The Penn Stater Magazine

Of Magazines and Ducks

July 26, 2011 at 8:42 am Tina Hay Leave a comment

A couple of my colleagues on campus have a podcast they call the U Report, in which they go behind the scenes at various Penn State locations, from the Ice Pavilion to the airport to the Hort’s department’s vegetable cellar.

(Not familiar with the vegetable cellar? It’s just across from Eisenhower Auditorium, and in the summer they sell veggies that were grown in the hort farms at Rock Springs.)

Anyway, a week or so ago the U Report trio came over to interview me about the magazine, and that interview is now available online.

The U Report is a hobby of sorts for its creators, John Dolan ’89, Christina McNeill, and Shannon Ritter ’90, all of whom are on the Penn State staff in jobs that involve social media. It’s a fairly low-tech affair—audio only, with a few still photos that they take with their iPhones. You can read more about the U Report’s origins in this article at the University’s “Teaching and Learning With Technology” website.

So, the Friday before last, the four of us sat out in the gazebo in the alumni gardens outside my office, and they asked me stuff about the magazine’s editorial philosophy, my interest in photography, and the wildlife that inhabit our gardens. Somehow the conversation always kept coming back to the ducks.

You can give it a listen here, and don’t feel bad if you don’t get through the entire 16-minute interview in one sitting. Even I listened to it in two chunks! But it was a lot of fun—there’s a lot of laughter in the conversation, always a good sign.

Tina Hay, editor

P.S. Last week, Ryan Jones called our attention to part 1 of the annual interview that Rich Scarcella ’81 of the Reading Eagle does with Joe Paterno. Part 2 of the interview is now online as well.

Entry filed under: Alumni Association, The Penn Stater magazine. Tags: Christina McNeill, John Dolan, Rich Scarcella, Shannon Ritter.