NCAA qualifiers continued…

The reactions around the web have been colorful about the two football players denied admission to SMU.

• “This is an injustice.” [University Diaries]
• Hall exploring options for his future — BHS grad could play football and baseball after being denied admission to SMU [Brenham Banner-Press]
• The PonyFans Recruitment Board also has some interesting threads.

Congratulations are in order for Meadows Dean José Bowen

Dallas Historical Society announces recipients of 2010 Awards for Excellence in Community Service [Dallas Morning News]:

Jose Antonio Bowen (arts leadership): The dean of the Meadows School of the Arts since 2006, Bowen has brought bold, dynamic leadership to the school and to the arts in Dallas.

Photo Source

SMU can be pretty newsworthy. Here’s where you can catch up on the important SMU news of the day.

The Gulf Project

SMU is teaming up with “a coalition of scientists, policy experts, oil and gas engineers and state officials” in an attempt to make offshore drilling safer—thus preventing future oil spills.

Gov. Rick Perry created the task force, which the Houston Chronicle has him describing as “a Texas version of that legendary race to the moon.”

(Ed. note: No, I don’t really get the metaphor either. What are you trying to say, Rick Perry? How does a race to get a man on the moon compare to creating safer offshore drilling environments? The race to get the most oil?)

• SMU researchers to help in Gulf Project [Dallas Business Journal]
• SMU Part of Governor’s Offshore Drilling Think Tank [KERA]
• Tech to study Gulf oil spill [Lubbock Avalanche-Journal]

Video Game Sales

A study conducted by the Guildhall at SMU and EEDAR found that reviews of a game, such as one published by a newspaper, influence the sales of that game. The study found “a strong causal link between professional critic reviews and their ability to affect consumers’ actions and perceptions.”

• The Guildhall at SMU and EEDAR Study Influence of Professional Review Critics [IGN]
• Research Shows Game Reviews Influence Sales [Gaming Union]
• Study suggests review scores affect player opinion of games [Network World]
• Study: Review Scores Do Matter [IGN]

Sports

SMU denies a second NCAA qualifier [Dallas Morning News]

The first painting to get loaned to SMU from the Prado.

I used to round up links for my EIC blog (before I apparently forgot how to post to it). I figure this could be a good thing to do on this blog, since I’m still getting Google Alerts about SMU. I can’t wait for graduation and the day I can turn them off. So without further ado, here’s what you should know in recent SMU news:

Donald Andrew Bess is on trial for the murder of an SMU student in 1984:

• Dallas County death penalty trial delayed after defendant accused of killing SMU student has massive heart attack [Dallas Morning News]
• Defendant’s heart attack delays SMU murder trial [Associated Press]
• Rapist was also SMU student’s killer in ’84 slaying, two testify [Dallas Morning News]
• Dallas County prosecution rests in trial over killing of SMU student in ’84 [Dallas Morning News]

SMU Research is trying to help women practice assertiveness skills with virtual reality so that they can prevent rape (Editor’s note: But what we really need to be doing is teaching people to not rape other people. I mean, that’s the problem with our rape culture. But I digress.): Practicing assertiveness skills on virtual-reality “dates” may help women prevent sexual victimization [SMU Research]

The Meadows Museum announced a three-year partnership with the Prado Museum, which further cements the Meadows Museum’s association with Spanish Art:

• Meadows ties the knot with the Prado [Daily Campus]
• Prado and Meadows Museum announce three-year partnership [SMU Public Affairs]
• Prado and Meadows Museum Announce Three-Year Partnership [Dallas Art News]
• Prado has U.S. alliance [New York Times]

Summer Senate doled out approximately $5,400 to various organizations at their first Summer Senate meeting.

Sports News:

Conference realignment could mean a big shakeup for SMU Athletics. Right now, all we’ve got is speculation.

