COMM 390: Two articles on advertising in this week's Newsweek -- READ AND DISCUSS

In the business section, there's a profile of marketing guru Peter Arnell that gives a fascinating picture of the guy who branded PepsiCo and Donna Karan's DKNY design house, among other enormously successful corporate clientts. It's not only a great example of fly-on-the-wall feature reporting, as Newsweek staff writer Daniel Lyons follows Arnell around for two days and draws his conclusions. It's also a thought-provoking story about what marketers do -- what we all do -- in communicating with the public.

Read it. Blog it. We'll talk about it Monday. (Remember: No class Friday.) They both fit right in with what Arthur Berger and Jean Kilbourne have been saying about advertising, but they put a spin on it.

One insight comes at the very end of the story about Peter Arnell, whose recent Tropicana orange juice packaging has bombed but whose other projects seem to be flourishing:

... it occurs to me that the way to understand Peter Arnell is to think of everything he does as a kind of high-stakes performance art. Not just the commercials and advertisements, but everything—the meetings, the memos, the celebrity phone calls, the crazy brainstorming genius shtick. When it works, it works. Who knows why? You can study it, but you can't explain it. So Peter Arnell seduced PepsiCo into forking over millions of dollars, and gave them a memo about perimeter oscillations and the gravitational pull of a soda-pop can. Is that nuts? Probably.

But guess what? While the new Tropicana box fizzled, Pepsi says Arnell's new logo for its soda cans is working. "Our business momentum has really changed," says Burwick, PepsiCo's marketing boss. "Customers like the new design. Our bottlers like it. We're happy with the work." I keep remembering something Arnell told me when we sat down to breakfast in New York. "It's all bulls––t," he said. "A logo on a can of soda? Please. My life is bulls––t." Did he really mean that? Maybe. Or maybe, like everything else, it was all just part of the act.

After you read the whole story, you'll see why Lyons doesn't know quite what to make of it all. I don't know either.

But I can guarantee you, it'll leave you thinking about what we do in communications.

The other article, article headlined "Generation Diva," is by Newsweek's Jessica Bennett. She writes about children in beauty contests and

Why are this generation's standards different? To start, this is a group that's grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading. These girls are maturing in an age when older women are taking ever more extreme measures, from Botox to liposuction, to stay sexually competitive. They've watched bodies transformed on "Extreme Makeover"; faces taken apart and pieced back together on "I Want a Famous Face." They compare themselves to the overly airbrushed models in celebrity and women's magazines, and learn about makeup from the girls of "Toddlers & Tiaras," or the show's WEtv competitor, "Little Miss Perfect." And while we might make fun of the spoiled teens on MTV's "My Super Sweet 16," these shows raise the bar for what's considered over the top.

A combination of new technology and the Web, is responsible—at least in part—for this transformation in attitudes. Ads for the latest fashions, makeup tips and grooming products are circulated with a speed and fury unique to this millennium—on millions of ads, message boards and Facebook pages. Digital cameras come complete with retouching options, and anyone can learn how to use Photoshop to blend and tighten and thin. It's been estimated that girls 11 to 14 are subjected to some 500 advertisements a day—the majority of them nipped, tucked and airbrushed to perfection. And, according to a University of Minnesota study, staring at those airbrushed images from just one to three minutes can have a negative impact on girls' self-esteem. "None of this existed when I was growing up, and now it's just like, in your face," says [New York City social worker Anna] Solomon, 30. "Kids aren't exempt just because they're young."

Which leads me to a couple of questions:

1. Are these trends real, or are they just a way for Newsweek to sell magazines?

2. What do the Newsweek stories tell us about pop culture?

3. What do they tell us about advertising? What do they tell us about the media ... including Newsweek?

4. If even half of this is true, what can each of us do as media professionals to keep our personal and professional bearings in a society that seems to have lost its bearings?

COMM 209: Copyright, Creative Commons, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksers' bus

Merry Pranksters' bus ( Creative Commons photo)

Even as university students, you will be concerned with copyright issues when you publish material. And remember, in mass communications law to "publish" something means to write it down for a third party. In class Wednesday, we'll demonstrate something called Creative Commons. I used it to illustrate this blog post.

Here's how I did it.

I wanted to post something about a novelist named Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies who were written up in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And I wanted to use a picture of the bus they used for some of their most famous pranks. You see it in the picture above.

Here's the basic background, from a University of Virginia website about the 60s:

THE PUBLICATION OF Kesey's second novel Sometimes a Great Notion demanded his presence in New York, so Kesey bought a 1939 International Harvester school bus that he and the Merry Pranksters painted in day-glo colors, and outfitted it for a cross-country trip. With Neal Cassady at the wheel, they left La Honda in June 1964 and began their now legendary journey across the country, smoking marijuana, and dropping acid along the way. The top of the bus was made into a musical stage and when it detoured through some cities, the Pranksters blasted a combination of crude homemade music and running commentary to all the astonished onlookers. They arrived in New York in July after an arduous journey, whereupon Neal Cassady introduced them to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg embraced the new legends immediately and arranged for them to drive to Millbrook to meet the other psychedelic pioneer, Timothy Leary. Jack Kerouac was not impressed and had little to say to either Kesey or the Merry Pranksters. ...

