AN ARGUMENT FOR SNAIL MAIL

In our tweeting, emailing culture, the humble snail mail letter may be undergoing a slow, slow reappraisal.  And at least one PR veteran believes it's about time.

 "I have counseled younger people to adopt this old-school technique as they build their own careers," writes Don Spetner.  "I want them to understand the magic of a personal letter, the gravitas that the heft of paper and letterhead can lend to a message. It becomes more than a note; it's something that can be saved. And you never know when that might matter."  Courtesy PRWeek. 

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YOUR MOOC IS TELEVISION

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

It’s been a little more than a year since the higher education community began to appreciate the huge potential of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  Suddenly, those forward-looking musings are reading more like stale science fiction. 

As someone who has spent many years reporting TV news on the street - and teaching about it in both the classroom and the boardroom - I wonder when it will dawn on educators that the staggering dropout rate for online courses has nothing to do with the concept, and everything to do with the execution?

"MOOCow," based on "La Vaca de los Sinvaca" by Jose Bogado.  Courtesy iberry.com. 

In the wired world, the students have been handing out the grades - and they have been giving MOOCs, and their professors, an F.  One study reports that the average completion rate for MOOCs is just 6.8 percent.   That translates to a 93 percent dropout rate.  

What’s more, one of the MOOC’s biggest mavens is now running, not walking, in the opposite direction.  Sebastian Thrun, the founder of leading MOOC distributor Udacity, says his firm has “a lousy product,” and that he will reposition the company to focus on short courses aimed at professional development. 

Please, Mr. Thrun. Not so fast.  Before you tow your car to the information junkyard, let's at least look under the hood.  

A central truth about the nature of MOOC's appears to have been lost on the vast majority of their creators.   It is simply this: that MOOCs, at their essential core, are television.  

Do not confuse the attributes with the essence - or the accidents with the substance, as Aristotle might say.  A MOOC might have elements of Web-like interactivity.  It might be watched in small snippets, instead of in hour-long chunks.  And you will probably experience it on your iPad instead of in your living room.  Delivery methods have changed and will change, but they have nothing to do with the core of the experience.  

MOOCs, at bottom, are people, pictures, and ideas on a screen.   They are television.  

Grasp this basic truth - then survey the quality of the MOOCs that are out there.   Is it any wonder that the substandard programming has led 93 percent of the audience to tune out  before it’s over?  

As a coach who has helped thousands of individuals to communicate more effectively in the visual medium, let me offer a few relevant takeaways from the MOOCs we've audited, as well as from the brave and open-minded professors we have counseled: 

-  MOOC's need to tell stories.    "A growing body of cognitive research," wrote Chrystia Freeland in these pages in 2010, "is demonstrating something schoolteachers and entertainers have known for a long time: Most of us respond better to personal stories than to impersonal numbers and ideas." Television figured out a long time ago that the medium at its best when it tells stories.  That means setting up your courses with a strong narrative arc from beginning to end.  

-  Don't reinvent the wheel.  Observe the storytelling techniques on successful TV programs, and don't be afraid to emulate them.  Set up characters.  Identify problems.  Create suspense.  On the other hand, the majority of MOOCs we've encountered are set up like textbooks, which usually convey information without a strong story line.  When your students retain more about the last 10 episodes of "Mad Men" than about the last installment of your MOOC, you have a problem.  

-  Presenters must loosen up.   A large number of professors online come across as dweebish and boring.  That may be acceptable - barely - with a captive audience in a lecture hall.  It is lethal for your prospects on television.  Presenters should lose the pocket protector mindset and learn how to relate to the camera, which is the principal conduit to the unseen audience.   And that involves much more than looking at the lens.  

-  Break out of the visual jail.   Too many MOOC presenters get lazy when it comes to the visual element.  Some resort repeatedly, for instance, to handwritten notes captured by a virtual pen application.  It's about as exciting as watching paint dry.  Think creatively about visuals that could enhance your lecture - many of them are available at little or no cost in places like Wikimedia Commons.   Ken Burns could make the Civil War come to life with creative use of tintypes, because he understood how to use them.  You can too.

"This instrument," Edward R. Murrow said of television in 1958, "can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire.  But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends."   MOOCs are television - there is no avoiding that truth.  If educators are truly determined to make the world their classroom, they have to learn how to adapt to the medium - and not expect the medium to adapt to them. 

SOCIAL MEDIA: A disaster worth avoiding

In February, we'll be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Facebook.  Celebrating, you say?   Well, whether or not you haul out the Dom Perignon, it's time to take stock.

Less than a decade and a half into the new millennium, we have already witnessed the birth of some game-changing social phenomena.  Consider these common terms that would have made little or no sense in 2000:  "We're on Orange alert."  "What a cool tweet."   "I'm defriending you."  

But perhaps the most confounding trend in our wired age is the emerging insistence by public figures on destroying themselves - in 140 characters or less.   "As someone who covers politics," writes a columnist for the Santa Fe New Mexican, "I implore politicians from the local to the national levels to keep tweeting and Facebooking to your hearts’ content... you’re making my job easier."