• How does conference movement affect SMU?_updated with Orsini statement [Dallas Morning News]
• C-USA hires consultant to assist as conference realignment unfolds [Dallas Morning News]

The NCAA sanctioned USC for a host of violations, bringing up memories of the Death Penalty and the death of SMU Football. Naturally. Sometimes I think SMU is the Jennifer Anniston to the NCAA’s sanctions’ Brad Pitt. No matter what the story, we’re going to be brought up:

• NCAA Slaps U. of Southern California With Stiff Penalties in Closely Watched Case [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• USC Football: Sanctions Worst Since SMU Death Penalty? [Bleacher Report]
• USC Trojans: They’re Different From 1980s SMU How, Exactly? [Houston Press]

Former SMU Director of Athletics Jim Copeland dies at the age of 65 from cancer: [SMU Public Affairs]

That's an epic fail.

Just because you never run corrections doesn’t mean you’re never wrong.

I was talking to Craig Flournoy, one of my journalism professors, one day last April when he said something to that effect. The Daily Campus had just run a correction recently, and he was telling me that we, the paper, were doing the right thing by publishing corrections.

And you know what? He’s absolutely right.

By their very nature, humans make a lot of mistakes. We’ve got the sheepish apology and “I’m only human” line down. You’d think journalistic institutions would realize this and admit their erroneous ways. Some do. Others don’t.

In an old post (but worth the read), Scott Rosenberg of MediaBugs.org highlights one of the reasons why corrections are important, focusing on two New York Times corrections of Voxox (originally reported as “Vovox”) and the College of William & Mary (originally printed as “William and Mary College”):

the importance of correcting them lies not in some earth-shattering import to the facts themselves but rather in the bond of trust that is established when a publication is seen to care enough to correct them — and, inversely, the loss of trust that occurs when the publication doesn’t bother.

Remember that, for Joe at Voxox or Sue at William & Mary, the misspelled name isn’t just a tiny fact in a sea of information; it represents that person’s point of maximum contact with the publication. Each time these people think of that newspaper or magazine they’re going to remember, These are the folks who couldn’t even get my name right. Multiply that by all the careless errors that get made in the course of normal journalism and you can get some insight into why public trust in the media has been on a downhill curve for so many years.

Issuing a correction is painful and gives me a queasy stomach. I absolutely hate doing it. Because as a journalist, I’m supposed to get the facts straight. The paper is supposed to get the facts straight. We’re the first draft of history!

Running a correction is something of a Catch-22: Either we admit that we were wrong or we don’t. Admitting mistakes shows our readers that we make mistakes and aren’t fully accurate. Not admitting mistakes shows that a) we’re too stupid to know we made a mistake, b) we don’t care about making mistakes, or c) we don’t want to make ourselves look bad. The only way out of these situations is to admit wrongdoing. To do so otherwise is a disservice to journalism.

The 2009 State of the Media report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that fewer and fewer Americans trust the media because we’re less accurate. We can’t just pretend the mistake never happened. Why not? Because our readers know if we get something wrong. There’s always going to be at least one guy who reads a story and notices that something’s wrong. And that one guy will inevitably tell someone else about the error. It spreads like a virus. They know we got something wrong, so why should they trust us?

Then there’s the other side of errors: spreading misinformation. Just ask Mark Twain, who is probably one of the most quoted people who ever lived. Or Marie Antoinette, who never did actually say, “Let them eat cake.” If we don’t correct our wrongs, some people might not realize we were wrong. This, I believe, is the single most important reason why we should correct mistakes. Not everyone is a fact-checker. It’s why birthers believe that Obama is not an American citizen (that, and a healthy dose of conspiracy theory). News outlets are supposed to be credible (because we’re all about facts), which means a lot of people take our information and assume its true. Even sometimes when it’s not.

If we don’t correct the information when we know it’s wrong, we’re lying to our readers. We’re intentionally saying the facts don’t matter. And in journalism, that’s akin to blasphemy.

This is somewhat depressing because unless I either a) become a famous author (my journalism career having gone to pot and all) who doesn’t have a set work schedule or b) marry an uber-rich European monarch (or equally-rich software/computer tycoon) and officially start using the word “summer” as a verb, this is the last time before retirement that I’ll ever be able to laze about.

