Month: December 2009

Friday Five: best songs of the decade

Before I post my highly anticipated list of my selections for the top 100 albums of the decade, I need to get this out of my system: a brief Friday Five listing of my favorite singles of the decade. (I use “best” and “favorite” interchangeably, because if it’s one of my favorites, chances are I also consider it to be one of the best.)

Also, while you’re waiting for my personal list of the decade’s top albums, please visit the collective ranking by me and six other higher ed music geeks at Higher Ed Music Critics.

OK, on to our countdown. I’ll try to do my best Casey Casem impersonation for you:

5. (tie) I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor – the Arctic Monkeys. These bratty Brits came out of nowhere with buzzsaw guitar and hammering rhythm to accompany the clever, come-on vocals of this tune. No other word to describe it but “catchy.”

5. (tie) Fell in Love With a Girl – the White Stripes. I was hooked by Jack White’s chunky power-chord opening. The song’s sudden ending follows the showbiz rule to always leave ’em wanting more. This is the song that made me fall in love with the White Stripes.

4. Beautiful Day – U2. See the bird with the leaf in her mouth/After the flood all the colors came out. A song of hope and renewal.

3. Crazy – Gnarls Barkley. How could anyone listen to this and not get up and dance?

2. Hey Ya – Outkast. Another highly danceable tune, and the only one that compels us to shake it like a Polaroid picture. I am on record as proclaiming this the song of the decade, but upon further review I must place it a rung below…

1. Hurt, Johnny Cash. What a powerful, moving rendition of this Nine Inch Nails tune. The Man in Black, no stranger to pain, heartache and hard life, creates a beautifully dark and haunting melody at the twilight of his career. It’s pretty depressing, though.

Bonus: music video of the decade:


Here It Goes Again (video) – OK Go

The shrinking news hole for education

It should come as no surprise to those of us in higher ed PR who try to get media attention for our institutions, but now it’s official: according to a new report from the Brookings Institution, the traditional news media pays scant attention to education.

Education coverage makes up just 1.4 percent of news covered on a national level, according to the report. And most of that coverage has little to do with learning.

Oddly enough, the amount of coverage in 2009 was an increase over the past two years (0.7 percent in 2008 and 1 percent in 2007.) “This makes it difficult for the public to follow the issues at stake in our education debates and to understand how to improve school performance,” the Brookings report concludes.

Brookings conducted an analysis of national media coverage of education in newspapers, news Web sites, network and cable television and radio during the first nine months of 2009. As CASE points out in its summary of the report, the researchers “found that newspapers and radio stations placed more emphasis on stories related to school finance and budget cutbacks, network television to stories on H1N1 flu or health issues, cable to politics in education, and online sites to education reform.”

I guess those of us in higher ed should be thankful that we get the lion’s share of the coverage. Twenty-seven percent of that national media coverage pertains to colleges and universities. Community colleges don’t fare so well, earning just one-tenth of the coverage four-year institutions receive — a 2.9 percent slice of education coverage overall.

http://genflux.chartle.net/embed?index=23618&content

The Brookings report offers several suggestions for improving the amount and quality of news coverage of education. Topping the list is a commitment by educational institutions to make communication with the news media a priority. Hey, that’s one of the reasons we’re in this business, right?