Opinion THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2010
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ALEJANDRO
I wish KU would hire math and science teachers that didn't have outrageous accents.
Your mom sounded sick last night. No seriously, she sounded ill, you should call her.
RIP John Wooden
--gain all supposedly unbeknownst to Perkins. Shortly after, Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little ordered an investigation into claims that Perkins inappropriately accepted free athletic equipment for personal use.
IN MY BELLY
--gain all supposedly unbeknownst to Perkins. Shortly after, Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little ordered an investigation into claims that Perkins inappropriately accepted free athletic equipment for personal use.
Whered all the FFA happiness go?
I wouldn't be opposed to having sex right now.
You should just offer.
Make it a threesome?
I want to cook some eggs,but my roommate used the pans and hasn't washed them yet. Sigh.
Summer sucks and it is impossible to find a job.
*Too bad girls don't read Dune.
EDITORIAL
Perkins was in wrong,but we need him
Thousands of illegally sold tickets and a blackmail case were only the latest in a series of questionable acts committed by Kansas Athletics. And not surprisingly, many are calling for the head of Athletic Director Lew Perkins.
The University announced May 26 the findings of its internal audit, which found that nearly 20,000 basketball and football tickets with a value of at least $1 million were sold from 2005-2010 by several Athletics employees for personal
As the chief executive, Perkins should be held responsible for the actions of his staff. It seems unlikely that he was completely in the dark to his staff's siphoning of tickets. His professed naivete is no excuse; he should know what's going on within the department. So calling for his termination seems reasonable.
Someone needs to be held responsible, or at least take the fall.
But right now we can't afford to lose Perkins, the aggressive businessman who pulled the Athletics Department out of mediocrity.
With as many as eight teams possibly leaving the Big 12, the conference's long-term viability is sketchy at best. If the Big 12 doesn't survive, Perkins is our only chance at getting into another BCS conference such as the ACC or the Big East where Perkins has connections from
his days at UConn. Our legendary basketball and up-and-coming football programs won't mean much if Kansas is put into a non-BCS conference like the Mountain Sky or Missouri Valley conferences.
Now is not the time to chop the head off KU Athletics. Now's no time for an interim director or a reorganization of the athletic department.
We need our best batter at the plate.
TRAVEL
Kevin Hardy for The Kansan Editorial Board
Is this the end of foreign correspondents?
In March 2008, Solana Larsen, a prominent blogger and international journalist, made a startling prediction while participating in a forum at Harvard University. Foreign correspondents, she said, will no longer exist by 2013.
Larsen's two-minute "provocation" sparked a firestorm of controversy. According to her blog, she "spent the rest of the day dodging journalists and editors who wanted to tell me I was wrong, naive, and even careless."
Now, more than two years later foreign reporting looks as bleak as ever. Steadily declining ad revenue accelerated by the 2008 economic crisis left many news outlets on life support.
The dire economic conditions forced nearly all media organizations to slash budgets and cut staff in attempts to remain solvent. Foreign news bureaus — with their rising costs and an increasingly uninterested American audience — are often among the first to go.
Foreign Telegraph
Larsen's grim prediction is not the first of its kind, nor will it be the last.
BY MICHAEL HOLTZ
mholtz@kansan.com
The uncertainties surrounding foreign correspondence reflect a much larger trend in professional journalism - the race to reveal its future.
The anxieties that fill newsrooms across the country have permeated college academics. As news outlets struggle to redefine what it means to be a professional journalist, journalism schools struggle to redefine what it means to be a student journalist.
Media integration, a buzzword in both professional and collegiate journalism, has emerged as a popular aim for newsrooms and classrooms alike. Recent plans for restructuring the University of Kansas' journalism school emphasize media integration
as a primary goal.
Starting in the fall of 2011, Columbia University will offer a combined computer science and journalism master's degree, with an emphasis on multimedia skills and comprehensive IT knowledge.
And the University of Missouri's journalism school has decided on a much different approach. Rather than following the media integration trend, Missouri's new program requires students to major in one of 25 separate interest areas.
So what do these academic disparities mean for us, the students? How do we prepare ourselves for a future that remains so uncertain? In my case, if Larsen's prediction becomes true and my dreams of becoming a professional foreign correspondent are shattered, where does that leave me?
Though the differences between journalism schools signal a largely undecided future, they do share at least one common thread — the need for students to adapt.
The same can be said for all students, not just those in journalism. A CBS News poll found that nine in 10 Americans think today's job market requires different skills than it did 20 years ago.
As new technologies, models and ideas replace old ones at an exponential rate, 20 years will soon become 10, if not even less. Having the ability to adapt to a continuously changing job market and the willingness to try new things are essential supplements to any college degree.
Despite their tentative forecasts, the futures of journalism and other fields are nothing to run from. The sense of "anything goes" can be equally liberating and exciting, which is why I'll be spending the next six weeks in Europe exploring the current state of foreign correspondence. If college journalism is any indication, what happens in the future remains anyone's guess.
— kansas columnist Michael Holtz will contribute weekly columns from his European travels.
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