The worst part is that I’m not lazing about at all for most of it. I’ll be taking a few summer classes and probably getting a job to earn a little extra money. That epic roadtrip across America will have to wait until I’m 89 and can finally afford that Winnebago (I’ll nickname it “Ralph”).

But I’m also a little excited, because this means soon I won’t be in school anymore. Sure, there’s going to be a lot more responsibility… and loans that need paying. But I like the idea of a world where I don’t have to constantly take tests and keep up with grades. That gets tiring.

My brief stint as Editor in Chief of The Daily Campus has been wonderful. I set out with a few goals,  and thankfully we accomplished nearly all of them.

This was one of the best semesters we’ve had in quite a while. Our readership is up. Reader discussion on our website, the opinion page and in other places has increased. We redesigned the website (with more changes occurring on the summer). We did more hard-hitting stories about subjects that impact students.

Perhaps the only thing we didn’t do was change our newsroom production flow to a web-first mentality.

While we did break several stories online (more examples here, here, here, here and here), the print product was still first in the hierarchy.

That’s not a change you can make overnight, of course. And I still haven’t figured out how to make a web-first approach work without copy-editing stories to the point of mass redundancy. Hopefully our new EIC, Jessica Huseman, can figure out how to accomplish this goal.

I have great faith in her; she’s already on the ball and gearing up for our summer issues. She’s got next semester’s staff tied up; she’s hired a couple of freshmen apprentices; she’s looked at making changes to the website and the print product’s layout. Also new? A Monday, Wednesday, Friday print schedule. No longer will we have to suffer through a five-day wait betwixt Friday and Tuesday! It’s going to be marvelous.

What’s Next for Me?

I’m going to be a senior staff writer for the DC covering Student Senate (for the most part). I will also be interning at The Dallas Morning News during the fall semester.

Over the summer I will be working an in-depth story for next fall’s DC. It should be extremely interesting. I won’t give away the details, but I will express my appreciation for the IRS. Thank you, government-tax-agency-that-requires-disclosure-from-nonprofits.

You’ll have also noticed that I gave the ole’ blog a fresh new theme. Hope you like it.

The Board of Directors of Student Media Company voted yesterday to continue the suspension of Friday print editions of the paper for the Spring 2010 semester. While we had hoped that we would be able to bring Friday editions back to the newsstands next spring, the economy’s downturn still affects us. Declining advertising revenues have made producing a Friday print edition of The Daily Campus financially unviable.

Disclaimer: I wrote it. And I added a reference to Evita.

The DC suspended the Friday print product at the end of Spring 2009. It was a sad day for me, and I hope the rest of the staff (but truth be told, I can’t quite remember how everyone reacted). We’d been hanging onto the “daily” in our name by publishing four times a week. Then we were down to three.

Would we have to change our name back to the Semi-Weekly Campus? For a while, it seemed plausible to me.

Well, we’re continuing the three-day print schedule. The economy just isn’t in the right place. It’s a shame considering that most college newspapers are fairing pretty well compared to our professional counterparts. After all, our niche has already been established. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Fall 2010 is the magic semester where we can bring Friday issues back.

The good news: our new Web site. The Internet may have caused all the “Print is Dead!” hullabaloo, but we can publish on the Web for free and as often as we’d like.

Now if only we could figure out how to monetize it.

I’m a little speechless.

College Publisher just sent back their version of the mockup we sent them for our new Web site. What you see to the right is a small snapshot of the awesomeness.

We had a couple of goals (well, I did) when this redesign started:

1. It had to be user-friendly
2. It had to be pretty and simple in its design
3. It had to feature our social media prominently
4. We had to get rid of the mash-up of newspapers in the background of our nameplate on the Web site. And the blue background.

I’d say we sufficiently accomplished those goals. I know College Publisher may not be thought of as the best college newspaper CMS, but they’ve been pretty awesome so far with our redesign. We don’t have super tech-savvy staffers (myself included; I couldn’t code to save my life unless it’s basic HTML), so it’s not much of an issue.

