The CommunicatorMay 2009

Inside:

Chair’s Note: p 2

FacultyAchievements: p 3

Donors offernewspapers p 4

Other notes p 5

The Newsletter of the Dept. of Mass Communications, Minnesota State University, Mankato

“A Bright Future for Journalism?”:New jobs bring promise to field

Mass communications students still have viable careers in front of them.

That news, delivered by Nora Paul, Director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, drew many interested questions and much discussion at the department’s Nadine B. Andreas Lecture April 23.

In a presentation called, “A Bright Future for Journalism?,” Paul told the crowd that while the outlook for the newspaper profession may look dire, the skills that come from a journalism education will be more valuable than ever in a new media landscape. One key word? Entrepreneur.

Media professionals who adapt to changing conditions in journalism and seek out opportunities to demonstrate their new media skill will be valued in the new media landscape, Paul said. She urged students to become familiar with social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook ,and MySpace, and to practice blogging.

Paul also advocated students and

Students earn awards, scholarshipsFaculty honored a number of students

April 23 in Media Day ceremonies.Friends and family gathered with

faculty and students to cheer on individu-als who were awarded scholarships and certificates of excellence from the depart-ment.

Scholarship winners included:n Emily Richardson, Volunteer Schol-

arship.n Kelsey Chester, Menton Scholarship.n Jenna Hewitt, McConnell Scholar-

ship.n Larissa Larivee, Kunerth Scholar-

ship.n Dan Moen, Suzanne Pothast Schol-

arship.n Ali Ramsey, AP Style Scholarship.n Danielle Doroff, Mass Comm Schol-

arship.n Nicole Smith, Mass Comm Scholar-

ship.n Erin Rohrer, Mass Comm Scholar-

ship.n Elena Shufelt, Mass Comm Scholar-

ship.n Regan Carstensen, Shipman Schol-

arship.Other awards went out to Outstanding

Sophomore, Shaina Sieh; Outstanding Senior, Kiki Polzin; and for general excel-

See Awards, p 5

“Key Word: Entrepreneur

professionals learning to think about reporting in new ways, adding value to online newspapers through innovation in storytelling and in advertising.

This particular bit of advice has been a hard sell to some journalists, Paul said, noting that journalism is one of the

top three professions resistant to change. The other two? The military and health care industries.

“And it makes sense,” Paul said, “[These professions] are all about triage.”

All three industries are response-oriented, and they have developed systems that work in the face of significant pressures, she added.

During the course of her stay on campus, Paul also discussed innovations in digital storytelling and in web design with students in Media Writing II and Publications Layout classes.

The bottom line? Students who learn how to write well and to adapt to changing industry conditions, who are familiar with the new media landscape and embrace it, still have bright futures in the field, Paul said.

Page 2 The Communicator

A word from the Chair ....

The Communicator

Editor: Dr. Amy Lauters

Administrative Assistance: Roberta Morsching

Current Permanent Faculty: Prof. Ellen Mrja Dr. Marshel Rossow Dr. Charles Lewis Dr. Jane McConnell Dr. Mavis Richardson Dr. Amy Lauters

Current Adjunct Faculty: Paul Allan John Cross Ann Fee Jim Gullickson Rachael Hanel Timothy Krohn Michael Lagerquist Mike Larson Robb Murray Scott Roemhildt Shelly Schulz Peter Steiner

How the semester ended so quickly is a mystery. Only yesterday it began, full of promise and time. And then, in a (albeit very long) flash, it has ended. My red ink is exhausted, my paperclips are gone and instead of 40 e-mail messages in the morning, I have five.

Perhaps the repeated budget cuts made the semester short. After all, we went from three percent to five percent to 10 percent cuts – maybe the days remaining in the semester were cut also? What happens now, when departments discover they have far less money than earlier thought? Suddenly percents don’t manage our money, but new lines across the ledger in ink we haven’t seen before. Does the phenomenon of slippery money translate into days that slide pass without notice, until suddenly there’s nothing left? Department chairs were told about the vanishing money only two days before the semester ended – is that a coincidence? Stranger things happen.

Like disappearing faculty members. Who decides which professors teach in the

summer? Do some simply disappear, like money, never to return? Or do they bask in the summer sun somewhere, waiting for some sign only professors know that tells them to ready themselves for a new school year? Maybe they don’t really go away at all, but sit behind office doors with their lights off, hoping no one will knock?

Actually, summer is a rarified time for professors. It’s time for the mystical moments they call research. They tell everyone they’re scholars, and write esoteric documents for obscure little journals. They fill their bookshelves with these endless little books, and line them up in neat rows like so many students on the first day of class in chairs bolted to the floor. But students disappear from classes – sometimes for days – and those little books stay faithfully, scoring A-pluses for patience and consistency and whatever those little words have to say.

Professors also claim summer is for recharging maligned and abused batteries. Their batteries. Have you ever noticed how much older professors appear in May than in the fall? Their clothes look crumpled and tired in May, in sad browns and grays, having lost all their color over winter. And then in August, the professors sport sandals and new haircuts and write with new pens with special new grips and endless supplies of ink?

