SPEAKER_00
You're listening to the Higher Ed Marketer, the podcast for marketing professionals in higher education. Join us every week as we talk to the industry's greatest minds in student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where marketing and higher ed is going, this podcast is for you.

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SPEAKER_01
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. My name is Troy Singer and my name is Bart Kaler. And today we cover the topic of the crucial role that universities can have in supporting and developing media literacy.

And we do this with two wonderful individuals. We have another Bart today, which makes things a little confusing. Their names are Bart Volhals and Chris Davy.

And Bart, as you know, this is something that we wanted to bring to the forefront. This topic, especially after getting a sneak preview of the paper that Bart and Chris shared with us.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's one of those topics that I think can be polarizing because I think talking about media literacy, everybody has their opinion. There's a lot of polarization going on. I so appreciate it, Troy, in the beginning when you talked about, this is not going to be a politics.

This isn't going to be about, I've valued that because at the end of the day, we do have an issue with media literacy. We do have an issue with just especially the danger with, we touch on it with AI. Many of you might have seen my deep fake video that I did online a couple months back.

And I think that there's just, there's a lot of stuff going on right now. So I'm really grateful that we had this conversation with Chris and Bart. I have to admit, this is the first time I've interviewed another Bart, probably the first time I've had a conversation with another Bart.

It's not a popular name, but anyway, it was a great conversation. I'm so excited to share

SPEAKER_01
this with everyone. Yes, here's our conversation with Chris and Bart. Now, Chris and Bart V, to help us and our audience get to know you a little bit better, would love to ask you both if you could share something that you've recently learned that you would deem fun or interesting.

And Bart V, I'm going to ask you to kick us off.

SPEAKER_04
Well, it's a really random thing. But yesterday, I heard about a little animal called a monotreme, I think it's called in English. And it's actually a mammal that lays eggs.

And as far as I can remember from my school days, I never heard about a mammal that laid eggs, but apparently here is a mammal that does lay eggs. I'm 51 now. I think I learned all about mammals when I was 10, 11, 12.

So I spent about the better part of 37 years wrongly educated.

SPEAKER_01
So there we go. That's great. I love that.

But now we are educated. So thank you, Bart.

SPEAKER_03
All right, you're good. Chris. When I was in elementary school, they taught us about mammals, Bart, they always pointed to the platypus as the example of the mammal that could lay eggs. But that's not the new thing I learned.

I would say this is really, this is very obscure, but it's what leaps to mind when you ask the question. I like horse racing. And I follow the horse races.

There's a horse race at Gulf Stream Park in Miami this weekend called the Pegasus Classic. And I was looking at this race that's being run at a mile and a 16th on turf. And comparing a horse to the mile and a 16th turf course at the fairgrounds in Louisiana.

And what I learned is that the mile and a 16th turf course at Gulf Stream Park in Miami favors early runners. And the mile and a 16th course at the fairgrounds favors closing horses. So you're ever at one of those racetracks.

That's the angle you're going to look, I'm going to want to look

SPEAKER_01
for on the on the church course. And I'm going to recite that and people are going to be scared of me because they know I am informed. So thank you, Chris.

Everyone, we are talking today with Chris Davy from 30PR and with Bart Volholtz. He is the head of investor relations services at PressPage. And most importantly, we are going to have a conversation with him about navigating the truth, the crucial role of universities in the digital age.

And if both of you could just take 30 seconds to a minute each, tell us a little bit about you and how you work together and give us a perspective of how you come to this conversation. And I will ask Chris to start out first.

SPEAKER_03
Sure. Thanks, Troy. I'm happy to do that.

Thanks for having us on the program. I was the Vice President of Communications at the Ohio State University for seven years before I founded 30PR. And started my career in journalism.

I'm wearing my lantern shirt today from the lantern student newspaper at the Ohio State University where I was the editor and then I was a political reporter for some newspapers in the United States. And so journalism has been an institution that's always been near and dear to my heart. And my role at Ohio State was to kind of be the gateway for journalists to the university serving as the spokesman and as the Chief Communications Officer for Ohio State.