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THE "D" IN DAYTIME TALK SHOWS STANDS FOR "DEAD"

  A variety of factors are conspiring to suck the life out of a television staple.  

Media commentary by Doug Spero via The Huffington Post

Daytime talk on TV is dead!  Well, maybe not dead, but it is going the way of westerns, game shows and teenage bandstands. Littered across the daytime talk landscape are the has-beens and colossal failures from the past.

This scene is full of graveyard greats like Ricki Lake, Jeff Probst, Anderson Cooper, Wayne Brady, Martin Short and many others who folded up shop in recent years. But there's one talent that's signaled it may be time to call in the priest for last rites: Katie Couric. 

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A-MAZ'IN - AND VIRTUALLY UNSTUMPABLE

Remembering New York sports broadcasting legend Bill Mazer, dead at 92

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

The Boston Red Sox won their ninth consecutive World Series game last night.  Who was the last team to do that? 

Today, you can just call up the answer on your smartphone.  But in an era before information became as ubiquitous as tap water, there was a far more authoritative way to get a reliable answer:  just ask Bill Mazer.

Bill Mazer (left) with Steve Dunlop on the Challenge Round on New York's Ten O'Clock News, 1990.  Image courtesy WNYW-TV. 

I had the privilege of working with the man they called "The A-Maz-in'" for the better part of a decade in New York at The Ten O'Clock News on Channel 5.  He was a genial, avuncular conversationalist who sang opera in the newsroom (although he actually preferred the acoustics in the men's room)  and who would yell out "Stevie!  Boychik!"  with a smile when he passed me in the hallway.   I never knew what that Yiddishism meant until Mazer taught me the term. 

But for members of my generation, Bill Mazer and sports trivia were virtually synonymous.  He might as well have invented the field.   He certainly invented the sports radio call-in show. 

I first encountered him as a kid of about 9, on our kitchen radio, listening to his afternoon call-in program on WNBC called "The Challenge Round."   My parents, both transplants from the Buffalo area where Mazer had spent 16 prior years as a sportscaster, were already well acquainted with his near-photographic recall. 

"The first call was a kid," Mazer told Newsday in 2011, reflecting on how it all began.  "And he said, 'I just want to ask you one question.' I said, 'OK, go ahead.'  He said, 'Who's better: Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle?" 

The Sports Answer Book, authored by Bill Mazer in the 1960's.   

That's asking for an opinion, of course, not a fact.  But Mazer's knowledge of sports facts was so encyclopedic that he wrote a book on the subject that you can still find on Amazon.   (Sorry, my copy is not for sale.) 

Mazer was no sports geek, however.  In the late 1960's, he moved to WOR Radio, where he hosted a nightly interview program from The Steer Palace, an upscale steakhouse near Madison Square Garden.   On WOR, Mazer and his guest would entertain subject matter ranging from the arts to politics to music to popular culture.  

Mazer was a radio producer's dream.  Just wind him up and point him toward the microphone.  But unlike most of today's non-stop talkers, Mazer was a Renaissance man.  He could address virtually any topic with intelligence, civility, and depth.  He was a sports guy for people who didn't necessarily care for sports.  

And it was that ability to cast a wider net that led to his hiring at Channel 5, as my longtime Ten O'Clock News colleague Christopher Jones told me. 

"Mark Monsky was the news director and he was looking for a sports guy," Jones said, "but Monsky was a news guy with little interest in sports." Jones, who listened to Mazer on the radio, was deeply impressed by how he handled stumper questions live, and suggested that Monsky hire him. 

"I told Monsky that Mazer could keep viewers watching the sports segment, even when they didn't particularly care about sports - and that included Monsky," Jones told me.  "Monsky called Mazer.  The rest is history." 

One night in the summer of 1990, I was anchoring the Ten O'Clock News alongside Bill Mazer.  Sports was the last segment.  Mazer was running long, as he usually did, and floor manager Donna Hayes was waving frantically at him to wrap so we would have time for the Challenge Round. 

Mazer brushed Donna off with a wave of his hand, and just kept reading his script at his normal pace, as though nothing had happened.   No one at home saw it - and probably not even any one in the control room.  

The question I read to the A-Maz-in was from a Joe Niehardt in Middle Village, Queens.  "When Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941," I asked him, "Joe DiMaggio hit .357 to finish third in batting that year.  Who finished second?" 

"I know the guy," Mazer responded without hesitation.  "I saw him play shortstop for Washington.  His name was Cecil Travis.  He batted, what?  .359?"

Bill Mazer got it right, of course.  Even the batting average.  That didn't surprise me.  What surprised me was how he could handle both an unexpected question and the pressure of the clock - just by staying focused, doing his unique thing, and by being as warm and engaging on-camera as he was in person. 

You can't do that by pretending to be someone else - which is what too many people on TV do these days.  "What you see is what you get," Mazer once told me about his delivery style. 

By the way… we got off the air on time.