Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Harold Hill, meet Medill

11.24.2010 by David Murray // 10 Comments

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.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Bob Newhart, Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Company, IMC, Integrated Marketing Communications, journalist, Media, Medill School of Journalism, salesman

A green shoot in the winter of our discontent

03.03.2010 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

A brief counterweight to my Debbie Downer post of yesterday. In Phoenix last week I played golf with Writing Boots' Hong Kong correspondent Lorne Christensen, a Canadian expat speechwriter.

(The U.S. beat Canada, and the Star Spangled Banner was warbled on the 18th green.)

As good luck would have it, we were paired with another couple of Canucks, one of whom is the editor and publisher of an ancient family daily newspaper that serves the surrounding community of a Quebec town of 1,300.

So he's a dead man walking, right?

Nope. He's got four writers and he writes himself. His circulation is growing by leaps and bounds and he's having a blast.

The corporate chain papers suck and their readers are flocking to the independent paper.

"I love competing against the corporates!" he said, adding that if he was 35 instead of 55, he'd start launching more small-town newspapers.

Too much attention had to be paid to the golf—I prevailed over Christensen by only a single stroke—to afford me time to grill this guy further.

So I'm left to gasp: Is it possible that, after the media catastrophe shakes out, there might be a return to the (always suspect) romantic age of the family-owned small-town daily?

Is it possible?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Canada, corporate chains, daily papers, Media, small-town newspapers

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