That's where I got to know Bart, where we worked together with his firm on some a program that we created in Ohio State called Ohio State News, where we were taking some of the principles of journalism and applying them to the communications framework at the university. And that's one of the things that we want to talk to you about today, but we can get into that a

SPEAKER_04
little bit down the road. My name is Bart Verhulst. I am from Amsterdam in Holland and I've studied communication both undergraduate and graduate level.

And began my career also in public relations, corporate communications, also on the investor side. And then I made a switch, a mid-career switch and became a university professor at the University of Utrecht of Applied Sciences and also became the head of department there. And that was actually the place where Press Page was actually founded and we were a university spin-off essentially.

And today, my company, besides serving the corporate communications team of global companies, we have a lot of university and higher ed institutions that are our clients and use our platform to spread their news. And that's also how I met Chris. Well, thank you.

And I admit that

SPEAKER_01
this conversation is very much needed and it is meant to be practical and with things that are currently going on in the U.S. that is not meant to be political at all. What we are attempting to do is inform you and also let you know what some of the thinkers are thinking in regard to our new digital age.

But with that, I'm going to get right into the conversation and would like to ask the both of you if you could discuss how programs like the University of Pennsylvania's digital media

SPEAKER_03
program influence societal change. Well, Bart and I wrote a piece recently that's going to be published in the coming weeks where we looked at how the whole information economy, the entire information environment, the way that society, that individuals and society, get information and process news and understand what's true and what isn't true in the world, has completely transformed during our lifetimes, really just in the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years you could say. When I started taking journalism classes at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I was the last class that took the news writing course on a typewriter.

The very next quarter, they got computers. And when I was the editor at Ohio State, we were still cutting the galleys and pasting them up for the daily newspaper. And we published a 30,000 circulation daily newspaper five days a week at Ohio State.

That was a moneymaker for the university. And that's the way that people were getting their news on campus about what was going on at Ohio State. That's how everybody got their news.

And so there was this unified place where people went, you went to your newspaper, you went to the evening news, and there was a source that we all could kind of agree. We disagreed on a lot of things, but we had a common source for determining at least what was true or false in the world for us to make decisions in our democracy. Obviously, with the rise of the internet, the really the collapse of the business model for journalism in this country, we've witnessed a decline in the economic fortunes of journalistic enterprises.

But more importantly, what we've seen coinciding with that is, I think it's safe to say a total collapse in the systems that we in society use for deciding what's true and what's not true. And the consequences are evident to us. So programs like the Annenberg program, we write about them in the article.

And we look at a number of other programs around the country where there's intensive study going on, scientific research into this phenomenon, into mass communication, into all of the various aspects of how the communications environment has transformed and the effects that it's having on society and what can be done about it. So we make the case in our piece that these types of programs need to be supported if we're going to find our way as a society into whatever this next chapter is, that hopefully is going to be a place where we stabilize the environment and find ourselves in a position where we can once again have something that at least looks like a common truth for us to make collective decisions on.

SPEAKER_02
I think that's a good point, Chris. And I'd love to hear Bart's take on that as well. But I just have to comment on the fact that when you set that up with what you were doing at Ohio State as a student, I mean, it sounds like it was Eon's ago.

I mean, if you think about the fact that, you know, I remember, I mean, you and I are pretty close to the same age. I mean, I was, when I started my career, they just stuck the max on the agency desks of designers and ad agency firms. And it was a new world.

And it's amazing just to think about, you know, 35, 40 years later what that looks like. But Bart, what's your take on all that as far as, you know, where all that this new information warfare and all the challenges around that are going? Yeah, so it's an interesting question. And I

SPEAKER_04
always like to, so I'm an amateur historian, so I always like to look at history as well. And if we go back in time and we look at everything that's happened, you know, all the way from, let's say, you know, the first town criers and the bulletins and the word of mouth that was spread, you know, in the old European cities about, you know, lands being conquered and kings being born and all that, all the way to the 1600s when, you know, the printing press that was invented around the 1450s was actually in bigger circulation. You see that media has also gone through an incredible modernization.

So it's not just, it's not just the way we consume it. I think it all starts with the medium and the carriers that are changing. And what we've seen is that with the advent of technology, I think our generation is the one that probably has seen the biggest change, right? We've gone from a 24 hour news cycle.

