• by November 15, 2004

WE'RE KEEPING OUR EYE ON THE BALL - Until this year, there were only two things we knew about Ball State University: That it is David Letterman's alma mater; and that it has a funny name. Now it's beginning to rival such ivory media towers as Syracuse's Newhouse School, NYU's Tisch School, and MIT's Media Lab as an academic authority about media.

BSU's Center for Media Design kicked the year off with the release of its ground-breaking Middletown Study, which found media consumption patterns to be much higher than what's been measured by official ad industry sources like Nielsen, Arbitron, and MRI.

The implications of that study are still resonating on and off Madison Avenue, even as BSU prepares to field a larger, more robust and more statistically projectable version of the research, which directly observes how people actually consume media during their day. Now BSU has released yet another media study. This one finds that the newspaper industry is still struggling to define its role in so-called "convergence" news operations with TV news organizations.

The finding, which is based on the results of a survey of 372 newspapers editors polled by BSU, indicates that nearly a third are involved in news-gathering relationships with TV stations, but most feel their papers are not taking advantage of the cross-promotional opportunities between the two media. Only 8 percent of newspaper editors said they urge their readers to view stories on their TV partners' outlets at least once a week, while two-thirds say they "never do."

"When the whole convergence process started, it was technology focused," noted Larry Daily, a journalism professor working on the project at BSU. "Executives on both sides have spent a lot of money on equipment but didn't think how they could work across boundaries separating television stations and newspapers."

The study is the first in what is planned to be a three-part research series examining the relationship between newspapers, TV stations, and Web sites. The second and third parts are due in 2005.

Meanwhile, BSU is going beyond an observer's role in media and has become a practitioner, and from what they say, a pretty compelling one at that. At least that's what BSU said Billboard magazine said, when it bestowed one of its illustrious Billboard Digital Entertainment Awards on the school, which beat an entry from Walt Disney Co. in the competition's first "Best Use of Technology for Educational Programming" award.

BSU won for its use of commercial software that enables students to remotely experience simulated case studies in social work, nursing, criminal justice, and speech pathology. The simulated case studies utilize text, video clips, and Web sites to, for example, diagnose a "patient," or investigate a "crime scene."

Another one of BSU's media projects, "Reality TV Bytes," which spoofed reality TV shows, was nominated but did not win in the Best Interactive Television Programming and Television Technology category.

A separate CMD project was nominated in two other categories. "Reality TV Bytes," a live broadcast that spoofed reality television and allowed interactivity through Internet connections, was nominated for Best Interactive Television Programming and Television Technology of the Year.

Meanwhile, we can't wait for the next installment of BSU's Middletown Media Studies, which are sure to shake up some of Madison Avenue's conventional media thinking. To help steer the next phase, the university has brought in two well-known industry players, Sequent Partners' Jim Spaeth and Bill Moult, who will serve as professionals-in-residence on the project.