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March 23, 2009
EAAvesdropping you can feel good about

Eric Rangus is director of communications for the Emory Alumni Association.

How exactly do you write about a blog? Wouldn’t the easiest thing be to just blog about what the blog is? But if I blogged about the blog, would my computer simply implode? Maybe the straightforward approach is best. Let’s try that.

EAAvesdropping (http://eaavesdropping.blogspot.com) is the new staff-written blog of the Emory Alumni Association (EAA) that invites all members of the Emory community to listen in to what’s going on in the alumni world.

EAAvesdropping presents the work of the EAA in a new way. In alumni relations, we pride ourselves on our personal touch, and through EAAvesdropping we hope to add that personal feeling to our electronic communications.

In its first three weeks, EAAvesdropping visited Oxford College, New York, Houston and even Mexico (not necessarily in that order) in search of interesting alumni stories, which weren’t hard to find.

Because there is so much to talk about alumni-wise, EAAvesdropping will be updated several times a week with content from all over the Emory alumni community. Each EAA staff person (there are more than 20 of us) will contribute content, ensuring EAAvesdropping’s dynamic voice.

The majority of EAAvesdropping’s content will be original, but it also will frequently link to content from all over the Emory Web site and beyond. Our newest post, for instance, sends readers to iTunes U, where the EAA has recently uploaded content from Celebration Emory: New York and our J. Pollard Turman Alumni Service Award recipient.

We’re particularly proud of the Turman content. We’ve always highlighted the Turman in print and online publications (including Emory Report last week), but the University’s new technologies have given the EAA some additional opportunities to highlight our 2009 recipient, Sally Lehr ’65N-’76MN.

We already have a personal interview with Lehr on iTunes U, and soon we will have an audio file of the Turman ceremony (complete with addresses by President Jim Wagner and Board of Trustees Chair Ben Johnson ’65C). Direct links to the audio files can be found on EAAvesdropping. The April issue of EmoryWire, the EAA’s electronic publication, will link to an event slide show, making our Turman content a true feast for the senses — well, almost all of the senses. We can’t do much about taste, although the chicken dinner from the Turman ceremony was pretty good. Hope you’ll take my word for that.