So basically, you know, you wait till the next morning, eight o'clock before you get the newspaper again on your mat to a 24 hour, you know, full blown, instant news economy. That has done a lot for the media in the sense that, you know, it's some media outlets haven't been able to adapt. I think in the US alone between 2005 and 2017, I think about more than 2200 newspapers went belly up because they haven't been able to cope with that new business model.

Others have. I know that some large newspapers, they have basically sold their editorial soul. You know, they kicked out all of the journalists, hired them back in as freelancers, and now they employ more web designers and content people than they do journalists.

And it's all about, you know, selling ads and, you know, which stories get the most clicks, you know, that's where journalists get paid off. So I think we also need to look at the media as a business, not just as the fourth estate that, you know, controls government and it's, you know, about the people and all of that. I also think you should look at it in the light of being being an industry with its own folds, just like the banking industry has its folds and the food industry has its folds.

And there to go back to that question that you asked, Troy, we need to understand that and we also need to learn that just like people are being educated in what to eat, just like people are being, you know, educated in other parts. We also need to be educated in the

SPEAKER_01
media. You speak of the necessity of multidisciplinary programs in digital communication, like the one at USC Annenberg School. So how do you think such programs can shape the future of digital communication and the media effects research? So first of all, I think it's all about, you know,

SPEAKER_04
everything has to do with demand, in my opinion. Things are made because of demand. At the end of the day, we are in a mostly in a capitalistic society and I think, you know, demand is crucial.

And demand can be better measured now in the digital age than it could be in the time of, you know, of a piece of paper because you didn't know which articles were being read and which ones worked because you bought a whole piece of paper, period. So I think, you know, educating the people on what is news and what is, you know, what it is that you can consume will at the end of the day also, in my opinion, hopefully shape on what's being produced and how that industry is going to evolve as well. That in short is a little bit my personal take on that.

SPEAKER_02
Okay. And I think, I mean, I think you're right. I was reflecting while you were talking there about the idea that it seems like anytime I watch any, you know, any news on, you know, television or even if you listen to the radio, the amount of use of breaking news now, it seems like every other, you know, coming back from commercial break is breaking news.

Whereas, you know, I remember, again, you know, we all are extras, I think, on this. I remember growing up with the idea that, you know, when Walter Cronkite came on with breaking news, it was breaking news. It was like something that nobody knew about yet.

And I think that's interesting in the way that you're talking about that. But I also think it's interesting, like you're talking about, just kind of like this literacy of understanding journalism, understanding the news that we have. Help me kind of understand a little bit, you know, especially as you guys are thinking about it.

And I know in your article that's going to be published, you kind of gave us a little sneak peek at it. I mean, one of the biggest challenges we have today in today's world. And I really, again, I appreciate Troy kind of talking up and setting this up as this isn't a political discussion, but everybody has their camps and they can all go into their own little camp and get the news that they want that's custom made for their worldview and then walk out with what they believe is, you know, their authority.

How are you guys kind of unpacking that a little bit? And how are these programs that we've discussed helping universities kind of prepare students, not only students in the program, but also help navigate the world? I mean, there's a lot of challenges here.

SPEAKER_03
Well, I guess I would respond to that by saying that since Bart is right, the demand is clearly what drives so much of the media ecosystem. It is the essential currency of the media ecosystem. I think we can do a lot of work on how demand operates.

And I guess what I mean by that is demand is people, the demand is individual people in their minds and what they choose to connect with. And those are decisions that citizens make about what they're going to consume. Are you going to spend your evening mindlessly scrolling through Reels or TikTok, looking at goodness knows what? Or are you going to read the New York Times? Are you going to pick up Twitter and only follow those Twitter accounts that make you comfortable in your bubble, your ideological bubble, whatever it is? Or are you going to challenge yourself by following accounts that don't necessarily align with your political view or worldview that you've arrived at? And those decisions are not made in a vacuum.

They're the culmination of that individual person's environment, their education, and their upbringing. So one of the things that we advocate for in the piece is media literacy. That's the buzzword.

That's the term. I actually wish there were a better term for it. And I feel like something's going to emerge to replace it.

You know how language evolves. And we call this thing this now. I know there's a better term out there, but that's the term that we're using that's used widely to describe what we're trying to talk about, which is systematically educating the next generation on how to make good choices when they are the demand in the marketplace for ideas and information.

