Owens of “Hee Haw” fame never imagined that his famous song, “Crying Time,” would be used (abused) in conjunction with academic advising time. But the tune, recorded by singers from Tammy Wynette to Ray Charles, has been stuck in my head for the past few days as students begin the semi-annual ritual of stopping in to say hello and to set up schedules for future semesters. For some, it might BE crying time: those whose GPAs won’t meet scholarship minimums or those who aren’t going to graduate “on time,” whatever that is, because they’ve dropped too many classes or taken the wrong electives.

And that’s only one reason advising time is so important. Advising is an opportunity for students and their advisers to talk about requirements for majors and minors, options for advanced common curriculum courses or those “free” electives. It’s not just your adviser saying, “Take Biology T122 on Tuesday/Thursday at 11:00.” It’s not just about reminding you that you need to average 15 hours a semester to graduate in four years or trying to figure out what those study abroad credits are going to substitute for.

Sure, advisers do those things. But your adviser also helps you plan your academic life, reminding you about prerequisites (you have to take XXX before you can register for YYY) and alternate semester courses (course ZZZ will only be offered in fall semesters of even years). And your adviser can help you identify good electives that will enhance your education, not just easy ones that lift your GPA.

Your adviser will help you figure out what minor suits you, personally and professionally. And more than that, a good adviser will help you figure out what you’re going to do AFTER your academic life at Loyola ends.

Every semester I get a new advisee who comes in and says, “I just want you to take my adviser hold off so I can register for classes.” While other departments may “advise” that way, we don’t do that in the School of Mass Communication. We make you sit and talk with us, and we talk about things that you might not see as relevant to the advising process.

I ask my advisees a lot of questions:  what do you want to do with your life? how do you spend your spare time? where do you want to live after you graduate? All this helps me make better, more appropriate suggestions for your courses, as well as to steer you into professional organizations, internship opportunities or even career paths.

I like advising, even when there are more than 40 of you and only one of me. (And there was that semester I had 120 advisees, but that was at another school!) I get to know my students better through the advising process, and we often chat about non-academic topics. I’ve had tearful sessions (and keep a box of tissues nearby), and I’ve celebrated engagements, job offers and revelations of newly-found career enthusiasm.

I look forward to seeing my advisees in the next weeks. I encourage you to come prepared, to have a tentative schedule made out or at least a list of proposed courses to take. But I also remind you to come see me when it’s NOT advising time, just to say hello.

I have a dear friend (hey, Leslie!) who is a hair stylist in a tiny town in central Georgia. She is the kind of lively, personable stylist who makes the whole hair experience fun, and she’s good at what she does. Customers follow her from salon to salon and travel relatively long distances to have her cut, curl, color or whatever. (She’d also be a great contestant on Shear Genius!)

Unlike the stereotypical hair stylist (whatever that is), Leslie is a very talented PR practitioner. She has a degree in mass comm/PR and has worked with nonprofit organizations. She is a tremendous fundraiser and event planner. Leslie came to PR sort of late in the game. She test drove a few other majors before she quite accidentally “found” PR after reading a flyer on a bulletin board about what all you could do with a degree in the mass comm sequences.

It didn’t take her long to realize she’d finally found an academic home. She jumped in with both feet, taking to PR like a swan to water. She landed a valuable internship and went to work for an organization serving youth, putting her PR skills to work and succeeding.

But Leslie had another vision for her future:  to do hair. After working in PR for a while, she almost apologetically told me she was going to trade school to learn to do hair, with the intention of opening her own salon.

While I supported Leslie in following her dream, I was disappointed that the industry was losing such a tremendous talent. But she assured me that she was going to use her PR skills in promoting herself as a stylist and in managing her own shop, when she opened it.

And Leslie was true to her word. She’s an active member of her church and has directed many special events there. She’s developed brochures for the ushers’ program and works with the pastor to create fundraisers and programming for the youth. She supports Locks of Love, volunteers to do hair and makeup for local events and cheerfully joins in as a participant in all types of worthy causes.

