I try to maintain this routine every semester. Occasionally, more or less due to chance, I find a story that I can use, and I store it away for my class later in the week. Even more rarely, I stumble across a story that perfectly matches my lesson plans. For example, I happen to catch an article about an airline's decision to change its frequent flyer rewards program the same week that I plan to discuss customer relationships. Or I see an item online at CNN/Money covering a well-known consumer-product company's changing advertising strategy while I am preparing to lecture on marketing communication.

I am sure it works the same way for a lot of marketing teachers. I imagine there must be thousands of other instructors, all walking down their respective hallways before their classes pondering these same thoughts. I don't want to overdo the irony, but what probably happens most often is that you find the frequent flyer article the week you are scheduled to cover marketing communication and I find the news story about the new ad campaign the week I want to do something on CRM.

If only there were some sort of mechanism by which we could communicate our discoveries, pool them, exchange them, and reduce the redundancy of our efforts. Obviously, a paper publication wouldn't work; these stories do not have an infinite life span and we need to communicate them quickly. Smoke signals are pretty quick... No, the wind would mess that up. Pigeons? I wonder if those little birds can carry flash memory sticks. Hmm, memory sticks—that reminds me of something. We might be able to use some sort of computer mechanism. Wait a minute, we have one of those! The ARC!

Here is the proposal. See a story that you think might be of interest to other instructors? Send an email to marketingeducator@ama.org. Send whatever you want—a quick description of what the story is about, its relevance, or just a URL with no accompanying text at all. I'll figure it out. If you are viewing a story on the Web with Internet Explorer, you can click on "File" from the browser's menu bar, pick "Send," and then choose "Link by E-mail." I believe the entire sequence should take 20 seconds, maximum. I will add your name and the link to a page on the ARC that I am thinking of as "The Newshound Page."

We all have different media habits and interests. I perk up when I spot an article in the New York Times business section on E-Commerce, and you might read Fortune magazine's Web site for interesting entrepreneurial stories. Also, each of our local media markets is different. Our variability could help us. People who study virtual communities categorize diversity as a "strength of weak ties."

To help potential newshounds, I recently added some pages to the ARC with links to trade publications and business press outlets. These outlets can be mined for up-to-the-minute teaching ideas. There are separate pages for advertising, b-to-b, direct marketing, relationship marketing, retailing, sales management, entrepreneurial business, sports marketing, and general business or marketing. The page is located at http://www.marketingpower.com/content16608.php.

Last semester, every once in a while I read something that I thought was worth sharing—that struck me as a good example of a marketing phenomenon or that offered a lesson on how a marketing principle works in a messy, but real, market.

Next time, I will be able to share such links. So will you. 

- Charles Hofacker, ARC Editor