We can't, I mean, if you look at this environment that we're in now and all the choices that we have and how people are consuming media and what it's doing to our society, what's doing to individual people, it's very clear that we can't just expect for a kid to come up in this world and be just left to their own devices to end up being a well-educated, well-informed person who's going to make sound decisions about the media that they consume. We in high school teach kids about how to balance a checkbook and make sound finding. We systematically teach them about finances or other aspects of life.

We used to teach kids about how to be a good citizen in our Democratic Republic. Unfortunately, that actually civic education has dropped off a little bit. But to me, it's very clear that for lack of a better term, media literacy is just critical.

And if you look around among public policymakers and opinion leaders, there's really very little discussion or movement to try to put something like that in

SPEAKER_04
place. And I think it's critical. If I can add to that a thing, in the 1600s, right, when these very expensive printing presses were being introduced because at the time they were expensive, it's not that the average media consumer had a lot of money to pay for their prints or their newspaper they would get.

So let's be very fair and honest about this, that at the time they were also being sponsored. So that meant government, political parties, whatever it was. At the time there were being, it was propaganda as well in a certain way.

And it is just good to know what the source is and what the economic dynamics are of the things you consume. And there are, I think throughout history, hundreds of examples that if you put them into a classroom and you make it very apparent, I think even those stories from way back in the 1600s, if you compare them to now, they haven't changed much. And I think they could be real eye-openers when it comes to media literacy of understanding how those dynamics still work today.

Although

SPEAKER_03
digitally, they're still the same. Another component beyond media literacy is what the actual platforms can do to regulate themselves and be responsible and promote responsible use and also promote a culture of truth, if you will. So Twitter is an example.

Twitter has had, of course, they've gotten beaten up since Elon Musk took them over. And there are things that under Musk's leadership they have done that in my opinion were a step back. But there's a couple things Twitter has done that have been improvements.

And so just two quick examples. It's so simple, but taken together, if all of the media platforms were to approach things in a way where they felt like they had to fulfill this responsibility, it could go a long way. So like with Twitter, I just, it just happened to me the other day where I was guilty of seeing the headline and going, oh yeah, I'm going to share this, you know, it was actually, it was an article disparaging Coach Jim Harbaugh for leaving to go to San Diego and leaving a mess behind in Michigan.

So me, I'm an Ohio State fan. If I see anything that disparage, right? So I saw the headline, I was like share, right? And then Twitter says, do you want to read the article first? Right? You know, they have that function built in. Is it right? And it's just a reminder.

It's like, yeah, you should probably read something before you share it, you know, but the better example on Twitter is their community notes, you know, and I routinely will encounter things on Twitter where it'll say, you know, there'll be a post that makes a claim. And then under it, it says, you know, community note. Here's how this thing here is probably not true.

Or here's a piece of context you need to know about this thing to understand that it's either not entirely true or it's not what it purports to be. So those are just two examples of things that the platforms can do that would go a long way in addition to the media literacy concept. I think that's a really good point.

And I am

SPEAKER_02
encouraged to see some of these technology advances that are kind of helping with the situation. Part of it is, and we'll talk about AI in a moment, but a lot of it, the genie's out of the bottle or whatever you want to, what analogy you want to say. There's a lot of challenges in our world right now with media literacy.

And so I guess I've got two questions. I mean, we can certainly talk a lot about, and I know in our pre-conversation, we talked about, you know, journalism education and evolving. And Bart, you made some comments about just being able to better educate the students within our care at universities to be able to say, hey, here's how you need to think about media.

And really teach a lot more critical thinking skills to improve all of this. But I guess I step back and I look at it and I say, okay, we've got an issue right now that I feel is only going to get a little bit more exasperated with deep fakes and with AI and some other things. What are we to do, you know, kind of in the current place? And maybe you've kind of distressed some of that in the article.

But, you know, I think that we can talk about education, we talk about other things. But I have a real concern that we're kind of at a little bit of a, there's a lot of kinder, a lot of dry kinder sitting around and it's only going to take a spark or two to get us into a real pickle that we're going to have a hard time getting out of.

