On the Road Again...

I seem to be spending a lot of time on the road lately. Now I'm packing my bags for a doubleheader trip up north -- attending the Silha Lecture at the University of Minnesota on Monday night, then spending the following two days at the Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn. Never been to St. Peter, but it seems about as Lake Wobegon-ish a place as I'm likely to land.

Our current academic dean at Simpson, Steve Griffith, was a Gustavan (or is it Adolphan?) for two-plus decades before relocating to the relative tropics of Iowa. And our administration is thinking about ways to create a Nobel-like symposium at Simpson. As I'm director of the Simpson Forum, the public lectures program at the college, I'll be observing how GAC puts on its big show and see what lessons we can learn.

Thank goodness this is taking place in early October rather than January.

Figuring Out the Future

Many thanks go to Bryan Murley of the Center for Innovation in College Media and Eastern Illinois University, who visited us at Simpson this past week to take a look at our faculty, our students and our facilities. Like a lot of schools of communication, Simpson is trying to get a handle on how best to teach the next generation of journalism, public relations, advertising and new media professionals.

Bryan will be filing his report with us in the next couple of weeks, and that will be big help as we get ready to launch a national search for a new faculty member in the department.

By the way, Bryan's blog is one of the best places to go to get information on how you can keep working toward staying ahead of the curve in terms of recognizing stories and

Feeling Right at Home

So it was class dinner and movie night all wrapped up in one at the Steffen house on Sunday night. Twenty Liberal Arts Seminar students rolled in, dumped their flip flops at my front door and ate Sharon's comfort-foodapalooza. Then we all crowded into the basement for a viewing of Hotel Rwanda.

This has been a great LAS group for me this term. They seem well adjusted to their first term at Simpson, and they're also stepping up to what we're expecting of them as college students.

How to Be a Journalism Student

Professors in a variety of disciplines get a little frustrated with students from time to time. Why aren't they, as a group, more curious, more disciplined, more intellectual than they used to be some elusive golden age of yore? (By the way, profs usually think that that golden age was when they were undergrads...)

Having taught journalism for going on 20 years, I find myself sometimes asking that question. The problem, it seems to me, is that most undergraduates don't act like journalists. With some notable exceptions among the students I've worked with over the years, they don't seem to have the unteachable instincts of journalists.

So how to study journalism? British journalism blogger Paul Bradshaw offers a great set of 10 ways to study journalism. And this list seems to speak of those traits that I'd love to see in all students — not just journalism students. I especially like the following:

Get a life. Journalists generally report about a particular area - politics, sport, the environment, science, health, education, communities, religion, technology, motoring, finance. If you haven’t picked an area, pick one, and start getting involved — join organisations, attend meetings, go to events, do things and talk to people. Stories don’t come with a convenient label: you need to be able to spot them - while experiences can make for great material.

And how 'bout this one?

Don’t sit around waiting for an email reply. People can ignore emails, and they generally do. A phone call is much harder to ignore, and you’ll get more than a one-line reply. Learn to use the phone.

The Revenge of the Macs

Folks around Simpson who know me also know that I'm an obsessive Macintosh guy — have been for 20 years and probably will be buried with my fingers on my MacBook Pro keyboard. (And, by the way, could the folks at Blogger please do something to better integrate with the Safari browser? I have to cut over to Firefox to post to this blog -- major pain.)

We are a smug crew, we Mac users. Could it be that, finally, the rest of the world is coming to see the wisdom of the Mac platform? With a new Leopard operating system about to hit market and the thud of the Vista system from Windows, the Wall Street Journal reports that former Windows devotees are now realizing that Mac is the place to be for innovation.

The Journal's not alone. Sure, the Mac’s a more expensive machine, but pop music biz and tech blogger Bob Lefsetz argues that they’re worth the price in the headaches they save alone. "You can buy a Vista machine, laden with craplets, spend hours loading up the anti-virus and spyware detection software," Lefsetz notes, "or you can go Mac, and be up and running almost instantly. And, if you've got a problem, you can go to the store where you bought it and get help free."

Don't say I didn't tell you so.

Getting Advice

This past week was big for the Department of Communication Studies, as we convened our first meeting of the Communication Advisory Council. Doesn't sound like much at first to prospective and current students — but the CAC will play a big role in helping connect our program and students with industry professionals around the area and state.

We sent out about 35 invitations last spring, thinking maybe half of those invited would join the group. We were pleasantly surprised when nearly everyone accepted — and shocked when nearly everyone showed up for last Tuesday's first meeting at Simpson's West Des Moines campus.

The board is a Who's Who of media and communication professionals -- the area's newspaper, radio, television, multimedia, public relations, magazine, marketing and corporate sectors are represented. We even have a state legislator on board.

The first meeting was devoted to introducing the members of the board to our programs and to Simpson generally. We heard from President John Byrd, who told the board about Simpson's commitment to building communication studies into a centerpiece of what he calls Simpson's position as a "comprehensive college with a strong liberal arts focus."

The board's input will be crucial in the coming weeks, months and years as we look at changing our curriculum to reflect all of the major changes that are impacting communication education in specific and liberal education in general. Stay tuned: I'll be blogging about the board and our discussions in the weeks ahead.

Student Journalists, Real Journalism

Gotta prop some of our hardworking student journalists at Simpson, who aren't just doing campus journalism on our student newspaper and radio station at the college. They're out covering the 2008 presidential campaign as freelancers for C-SPAN, the nationwide cable public affairs network.

C-SPAN this summer started using an army of journalists to cover campaign rallies and presidential hopefuls mixing with ordinary folks in Iowa and other important early 2008 campaign states. So when C-SPAN producer Ben O'Connell called me in June to see if we'd be interested in taking part, my colleague Chad Roberts and I put together a team of Simpson students who jumped right in.

So far, Simpson VJs (video journalists, as C-SPAN calls us) have covered campaign events for Republicans Sam Brownback and Fred Thompson and Democrats John Edwards and Barack Obama. And you can watch some of their work online:

• Andrea Kemp, who is editing The Simpsonian student newspaper this academic year, shot this great bit of video of Brownback's campaign event at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in July.
• Nicole Cleveringa, who is the lead copy editor of The Simp this year and writing for the Des Moines Register (along with serving as student body president at Simpson), shot this event of Barack Obama's in Adel, Iowa.
• Mike Wilson made it to the Iowa State Fair to shoot this event with Fred Thompson in mid-August.
• And I, your humble blogger, got behind the camera myself to shoot this event with John Edwards in July.

We're going to be all over central Iowa until the Iowa caucuses in January, so stop back to get the latest on how Simpson student journalists are covering the world of politics.