Mediated Communication

It’s our venerable basement classroom here at SJMC, and it’s being entirely gutted and refurbished over the summer. Watch this space this fall for big news on the much-loved former faculty member to whom we’ll be dedicating this new high-tech learning environment. But for now, here are some fun photos of the destruction.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a new study entitled “How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press.”

UW Journalism School Video from
Becky Vevea on Vimeo.

I took this quick and blurry iPhone photo of the SJMC senior class from up on the stage at the Kohl Center on Sunday afternoon.  (They were a rowdy bunch.)  We wish all of our Spring 2010 graduates the best as they leave us for the next phase in their educations, their careers, and their lives.  If you have a chance, leave a comment on this post and tell our readers where you’re headed.

The open media site “Wikiquotes” has built up quite a collection of pithy observations about both journalism and advertising (alas, there is no “strategic communication” page yet).  They attempt to source every quote, unlike some other web repositories out there.  Here are two of my favorites, mainly because of the historical context in which they were uttered:

The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people. It is the visible speech, if not the voice, of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world.

• William Thomas Stead (May 1886) “Government by Journalism”, Contemporary Review.

Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

• J. B. Priestley, “The Disillusioned”, 1929; in The Balconinny, and Other Essays, 1969, p. 30.

Anyone have favorite quotes to contribute to the mix?