Category: media

Boise State hopes for a bowl bounce

Boise State University is riding high on a victory over Big 12 football powerhouse the University of Oklahoma in last week’s Fiesta Bowl. Now, according to an AP report in Idaho Business News, Boise State officials are hoping a “bowl bounce” will help their campus gain more national recognition — and more students and private donations. (Link via University Business.)

If the increases in enrollment and donations following Cinderella runs by the George Mason and Gonzaga basketball teams can predict Boise State’s “Bowl Bounce,” the commuter school in Idaho’s capital city should expect the glass slipper to fit for months to come.

University President Bob Kustra thinks so. Thanks to the Fiesta Bowl victory, “It’s going to be easier to recruit topflight faculty, easier to recruit students and easier to raise money,” Kustra said. “It’s in a sense a coincidence because we’ve been preparing a comprehensive campaign for a year now.”

The school’s marketing slogan, “Beyond the Blue,” refers to the academics behind the signature blue Astroturf at Bronco stadium. A one-time junior college, Boise State already was slowly blooming into a research university as the Boise metropolitan area attracted technology firms and thousands of urban transplants throughout the 1990s.

Kustra hopes the bowl victory will accelerate that transformation, mirroring the experience of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., in the nine months since it captivated basketball fans on a run to last year’s NCAA Final Four as a No. 11 seed.

Ah, big-time intercollegiate athletics.

Angst in the Philly Inquirer newsroom

One of the great daily newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer, has become the latest big-city old paper to lay off news staff. The Inquirer will trim about 20 percent of its news staff as it reinvents itself as “a local and regional publication with a growing online presence anchored by a redesigned Web site.”

The Inquirer’s resident blogger, Dan Rubin (whom I met last fall at the CASE conference in Philadelphia), describes the somber mood in the newsroom.

Staff meetings are scheduled for this afternoon. I’m guessing we’ll talk about individual sacrifice, the needs of the group. The paper will take a look, again, at what it needs to do in this crushing time, and many people will be asked to change jobs, to fill in the many holes. (Update: Editor Bill Marimow described this as “the worst day in the history of the Philadelphia Inquirer.”)

I’ve said to a couple of glum-looking people today that there’s part of me that’s envious. I know it sounds hollow, coming from someone who has seniority. But this will be saving some people from heartache later, when it’s harder to pull up stakes. This is a good time to be looking for other ways to use those peculiar skills they put to work here.

I told a young writer who was wondering how she’d manage that the amazing thing is, I’ve never run into anyone who left the newspaper who didn’t look younger and healthier the next time I saw them.

A harbinger of things to come for old media?

Related: Will the old media survive?