Their clothes are brighter and they sport the newest technological device, hanging around their necks or packed in a vinyl bag for trips across campus. Perhaps most telling of the new energy professors find over summer are the jokes. In May, professors have no jokes. They just keep repeating what sounds like “it’s almost over, it’s almost over.” No joking at all. But in late summer, with recharged batteries and a new supply of bright ideas,

professors tell jokes. Corny, old, broken down jokes, but they’re told with the energy and self-amusement of someone who hadn’t heard the joke before, actually forcing students to laugh. It’s a ritual that no one has formally identified in academe, but one that provides students with the evidence that wisdom is funny and boring that they need to sustain a year of apathy.

Summer is an amazing rupture in the world of academics. While you’re out there working your hearts out to afford another year at school, car insurance, rent and Thursday nights, some professors are gone. You may be able to contact one in a relapse, answering a phone or e-mail as if it were late January. But the truth is, if they’re not in a classroom, they’re gone. Their bodies are in storage and their minds are somewhere between the last summer of youth and the first summer of meaningful intellect. Or, possibly, wherever mine will be this summer.

Have a great summer!--Dr. Jane McConnell

Dr. Jane McConnell, Chair

lence. Students who received Certificates of

Excellence and Who’s Who recognition included Regan Carstensen, Danielle Dor-off, Ashley Marks, Heather Martin, Emily Richardson, Rosanna Rashkova-Kosberg, Kristina Sukalski, Zachary Thieman, and Lynn Zaske.

Continued from page 1: Awards

Students receiving the certificates of excellence all met the criteria of having junior or senior standing, a mass commun-ciations major, and a 3.8 or above overall GPA.

Faculty congratulated all winners of the scholarships and awards, and offered best wishes to this year’s graduates.

The Communicator Page 3

Lauters welcomes her second book

Photo by Chuck LewisDr. Amy Lauters peeks out from behind her new book, More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of Ameri-can Farm Women, 1910 to 1960. The work, based in part on dissertation research conducted at the University of Minnesota, draws on fifty years of national farming and mainstream magazines to uncover the story of American farm women. Lauters also interviewed or corresponded with more than 180 women who lived on or were raised on farms during the period for the research.

It’s been nearly eight years in the mak-ing, so when my new book, More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910 to 1960, arrived last week, I surprised myself by at first by feeling noth-ing at all.

Of course, it did arrive in the middle of finals week.

My immediate second reaction was, “Oh, look; how pretty!”

The book’s cover, designed by Aaron Lueders at the University of Missouri Press, blends a purple quilt with a farm-ing landscape in greens and golds, and it’s visually stunning.

Authors who publish with a university press have no control over the marketing or design of their work, in general terms, so to see the cover let me know that the press believed in the work as much as I did.

The journey to this point began with the death of my grandmother, Elsie Coen Mattson, in April of 2001, just as I was deciding where to attend classes for my doctorate. Elsie, a farm woman, worked with my grandfather, Harvey Mattson, in running a farm in northern Wisconsin.

As I started taking classes at the Uni-versity of Minnesota, I particularly became interested in how farm women themselves were discussed in the history and cultural studies texts I read. Troubled by the char-acterizations of farm women as victims of patriarchy and poverty on their farms,

I began to conduct my own research into the lived experiences of these women.

The result, many papers and years of research later, can be found in this book.

I found, in the magazines I studied, a farming culture rich in characterizations of farm women as central, important, and somehow essential to the business of farming. American farm women worked extremely hard, but their businesses could

not be run in the same way without their participation.

These constructions differed from what I’d read in those first books. And they were borne out when I stepped out of my office to talk to these women in person.

This work offers another side to the history of the American landscape, and I’m beyond thrilled that it’s now available.

--Amy Mattson Lauters

Lewis lands summer research grant to complete work on manuscriptDr. Chuck Lewis has received an MSU

Graduate Studies Summer Research Dis-semination Grant to complete a manu-script titled “Fears and Depredations on the Frontier: The Clash of Dakotas and Whites in the Newspapers of Mankato, Minnesota, 1863-65.”

The work will be the third major manuscript Lewis has produced in the last year related to newspaper coverage of the Dakota Conflict. The first two manuscripts are under review.

The third manuscript explores how the two Mankato frontier newspapers covered Dakota-related events during the first two years after the Dakota Conflict of 1862.

Although the Dakota had been removed from the state, small bands would return to the Minnesota River Valley during the spring and summer months of 1863 through 1865.

This panicked white settlers and created a climate of fear that led to many alterca-tions between small groups of Dakota and area whites, such as the July 1863 shooting death of Chief Little Crow near Hutchinson and the May 1865 lynching in downtown Mankato of John Campbell, a mixed-blood accused of murdering white settlers near the town.

The Mankato newspapers provided detailed coverage of such events.

However, like nearly all other frontier-newspaper editors, the key concerns of the Mankato editors were promoting their particular politics and boosting the growth of white settlement.

They wrote about and for the white community, and the Dakota had no voice and were usually vilified in stories.

Lewis’ research adds to the body of knowledge concerning the frontier press and the history of Indian-white relations in the United States.