Kesey and the Pranksters said if you were grooving, or tripping, with them, you were "on the bus." And if you weren't, you were "off the bus." I can't believe we used to talk like that. (And, no, I wasn't on the bus.) On the a website called wild-bohemian.com, webmaster Colin Pringle explains how it started:

On the Great Bus Trip of 1964, Ken Kesey had a problem. Every time they had to stop for gas or something, some of the Pranksters would wander off and whenever it was time to leave, at least one Prankster could not be found. Hence the metaphor, "You're either on the bus or off the bus." Of course, no outsider had any idea what Kesey was talking about when he said that, because you had to have been on the bus that summer to get it.

In short, it was all about the bus. So I wanted a picture I could post to the blog. And I can get one from Creative Commons.

First: I went to the Google start page and did an image search on keywords: Merry + Pranksters + bus + Creative + Commons. I clicked on the first picture in the directory, and it took me to a Flickr photo page put up by a guy from Canada whose screen name is "Larry He's So Fine." His photos are available for reuse for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons license.

In the lower right of the Flickr page, there's a link that says "Some rights reserved." I clicked on it, and it took me to an explanation of how Creative Commons works. By copying the HTML code from the browser for that page , I embedded it when I wrote my cutlines for this page -- the caption under the photo -- and thus created a link to the original Flickr page and credited it at the same time.

COMM 390: Class question, Monday

How, specifically, does advertising affect/influence media content? Use some specific examples from Kilbourne's book.

COMM 209: Copyright on the Web

http://www.keytlaw.com/Copyrights/cheese.htm

Internet Copyright Law: A Rat Pilfered My Web Site Cheese - What Do I Do?
Remedies for Web Site Copyright Infringement 2002
by Richard Keyt of Phoenix

Copyright and the Internet 1996
© Virginia Montecino 1996 George Mason University
This information is meant to be only a guide and not the last word in official copyright law. Copyright and the Internet is still in a state of flux and many issues are not resolved.

http://creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

Has FFAQ: Abbreviated FAQ (a.k.a. Frequently Frequently Asked Questions)

BenU-Springfield students in COMM 207 blogged on copyright fall semester ... class blog at http://comm207fall08.blogspot.com/. Very imaginatively named, huh?

COMM 209, 390 (also 207, 296, 353 and 393 ... especially 393): The best thing I've seen lately on journalism's history, future

As Kurt Vonnegut has said, “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”




https://www.spj.org/quill_issue.asp?ref=1490

COMM 209 (in class): Good writing = good reporting

This month's issue of The Quill, trade magazine for members of the Society of Professional Journalists, includes a first-person story by Tom Hallman of The Portland Oregonian telling how he got a powerful story on a nightclub shooting. He begins:

I want to share the process of how I got the story — reported and written in a matter of hours — because it serves as a vivid reminder of the first lesson when it comes to narrative: Good writing depends on good reporting.

By reporting I mean using shoe leather and ingenuity, getting people to talk with you, listening — not simply for quotes, but for clues that let you into the soul of the story. Reporting means thinking on your feet, asking questions that grow out of your curiosity and ability to read your character and the moment.

My job was to see if I could get an interview with a nightclub employee. A witness had reported that this young man had performed CPR on a girl who died. I wandered down to the nightclub.

Let's read Hallman's account of how he got the story. Then we'll read the story itself as it ran Jan. 27 in The Oregonian.

COMM 209: Portal to Fargo (N.D.) Forum

Flood coverage by the hometown paper's website at http://www.inforum.com/ ... you'll have to register with them to open pages. I did it with my school username and address.

Be sure to follow this story

Published March 27 2009
FLOOD UPDATE: Forum creates social networking site for those affected by flood
Today, The Forum created a social networking site dedicated helping people affected by flood communicate with one another.
By: Staff report, INFORUM


at http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/235451/group/home/

Next week's classes; sophomore test Wed.; no class Friday

Monday's and Wednesday's classes will be at the usual time and place, but sophomores in HUM 221 will take a required standardized test at 10 a.m. Wednesday, April 1. (Sophomores in COMM 209 will get out of the last test in time to come to class.) But all of my classes Friday, April 3, are canceled since I will be taking part in a panel discussion on Illinois music in Decatur that day.

