Archive for March, 2009
Time to Vote
Time magazine is putting together its sixth annual list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People, and a trio of Penn Staters feature prominently among the 200 or so finalists.
Nominated as a team are research scientists Stephan Schuster and Webb Miller, known for their work in gene sequencing (which you can read more about here). Also nominated is Harvard economist Roland Fryer ’01 MA, ’02 PhD Lib, best known for landmark studies on race and education — check this video of his appearance last December on The Colbert Report for a fun but informative explanation.
The coolest part about all this? You can help these guys make the final 100. Time is using reader input to compile its list; click here to vote for Schuster and Webb, and here to vote for Fryer.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
A Pile o’ Skulls at Zoller
Our art director needed a photo of Zoller Gallery to go with our “Faces Behind the Buildings” mini-feature in the Pulse section for May-June, so I volunteered to go up with my camera this afternoon. For one thing, I’m still trying to get back in the groove at the office after a great editors’ conference in San Francisco (more on that another time), and for another, I can’t remember the last time I was in Zoller. It’s been years, I’m sure. So figured it was about time I paid a visit.
The exhibit that’s up there now—although today is the last day for it—is one by an MFA student by the name of Bryan Billingsley. It’s called “Shipwrecked Pirate Cowboy” and its centerpiece is a funky pile of plastic (or maybe rubber?) skulls. So I took a few “safe shots” for Carole, i.e., some general overviews of the gallery space, and then I got down on my stomach with my wide-angle lens to photograph the skulls up close. I gave her about six photos to choose from; check your May-June issue in a few weeks to see which one(s) she ends up using.
You can read a Collegian article about the exhibit here.
Tina Hay, editor
Ax-Perlman-Ma at Penn State
Photo by Annemarie Mountz ’84
I was at State College Choral Society rehearsal last night (we’re working on Haydn’s The Creation for a concert at Eisenhower Auditorium in early May) when I got a text message on my iPhone from two friends who were missing from the rehearsal:
Hey you should hear these cats rock!
Dan & Cath
It turns out they (and a lot of other Choral Society members) were skipping rehearsal to attend the Ax-Perlman-Ma concert on campus. Pianist Emanuel Ax, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma were performing together for the first time ever—and doing it at Penn State. It’s one of only two shows they’ll do, the other being tonight at Carnegie Hall.
You can see photos from last night’s concert here.
Tina Hay, editor
‘Street of Our Lady’ in Philadelphia
Francisca Halamajowa
We just noticed that No. 4 Street of Our Lady, made by three filmmakers from Penn State, is scheduled to be shown in Philadelphia in August. The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies hasn’t announced an exact date yet for the screening, but a genealogical blogger lists the film as having been confirmed for showing. The film made its world premiere in State College at the beginning of March.
As our November/December issue described, No. 4 Street of Our Lady tells how Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish Catholic in the town of Sokal, hid more than a dozen Jewish neighbors on her property for almost two years, right under the noses of the Nazis. Sixty years later, some of the survivors went back to Sokal with filmmakers Judy Maltz, Barbara Bird, and Richie Sherman—a powerful experience for all.
Chas Brua, contributing editor
A Bigger, Happier Valley
Penn State Lehigh Valley is on the move. Having outgrown its Fogelsville campus, the 97-year-old Penn State branch on the outskirts of Allentown is moving 16 miles east to Center Valley, where it will serve students at a nearly 100,000-square-foot building recently purchased from Lehigh Valley College. The benefits? More room, both existing (the new facility has about twice as much classroom and office space) and for possible future expansion; better access to public transportation; and the chance to upgrade without having to build new facilities.
The Lehigh Valley campus website has plenty of information on the move, including a Frequently Asked Questions page that answers the most common queries. One tidbit that’s not on the FAQ page, but which you can find on the site’s historical timeline: This will be the fifth location for Penn State Lehigh Valley since it opened — “as the first permanent Penn State technical center … in the attic of the Stevens School at 6th and Tilghman Streets in Allentown” — way back in 1912.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Zombies and Green People
I’ve been in the office for awhile this evening (yes, my social life stinks) and had the chance to observe two interesting student activities.
One involved about 50 kids running around for the better part of an hour and a half, brandishing Nerf guns and yelling things like “Get down, I told you to get down!” and “You can’t go into buildings! He went into a building!” I’m assuming it was a game of Humans vs. Zombies. Looked like fun. I think the magazine has an article about this campus craze in the works for an upcoming issue.
Activity number two, I only heard, didn’t see.… A walkway from downtown to campus runs right under my office window, and I heard several students yelling, “Turn off your light! Turn off your light!” I thought they were just leftover Zombies until one of them said, “Earth Hour” and I saw that it was 8:29 p.m. So I guess they were talking to me. As I mentioned yesterday, Penn State was observing Earth Hour, a symbolic shutting off of lights in Old Main and some other buildings. (Not this one, though.) The event was scheduled for 8:30 local time around the world.