SPEAKER_04
Sometimes I admit, I think the same. On the other hand, if for example, if you're talking about technology and you look at the algorithms that all of a sudden will feed you everything that's down your alley, because you know, you've watched, I don't know, you've watched the, I don't know, let's just say a yellow piece of content and then you watched an orange piece of content. So the next thing they'll do, they'll feed you a red piece of content because it's in the middle, right? And just using colors as an analogy here.

But these algorithms can also be programmed differently, right? I mean, they can also be programmed, hey, you know, if you read green, green, green, hey, here's something brown, here's something black, here's something red, you know, just mix up the colors a little bit, you know, that could also be done. Because that was one of the things that, you know, a lot of people say is that, you know, once you go into this rabbit hole of a certain theme or a certain way of thinking, and it doesn't matter, it can be political, but it can also be different than it's difficult to get out of there and get, you know, and get a balanced piece of opinion. So I think these algorithms can also be programmed.

I mean, you know, I'm also a technologist, there's no way in hell they cannot be programmed differently either to bring a more balanced flavor to the content that's feed it.

SPEAKER_03
Now, of course, well, that's exactly right. And the dilemma there is that absolutely the technology is enabled. The algorithms could be programmed in a way that they are much safer or better for society, more conducive to us knowing what's true.

But you mentioned capitalism earlier in demand. And the fact is all of these companies are for profit corporations, and they have a immense financial incentive to program the algorithms in the way that they have, you know. So I think this is why, you know, we started by talking about these programs in the United States, the Hannonburg School and others that we identify in the article that are doing grade work studying all of this stuff.

It does start there. So before we could reprogram the algorithms in a way that we could confidently say is going to be more beneficial to society, we have to have a better understanding of how that all links up. And that's where the research comes in.

Then the challenge is I can't imagine a world where these for profit corporations meta X, as we now are made to call it, formally Twitter, Google, the others. I can't imagine a world where they are going to all the sudden start changing their algorithms to for altruism and for the betterment of society. Okay. One sec, Bart. Because so therefore, maybe I'm old school, but it seems like there's going to have to be a regulatory, some type of regulatory intervention.

Okay, so what are you going to say,

SPEAKER_04
Bart? And well, at the risk of being a very progressive leftist European, which I don't consider myself. You're in a socialist country, aren't you, Bart? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not sure if you saw the last elections, but I don't think we could say that anymore.

No, we weren't going to get political though. No, no, no. But at the end of the day, I think the only ones that have the power to regulate this is, of course, and it's controversial, I know, in some corners, but is, of course, legislation and legislation is made by government, right? So if you look here in the European Union, I mean, they are very fierce and serious about it.

And yeah, they are. A little bit more, well, let's not say a little bit. Let's just say that it is a

SPEAKER_02
lot more than the US. Yeah, I think those are really good points. And I agree that I think that it's a difficult and challenging problem to solve.

I don't think it's beyond what can be solved, but I do think it's going to be challenging. And I think one of the things that I wanted to point out, I touched on AI a bit ago, and I shared with the two of you after our pre-interview, just a deep fake video that I had created just to prove a point to show how dangerous it is to just be able to make something appear real when it's not. And when I posted that, I had somebody, a friend of mine on LinkedIn, kind of used the word, we kind of live in a post-truth world.

And I kind of thought about that. And I'm just curious to get your response, your both of your response on that too, because I think that Chris, you had said a couple of times, it's like making sure that everybody understands what's true. But I think that a lot of people like today like to define their own truth.

And all of a sudden, it's like, well, where does that truth? And, you know, we talked about not getting political, I'm not going to get theological. But I just think that we've got to figure out, how do we all agree on truth in a post-truth world?

SPEAKER_04
I'm just curious what you guys are thinking. I personally think you'll never agree on what's true. And that has nothing to do with theology or politics.

You know, it's just, you know, people, people see things differently. It's also, you know, you hear that a lot of police testimonies as well, three people saw what happened, and they all have a different story, right? It's not so much about truth. I think it's about something that we also discussed in our prep meeting, which has to do with, I think, Chris, you called it the base course, no, the base curriculum.

Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, at every core curriculum, yeah. Core curriculum, right? At every university or institution of higher education, we teach people to think critically, right? And I think you touched on it a little bit before as well, Bart.

