Sean Keeley promised his mother that if Donovan McNabb could produce a miracle, they would have no choice but to rush the field. With a tough pass across his body, the Syracuse football legend found Stephen Brominski in the end zone as time expired, beating Virginia Tech 28-26.

Fulfilling his promise Keeley rushed onto the field amongst the madness of enthralled students on the Carrier Dome turf. Just two years prior, he became hooked at his first Syracuse football game, and after that game it wasn’t long before he began writing about sports.

In 2002, Keeley created ‘Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician,’ a popular SU sports blog hosted by SBNation.com. He currently manages all blog content.

This MAYmester, Keeley is coming back to Syracuse for just the second time since graduating in 2000 to teach a course titled IST 400/600: ‘Blogging for Information Professionals’ at the School of Information Studies.

Keeley will teach one section of this course with both undergraduate- and graduate-level students meeting together. The class is from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. from May 16 to May 20, and as of 5 p.m. Monday, it still had seven seats available. The course is available thanks to a $25,000 grant from the Ruth Ivor Foundation of New York City in support of the School of Information Studies’ social media efforts.

Keeley will show students how to create, grow and maintain a blog in the weeklong course. He wants to help students learn to communicate in a way that keeps readers interested.

‘We all have that generic view of the guy sitting in his underwear in his mother’s basement blogging and just hating everything,’ Keeley said.

Instead, Keeley works from his Seattle home, sifting through blogs and websites to find the most interesting and relatable content. It is a process that requires skill, practice and commitment to quality, he said.

‘If you take one day off, your audience goes away,’ he said. ‘As much as they may love you, they are a fickle bunch.’

Blogging was not Keeley’s first passion, especially blogging for Syracuse. Having grown up in Central New Jersey as a Notre Dame football fan and Georgetown basketball fan, Keeley admitted the likelihood of writing about Syracuse was slim and he would have laughed at the notion of one day teaching a course on blogging.

Though he wanted to focus on screenwriting, he felt it was more important to be writing, and creating, every single day. He moved to L.A. after graduation to pursue screenwriting, but found passion elsewhere.

‘I couldn’t get over the fact that you could do (blog writing), do it in a funny way, throw in references and make it different,’ he said. ‘And I kind of got hooked on that.’

Though making a living off a blog can be difficult, Keeley said, having an audience allows you to monetize the blog in other ways.

Keeley grabbed the attention of Alyssa Henry, a graduate student pursuing a degree in information management from the iSchool, during his Skype session with professor Anthony Rotolo’s class. Having graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications as a broadcast journalism major, Henry said she is excited to learn how to adapt her writing in the course.

‘Even as we saw with (Osama bin Laden’s death) last night, journalism is changing rapidly and blogging is one of those tools journalists need to have,’ Henry said.

Dan Lyons, a junior writing and rhetoric major, started reading the blog his freshman year. This year Keeley allowed Lyons to cover spring football on the blog. Lyons stressed the importance of writing and creating content everyday but said that blogging might not be for everyone.

‘I don’t know how much blogging an engineering student needs to do, but for writing majors and journalists it’s very important,’ Lyons said.

Keeley hopes to limit his time spent lecturing and focus on interactivity with his students. He recalled an entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises class he took at SU in which he helped improve the businesses of entrepreneurs as an example of the kind of class he hopes to teach.

‘I loved the fact that we were actually doing things, not just talking about them,’ Keeley said. ‘It’s very easy for me to zone out in a big lecture hall and start doing my Daily Orange crossword puzzle.’

Keeley hopes that students who haven’t given blogging a chance will enroll in the class so they can learn how to do it, and do it well as media changes.

Keeley said: ‘The internet is the great equalizer. You don’t have to get a degree from Newhouse now to write about the news.’

akgould@syr.edu

 

Published on May 2, 2011 at 12:00 pm