Like clockwork....

Today La Salle hosted its annual Thanksgiving Day dinner for police and firefighters at the 35th police district headquarters. Several TV stations sent cameras to cover the event. Since I've been at La Salle, TV has covered this dinner every year but one....in 2001. I'm still trying to figure out that one....

For those of you who were born before personal computers were a part of our daily lives, and whenwriters worked on something called a typewriter, it took a good deal of time to do several versions of a press release. For instance, La Salle is honoring someone for their charitable work. I'm doing three releases: one for a general audience, one for her hometown newspaper, and one for the paper that covers the city where the charity is based. Thank God for word processors. This way it's possible to get three media hits for one story with a minimum of typing!

The waiting game

A journalist in Philadelphia is interested in doing a story on a La Salle project that involves our students tutoring at a city middle school. The program is held on Wednesdays, and there are 3 more until the end of the semester (after which our students in the program take a break to get ready for finals). This journalist is pretty busy and said they can probably make the last Wednesday; I have no problem with that, but if something comes up and it falls through, then I'll have to wait another six to eight weeks before the journalist can visit the site again. Such are the hazards of this profession.

I just learned that a story in Philadelphia Metro about our MA program in Psychology was published; it was written by Rachel Vigoda, daughter of the late Ralph Vigoda, who was an Inquirer reporter. Ralph died several years ago at 53, and I will always be grateful for his professionalism and assistance. If I pitched a story to Ralph, he'd listen and if he liked it, fine, and if he didn't, he didn't wavering for days and days. If he thought another writer at the paper would be interested in doing that, he would tell me who to approach. I don't think I'm going overboard here, but the Inquirer and its readers lost something special when he died.

Once again coming up with a trio...

Tuesday, Nov. 4 was a pretty good day: the Philadelphia Inquirer posted three La Salle stories:

One was a book review by Br. Ed Sheehy; the second was an oped by Jack Rossi on the 1960 presidential election, and the third was an item about Bob Vogel being honored for his "Writer's Matter" program, done in 12 schools throughout the area. I knew the review would be published that day (the author was in town and the paper likes to publish a review when its author is speaking locally), but the other two could have run at any time.

When it's not Halloween

For the first time in 13 years, TV did not come to campus to film the kids from our daycare center trick or treating. It's possible TV crews didn't show because they tricked and treated on the Friday BEFORE Halloween, as opposed to doing it on Halloween (which was on a Sunday this year). Well, next year Halloween should be on a Monday; if I'm lucky, the Eagles will have had a bye week then and the airwaves won't be saturated with football, football and more football.