And I think at the end of the day, you know, before legislation is here, before corporations really think, oh my God, I'm making a lot of money, but I'm ruining the world. I don't think that's going to happen, you see? I think the quickest and best solution might be in teaching young people to be critical about media. And let's say this, media today is a, I would say, extended or expanded, I would like to call it a container word, because it's not just, you know, the newspaper or the eight o'clock news.

Media these days is a lot more because anybody that can build a small website can call himself a media outlet. So we must be very careful about what we see and basically install that critical thinking. I think that's the quickest path to success.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, a couple guys could start a podcast. I mean, who knows? Hey, here we are. Maybe this is the

SPEAKER_04
butterfly in the Atlantic that will also win too. Yeah, so that takes us back to the media

SPEAKER_03
literacy, at least that's the term we were using. And that's certainly a critical component of it. I think it's like any complicated problem, there is going to be multiple layers to it and multiple facets to the solution.

And one of them certainly is media literacy. We already mentioned that intensive, well-funded scientific media study at our universities. Both those things need to happen at our universities.

Another one that we, a third piece that we talk about is to support the institution of traditional journalism by supporting journalism education. I mean, I am on the alumni board at Ohio State and have the great pleasure of spending time with our journalism students today who are coming up and with the faculty there at Ohio State that's teaching the next generation of journalists. And the amazing thing is demand.

You talked about demand earlier as it relates to the demand for media content, demand in the higher education market for journalism education, at least as measured at Ohio State is as strong as it's ever been. These kids, I want to be a journalist. I want to seek the truth.

I want to tell the truth. I think that's another component of it is supporting journalism education. As long as I'm walking through them, in the article, we write about four of them.

Those are the first three. The fourth is a little counterintuitive. We make the case that universities need to think of their own communications operations as journalistic enterprises, to think of themselves as the publishers of news.

And at the beginning of the podcast, that's when I said I first met Bart, was his company helped us create the program that's still at Ohio State. It's just called Ohio State News. And what we did was we consolidated all of the news that's produced all across that $8 billion enterprise at Ohio State from the medical center to the football program to research news, which is what we found in measuring demand for the news that's coming out of Ohio State.

That's one of the beautiful things about it. And Bart alluded to this, is you can measure it now. It's not like in the old days with the newspaper, who knows which articles are being read.

And we were very systematic about it, just like any news organization is today. Where are the clicks coming from? What do people, what do our audience want to see from the Ohio State University? You know what? It wasn't football, if you can believe that. Now, there's a big demand for football news, right? There's a big demand for football news.

But that wasn't the number one category. It was research news. Research news crushed it.

We had stories that would get hundreds of thousands of clicks about research emerging from Ohio State. So that's why one of the things we advocate for is for universities to think of their communications programs as journalistic enterprises. Not only will it enable them to connect all of the research that's happening with their audiences, which serves the cause we're talking about.

Because if the public is consuming scientific research from all of the great universities, the public is becoming more educated and is presumably going to make better decisions about how to consume media and be in a better position to make critical judgments about what's true and what isn't true. But here's the kicker. This is a marketing podcast, right? The kicker is if when universities do this, when we did this at Ohio State, when other clients that we've worked with have done this, what they find is it also elevates and supports the brand of the university and it advances the bottom line of the university in ways that are pretty powerful and surprising.

So can I just go to this, Chris? Because

SPEAKER_04
so it was my good friend Tom Foremsky that he was an ex-Wall Street Journal correspondent or journalist and he came up with the term every company is a media company, right? And he did quite a bit of research on this. The bottom line was that all of a sudden, you know, car brands like Nissan and American Express, well not American Express, not a car brand, but American Express were bringing out their own news. And the idea basically was trust my news, trust my product, right? And Chris, I think you allude a little bit to this as well, right? If you have good news, reputable news or content that you share, it doesn't always have to be news.

So because we call it news because, you know, it's published, but it might not be news as we would typically call it, but let's just call it content. It's very good. The moment you publish that and it's being consumed and it's being seen as reputable and it's being reused because that usually happens with good content, good news.