Plus, CP will allow us to have a mobile site (they just released it). SMU students are smartphone addicts, and I’m thrilled we’ll be able to accommodate them.

Expect the new site to launch over Winter Break.

CHICAGO– Class of 2008 journalism school students graduated into the worst job market for new journalists in nearly a quarter-century — and those who managed to find a job usually had few benefits to go with a stagnant salary, according to a survey released Wednesday. 

…

“Only six in 10 of the graduates had full-time employment six to eight months after graduation,” Becker and Vlad report. That’s the lowest level of full-time employment ever reported in the 23 years of the survey. 

University of Georgia’s Lee B. Becker, along with Tudor Vlad, conducted the study. Becker’s been doing this since 1986. Some results? 71% of public relations graduates had been employed, while only 59% of print journalism graduates had found employment. Many stated that they only took their jobs because they had no other opportunities. Job satisfaction fell from 42% in 2007 to only 37% in 2008 reporting that they felt “very satisfied” with their jobs. Average salary remained the same at $30,000, but Becker and Vlad found that graduates’ benefits packages were different:

“But the compensation package for last year’s graduates was lighter. Compared to a year ago, employers were less likely to pay all the cost of their health plans, or to pay at all for dental coverage, life insurance, maternity and paternity leave, child care and retirement.”

[Emphasis is mine.]

So what exactly am I getting myself into? I’ve got two years to find out how to make the changing industry mine.

And if I can’t, there’s always selling a kidney on the black market.

So what’s a girl to do? I’m not a daughter of a world-famous, filthy rich rockstar. My parents don’t own a multi-billion dollar business. Luckily, I’ve got a good imagination, which has helped me come up with a rather extensive list of things I can do.

Scholarships: This one’s pretty straightforward. You write the essay, we’ll give you money (if it’s good enough). Pros: It’s not that hard, and sometimes the money is good. Cons: Too many applicants, not enough money to go around.

Loans: Again, straightforward. You fill out an application, we’ll see if you qualify and saddle you with massive amounts of debt. Pro: You get money now. Con: You have to pay it back… with interest.

Get a Job: While college itself is often a full-time job, sometimes getting a real job is necessary to pay for that all too expensive education. Pros: You learn responsibility, time management, and the benefits of not having to work in the food and/or retail industry for the rest of your life. Con: You might have to buy the uniform.

Sell Your Firstborn Child: Babies can be big bucks, so I’ve learned from the Lifetime Movie Channel. Plus, firstborn children are always in demand when you bargain with demons. Pro: You don’t have to change diapers. Con: You just sold your firstborn child, heartless traitor!!!!

Selling Organs: People need organs. You need money. A + B = Happy Compromise. Barbara from Michigan can live; you can pay tuition. Pro: Who needs two kidneys anyways? Also, you’d lose a couple of pounds in the process. Con: What if your only kidney shuts down or it turns out a family member could have used it?

Become a Drug Dealer: Things that are addictive tend to lead to lucrative business ventures. Pros: You get to meet a lot of people, such as crack addicts or Colombian drug lords. Cons: It’s illegal. You could go to jail. You could get knifed by a crackhead or shot by a drug lord.

Donate Sperm or One of Your Eggs: Financial security these days is all about letting other people in on your healthy and normal reproductive system. Pros: For guys, it’s pretty easy to do, and you can do it often. For girls, it could mean a lot of money. Cons: You might one day meet your biological offspring and never know it. For girls, the whole ordeal is extremely complicated.

Reality TV: It’s the new get-rich-quick scheme. If you don’t win Survivor, there’s always becoming the next Speidi. Who doesn’t like a media whore? (Me, that’s who. But do you really care?) Pros: Money. Possibly lots of it. Cons: Invasion of Privacy by Photographers and Gossip Bloggers. Also, you have to pay taxes on any winnings (See: The First Survivor Winner).

Win the Lottery: A recent winner received well over $300 million. Now THAT’S some serious dough. You could pay for college, buy three houses and a yacht, AND still have change left over for alimony from your gold-digging spouse. Pros: Money. Money. Money! Cons: What are the chances you’ll actually win the lottery? Hey, at least you’ll be contributing your hard-earned money to the state (in Texas, doesn’t lotto money go to fund education?).

