When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, his famous (and, as it turns out, apocryphal retort was: "Because that's where the money is." The subject of this week's Carnival of Journalism is the changing role of universities in meeting the information needs of their community. I'm sure that many others will do a much better job than I would of writing about reforming curricula to include training in the digital arts, entrepreneurship, and what my friend George Kelly calls "getting away from the article as the unit of production" to adapt to the idea of news as a stream beginning with sources and flowing far beyond publication through social and conversational media. When I thought about what I could add to the conversation, all I could think about was...money. Many people I meet describe themselves as "recovering journalists," but if I used the same convention, I guess I'd have to say that I'm a recovering market analyst. Looking at the world through the lens of "how many" and "how much" is second nature to me.