She writes a column for the local newspaper, answering questions about appearance and lifestyle in a simple, straightforward way. And at the end of each week’s column, she promotes the salon where she works and proudly lists her B.A. in her bio.

As Leslie good naturedly reminded me  – in words I’d told her when she was my student – PR skills are transferrable. You can use them in an almost unlimited number of career areas. No matter where you live or what industry you work in, you can put those PR skills to work, helping publics and organizations understand and communicate with each other.

Leslie’s experience reminds me that anything you say as a professorcan come back to haunt you! But she was right. PR skills are practical and relevant; they can take you anywhere, just as you can take them anywhere. At a time when jobs are rapidly and drastically changing, good communication skills – particularly strategic ones – will make you valuable and more marketable.

By the way, if you’re ever in Gray and need a haircut, give Leslie a call. She’ll give you a great style and tell you about that time during PR Campaigns I yelled at her via cell phone from a theatre in NYC about the brick brochure. (But that’s another story for another day.)

1. When I ask students in my classes to tell me why they no longer read newspapers (and most of them do not read newspapers very often if at all), their answers reference a lack of accessibility, immediacy, and relevance.  But, at the core of these answers is the real reason:  newspapers cost money, and information is free.

2. The phrase “information wants to be free” dates from sometime around the publication of Steven Levy’s Hackers in 1984.  That book helped popularize what thereafter came to be known as a “hacker ethic”:  A loose set of programming principles that subsequently became a full-blown ethos promoting information unburdened by ownership or restriction.

The core of that ethos is this:  Information is most valuable when it is most connected to other information; and, anything that prevents information from connecting to other information is inferior to anything that doesn’t prevent it.  Therefore, over time, things that allow information to connect will prevail over the things that don’t.  Freeware, open access, and net neutrality remain products and principles actualizing this belief.

3. Other things that are free:  Air.  Water (sort of).  And advice.

Each of these, like information, is free wherever it is abundant and easily collected — and not free wherever it is not.  A couple of minutes of compressed air, for instance, costs 75 cents at my local gas station.   Bottled water is at least a dollar at the same gas station.  And, while good medical advice often comes free (eat right, gets lots of exercise), a consultation with your primary care physician costs you your deductible.

4. A current question for schools and universities is whether the education they sell to students is more like the information newspapers sell to readers or more like the advice that doctors sell to patients.  On one hand, information that is abundant and easily collected offers vast learning opportunities:  a truly liberal-arts education.  On the other hand, information that is merely preface to some subsequent, more personalized intervention (e. g., surgery by a specialist, or placement in a job) may be considered more justifiably private and protected than public and shared.

In order for universities to avoid the fate of newspapers, the information they sell to students may be slowly shifting from information that wants to be free to information that doesn’t, and from information that is abundant and easily collected to information that is neither.  This latter sort of information might in part be represented by what some call insider information:  stock tips, internship opportunities, names to know, places to be, numbers to call.  Instead of providing free and open access to the world’s libraries, universities may find it more economically viable to provide more exclusive access to the world’s marketplaces.

5. Selling free information is hard, but it’s not impossible.  Here are a couple a strategies that could help:  You could try to make information that wants to be free less free (like the RIAA), or you could sell a special sort of information:  information that is more valuable when kept private than when made public (like Coke).  This second, “special” sort of information then conflates information and status.  The more status you have, the better — just like information that wants to be free.  But, also, the more status you have that other people don’t have, then even better still — unlike information that wants to be free.

Newspapers are now experimenting with both sorts of strategies:  making information less free, and making information a status symbol.

Schools and universities may be way ahead of them.

1.  When the news media tell us stories about the world, there are good guys and bad guys.  For instance, right now in New Orleans, outgoing Mayor Ray Nagin is a bad guy.  However, it wasn’t too long ago that incoming Mayor Ray Nagin was a good guy.

