Imperfect Ten There’s an issue with kids these days. Jeff Pilchiek sees it in the Westlake High School upperclassmen he counsels on college admissions. “These are kids who don’t want to get rejections,” he says. “In the past, we’d just apply to schools and hope, but the student today is scared of rejection because they haven’t had much of that in their lives.” This might not invoke much sympathy from the grow-from-your-failures generation, but it’s an attitude that’s been encouraged by state law. In the 12 years since the top 10 percent law (HB 588) was passed, The University of Texas at Austin (along with the other public state universities) has guaranteed admission to all in-state applicants who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. In 2008, HB 588 alone accounted for 76 percent of UT-Austin’s freshman class. Projections showed that the campus would be entirely occupied by HB 588 admissions within a decade. The school had, according to UT President William Powers Jr., “lost control” of its admissions process. More

Why parity is only an AL problem

It’s the DH, stupid

By now, I’ve heard just about every possible reason for why the American League is just a better league. This is based on the head-to-head interleague records and the streak of AL wins in the All-Star Game.

Now, personally I like to call the National League “baseball” and the American League “Disney on Ice” because of the DH, which destroys the integrity of the game’s strategy. But more than hampering the in-game strategy, I think what we’ve seen since the last expansion rounds — which added 3 teams to the NL and only 1 to the AL — is the more sinister effect of the DH, the one that occurs in the off-season.The media has been bemoaning the lack of parity in the league since the last expansion, that in baseball your wallet size trumps everything else. What they’re missing, because of the incessant focus on the New York/Boston rivalry, is that this is only true in the American League.

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The real reason behind Twitter’s mediasplosion Everybody’s typing about tweeting, even though most savvy web users grokked, used, and digested the concept of Twitter a year ago. What’s with the sudden rush? Some of it is Twitter’s own hyping of the race to a million followers, which highlighted the service’s celebrity users, and American media loves it some celebrities. But the other thing the media loves — the one that might really be behind the twitternoia and obsessive “we’re still hip!” coverage from newspapers and TV newscasts clawing at the cliff of extinction — is that the service has reached a tipping point among a very specific class of communicators: PR professionals. I don’t know how the mythical Average Reader would feel if they ‘found out’ what a large percentage of media stories are driven by PR froth. I do know how irked and defensive most reporters get when this is pointed out. I don’t mind admitting that I rely on PR. I get far more interesting story ideas from PR folks than I do from freelance writers, and on today’s editorial budget, I’ve never had a staff to create in-house brainstorming to counteract the tide of PR info. Does this plain fact indicate nefarious forces at work? Or does it point to just how much good, important work PR professionals do? I’ll leave such judgments to people with more active Twitter accounts than mine. However, it does mean that I’m in a position to judge how much Twitter activity is really newfangled PR, and the answer is: LOTS. The service has shifted in recent months from proto-blogging of entirely useless information to professional peddling of mostly useless information. PR presence on Twitter is enormous. If you are a heavy Twitter user, and chasing down follow counts as fast as you can, chances are you’ll fill out your Census profession with PR or Marketing later this year. And why not? It’s a tremendous venue for unfiltered PR (a flavor of marketing that is two ethical slips away from spam). Plus, it adds a nice quantitative number to the size of a PR professional’s reach. Where once a firm might brag about the size and quality of its media contacts, now it only has to point to its Twitter stats. Media dependence on PR + PR user increase on Twitter = media about Twitter. The exact same process led to a sudden surge of “lifestyles” and “humor” columns about e-mail in the ’90s. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the scenario. Reporter has inbox that is 80% press releases. These press releases start touting the PR person’s Twitter account. Reporter checks out Twitter, and sees mostly PR people on (because, in the increasingly myopic world of journalism, these are the people she knows). Options: a) reporter is annoyed and writes scathing article about uselessness of Twitter; b) reporter is impressed with the efficiency of the service and writes glowing article about revolution of Twitter. And once a few reporters write about something, the herd follows, especially now that the herd is basically a handful of wire services, hundreds of inexperienced interns, and an expanding galaxy of laid-off reporters with blogs. It might be the most predictable phenomenon on the planet, right up there with hyperventilation about scary new diseases that aren’t that dangerous (um) and overwrought dissections of media trends (whoops).