The following is excerpted from a faculty newsletter called Nuts & Bolts that I write and edit. It explains the need for Wednesday's standardized testing, which is required as a condition of our accreditation plan:

Let's all try to forget we're doing our standardized testing for General Education assessment on April Fool's Day! But let's also remember how important it is to have a good showing -- the more of our Gen Ed sophomores who take the ACT Inc. Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) test, the better the data we'll get. And the better the data, the better the decisions we'll make as we consolidate our curriculums and continue to work for continuous improvement at BenU-Springfield.

I can't say it any better than David Holland, chair of our Gen Ed assessment subcommittee, put it in a memo that went out to all faculty.

"Please remind sophomore students in your classes that they are required to take these CAAP tests," Dave said, "either during the morning or afternoon testing sessions. ... It is imperative that you not only remind sophomores of these tests but also encourage them to attend as these tests are an important part of our assessment package at the college."

---

Math and writing skills modules of the CAAP test will be administered in classrooms on the second floor of Dawson Hall from 10 a.m. till noon and from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 1. Sophomores need to be excused from classes that meet during these times so they can take the CAAP tests. Evening students who take the tests at 4 should be in class before 7. If you have questions, please feel free to contact Dave at ext. 242 or me at ext. 519 (email pellertsen at sci.edu).

---

As Dave said, the Gen Ed tests are a vital part of our assessment-and-accountablity piece at Benedictine at Springfield. We chose an ACT Inc. testing product because the firm also designs the Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE) taken by 11th-graders in Illinois, and we can purchase "linkage" data comparing our students' scores on the CAAP to their PSAE scores. That gives us a measure of "value added," so we can compare what our students knew before they came to us with what they learned in their first two years of Gen Ed courses. It is a very important piece of the evidence we submit for accreditation and accountability to outside stakeholders.

So it couldn't be more important, and I'm not foolin'.

COMM 390: Another 'f-word' ... feminism

In order to evaluate what Jean Kilbourne is trying to do in "Can't Buy My Love," I think we ought to know a little more about where she's coming from. We don't have to agree with her, but if we understand her brand of feminism, we'll be able to come to a more nuanced critique of what she has to say.

There's a lot of stuff on the World Wide Web about feminism, and 99 percent of what I've seen is worthless. But the British television Channel 4 aired a series in 2002 called "Feminists and Flourbombs" (ah, another f-word). It's British, but the same issues have played out in the U.S. over the years.

Links are below.

Read the pages linked below and answer these questions:

1. How did the feminists allow their enemies to define them -- how did they lose control of the message? How might you have done things differently to keep control of the message?

2. As you read about the feminist movement in Britain, think of how society has changed in the U.S. since the 1970s, especially with respect to women's rights. What parallels are you aware of?

3. Be ready to discuss 1 and 2 above. Post tentative answers as comments to the Mackerel Wrapper post.

Links:

-- The overview at http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/F/flourbombs/index.html

-- The essay "Then and Now" http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/F/flourbombs/thennow.html

-- The essay bt Sue O'Sullivan, a member of one of the first consciousness raising groups in London who was editor of Spare Rib magazine ... http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/F/flourbombs/essay.html

COMM 209, 390: How the world is changing ... part _____+1

A story in Higher Ed Today, a newsletter I keep up with for my faculty committee work, about changes in the master's degree program in journalism at Columbia University. It says a lot about the way the industry is changing as more and more of it moves online.

Money graf:

Among other required courses, these students currently take a law course and a course combining journalism history and ethics. [Academic affairs dean Bill] Grueskin’s first initiative would shuffle these courses slightly, splitting history and ethics into separate courses and bringing a more modernized approach to the law course. As journalism has moved predominantly online, he noted, legal discussions surrounding it have shifted in a way that demands students be aware of how copyright and other laws apply in this new environment.

“These courses should be taught with a different agenda in mind,” Grueskin said of his revamped requirements. “Students will be going off, when they leave these walls, into a very different environment than the one that greeted them years ago.”

And this, which I think also applies for undergrad students in mass communications at Benedictine:

“It’s important for the school and for our students that Web training not be segregated from the core journalism curriculum,” Grueskin said. “I think it’s important for us to address digital skills training for everybody, not just those who will be new media majors. Students who are multi-talented will have the intellectual dexterity to adapt to some of the technological change that will come in the next 5 to 10 years. Still, at the core is journalism. All of the [new media] tools in the world don’t cover up bad journalism.”

COMM 209, 390: How the world is changing ... part ___

Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, writes in the electronic magazine Slate.com that Amazon's handheld Kindle 2.0 "literature delivery system" is going to make books obsolete. Oh, great! Fine! Just what we needed to hear! "The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated," Weisberg says. "It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence." He may just be right.