But sorry, I can’t work in the dark. If it’s any consolation to the students who were bothered by my light, the TV and most of the other energy-draining appliances in my apartment are always unplugged when I’m not using them. Like now.
Chas Brua, contributing editor
Blackout
Apparently 8:30 tomorrow evening marks an event called “Earth Hour,” in which people all over the planet turn off their lights for an hour to reduce energy consumption and the resulting pollution. Penn State is getting involved by turning off the lights of some of its showcase buildings, including Old Main and the IST Building. The Penn State sites are in good company—the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower are also taking part.
Chas Brua, contributing editor
More From San Francisco
One of the fun things about the annual editors’ conference is that we editors get to see all our buddies from other alumni magazines, most of whom we only see once a year at most. At breakfast this morning, for example, I bumped into David Gibson, who won two Sibley Awards when he was editor of the Cornell University alumni magazine (the Sibley is the top award in our field—we won it two years ago), and Bob Bliwise, who is the editor of the Duke University magazine and who has two Sibleys of his own.
David is the guy on the left; this morning he’s giving a session on how to cover fund-raising news in your magazine in a graceful way. That’s a big issue in our field—many alumni magazines are constantly under pressure from the development folks to do profiles on major donors, stories about how the capital campaign is going, and so on, and yet most reader surveys show that readers have little or no interest in the subject. It’s important to cover that stuff, but how do you do it in a way that readers will actually read? David’s session this morning may answer some of those questions. Oh, and he’s not at Cornell anymore—he left the alumni magazine world and is now director of development communications at Dartmouth, so he has a unique perspective on the subject.
The restaurant at our hotel—the Grand Hyatt on Union Square—is on the top (36th) floor and gives us some spectacular views of the city. Here’s one from this morning where you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.
Tina Hay, editor
Still More on Paterno vs. Bowden
Thanks to alumnus Ken Wilson for calling my attention to this opinion piece in Tuesday’s New York Times. Bobby Bowden has been publicly critical of the NCAA for the sanctions against Florida State that might cost him 14 football victories and widen Joe Paterno’s lead over him. The Times writer comes down pretty hard on Bowden.
Tina Hay, editor
Greetings from San Francisco
So I’m out here for the CASE Editors Forum, the annual get-together for those of us who do alumni magazines—mostly at the college and university level, but there also are some folks here from what we call “independent schools,” i.e., private K-12 schools. For example, I had the editor of the Sidwell Friends School alumni magazine in my session this morning.
The session I gave was a three-hour workshop called “Magazines 101,” aimed primarily at rookie editors, although there were quite a few veterans in the room. (I still don’t get why they signed up for the workshop!) I talked about some basic principles that guide us at The Penn Stater—for example, we make the assumption that people are fundamentally disinclined to read our magazines, that they’re busy and they’re bombarded with information from other sources, and that somehow we have to be engaging enough that they’ll read us in spite of themselves. I also talked a lot about storytelling, about design principles I’ve picked up over the years, about covers, stuff like that.
I heard a couple of things that made me realize how lucky we are to have the support of our higher-ups to produce a quality magazine. One was during the Q&A portion of my workshop, when someone asked how to turn a story about their school’s new strategic plan into an interesting magazine cover. I had just gotten done talking about the reality that your readers don’t care about your school’s new strategic plan, and putting it on the cover is not going to make them want to open the magazine. But she has no choice—her boss insists that this be on the cover. I tried to think of how she could make that into a good cover, and I just had nothing to offer her. The best I could tell her to do was to just hold her nose and do it, just get it over with—and be grateful that in a few months she’ll be putting out the next issue and that stupid strategic-planning cover will be behind her.
The other sobering moment was when the editor of one of the best alumni magazines in the country told me at lunch that her magazine is essentially being discontinued by her administration, and replaced with some sort of slick marketing magazine that she will merely “lead the editing of,” in the words of one of her higher-ups. She’s very savvy about how to produce an engaging magazine, and it sounds like the new administrators above her don’t really have much respect for her expertise. It made me very sad.
Dale Keiger of Johns Hopkins magazine was sitting next to me and said something like, “All of us are only one administrator away from having everything change for us.” I’m not remembering his quote exactly, but basically he was saying that all it takes is one new, unenlightened boss, and we too could be putting stories about strategic plans on our covers.
On a happier note, San Francisco is gorgeous! The weather is beautiful and, of course, so is the city. I got in early yesterday afternoon and bumped into two colleagues from Swarthmore’s alumni magazine and we spent the afternoon poking around the city with our cameras. (We weren’t playing hooky—the conference hadn’t started yet.) Here’s Jeff Lott, the Swarthmore editor, at (no duh) the Golden Gate Bridge, which we walked the whole way across!
And here’s a shot of the view from the top-floor restaurant in our hotel.
Not too slouchy, huh?
OK, lunch break is over. Off to the afternoon sessions.
Tina Hay, editor
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