2007 wraps up!

Finals wrap this week, then the campus gets pretty quiet when our nearly 45,000 students head off on the semester break. As we wind down the Fall 2007 semester, I look back on the previous year and go “whew!” What a year it was!

Our year-long effort for reaccreditation kept us hopping through October when a four-member visiting team from the Accrediting Council on Education for Journalism and Mass Communication was on campus for a two and a half day visit. The team found the J-School in compliance on all nine standards and recommended reaccreditation. That was not an unexpected result but a huge relief nonetheless.

We are pushing ahead on a major overhaul of the curriculum to address the ongoing changes in news and information delivery. Associate Director Darcy Greene is chairing a Task Force on New Curriculum. We came up with some terrific ideas during our retreats. Now the time is ripe! This requires lots of input from professionals and lots of training in different skills for faculty. We're listening and working hard to keep our students on the cutting edge.

We’ve also had some terrific speakers this semester. The highlight had to be former New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer editor Gene Roberts’s November 14 lecture. Roberts was the seventh Neal Shine Ethics Lecturer. A copy of his speech is on the Poynter website at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=71&aid=133835. We also welcomed 3-D graphic artist Bryan Christie and documentary photographer Rania Matar among others.

The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism also brought in a cadre of distinguished speakers in the past year. The Knight Center folks, especially Jim Detjen and Dave Poulson, have been hard at work raising funds for the match challenge endowment from the Knight Foundation. We need to raise $100,000 in endowment money each year to have Knight match it.

More than 150 students in the Intro to Mass Media course and a handful of others partnered with The Detroit News in covering the GOP CNN/You Tube debate. The partnership was so successful (and our students, mainly freshmen taking the class from Bonnie Bucqueroux and her teaching assistant, doctoral student Robin Blom) that the News wants to continue it through the presidential election season.

We welcomed two new visiting faculty members this fall, former Detroit News Managing Editor Sue Burzynski Bullard and former WZZM-TV chief photographer Bob Gould. Sue is teaching Media Management and Advance Reporting and News Writing. Bob is teaching the advanced broadcast classes and executive producing our award winning Focal Point.

Recent graduates are landing great jobs. Sarah Swistak just did a live stand-up from Butte, Montana for MSNBC on the funeral of Evel Knievel. Here is the link to her live shot: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=&vid=5de3ff78-c608-404a-bbf9-e725c22db8e9 .

Alumna Jamie Gumbrecht is reporting from Baghdad.

Happy Holidays to you and yours! As we wind down the Fall 2007 semester, I look back on the previous year and go “whew!” What a year it was! And the plans we have for 2008…

To give you just one short preview, former Newsweek graphics editor and now J-School faculty member Karl Gude will be leading a Study Abroad in Graphic Design in Spain this summer. Check out his website at http://picasaweb.google.com/karlgude/SpainStudyAbroadExploratoryTrip.

Have a safe restful holiday break. See you next year!