Weisberg says people have been putting books on paper since Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable-type printing in the 1450s, and the demise of ink-and-paper publishing is troubling. But he senses opportunity, too, for those who are adaptable enough to make the transition:

What we should worry about is that the [old] system supports the creation of literature, if grudgingly. There's a risk that what replaces it won't allow as many writers to make as good a living. But there's also a chance it could allow more writers to make a better living. For newspaper journalism, the future looks bleak at the moment. As the economic model for daily reporting collapses, we're losing the support structure for large-scale newsgathering. At the same time, the Internet has radically expanded the potential audience of every journalist while bringing a new freedom to experiment and innovate. When it comes to literature, I'm optimistic that electronic reading will bring more good than harm. New modes of communication will spur new forms while breathing life into old ones. Reading without paper might make literature more urgent and accessible than it was before the technological revolution, just like Gutenberg did.

Disclaimer: I first read this story in the print issue of Newsweek. I'd seen it on the Slate.com website, which I read daily, but just didn't want to read about a damn electronic "literature delivery system" till I could curl up with it in the magazine. But I'm afraid Weisberg is right. I hope he's right about the other part of it. And maybe, just maybe he is.

COMM 209: Law and ethics in 17-21 words

Write a sentence (17 to 21 words) that summarizes Chapter 7 of Harrower's "Inside Reporting."

Post it as a comment to this post.

COMM 209: What newspapers do ...

Posted Sunday to Time magazine's website, an article by Belinda Luscombe on "What Happens When a Town Loses Its Newspaper?" Her answer: Not as much.

According to a recent Princeton University study by Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, interest in local government and turnout in local elections ebbed in the bi-state Cincinnati media market after The Cincinnati Post shut down in 1987. Luscombe's take on it is nuanced, but troubling:

The study is very small in scope, since the Post only had a total of 27,000 subscribers in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. And it only measures the outcomes in northern Kentucky, since Ohio has not had municipal elections since the Post's closure. But even with those limitations, a few trends seemed to emerge: in towns the Post regularly covered, voter turnout dropped, fewer people ran for office and more incumbents were reelected. That is, when there were fewer stories about a given town, its inhabitants seemed to care less about how they're being governed.

In the only possible hint of a bright spot, it seemed that smaller towns were much less affected by newspaper closures than larger ones. Voter turnout in the smaller communities did not change.

So ... is the glass half full or half empty?

My take on it: There's still a market for intensely local news. Some of the pundits call it "hyperlocal" coverage, and people still want to read about the school lunch menu, street closures and parish bake sales. But there's going to be a void as more traditional ink-on-paper news outlets close. Next question: Who's going to be smart enough, innovative enough and resourceful enough to fill that void?

COMM 209: Law, ethics and an New York Times op-ed column

In today's New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, a useful explanation of the difference between law and ethics. Friedman, who thinks we need more ethics on Wall Street, Capitol Hill and the White House alike, quotes a business ethicist:

“There is nothing more powerful than inspirational leadership that unleashes principled behavior for a great cause,” said Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, and the author of the book “How.” What makes a company or a government “sustainable,” he added, is not when it adds more coercive rules and regulations to control behaviors. “It is when its employees or citizens are propelled by values and principles to do the right things, no matter how difficult the situation,” said Seidman. “Laws tell you what you can do. Values inspire in you what you should do. It’s a leader’s job to inspire in us those values.”

And ethics is about values.

Tom Friedman, by the way, is one of the heavy hitters on the Times' *op-ed page. He's a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and if you're not reading him regularly, you should start.
__________
* Jargon alert. In print newspapers, opinion columns ran opposite the editorial page. Hence the name op-ed page. You'd think professional communicators wouldn't use jargon. But we do.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes all-digital

The first sign of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's imminent demise came when they changed the Web address. Formerly linked to a portal shared with its print and broadcast competitors, it changed -- literally overnight -- Monday to http://www.seattlepi.com/. Later that day came the announcement: Tuesday's print edition would be the last.

xxx

P-I editorial cartoonist David Horsey was there with a column (a blog, actually, but old ways of speaking die hard) headlined The end and a new beginning" ... which turned out to be an account of how he and several other staffers sneaked up to the globe on the top of the P-I building. (It's the same globe you see depicted at the top of the webpage.)

And with the new day, there would be new challenges, new opportunites, a new era unfolding. This city would be moving forward without its oldest newspaper, but the offspring of that newspaper, seattlepi.com, would now be operating under the globe -- an experiment in telling Seattle's story a different way.

Also a cartoon on the same theme ... hardly Horsey's best, but equal to the occasion.

COMM 209: Life goes on ...

Last month's passing of The Rocky Mountain News has set off -- a better word would be intensified -- a round of doom and gloom in the media. For example, an article in today's New York Times by media columnist Richard Perez-Pena says it's just a matter of time before a major metro area dwindles down to having no surviving newspaper in its media market. He says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is about to go the way of the Rocky Mountain News, leaving Seattle and Denver as one-newspaper towns -- at least for the time being.

But in the meantine, there's activity in Denver. Not light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel activity but at least enough activity to ensure life will go on.

Perez-Pena of the Times isn't exactly cheerful:

... now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.

“In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets,” said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry.

And so on ...

