Director Speaks A
time to celebrate Please note in the dean’s column a request for you to let us know your preferred format for receiving the newsletter—print or electronic, or both. You will receive this version in December, a season of celebration whatever your religious preference. On that note, we have a lot to celebrate. My first year as director of the School has been a reason to celebrate and acknowledge the outstanding contributions of new and returning faculty and students, and our alumni. Some of those accomplishments are highlighted in this edition. For example, the advertising and public relations sequence produced an award-winning not one, but two PRSSA Bateman teams in the 2004 competition, capturing an unprecedented first and third place. Kudos to Beth Dickey and Jeff Ranta, who served as faculty advisers to three teams overall. We continued our winning tradition with the Carolina Reporter and Carolina News, in state, regional and national competitions. The advertising and public relations sequence also produced consecutive winners of the national most promising minority advertising students. We launched a new visual communications major. We raised our research profile in the University, region and nation, particularly in the area of health/science communication, nanotechnology, religion and the media, and the First Amendment, to name a few. None of these accomplishments would be possible were it not for the world-class faculty in the J-School. Our faculty has continued to earn university and national accolades, from outstanding teaching awards, research grants, to maintaining highly visible roles in national communication and journalism organizations. Don’t miss the article on new faculty who bring outstanding credentials in keeping with the South Carolina tradition of attracting the world’s best and brightest teacher/scholars. As noted elsewhere in this edition, we also celebrated the accomplishments of our alumni, most notably the annual Outstanding Alumnus Award, and Distinguished Alumni Awards. We value you and your contributions to the School, College, University and media professions. Please let us hear from you and continue to provide the valuable feedback we need to enhance the quality of our academic programs. We recently completed a comprehensive self-study review and document, in preparation for our February site visit as part of the accreditation process. As you know, our school enjoys the distinction of being continuously accredited since its first accreditation in 1954 by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Please let me know if you have questions about this process. On a related note, we need updated employment information from the class of 2002. If you are a Fall 2002 graduate or know someone that is, please contact Jen Horne with current employment information. Thanks for your support this past year. I have met most of you, and look forward to meeting others and working with all of our outstanding alumni to ensure that we become the best journalism program in the world. Contact us: On the Web:
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Welcome to this
electronic version of InterCom, the official newsletter of
South Carolina’s journalism and mass communication
alumni.
| Dean Speaks The
better to reach you This edition of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications’ InterCom is coming to you electronically. Many of our alumni have indicated they’d like a web version of our alumni newsletter. We know many of you also like to get something in the mail that you can hold on to, tuck in your briefcase, read at the beach. We’re willing to try different things. Since I came to USC two years ago, we’ve tried to put out InterCom as a newsletter once a semester. We relied heavily on faculty for the writing and layout. Lynn Zoch (now at the University of Miami) and the late Mike Witkoski shouldered a disproportionate share of the burden. InterCom deadlines often tangled with end of semester deadlines. In my experience as a journalist, tight daily deadlines are easier to meet than loose, sporadic ones. Over the years, InterCom has had a number of manifestations. It’s been a magazine, a newsletter, a mini-paper. It’s been a project for writing classes, faculty written or free-lanced. Its one consistency is that it’s always tried to pass on items of interest for alumni and about alumni. That, as we hope you’ll see here, has not changed. There’s a lot we want to tell you:
Of course, we want you to tell us where you are, what you’ve been doing and how the J-School helped you get there. At least, we hope it did. We’ll pass your news along to your fellow alumni. But how do we best do that? The College and its Journalism and Library Schools are reviewing their overall communications plans. We’re looking at new promotional and recruiting pieces that reflect recent changes in our program. The School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s web site is frequently cited as one of the university’s best. Check out the monthly I-site feature created by our web wizard Patty Kornegay. As dean, I send out periodic “e-alerts” to our alumni, advisory boards and friends. We plan a magazine version of InterCom in the spring. We teach convergence and believe that it’s important for students to be familiar with multimedia communication. We should reach you in the same multimedia fashion. Journalism School director Dr. Shirley Staples Carter and I want to hear what you think. How would you like to receive information from the J-School? How often? What matters most? Would you be interested in a unique alumni association for those of us in communications? (We’d charge no dues, and you’d still be part of the USC Alumni Association.) Tell us, please. Communication is a two-way street. |
Communication.
It’s in our name. It’s what we teach. Yet we
ourselves could do a better job of communicating. Let’s
start here and now.