Category: Media (Page 1 of 8)

I am a voracious reader and always have been. As a kid, I read the Star-Ledger sports section every morning at breakfast; as a young adult, I read magazines while brushing my teeth; nowadays, it goes without saying that I’m constantly on my laptop and phone, reading.

My reading sources run the gamut, from newspapers to magazines to websites to RSS feeds of dozens of blogs to Twitter and its successors to fantasy baseball experts. The best writing leaves me both informed and entertained. I gravitate toward news and well-thought-out opinion pieces. I will read and devour most anything discussing rock music, New York City, pro sports, new cars, the entertainment industry, Apple, business strategy and current events.

What I haven’t read, in many years, is a novel. Or pretty much anything in book form.

It’s not for lack of trying. I bought The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and carried it on so many vacations across several years that it became a point of amusement for my children. (I think I’m on page 87.) Two years ago, I decided that the issue was the fiction angle, so I bought The Power Broker, and I’ve only managed the first 27 pages of that, which has made the travel bag a lot heavier with the same result.

I bought Moneyball, but never cracked it; my son has it right now. I thought about re-reading the classics, but I never get started. At one point my sister-in-law bought me a thoughtful Adam Gopnik compendium, and I thanked her, and never opened it. “But you’d absolutely love it!” she said, when it slipped out that I wasn’t reading it, which was probably true, but it was a book. “If you had given him the link to it in blog form,” my wife said, both needling and truthful, “he’d have read the whole thing.”

This summer, in my building’s community bookcase, someone left two Carl Hiaasen novels. I brought them upstairs and wound up taking the first one (Bad Monkey) on vacation last month, where it came to the beach a couple of times, instead of the usual Sunday New York Times Magazine. And that did the trick. I read maybe 75 pages on vacation, and the book was fun enough for me to keep going when I got home, and before I knew it I’d finished the book and whipped through its sequel, too.

Fiction! I’d finally gotten back into reading something that wasn’t designed to advance an angle or teach me something. Hiaasen is fairly light reading, but he’s good at telling a story, and the books kept me going. And, happily, reading the books didn’t detract from my other reading; it pulled me away from sitcom reruns and video games, making for a much more rewarding diversion.

The two Hiaasen novels are headed back to the basement for another neighbor to enjoy, and next up is my first book on Kindle, an Amor Towles novel that my wife says is fascinating. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Franklin & Marshall College is my alma mater. When I was in school, I basically did two things on campus, academics aside: I was editor of the newspaper, The College Reporter, and I was a DJ on WFNM-FM.

So I was more than a little surprised and disappointed when friends pointed me to the F&M Spark website, where two rather desperate-sounding fundraising initiatives are currently live. Without $10,000 apiece, the site says, both WFNM and the College Reporter are in danger of ceasing operations, because, it is implied, the school isn’t investing in upgraded equipment for either entity.

I am having a rather hard time with this.

From my desk in New York, it seems both organizations have stayed fairly contemporary. WFNM has a live audio web stream, and the Reporter moved its publication online last year. As an alumnus of both properties I applaud the modernization. Whether they have large audiences or small, they seem to still be a relevant part of the college experience, which I love.

What I don’t love is the implied threats in these fundraising initiatives.

F&M has a $600 million endowment. The school has a target fundraising goal of $4.5 million for this year.

F&M is one of the fifty most expensive higher education institutions in the United States, with an annual cost north of $60,000 for the 2014-2015 academic year.

F&M has run its radio station for nearly 60 years and its newspaper dates to 1881.

Both of these activities are largely self-funded, or at least they used to be. WFNM had underwriting on many of its timeslots, particularly the news; the Reporter sold advertising, and used its revenues to pay for printing and computing costs. Ultimately, though, the college would find funds when the organizations needed additional support.

Am I to believe now that the school is ready to shutter both activities unless it gets direct contributions via online fundraising campaigns (neither of which I heard about from the school, mind you)? Do they mean that little to the campus now? Given the myriad ways in which Franklin & Marshall has expanded since my graduation nearly (gulp) 20 years ago, has there been a collapse of support for the media properties in which scores of students participate, year after year?

Sure, kids can blog and podcast from their dorm rooms nowadays. But without these organized activities, the real-world exposure to in-person collaboration and participation that is critical to the campus experience is lost.

I wrote in this space almost exactly 10 years ago how disappointed I had been with F&M’s direction since my graduation. (I will note here again that I had a terrific undergraduate experience.) The items I highlighted a decade ago don’t seem to have shifted all that much in the ensuing years, and with this latest fundraising request, my disillusionment shifts just a little bit further.

I sincerely hope these overtures in the Spark pages are poorly worded appeals by student activists and not the result of threatening overtures from the administration. And I strongly urge the college to support these institutions, both of which help shape their student participants’ interests, voices and personal growth.

Update: this blog post made its way to the administration at F&M (truly one of the better aspects of having gone to a small college), and the next day, F&M President Dan Porterfield donated to both fundraising campaigns, and tweeted about it. Which is nice enough of him, yet completely misses and thus reinforces the points made above.