Parody: the sincerest form of flattery?

You may have read on this blog about our university‘s campaign to introduce our new name — Missouri University of Science and Technology — to various audiences. We call it the hello campaign, and it features brief video clips introducing students, alumni, faculty and staff.

The campaign is now the subject of a parody by a group of enterprising students. (Enterprising in the truest sense, as they’ve created a t-shirt business poking fun at the university.) Here’s the video they’ve posted in response to the campaign.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/REccpS1cScY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

If I were wearing my official university spokesperson hat, I wouldn’t be sharing this. But this is a personal blog, so what the heck. I love parody in all its forms, so I tip my hat to these guys.

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Now playing: The Clash – Clampdown
via FoxyTunes

Journalism 2.0: a social network experiment

Despite the challenges “old media” face from the new world of social networking, these appear to be exciting times for journalists who are willing to embrace the new reality — or to at least experiment with it.

A new weblog, Beat Blogging, is one such experiment. The idea behind Beat Blogging is to connect reporters via a social network — a blog, in this case — to help them improve their beat reporting.

The group of 13 journalists — one each from various news organizations — includes a couple of journalist-bloggers whom I try to read occasionally:

  • Eric Berger, who blogs as SciGuy for the Houston Chronicle. Berger says he joined the network because he hopes “to raise the level of debate on my existing blog by adding considerably more commentary from practicing scientists, and giving scientists a non-threatening place to interact with the general public.”
  • Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired’s Listening Post blog. His editor, Evan Hansen, says, “One of the lessons we’ve learned is that blogging offers a fundamentally different relationship with readers than traditional newsgathering, and with this project we hope to tap even deeper into that phenomenon.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s news blog. The Chronicle is one of the 13 news organizations to take part in the experiment and has assigned Brad Wolverton, who covers the business of college sports, to Beat Blogging.

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Now playing: The Who – Naked Eye
via FoxyTunes