In the meantime, a former Rocky staffer named Robert Niles who blogs for the Knight Digital Media Center, talked with Steve Foster, assistant sports editor for interactive media, who launched his own effort [America's Fish] to provide an online home for several other former Rocky reporters and columnists. Something like this was expected.

But Niles has a gift for intriguing headlines, and one of them made me sit up and take notice. On Feb. 27, just before time ran out for The Rocky, he predicted:

Someone's going to get rich in Denver next week ...

Here's why. Niles said:

... with thousands of now-former Rocky readers looking for a new daily news source, there's a huge opportunity here for someone to get rich. Just put some of those readers together with some of those advertisers, using a fresh new online publication, and without the capital and corporate overhead, JOA [joint operating arrangment] obligations and debt that's weighing down so many newspapers across the country.

After some chit-chat about the Rocky's JOA with The Denver Post, Niles added:

A new online news publisher need not capture all of the Rocky's former readers, or advertisers, to do well. If a former Rocky reporter, or a small group working together, managed to claim just a few advertisers and a few thousand daily readers, they easily could clear more money than they did working at the Rocky. (Heck, I'm making more from my websites than I ever did working at the RMN.)

Again, that last sentence got my attention.

Niles ran a piece March 4 with another intriguing headline. It says:

Essential reading for journalists caught in the meltdown

I'd say Niles' blog in general, and the rest of the KDMC website as well, is essential reading for journalists.

COMM 390: Paper No. 1 due March 23

Write a 1,000- to 1,200-word documented essay in response to the following question. It is due Monday, March 23, the day after spring break. Please list your rererences at the end of the paper and cite them by page number in the text, but try to write in the style of an article in a quality magazine like The New Yorker or New York Review of Books instead of a college term paper. In other words, do not bore your reader! I will post further tips, hints and suggestions to the blog.

In "Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture," Arthur Asa Berger says Americans "become too caught up in consuming things as a means of validating themselves and proving their worth" (40) He adds:

In consumer cultures, all too often people don't think about what they have but only concern themselves with what they don't have. And is, in part, because advertising constantly reminds them of what they don't have. Needs are finite but desires are infinite, and thus, as soon as our needs have been taken care of, we become obsessed with what we don't have but want. Or more precisely, one might suggest, with what advertising tells us we should want.

Well, that's one way of looking at the world. On the other hand, in their book "Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communications," Kenneth Clow and Donald Baack describe a consumer's buying decision as a process of: (1) recognizing a need; (2) evaluating different ways of meeting that need; and (3) choosing one of them based on rational ("cognitive") and emotional ("affective") attitudes shaped by the consumer's value system. Clow and Baack say:

By appealing to basic values, marketers hope to convince prospective customers that the company's products can help them achieve a desirable outcome. At the same time, creatives [ad copywriters] know marketing communications are considerably more effective in changing a person's attitude about a product than they are in changing a consumer's value structure. (68)

Values listed by Clow and Baack are a comfortable life, equality, excitement, freedom, a fun and exciting life, happiness, inner peace, mature love, personal accomplishment, pleasure, salvation, security, self-fulfillment, self-respect, a sense of belonging, social acceptance and wisdom.

At the end of his discussion of demographics, Berger poses a question:

The primary goal of advertising and marketing, of course, is to shape our behavior; advertising agencies can be looked at as hired guns, whose main job is to destroy consumer resistance and shape consumer desire and action -- whether it be to sell cigarettes, beer, politicians, or, lately, prescription medicines. And in some cases, it is to sell socially positive messages. There is little question that the information advertisers have about consumer motivation and the minds of consumers is a source of power. Is this power used ethically and for constructive purposes? That is the question. (135)

It's a good question, and not one that has easy answers. If you pressed him, Berger might tend to come down on one side of it. Clow and Baack might come down on the other. How would you answer it? In their quest to sell products, do advertisers manipulate their audiences in ways that are harmful? Do they help create attitudes in society that are harmful? Or do they appeal to the best and the worst in us alike? How can marketers and advertisers maintain their own values and ethical standards as they craft messages designed to appeal to others' thoughts, emotions and values?

COMM 209 (390, too): Notes and quotes

You've heard me talk about a reporter's scribble, and you've read about it Tim Harrower's "Inside Reporting." Well, here's what it looks like in action ... and how I would turn the scribble into printed copy.

When I got to Monday's "Game Show" event in the Angela Hall gym, I made a note of the time and did a quick crowd count. Both are second nature to me after 15 years of newspapering. Pavlov's dogs salivate, I count crowds.

Then I noticed Dean Broeckling sitting on the bleachers at the side of the gym, walked over, sat down and got out my notebook. I asked him something really obvious, something like what's going on here. He told me and I started taking notes. You see them at the left. (Click on pix to enlarge.) I used green ink because I'd been grading papers, and that was the only pen I had with me. But I prefer a No. 2 soft lead pencil, because that's what I write fastest with. Everyone is different; whatever works for you, works for you. As Kevin talked, I took down what he said, improvising something kind of like shorthand but less systematic.

