What would veteran newsman Peter Jennings tell students seeking a career in broadcasting today?
His wife posed the question to him when they were in Pullman for Washington State University’s 30th Edward R. Murrow Symposium April 14. The answer came that evening in Jennings’s presentation, after he accepted the Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Broadcasting from WSU.
“If you believe that broadcasting is a public service, then please come into the profession,” he told the largely student audience of 2,500 in the Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum theater.
ABC’s World News Tonight anchor had been on assignment in Iraq a week earlier and shared some … » More …
Washington State University alumnus Brad Rawlins has earned one of the nation’s top scholarly awards in public relations.
The assistant professor of communications at Brigham Young University received the Pathfinder Award November 20 in New York City. He was recognized by the Institute of Public Relations for “a whole body of work through a number of years.”
Rawlins’s research examines ethical practice in public relations, especially moral decision making. He hopes to use concepts such as authenticity, accountability, and responsibility to show the need for transparency in communications.
“If you can help an organization become more transparent, then that organization has to account for what … » More …
Edward R. Murrow '30 broadcasted reports from a London rooftop during
the Blitz. He confronted Joseph McCarthy on national television. And he
admitted "an abiding fear regarding what . . .[radio and TV] are doing
to our society, and our heritage." » More ...
Swoop around Bryan Hall clock tower like Superman. Examine tiny details of the Sistine Chapel murals. Enter Tut’s tomb. Float in a cell next to the mitochondria. All within 15 minutes.
What sounds like a fever dream becomes a reality within the virtual three-dimensional world Second Life, a world now joined by a replica of part of WSU’s Pullman campus.
WSU joins hundreds of universities and colleges with a presence in Second Life. Many of these institutions have classes, conferences, experiments, art galleries, and innovative 3-D displays. The virtual WSU will host distance degree classes beginning this fall.
Sitting at Rico’s next to Frontline executive producer David Fanning was a defining moment for one Washington State University broadcasting student.
Senior communication major Kate Yeager was among a small group of broadcast students who closed the bar with Fanning and Frontline producer Mike Kirk after the Murrow Symposium. Kate was playing host to the Edward R. Murrow Award recipients from the PBS investigative reporting program.
The group discussed media, politics, and today’s hottest issues around a large table at the pub in downtown Pullman.
“We had this big table,” she says. “He was like a rock star-it was like walking in with Elvis.”
In spite of nearly universal name recognition and a client list that
runs through the Pacific Northwest alphabet, Rockey himself rarely
shows up in the press. In this age of Google, it's unnerving to go
looking for someone who you know permeates a civic and business
culture, and he just isn't there.
Shortly after Jay Rockey '50 arrived in Seattle to handle the public relations for the 1962 World's Fair, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
ran an editorial claiming it could not see how the fair could possibly
make it. "Do you really know what you're doing?" Rockey's wife asked
him. Turns out he did.
The workers in the office of Washington State University’s school of communication didn’t know what to expect when the first of two shipments arrived from New York last spring. But they opened the box, took out the old doorknob and passed it around, wondering what sort of door it belonged to, wondering whose hands had touched it.
A few weeks earlier Darby Baldwin, an assistant in the dean’s office, had called two CBS retirees on the East Coast because the husband had written a thoughtful opinion piece about his time working with Edward R. Murrow. It turned out that Joe … » More …
Aaron Johnson and Cliff Knopik, the odd couple of young parenthood, sit together in Johnson’s Puyallup dining room while his newborn daughter, Brooklyn, sleeps in a bedroom nearby. His wife, Heather, makes dinner in their small apartment kitchen.
A laptop, two microphones, and a soundboard clutter the round table in front of them, as they settle in for a half-hour of Who’s Your Daddy, a radio show-like podcast of not-so-typical guy talk: choking hazards, umbilical chords, creepy children’s books, and breast feeding in public. Nothing’s sacred for these two young fathers who feel their quirky take on parenthood is worth sharing.
Revealing the answer to the question posed by the title of this book by David Demers, associate professor of communication at Washington State University, will not deprive anyone of a reason to read it. Global media, the planet-embracing corporations like Time Warner and Disney that bring us information and entertainment, are neither menace nor messiah. Few prospective readers would suspect the latter. The book’s value lies in its refutation of the former, a charge popularized by Noam Chomsky and other Jeremiahs of the left.
The charge—that the corporatization and consolidation of media organizations lead inevitably to their uncritical acceptance of powerful institutions and failure to … » More …
