[Editors] MIT Editors' Club Minutes, May '07

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT EDITORS' CLUB

*Meeting Notes from May 21, 2007*

*Ch Ch Ch Changes*

Many people love writing about science or otherwise being involved in 
communicating news about it. But over recent years it's been getting 
harder and harder to land jobs in traditional media like newspapers.

My suggestion? Look around a university! This month's meeting of MIT 
Editors' Club began with Michelle Gaseau excitedly telling us about 
her upcoming move to the MIT-Portugal Program as communications 
director there. That, of course, leaves open her current position as 
communications manager for the Lean Aerospace Initiative out of the 
Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development:
http://sh.webhire.com/servlet/av/jd?ai=631&ji=2018047&sn=I

Michelle says she's happy to answer questions about her LAI position.

To find the URL for Michelle's (soon-to-be-old) job, I did a search 
for "communications positions" from HR, and *10* jobs were in that 
category! For example, the Materials Processing Center is looking for 
a science writer/web site administrator, and the News Office (yep, 
that'd be me) is also looking for a science writer.

*Popcorn Communications*

Congratulations to Editors' Club member Bill Smith, assistant 
director for finance and sponsor relations of the Research Lab of 
Electronics, for creating what I believe is the snazziest 
communications packet/marketing tool I've ever seen out of MIT. The 
subject? RLE's 60th anniversary carnival. The hook? Popcorn.

I am (fortunately) on Bill's mailing list for all things RLE. Usually 
that means I receive the lab's annual report and other potential 
goldmines for story ideas. A few weeks ago, however, I opened up an 8 
1/2 by 11 cellophane-wrapped package that included: an invitation to 
RLE's carnival, a stand-up "exhibit" of a popcorn machine (the sides 
of the "exhibit" were striped red and white) a large (folded) 
container for popcorn (similarly striped red and white), a MAGNET 
about the event featuring a 12-inch-tall Uncle Sam on stilts, and of 
course, a bag of popcorn.....specially printed in red-and-white 
stripes with RLE's carnival info on the front.

I shared the whole thing as a show-and-tell at this meeting.

And that brought up another good example of popcorn communications at 
MIT. Lauren Clark of communications/donor relations mentioned that at 
last week's launch of TechTV (a YouTube-like video-sharing web site 
), attendees were served cones of popcorn, each one with a card 
promoting TechTV. Go to 
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/techtv-expo.html for more info on 
TechTV and how all of us can volunteer MIT-related videos.

*A Groundbreaking and....More*

Sarah Foote, assistant director of Sloan Student Publications, told 
us about the recent groundbreaking for a new building in Sloan Land. 
Being a writer and communicator, Sarah is naturally quite observant. 
She noticed, for example, that the actual ceremonial "shoveling" 
featured....fake dirt.  Shipped in for the event, "It was a very nice 
light-brown dirt," she reports.

*At the Rotch*

The Rotch Library in Architecture and Planning will be featuring an 
exhibit to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Beijing Studio, an 
urban-design studio where students address specific problems 
associated with Beijing's phenomenal growth. According to Judy 
Daniels of the department, Beijing Studio is MIT's oldest 
relationship with China.

*Field Trips*

Toward the end of this meeting we chatted about especially cool labs 
and other places around MIT that we'd like to visit. What about doing 
so in lieu of an Editors' Club meeting? For example, Paul Rivenberg, 
communications and outreach coordinator at the Plasma Science and 
Fusion Center, told us about some of the visually interesting 
experiments going on there. Send me ideas for other cool sites you 
know about that we might want to tour as a group, and perhaps I can 
set something up for this fall.

*Next Meeting*

The final meeting of MIT Editors' Club for this semester will be on 
Friday, June 22, in the News Office (11-400) from 12-1.

Elizabeth
-- 

================================
Elizabeth A. Thomson
Senior Science and Engineering Editor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News Office, Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
617-258-5402 (ph); 617-258-8762 (fax)
<thomson at mit.edu>

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www>
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