Adviser Update
READINESS
Continued from page 10A
magenta
Skate
to the
puck.
The
readiness is
all.
cyan
black
P10.V53.I4
brokered the basic skill sets she gained
from working on our Wordpress site
into a summer internship with a San
Francisco tech startup.
Her Viking colleague figured out
that Twitter was going to be something
interesting and got us an account in
2009. She is now at Emerson College,
majoring in social media, and has
already had multiple internship and
work opportunities in that rapidly
expanding field.
My staff now uses Twitter daily as
an integral part of our online presence.
But I’ll bet it’s going to morph and
change and perhaps even be replaced.
Facebook is a daily evolution-inaction. At the Online News Association
conference in San Francisco in
September, new media and social
media startups were lining the halls.
Me? I’m no tech wizard, far from it.
And I’ll be happy to be a thousandaire,
much less a billionaire. But I know
what I don’t know. And I know how to
teach kids to try, to persevere and to
embrace change.
“We value innovation and striving to
be. It’s part of our thing to understand
things change all the time. Instead of
fighting that, it’s our tool. It’s human
nature to fight change — but it’s what
our whole mindset is,” Viking’s editor
Rosati explains.
Dan Nelson, a fellow adviser and
frequent JEA listserve contributor from
Ventura, Calif., appends a quote from
architect Frank Lloyd Wright to his
emails: “The thing always happens that
you really believe in; and the belief in a
thing makes it happen.”
I am reminded of Frank Lloyd
Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park,
Ill., where I volunteered on weekends
when I lived there in the mid-1980s.
Wright, who was forever in debt and
often only a step ahead of the sheriff’s
buggy waiting at his doorstep to take
him away for bills unpaid, used his
home as an architecture lab.
When Wright began the home for his
ever-growing family in the late 1880s
in this new suburb outside the city, he
added electrical wiring to it. Residential
electrical service didn’t exist at that
time in the area. But he knew it would
be arriving. Someday. And he would be
ready when it happened.
Skate to the puck. The readiness is
all.
Page 15A
yellow
directive that ended telecommuting
as an option for employees, citing
the need for employees to be in the
same place at the same time, talking
together.
Since then, business gurus have
published piece after piece talking
about the critical role face-to-face
collaboration plays in the success of a
nimble workplace.
That’s what our students do every
day, inside a journalism staffroom.
They are interacting not only with their
colleagues, but actively reaching out
into the world to get information from
real human beings for the work that we
do.
Not to be a gender warrior, but
the face of tech today is not Yahoo’s
Marissa Meyer. The face of tech is
most often male — and the face of tech
education today is also often male.
Inclusion matters in getting a fairer
cross-section to the shared tables
of power of tomorrow,
whether that’s the
boardroom or the
classroom.
Many of our staffs, where
we have such daily
access and ability to be
on the cutting-edge of
where this shifting sand
of innovation is going,
are majority female.
Females have the
best chance of breaking
through the infamous
“glass ceilings” of
American corporate
boardrooms not through the traditional
business model, but through new
sectors that are taking shape right
now in tech, social media, and digital
communication.
Several twenty-somethings from my
first graduating classes of seniors on
the school paper in rural Minnesota
have embraced the sense of “let’s give
it a try” to join ground floor roll-up-yoursleeves efforts at startups like Etsy and
Mashable and finding a “sky’s the limit”
opportunity available to them.
A more recent example involves a
21-year-old former editor-in-chief who
graduated from Palo Alto in 2010. She
SPRING 2013