Then obviously that has a huge effect on the brand that publishes it. And I completely agree with Chris that, you know, that is from a marketing perspective, that is a very strong method, absolutely. Yeah, I'm going to tease that out for

SPEAKER_02
a second just to kind of put a bow on that because I think that I'm sure we're having some people listen to this and they're like, okay, that's great, Chris, you're at Ohio State University or the Ohio State University, I should say, I'm sorry. And then we go again. But and we've talked about, you know, how some of the great schools can do that.

And I automatically, my mind goes to like a lot of the flagships and that's great. And that's perfect. But I've got a lot of people that are listening that are probably like, okay, great, I'm a small school, we've got under 2500 students, how am I going to make a difference? Because, you know, we don't, I mean, yeah, we have a, we have a communications department, we don't necessarily have journalism degrees or whatever that might be.

I'm just curious, you know, how can just any school make a difference in this? And I think Bart, you kind of touched a little bit on it. What I'm thinking, I'd love to hear what you guys think. Critical thinking is one of the ways.

I mean, you know, I went to a liberal arts school and that was kind of a big part of my education was learning how to learn, learning how to think, learning how to critical think. Why don't you guys kind of, what would you tell a smaller

SPEAKER_04
school how to how to approach this? So we work with a lot of large universities like D Ohio State University, but also University of Manchester in England, which is one of the largest in the UK, and sure, you know, they have their people, their budgets, you know, they can take a kind of accommodate for that. But, but I also work with with quite a few colleges in the US and, and I know of one that is in, in Texas. And trust me, they don't, I don't think they have the budgets that some of the other ones do, and they don't have the people on staff that, that they do.

But I think what they have done is they've instigated a sense of pride within the faculty and the students, and they've asked everybody to contribute with ideas and stories. And it takes a while, it takes a while for this to get going. But, but after a while, stories come in, ideas come in, that are just so good that they're easily transformed into something interesting.

And the good thing about it is that back in the days when you had a good story, you had to type it out, these days you don't have to type it out. It can be an infographic, it can be a piece of video, it can be a piece of text, you know, it can be a lot of different things these days. So the format on which you publish, it can be a podcast.

So the format on which you publish can be very diverse, which means that a lot more people will feel a feel at ease with it, because we all know, you know, we all know, even today, you know, some people are just very good at writing, and other people are not, but they have great ideas. Well, now they can express themselves in different ways digitally. So there is a lot to be done, and there's a lot to be created in this way.

SPEAKER_03
Well, you know, I, early on in my career, I worked for a much smaller university, Ohio Dominican University here in Columbus, which is back when I was there, I think they had in the neighborhood of 2000 students, then they did create a football program and used that as an enrollment strategy for a solid decade long after I left. And I want to say they're up into over 3000 now. But I have sat in that chair at a smaller school with more limited resources and smaller audiences.

And I mean, I see that what we're talking about in a couple facets is like, in terms of contributing to the broader higher minded goals that we were talking about of like trying to fix what's broken in society and stuff. The fact is they're in a less of a position to do that. And you already pointed out that the thing that they can do is the thing that good liberal arts schools have always done, which is to teach good critical thinking skills.

I would suggest that they should, I would love to see every university in the country, no matter the size, to offer programming as part of their core curriculum that's required for the degree, that it's not just critical thinking, it's specifically centered around media literacy. So that's that as far as that piece of it, that's that's what I would suggest there. But to this other idea of thinking of themselves as publishers of news.

There's a great book called the content trap that starts with this anecdote of the, the, the, we're all familiar in this business with the quote content is king. And I didn't know this thought, I didn't know this till I read the book, but maybe you guys did. But like, that was Bill Gates, when they launched MSN, the Microsoft Network.

And it was, you know, to what you were saying, Bart, about, you know, every company is a media company, the software company Microsoft in the early 2000s took that to heart. And they said, we're literally going to be a media company. And they launched the Microsoft Network, which failed.

And now all the only real vestige of it is MSNBC is still with us, but it's, it's an ancestor of the, of the original concept, which is they wanted to compete with the New York Times and, and Bill Gates famously said at the news conference when they launched MSN content is king. And the concept there was, if you just make great content, people, if you build it, they will come. It's really essentially what it was.

You make great content, you're going to draw audiences. And the concept of the book, the content trap is, that's not true, actually. Okay. Yes, you do need to make good content. Absolutely.

