NU: Plz tell us ur jk
"Dear Northwestern Undergraduate, ***If you are too busy to read this entire message - b4 u delete, pls fwd 2 ur parents!***"
I quote directly from the first line of an e-mail sent Tuesday to all students regarding monthly tuition payments from the Office of Student Accounts. I don't know what the e-mail was about, though, since I was too busy to read the entire message.
But I did have time to read the first line. It's easy to read things written in "teen speak."
Using full words? Oh pls! Not nemore. We r movin fwd in U.S. linguistics!
NU only made it to No. 14 on U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Colleges 2007" (falling one spot below Washington University in St. Louis, a school so well-known it must specify its location). Clearly, we at NU are a bit slow and need some help reading.
Medill teaches that brevity is ideal. Pretty soon AP Style will allow words like "2," "u," "pls" and "fwd" in professional writing.
My e-mails to potential employers would read: "Yo, im in medill, pls hire me 4 ur summer internship, lol, thanx, ttyl." It shows that I can be brief and to the point, and that I am well-versed in young people's language.
Office of Student Accounts: Thank you for transforming a complicated e-mail full of financial jargon into a quick sentence with clear instructions. But if you are too busy to read this article, feel free to forward it to your children.
- Lia Lehrer Slot editor
Hall of self-promotion
If there are any journalism students still confused about the direction Medill is taking, an important clue showed up in your inbox April 5.
According to a message sent over most of the school's e-mail lists, Medill finally is going to fill those big, empty display panels in the lobby of the McCormick Tribune Center, the building that - among other things - hosts many of Medill's undergraduate journalism courses. The Medill Mile Panel Competition "is a testimonial competition to uncover students across Medill's disciplines who best articulate their Medill experience in 30 words or less," according to the e-mail. "Winners will have their photo and testimonial featured in a panel in the McCormick Tribune Center lobby this spring."
The competition is being run by the Medill Branding Committee, which is made up of graduate-level Integrated Marketing Communication students. So presumably, those who "best articulate" the Medill experience will be the students who have the nicest, most eloquent things to say about Medill.
The school could have filled those panels with examples of excellent student reporting from its courses or outstanding work by Medill alumni. So what does it say about Medill that the school is devoting this space to self-promotion, instead?
Part of Dean John Lavine's transformation plan for Medill involves doing much more to integrate the marketing side of Medill with its journalism programs. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but this competition seems to be a small sign of that mindset. Those of us who have been trained to be instinctively skeptical of advertising need to get used to the idea that journalism has lost its privileged place in Medill; at best, it is now an equal partner with the school's marketing programs. So, it is only fair that the work produced by marketing students receive equally prominent placement.
Of course, showcasing excellent student or alumni reporting would be a form of marketing, too. But it's a kind of marketing that would follow the old journalism adage, "show, don't tell." I'm sure the testimonials ultimately chosen will tell about all parts of the Medill program. But they will show students' prowess at advertisement, not journalism. It's hard not to read something into that writing on the wall.
- Michael Beder Assistant campus editor, former managing editor
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