Boston University’s Strange Journo-Marketing

I just got around to sorting some of the mail and magazines on my desk. I was reading through the most recent issue of Bostonia, which is the alumni magazine of Boston University. There is a profile of WBUR, the NPR-affiliate based at B.U. At one point in the piece, the writer makes this awkward reference to an alumna, considering the story is running in a combination marketing and journalism mag.

As recently as two years ago, newspaper stories about WBUR described the station as troubled. They noted its growing debt to BU and the cancellation of The Connection, then the station’s flagship program, with a huge national following. Prior to that was the October 2004 resignation of longtime general manager Jane Christo (CAS’65) amid accusations of mismanagement, many eventually deemed not credible by a BU investigation.

Does that strike anyone else as weird, knowing this is a puff piece promoting B.U.? I can’t quite decide if it’s very bad marketing or very good journalism.

[BTW, the things an internal investigation found that Christo did were not all that interesting.]

The Lede Is The Thing

Has anyone checked out this One Sentence project? It’s pretty nifty — people trying to tell stories in one sentence, some of them quite swell. None are really quite stories, but quite a few would make interesting ledes to stories.

Some of my favorites from today:

• “I realize now that his being a passionate person is no excuse for him trying to choke me to death when he found out i was pregnant.”
• “Eyeing the intriguingly attractive girl in line, it took me a moment to remember that it’s almost impossible to find lesbians in birth control clinics.”
• “To think… it all started with a wayward icecube.”