Happy Thanksgiving.
Harold Hill, meet Medill
Maybe the Medill School of Journalism hasn't demeaned itself by changing its name to the "Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications" (Remember Bob Newhart's Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Co.?)
But riddle me this: If this gas cloud known as integrated marketing communications has become as substantial and socially useful an institution as journalism, why can't it find its own goddamn founder? Instead, Medill is desperately repainting the lemonade stand sign to read, "Cranapple Juice Too."
If you ask me, aspiring reporters (or salespeople for that matter) shouldn't pay for four years of higher education to study abstractly a craft that can only be learned on the job. So I'd be fine if Medill disappeared altogether.
In fact, I've always thought that the only honest good that could come of going to j-school is the late-night dope-smoking sessions where the kids think aloud and place their aspirations on a scale from Edward R. Murrow to Hunter S. Thompson.
Now what on earth will even the squarest of these journalism students have in common with some Young Republican marketer at once too soulless to go to college for a high purpose and too stupid to get a degree that could actually pay?
That IMC geek had better have good grass.
Audiences are polite. The Cicero Speechwriting Awards judges aren’t.
The speaker seemed to like the speech. It seemed like it hit on all the key points. It seemed to go over well with the audience.
But the speechwriter entered the damn thing into the 2011 Cicero Speechwriting Awards, to find out for sure.
And did so by the Feb. 11 deadline, of course—in heartpounding hopes that the speech would be good enough that Vital Speeches editor David Murray would read an excerpt to several hundred fellow speechwriters at his closing keynote "jam session" at the 2011 Speechwriters and Executive Communicators Conference in Washington, May 8-9.