COMM 353: Schedule of classes, coming into the home stretch ... ** UPDATE 1x - IS THIS WHAT THE FUTURE WILL LOOK LIKE?

We have two regular class periods left, and the final exam period. Please note the following change: I am scheduling a brief session during the regularly scheduled time for our final exam, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, May 10. I need the time to prepare a synopsis of the outside jurors' evaluations of Bulldog Bytes. The revised schedule is as follows:

• Tuesday, May 1. We will wrap up our discussion of James Thurbers' "Years With Ross" and The New Yorker. I noticed a couple of you mentioned Rolling Stone as a magazine today that compares to the New Yorker in its day. Let's look at their website at http://www.rollingstone.com/ and compare notes. Is Rolling Stone outmoded already? What are publications of the future going to look like?
• Thursday, May 3. We will roll out Bulldog Bytes to a small, but select group (it may be a group of one, but I'll be there if no one else is). Your self-reflective essays are due: Please submit them to me electronically.
• Thursday, May 10. I will return your graded self-reflective essays and give you a synopsis of the outside jurors' comments on Bulldog Bytes. After which we will ride off into the sunset.

UPDATE: They're not exactly literary, but the "hyperlocal" publications they talk about in the news biz may be one potential business model. They're almost wholly on line, they rely on amateur (and usually unpaid) bloggers, and they're springing up in "underserved" areas in the more populated parts of the country. I got to thinking about them when I was exchanging emails with David Logan, chair of our Arts & Letters division at Benedictine-Springfield:

When I say newspapers are as dead as the passenger pigeon and the great auk, I'm thinking more about the ink-on-paper platform. Have you seen the Patch.com websites up in the Chicago suburbs? They have a business model like you descirbe, a few professionals who coordinate the output of community bloggers, etc., in "underserved communities." That means little towns without a paper, inner-city neighborhoods or the suburbs around Chicago that don't get covered by the Trib or the Sun-Times. I first ran across it when I was following the Occupy profests in California, and I think the basic concept behind it could be adapted to a small campus like ours. Go to http://www.patch.com/ and click on "About Us."