2.  I study play.  And, just as there are stories in the news media about politicians, there are stories in the news media about play.  Sometimes, play is a good guy:  It enhances learning, creativity, and innovation.  Sometimes, play is a bad guy:  It’s wasteful, harmful, and disruptive.

3.  In September 2009, a PBS Frontline episode told a story about how a good guy (new technology) beat up a bad guy (poor student performance).  That story is called “How Google Saved a School,” and it’s an interesting story.  You should watch it.

In that story, at about the 4:50 mark, we learn that the assistant principal of Intermediate School 339 in the Bronx can access a student’s laptop webcam without that student’s knowledge or permission.  In the Frontline story, that new technology is a good-guy thing.  Fast-forward to February 2010, and that new technology is a bad-guy thing.

The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence…The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

Corey Doctorow

4.  Politicians and play and disruptive new technologies –- like, for instance, remotely accessed webcams — are complicated things.  They are not characters in a story.  It may please us to think and write and read about good guys and bad guys, but it doesn’t help us learn about them.  It may well be necessary to understand complicated things in complicated ways.

5.  Do stories help us understand complicated things in complicated ways?  Or do stories prevent us from understanding those things?

6.  If you ask questions like those in #5, are you always the bad guy in the story?

Anyone remember Franz Klammer’s downhill run in the 1976 Olympics?

I do.  If you’ve never seen it, here it is…

The call is by Frank Gifford and Bob Beattie.  It sounds live.  But that call, as exciting as it is, may well have been re-recorded prior to its broadcast by ABC.  Klammer’s run was so surprising, so dramatic, that Gifford and Beattie had earlier called Switzerland’s Bernard Russi the winner and were unprepared to give Klammer’s run its rightful due.  At the time, of course, no one knew that, because whatever ABC gave us was what we got.  Live or taped.  True or false.

***

It’s Lundi Gras in New Orleans, 2010.  No Loyola classes today or tomorrow.

Rather than braving the cold to see yet another of the 50+ parades and celebrations rolling through the city during Mardi Gras, I’m looking forward to watching the men’s downhill at the Vancouver Olympics. With only a single terrifying two-minute run down Whistler mountain to determine the winner, the men’s downhill is very often the most immediate, visceral, and exciting event of the Winter Olympics.  It’s the winter equivalent of the Summer Olympic’s 100-meter dash.  Both signature events rightfully lay claim to crowning the world’s fastest human, on the track or in the snow.

Starting time: 10:30am PST.   I’ve got the live interval times and updated standings ready to go on the Vancouver Olympics website.

But there’s no broadcast of the men’s downhill on NBC.

NBC is showing qualifying runs of the men’s snowboard cross, a new Olympic event.  There’s no mention of the men’s downhill in the NBC coverage.  No update.  No video.  No broadcast.

There is nothing.

NBC is taping and saving their coverage of the men’s downhill for tonight’s prime-time broadcast.

But it’s not 1976.  And NBC isn’t the only game in town. It’s not yet prime-time, and I know who won the downhill.  Twitter tells me.  Facebook tells me.

I know Didier Defago’s interval times.  I know Bode Miller of the USA took the bronze medal, and I know Miller was ahead of Defago’s time until he hit the very bottom of the course.

What happened?

Will I watch NBC’s prime-time coverage tonight to find out?  Probably.

Will I resent not being able to watch the men’s downhill live?  Definitely.

What I expect to see tonight is a carefully crafted package of the men’s downhill run, spliced and splattered with commercials and self-serving promotions of NBC’s coverage.  I expect to see a story.  I want to see an event.

Should I suspend my disbelief?  Should I trust NBC to groom and coif my experience of the 2010 Winter Olympics?

Once upon a time, circa 1976, I had no choice.

Today, I’m wondering where’s NBC’s coverage of the black bloc?  Where’s NBC’s interview of Canada’s poet laureate?

Where’s the 2010 Winter Olympics Men’s Downhill?