I would write the conversation up like this:

Broeckling was asked the purpose of the event.

"It's an alcohol-drug education program right before spring break," he said. "We just wanted to make sure the students make educated and informed decisions when they're put in difficult situations."

"Spring break?" he was asked. "Is that a difficult situation?"

Broeckling paused for half a beat.

"Yes," he said.

A couple of things to note. I made up my shorthand as I went along, abbreviating everything, circling words I wanted to spell out (but using the same part of speech, i.e. "education" instead of "educational." If Kevin had said "educational," I would have written "ed'l" or something like that.) and using ditto marks for repeated words. Also, notice where I went back a couple of minutes later and rewrote words that were illegible. (Like "ed'd" for educated, still a made-up abbreviation but at least a legible one.) If I hadn't gone back and written over my worst scribbles, I would never have been able to read my own writing when it came time to write a story.

COMM 390: Blog assignment for Wednesday

Post to your blogs for COMM 390:

What does the way Porochista Khakpour played with dolls tell you about the differences between Middle Eastern and American cultures? What does it tell you about American consumer culture?

How do dolls help girls model adult behavior? Compare the baby dolls Khakpour had in Iran with the Barbies she played with later.

She says of her days working in a major metro area in the U.S.:

For one brief phase, though, she got me. In New York, without family, without an Iranian in sight, I took to filling myself in and out, like a coloring book. My makeup palette turned all multichromatic madness and for exercise I simply raved away at nightclubs: Patricia Field stilettos, iridescent body shimmer, sparkly hot pants and sky-high afro — all hot pink, pleather and prattle.

My mother, that summer: What have you become?

During that era, my daylight hours were all crummy cubicle life in an office where I was the sole “ethnic person.” One day, I found myself at lunch with the usual group of middle-aged, disgruntled co-workers, all women. One hairy-eyeballed my big container of dressing-less salad and Diet Orange Sunkist — either that or my gold glitter French manicure — and muttered under her breath “Persian Barbie.”

She left before I could jump out of my seat and give her the hug of my life.

What do you think she means by this? Does it relate to what Arthur Berger says when he says we go out and buy our identity in America?

COMM 209: Today's assignment

This morning I got the following email message from Dean Broeckling:

FYI,

There is a ‘Game Show’ offering cash prizes to students today in the Gym at noon. Knowing you have noon hour classes, I just wanted to make you aware. If you feel it appropriate, you’re welcome to bring your class…in case you’re classes are smaller than usual, I wanted to make you aware, but also let you know that I am not asking for anyone’s absence to be excused.

The game show includes trivia on pop culture, but is intended to help students learn of the harmful effects of alcohol and drugs on their system.

The event is in the gym at noon.

Thanks,
KDB

Kevin Broeckling
Dean of Student Affairs
Springfield College - Benedictine University
1500 North Fifth Street
Springfield, IL 62702
(217)525-1420 x239 (office)

Your assignment: Cover this event. Write a news-feature story about it. Should it be a color story? A human interest story? A personal narrative? Or a combination? (See Harrower, "Inside Reporting" p. 113.) Length: 750-1,000 words. Interview at least three people, and quote them verbatim in the story.

COMM 390: Barbie gets her AARP card

At 50 you're eligible to join the American Association of Retired Persons (don't ask me how I know this), and today Barbie -- the doll -- turns 50. Mattel Corp. is observing the occasion with suitable ceremony ... and media hype.

In a class on gender images in the marketplace, how can we not observe this birthday?

Toy News, an online trade magazine, has a story on Mattel's promotional activities with links to British media coverage ... one that I kind of liked was a headline in a London tab called The Sun that says:

You're looking good at 50, doll

Let's go to the Google News directory and find some more.

One that looks intriguing is a New York Times op ed piece headlined "Islamic Revolution Barbie" by freelance writer Porochista Khakpour. She moved from Iran to the U.S. as a child, and she has a different take on Barbie.

Another sometimes overlooked angle is written up in "Boy Toy" by Troy Patterson in Slate.com. The subhead says it all: "Ken's sad and lonely life in Barbie's shadow." It also deals with gender images.

COMM 209: Written assignment for Monday

Read all the definitions and discussions of what a feature story is in Tim Harrower's "Inside Reporting," pages _____ and _____. Discuss some of them -- in other words, tell what you like about them and what you don't. Come to your own 25-words-or-less definition of a feature story. Length: 500 words.

COMM 390: Jean Kilbourne -- mea culpa

It looks like I sent several of you on a wild goose chase last night, and Jean Kilbourne spoke at the University of Illinois Springfield last year at this time. So ...

