Month: June 2009

Friday Five: the bad news bearer

Welcome to the Friday Five, Doom and Gloom Edition.

Woe is us.

Nothing like a little negative energy to kick off the weekend, I always say.

Hey, don’t blame me. I’m just the messenger. Kinda like those newspapers that are dying left and right these days.

Anyway, here we go. Bad news. We’ve got bad, bad news…

  1. ‘When Bad Times Come, Your Hand Is Forced’. Just how bad is the economic outlook for higher education? It’s bad. Very bad. Watch this video from The Chronicle of Higher Education and be afraid. Very afraid.
  2. Your clients hate you. How’s that for telling it straight? The story really isn’t as bad as the headline would lead you to believe, so go ahead and click it.
  3. MySpace becomes Murdoch’s MyProblem. “Rupert Murdoch was hailed as a visionary when he paid the then-bargain price of $580 million for MySpace in 2005, but now it appears that the newspaper mogul may not know that much about running an Internet community after all.” Earlier this week, MySpace laid off some 400 employees — more than 13 percent of its work force — and forecasters expect a 15 percent drop in ad revenue for the company this year.
  4. Feedback: the creativity killer. The sources of negative feedback and 12 excellent ideas for dealing with them. (See? I’m starting to get more optimistic already. The clouds are lifting. Blogging is good.)
  5. And to end on a positive note: There’s too much negativism in journalism. I totally agree. Why does everybody have to be so negative all the time?

And to end on an even better, ahem, note: The Hold Steady – Stay Positive (audio).

Moving from print to web

Hey, it’s the middle of 2009 already. Weren’t we all supposed to be working in paperless offices by now? (Yeah, and driving to work in our flying cars, like the Jetsons.)

Well, like the flying car, the paperless office turned out to be a bill of goods, a mistaken vision of the future from days gone by.

But budget crunches and environmental concerns may be pushing us closer to a paperless workflow than many of us thought. Karine Joly‘s latest column in University Business — 2010: Print to Web Odyssey? — outlines a five-step plan for moving some of your marketing efforts from the world of print to the online realm. The entire article is worth your read, but if you’re in a rush and just want the five points, check out Karine’s blog post. You might also be interested in an upcoming webinar on the subject.

No plans are in the works for a webinar on flying cars, to my knowledge. But Karine, if you do one, I’d totally go.