It also contributes to ideas concerning the functions of mass media in society.

The third manuscript should be com-pleted by mid-June.

Page 4 The Communicator

Real family donates newspapers to department

Photo by Chuck LewisDepartment Chair Jane McConnell, left, and Jennifer Real examine the Aug. 9, 1974, front page of The Des Moines Register. Jennifer’s parents, Kevin and Rebecca, donated several old Des Moines Register newspapers to the department recently.

A house purchase several years ago yielded more than a home for Kevin and Rebecca Real. It led to a discovery of newspaper artifacts.

According to Kevin, the couple bought the house from a woman named Lily. After moving in, they decided to check out the basement. To their surprise, they discovered a stack of yellowing newspa-pers from the 1970s and 1990s on a shelf. Rather than throw them out, the couple decided to hang on to the papers.

Recently, they decided to donate the newspapers to the department because of a request from their daughter, Jennifer Real, a mass communications major. Jen-nifer knew of the department’s interest in acquiring additional newspapers for display purposes and made the call to her parents asking for the dona-tion.

“I knew we had old newspapers, “ said Jennifer. “I asked my parents if they would mind donating them so they could be seen. They weren’t doing much good for anyone sitting in our basement gathering dust.”

One newspaper sparked a keen interest (and excitement) in faculty: a copy of The Des Moines Register dated Friday morn-ing, August 9, 1974. The headline reads: NIXON RESIGNS.

Once framed, the copy will be added to the several newspapers now gracing the department walls in Nelson Hall.

“I appreciate the generosity of the Reals’ donation,” said Jane McConnell, de-partment chair. “I continue to be amazed at the variety of newspapers and topics we have framed thus far.”

--Mavis Richardson

“They weren’t doing

much good for anyone

sitting in our basement gathering

dust.”

ALUMNI: Send us your news, too! Email your good news to Dr. Amy Lauters

at amy.lauters@mnsu.edu, or call 507-389-5523.

The Communicator Page 5

Allison K. Schmitt, daughter of Ken and Edna Schmitt of Waterville, is serving two years in Jerusalem as communication assistant for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land. She is one of more than 270 mission personnel of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America currently serving in 48 countries.

Among Schmitt’s duties for the EL-CJHL are creating a monthly newsletter, maintaining the church’s website (www.elcjhl.org), taking photos, helping write the ELCJHL bishop’s speeches, sermons and messages, serving as a resource to the media and to ELCA advocacy offices and generally telling the Palestinian people’s story to the world.

Schmitt is scheduled to be in Israel-Palestine until June 2010. She is a 1983 graduate of Immanuel Lutheran High School and a 1990 mass communications graduate of Minnesota State University, both in Mankato.

Alumni Notes

InternshipsSpring 2009

n Brittany HustadScience Museum of MN, St. Paul.n Ashley MarksMovie Star PR, Burnsville.n Erin RohrerMSU Athletic Communications, Mankato.

Summer 2009n Amanda BinghamKMSU 89.7 FM Radio, Mankato.n Regan CarstensenThe Free Press, Mankato.n Raquel DeVitoMinnesota Children’s Museum, St. Paul. n Amanda EckelmanShow in Seconds/Row 27 Studios, Minneapolis.n Kelli LagesonABDO Publishing, Edina.n Rachel LaitalaMental Health Assoc. of Minnesota, Minneapolis.n Ali RamseyBlooming Prairie Times, Blooming Prairie.n Matthew RiggsAustraLearn, Westminister, Australia

n Samantha SharpGreater Mankato Growth, Mankato.n Meagan SteeleKEYC-TV/Fox, Mankato.n Kaitlin StevensMSU Media Relations Office, Mankato.n Zachary ThiemanKMSU Radio, Mankato.n Jenna ThunhorstEstherville Daily News, Estherville, Iowa.n Derek WehrweinFaribault Daily News, Faribault.n Amy WenzelEye Care for Animals, Scottsdale, Ariz.n Adam WingenbachKEYC-TV, Mankato

Fall 2009n Amanda EckelmanShow in Seconds/Row 27 Studios, Minneapolis.n Kelsey JohnsonAdvertising & Design Inc, Mankato.n Chelsey SchruppMSU Athletic Communications, Mankato.

DonorsLisa BerhowJoseph and Linda BuckentineTerri BudahnDaniel and Anita CassidyJohn and Nancy CrossLee and Cindy DadyBenetechKelly GroettumStacy GroettumSusan GroettumLois HartmannMorgan JacobsKeith and Cheri LevitzCahrles Lewis and Roxanne MortvedtRobert and Jane McConnellRichard and Sandra MelcherRoberta and Stuart MorschingJames ProkopowiczMavis RichardsonMarshel and Linda RossowChelsey SchruppMaureen and William SinellDeborah and Kevin SlavinKaren and Jerome JohanningJessica Rossbach

More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of American Farm Women,

1910 to 1960, by Amy Mattson Lauters

Available now from the University of Missouri Press,

through your local booksellers, or online at Amazon.com.

Have

a great

summer!

The Faculty