If you went down to UIS, my apologies. Let me know, and I'll give you an appropriate amount of extra credit. Why don't you post it as a comment to this blog? That way, I'll be sure to see it at grade-averaging time. No proof necessary: I'll trust you.

COMM 390: Blog/journal assignment

In class Friday and over the weekend --

Choose a community you know, and compare its Claritas Corp. demographic profile to your impression of the community. Post your comments to your blog -- you can use my profile of the county seat in my home county in East Tennessee as a model, if you want to.

Claritas states its mission as providing "accurate, up-to-date demographic data and target marketing information about the population, consumer behavior, consumer spending, households and businesses within any specific geographic market area in the United States." Let's test that claim.

Here's how I'd do it:

• Choose your community. It'll make for a more interesting class discussion if we don't all choose Springfield, but it's more important you talk about a community you know. So Springfield is OK, too, especially if you look at different parts of town. How many different neighborhoods fit into a zip code like 62702, for example, and how does St. Al's differ from St. Joe's or the neighborhoods north of Washington Street? It'll probably be easier to work with a fairly small metro area (like those in downstate Illinois our outstate Missouri), though. Or a suburb like Highland Park, Ill., or Webster Groves, Mo.
  
• Look it up in Wikipedia. Why there? Because Wikipedia has descriptions and demographic stats from the U.S. Census for just about every community in the country. (If you haven't had one of my classes before, see *Doc's tangent on Wikipedia below.) It can be a town you've visited, a town that has a ball team that you love (or hate), a town you'd like to move to ... anything that works for you.
  
• Find the zip codes for that city. The U.S. Postal Service has a search engine at http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/citytown_zip.jsp. Keep this page open, because you'll want to look at more than one in the next step.
  
• Go to Claritas' Zip Code Look-up Page and, uh, look up the zip codes. Try several. xxx01 will probably be downtown. Does it have a lot of seniors in high rises? Or too few residences to count? As you look at the zip code page, be sure to check the map on the lower left.
  
• Compare what Claritas says to what you know about the community and what Wikipedia says. How accurate is Claritas' information?

*Tangent on Wikipedia

Many college instructors warn their students to never use Wikipedia. I'm not one of them. Here's why: (1) Wikipedia is the most up-to-date source of information around, since it's constantly updated by users; and (2) it's also the most reliable, since users constantly correct any misinformation they find. It's often said the old print encyclopedias are better, because they're written by experts. But in my book, up-to-date and reliable trump expert every time. In fact, I don't think the experts have all that good a track record. (Bought any stock tips from Merrill Lynch lately?) That said, I also think you still need to be careful. If you read Springfield is "the armpit of the nation and the @**hole of the world," you can safely assume a teenager's been playing with Wikipedia. I also think you can safely go back to Wikipedia a few minutes later, and the witticism will be gone.

COMM 390: Profile of a changing rural area in East Tennessee

In order to check out the demographic profiles that Claritas Corp. of San Diego puts up on the Web, I looked up zip code for Clinton, Tenn., the nearest town to the community where I grew up and the county seat of my home county. It's a good test of Claritas' typology, because its demographics have changed over the years.

Clinton, Tenn. Photo Brian Stansberry, Wikipedia Commons

Clinton is located about 20 miles north of Knoxville, a Sun Belt metro area of 750,000 population. Clinton used to be a mill town (in the picture above, you can see the water tower from a textille mill that employed hundreds of people from 1906 until 1967. The economy is now diversified, although the western part of Anderson County is in the Appalachian coalfields. According to the town's Wikipedia profile, Clinton's population in the 2000 census was 9,409, and its median household income was $32,120 -- less than the national median of $41,994, but not much below the Tennessee state median of $36,360.

Clinton High School was the first in the South to admit black students after Brown v. Board of Education was handed down, and the Tennessee National Guard was called out to restore order (see photo at left). Its population is 95.5 percent white and 2.7 percent African American, compared to 80 percent white and 16 percent black in Tennessee. Median age is 39 years (compared to 39.5 years for Tennessee and 35.3 years nationally. Clinton's post office serves three rural routes, taking in a good chunk of rural Anderson County including the parts closest to Knoxville, Interstate 75 and the U.S. Department of Energy lab at nearby Oak Ridge. It is mostly ridge-and-valley country. Farms are small and their owners typically rely on off-farm income from working in Knoxville. Every I go back there to visit, I see new subdivisions and mobile parks where pastures and cornfields used to be.

So you'd expect a mixture of rural, small-town and blue-collar suburban lifestyles to be reflected in Clinton's demographics. That is exactly what Claritas Corp. finds. You can get there by entering Clinton's zip code (37716) in the Zip Code Look-up. Claritas' types, or market segments, are listed as:

• Crossroads Villagers. "... a classic rural lifestyle. Residents are high school-educated, with downscale incomes and modest housing; one-quarter live in mobile homes. And there's an air of self-reliance in these households as Crossroads Villagers help put food on the table through fishing, gardening, and hunting."
  