First and foremost, if your content sucks, no one wants to see it. But the premise of the book is what he calls connections. Okay. So good content and good connections, network connections, network effects to connect that content with your audiences. So back to the small schools, my experience at Ohio Dominican, we had robust networks that we could tap into to connect with our audiences.

They were founded by the Dominican sisters of the Dominican sisters of the Dominican order. So, so the Catholic community in central Ohio was a network that we could tap into using AI, using all the tools that we have to distribute content and connect it with audiences is, is in having sound strategies for those smaller schools, they can move mountains if they employ the right contents, content strategy and connection strategy to bring people together user generated content and some of the things that

SPEAKER_01
Bart V was talking about. So to help us wrap up our conversation, as it relates to improving media literacy or having a positive effect, are there, is there any advice that a university could quickly implement that you could give that would help in that effort? And I'll start out with Chris, is there a quick piece of advice that could be implemented quite quickly by a listener?

SPEAKER_03
For the media literacy component specifically? Or anything that we talked about today? Oh, yeah, I, if I guess my big piece of advice to schools reflecting on this would be to reexamine your marketing and communications operation in light of these principles, right? Any good marketing and communications office is always going to be reexamining itself and reinventing itself. All of them and we talked to them all over the country, all of them are trying to find their way in this constantly changing dynamic environment. Taking a look at how you're running those operations through this lens of thinking of your operation as a news enterprise, as a journalistic enterprise, is an interesting lens to place over it and could be a productive way to reexamine the operation and make some changes for improvement.

Thank you, Bart. Yeah, and from my side, I think

SPEAKER_04
one of the important things is to cultivate the sense that understanding what's going on, whatever the topic is, is hard work. And we should cultivate the mentality that a Twitter

SPEAKER_01
thread is not a long read, period. Thank you. Chris and Bart, we really appreciate you helping us bring this problem and some of the solutions to the forefront.

It's something that once we were aware of what you're trying to do, Bart Koehler and I really wanted to make sure that we broadcasted it out. For anyone that has listened and would like to learn more from either one of you, if you would share your contact information and Bart V, if you would go first. I can best be found on

SPEAKER_04
LinkedIn, so Bart Verhals, V-E-H-U-L-S-T or Bart at presspage.com. Thank you, Bart. Chris?

SPEAKER_03
Probably the easiest would be, you can find me on Twitter. I was an early adopter, so my handle is just at Chris Davy, C-H-R-I-S-D-A-V-E-Y. Koehler, do you have any thoughts that you would like to share

SPEAKER_02
before we wrap it up? Yeah, I so appreciate Chris and Bart being on the conversation today. I think this is such a critical issue and a critical conversation to have. I would really encourage everyone, do Google search.

I think that the article is going to be coming out. If it's not out when we publish this podcast, it's going to be out very quickly. It's titled, Twin Crisis and Truth and Trust, A New Strategy for Higher Education.

I would encourage you to read that article. I've read it. It's excellent.

It's one of those things that a lot of what we've talked about is along those lines. I think that the whole idea of really trying to figure out how can you yourself become more media literate and broaden your horizons. I really like the idea of this color coding.

We talked about algorithms, but rather than waiting for the algorithms, why don't we all just do that ourselves? Practice that critical thinking that we know and encourage those people in our network to do that as well. I think that that's going to help us and actually just get out there and have conversations with somebody that might not see eye to eye with you, have a cup of coffee and just have a decent communication with them about that. I think that would be a great thing to do.

And then I would also just encourage us as marketers, what Chris had said, is take a critical look at what we're doing. How can we help in the way that we're practicing day in and day out with our own team and with our own efforts that we're doing to represent our schools? Again, thanks

SPEAKER_01
gentlemen. This has been a great conversation. We'd also like to extend gratitude to Rob Cullen, our producer at Westport Studios and remind everyone that the Higher Ed Marketer podcast is sponsored by Kailer Solutions, an education marketing and branding agency, and by Ring Digital, the ad targeting people who are successfully increasing response and yield by precisely serving ads directly to the handheld and household devices of your physical enrollment mailing list.

On behalf of both of our barts, Chris and myself, thank you very much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00
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