Steal the Money from Old People While They Nap: It’s as easy as taking candy from a baby. Provided, of course, that the old person you’re stealing from has money. Pro: Quick cash. Con: It’s illegal. And downright mean.

Insurance Fraud: Oops. You didn’t mean to burn your house down. But lucky for you, there was a big, fat insurance policy to cover it! Pro: It gets you money. Con: It’s also illegal, and there’s a greater chance of you getting caught than getting away with it. Also, who wants to fill out all those forms?

Armed Robbery: Give me the money or I’ll blow your head off! Pros: You don’t have to quit your day job, and you get to carry guns. It’s like a video game! Cons: Illegal, you’ll get caught, and it can get messy. Plus, unless you’re willing to devote all your energy to figuring out how to rob a casino, you’ll end up at some 7-11, where the take is only $40 or so.

Learn to Count Cards, then Head to Vegas: It’s not illegal! Pros: Blackjack can be fun, and you can drink while you make your money for college. Cons: There’s a good chance you could end up with two broken legs and a one-way ticket out of Vegas for good.

Solve One of the Millennium Problems: The Clay Mathematics Institute is offering anyone $1 million to solve some of the world’s greatest math challenges. Pro: It’s $1 MILLION! Con: These problems have stumped generations of mathematicians.

Blackmail: It’s as easy as one, two, record. Pro: This one could lead to a lifetime of fiscal security. Just because you’ve already received a sizable lump sum doesn’t mean you’re done blackmailing. As long as you keep the evidence in a secure place. Con: Your victim might not pay and could alert the police to your less-than-honorable activities.

Smuggling: It worked for Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind; why can’t it work for you? Pros: You give people what they want (at a considerably gouged price). The adrenaline high is also a bonus. Who wouldn’t get a rush sneaking across enemy lines to deliver goods to people who can’t get it themselves? Or if you live near a the Mexican border, you can help desperate people find a new life and the American dream. Cons: It’s pretty illegal, and people don’t like to be gouged on prices. And Rhett Butler ended up with a dead child and an uncaring wife  who realized her good fortune too late. Frankly, dear reader, he doesn’t give a damn. But I bet he’ll try to persuade you to find another method of paying for college. You shouldn’t have to end up like him.

Piracy: If you’ve been following all the action off the coast of Africa, you know what I’m talking about. Pro: It’s practically a cinch. Cons: This is no place for morals or regards for UN aid to Africa. Don’t even think about it if you’re prone to motion-sickness.

James Randi’s Million-Dollar Challenge: Got paranormal abilities? Able to prove it under scientific experimentation repeatedly? Then you’ve got yourself an easy million. Pro: Paying for college is sooo easy. Not to mention, you’ll become famous. Cons: No one’s passed the initial test (NO ONE. And you have to pass the initial test to even think about doing the actual experiment). And you’d actually have to have paranormal abilities. That’s not something you can develop easily.

Sell a Celebrity’s Used Kleenex on eBay: Why not? Pros: Lots of money and possible media attention. Cons: You’d have to dig through their trash (not to mention actually touch the used kleenex).

Inherit Money from a Rich Uncle: Hey, it could happen! Pro: Seeing your name in a will is THE BEST! Cons: It takes a lot of time to buddy up to the old crone. And then it’s not 100% that you’ll end up in the will (unless you forge a new one!).

Become a Porn Star:  If you like sex and are reasonably attractive, this avenue is for you. Pros: Sex. Lots of it. Also, notoriety. Cons: STDs, the inability to run for public office, and the chance that a relative or close friend could see you naked and doing the deed with some random porn star (how do you think THAT would help you at Thanksgiving Dinner?).

Become a Prostitute: It is the oldest profession in the world, after all. Pros: There’s the sex. And you’d be meeting new people by the hour. The ability to work as your own boss. Cons: STDs. Weird clients with weird proclivities. Jail. Loss of self-esteem.