  
• Heartlanders. "This widespread segment consists of older couples with white-collar jobs living in sturdy, unpretentious homes [small middle-class towns]. In these communities of small families and empty-nesting couples, Heartlanders residents pursue a rustic lifestyle where hunting and fishing remain prime leisure activities along with cooking, sewing, camping, and boating."
  
  
• Old Milltowns. "Today, the majority of residents are retired singles and couples, living on downscale incomes in pre-1960 homes and apartments. For leisure, they enjoy gardening, sewing, socializing at veterans clubs, or eating out at casual restaurants."
  
  
• Red, White & Blues. "... typically live in exurban towns rapidly morphing into bedroom suburbs. Their streets feature new fast-food restaurants, and locals have recently celebrated the arrival of chains like Wal-Mart, Radio Shack, and Payless Shoes. Middle-aged, high school educated, and lower-middle class, these folks tend to have solid, blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, milling, and construction."
  
  
• Young & Rustic "... is composed of middle age, restless singles. These folks tend to be lower-middle-income, high school-educated, and live in tiny apartments in the nation's exurban towns. With their service industry jobs and modest incomes, these folks still try to fashion fast-paced lifestyles centered on sports, cars, and dating."
  

For a bunch of market research people out of San Diego, I'd say Claritas did a pretty good job of profiling a rural community between the coalfields and the suburban sprawl of a major Sunbelt metro area. Ask yourself: How different are the people in Clinton, Tenn., from people in Springfield and rural Sangamon County? How much would you expect to see different products in their Wal-Marts and Kroger stores?

COMM 390: Quiz -

In what large West Coast city is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer located?

a. New Berlin
b. Illiopois
c. Petersburg
d. Chatham
e. Seattle

Post your answer as a comment to this blogpost.

The ultimate website!

Follow this link: http://www.w3schools.com/html/lastpage.htm

COMM 390: 'Boomtown Singles' and 'Family Thrifts' in 'Mayberry-ville'? Demographic typologies and Springfield

In "Ads, Fads & Consumer Culture," Arthur Berger says, "... advertising agencies and marketing experts, with their various typologies, do offer some very interesting information about the human psyche and what it is that makes us tick. They are continually probing us, trying to get at the G spot of consumer behavior and decision making, doing everything they can to understand us so they can -- in starkest terms -- manipulate us" (133-34). Leaving aside Berger's metaphorical flights of fancy, we'll test one of the typologies. Claritas Corp. of San Diego builds its business model on the idea that "birds of a feather flock together" ... by zip code. Let's see how it works by visiting Claritas' website and seeing what its typologies can tell us about Springfield.

(And what Springfield can tell us about the typologies.)

Go to the ZIP Code Look-Up page and enter our zip codes ... in a minute, we'll start with the north end, since we're smack in the middle of that part of town right now. But first, read the FAQ page.

Finished? Good. Now let's go back to "ZIP Code Look-Up" and enter 62702 (plus the security code below). You'll get five "PRIZM-NE" categories, starting with "American Classics," i.e. older, downscale adults. When you finish, return to the look-up page by clicking on the "Back" arrow (unless you enjoy reading "Warning: Page has Expired" error messages). Ask yourself: Does this sound like north-enders? Read the other categories. Same question. Look at the map on the lookup page. How much of the 62702 zip code area is north end? What other neighborhoods can you identify? What are their demographics like?

Here are a couple of other questions.

• Look up some of Springfield's other zip codes -- 62701, 62703, 62704 and 62707. What neighborhoods are included in each? How do their demographics vary (for example in 62703 and 62707)? How would you target a mailing to a diverse zip code?
  
• How well do Claritas' categories fit people in the neighborhoods you know? What, if anything, are the marketers leaving out? What do they emphasize?
  
• How useful, in general, do you think demographic segmentation is in analyzing a smaller metro area like Springfield? How much of it can you trust? What would you want to be suspicious of? What else would you want to know? What other kinds of information could you gather?
  
• Berger suggests, although I don't think he quite comes right out and says it, that demographics and advertising have an overall negative impact on society by splitting people into little categories based on consumption patterns. Agree or disagree? If your answer is, "yeah, both" (which is altogether likely), which parts do you agree with? Which parts do you disagree with?

At the end of his discussion of demographic and other marketing typologies, he also has something he calls

A CONCLUSION IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION
It's worth quoting in full here, because you may see it again:

The primary goal of advertising and marketing, of course, is to shape our behavior; advertising agencies can be looked at as hired guns, whose main job is to destroy consumer resistance and shape consumer desire and action -- whether it be to sell cigarettes, beer, politicians, or, lately, prescription medicines. And in some cases, it is to sell socially positive messages. There is little question that the information advertisers have about consumer motivation and the minds of consumers is a source of power. Is this power used ethically and for constructive purposes? That is the question. (135)