Silver Award for the NewsU “It’s All About U” Starter Kit

An awards write-up from March 2006 recognizing the promotional campaign built to launch News University, Poynter’s web-based e-learning site. The Silver award went to distributor Atlanta Promotional Products, LLC, with News University as the client. Credit for the campaign goes to Susan Crain, our NewsU marketing consultant.

The objective, as stated in the entry:

To help launch News University and generate awareness of the web based e-learning site.

The tactic was a request card handed out at a 2005 newspaper industry convention, with cards dropped in an on-site box or mailed back to us. Everyone who asked got a starter kit — and “kit” was not an overstatement:

Starter Kits, mailed to those requesting them, contained a cover letter and NewsU flyer, an overview brochure, a Flash movie and printable Adobe® PDFs (on CD-ROM) describing NewsU, posters for the workplace, imprinted sticky pads, polybags containing an imprinted carabineer highlighter, mini-brochures, and an imprinted magnetic memo stand. In short, the starter kit was loaded! Every piece worked nicely in concert with the others, each one supporting the theme, “NewsU: It’s All About U.”

The results section reports the campaign beat its goal:

120 starter kits were requested, representing 40% of the total conference audience. (The goal was to receive 70 requests.) 2. To date, NewsU has registered 5,175 journalists!

Reading this in 2026, the mechanics are the artifact. To market an online learning site, we mailed physical objects — a CD-ROM with a Flash movie, a poster, a magnetic memo stand — because that was how you reached working journalists in a newsroom. Today the entire funnel would be a link, an email sequence and a social post, and nobody would be counting drop-box cards at a convention.

What hasn’t aged is the underlying problem. In the early days of NewsU, the hard part was never building the courses; it was convincing journalists that online training was worth their time and that a self-paced course could be as good as sitting in a seminar room in St. Petersburg. That first 5,175 registrations was the beginning of a number that grew into the hundreds of thousands over the years that followed — but every one of them started with someone deciding to take a chance on learning at a screen.