Before Thanksgiving I broke my glasses. There was a wire bookshelf thing in the newsroom, it fell and a bundle of newspapers landed on my nose. Somehow the arm of the wire frame snapped off right at the lens.
Life, being so busy, meant that I could finally this week get an appointment to go get new glasses or contacts — which I was due for anyway. So I booked that appointment on Monday. That appointment was today.
I drove over, parked, walked in, announced I was there for my 1:15 and was directed to sit down. I sat down.
For the next 65 minutes I watched people come in, sit down, get called back and take their appointment. For 65 minutes I did this. And then I left. That was better than trying to express how off putting the entire situation felt. There are, after all, other eye doctors in town.
Smith’s Rule of Business: Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.
And so I now have an appointment on New Year’s Eve, at a different eye doctor.
Things to read … because I can see up close just fine, thank you.
How newspapers lost the Millennials:
The inability of newspapers to resonate with digital natives has left them with a daunting demographic challenge. Two-thirds of the audience at the typical newspaper is composed of people over the age of 55, according to Greg Harmon of Borrell Associates. “The newspaper audience ages another year every year,” he adds. “Everyone’s hair ought to be on fire.”
As the newspaper audience grays, the readers that newspapers – and most of their advertisers – would like to have are, instead, busily racking up page views at places like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox.
(I)t is easy to see that publishers and editors have a higher regard for their products than the next-gen consumers they need to attract. Now, the only question remaining is whether newspaper folk have the gumption – and time – to turn things around.
‘Experiential Journalism:’ How Virtual Reality Could Depict News in 3D:
The news industry is currently grappling with a challenging problem: How can it make news interesting to the younger generation?
Virtual reality offers one solution: Strap them in vision-encompassing helmets and let them experience the news like a video game.
This is about three kinds of silly. Google axes News in Spain in response to royalty law
We’ll let our old friend and colleague Jeff Jarvis take it from here. Spain’s link tax forces Google News to shut there:
Thus a link tax intended to protect Spain’s publishers will only end up harming them — depriving them of untold audience — and could even end up killing the weakest among them. Spain will also bring damage to the web itself and to the country’s reputation, establishing itself as a hostile environment for investment in technology.
Be careful what you wish for, you old, threatened institutions of media and government, huddling together against the cold wind of the new.
A lesser thing is that it helps diminish the spread of information, but that’s most likely a tertiary concern here.
3 Steps to Leveraging Storytelling in Your Presentations:
We no longer want to be lulled to sleep by complicated graphs and bullet points. We expect to be excited, challenged and to reflect on our own experiences. And you can do that many times with the use of stories.
Here’s how you can harness your own personal stories and use them to touch your audience the next time you present.
That’s a fine essay from SlideShare. Click on over.
For a different kind of thing, Storytelling on the Radio Builds Community, On-Air and Off:
What separates radio documentary from any documentary? And what separates public radio journalism from any journalism?
Radio gets inside us. Lacking earlids, we are defenseless, vulnerable to ambush. Sounds and voices surprise us from within. As radio documentary makers, we have this tactical advantage over our colleagues in print, film, television, photography. Our tool is aural story, the most primitive and powerful. Invisibility is our friend. Prejudice is suspended while the listener is blind, only listening.
This is a great read. Just after her retirement from ABC, Ann Compton offers a great look back from her ringside seat for some of our most important recent history. I Spent 40 Years Covering the White House:
I retired from ABC News on September 10, 41 years to the day after I arrived as a network correspondent in 1973. Back then, the Cold War was hot, the Middle East was in flames and Watergate was coming to a boil. When Richard M. Nixon finally resigned to avoid impeachment the following year, the president of ABC News in New York deployed me, his youngest recruit, to the White House beat. No network had ever assigned a woman there, and coverage would demand near constant travel. Being the first woman assigned was not the challenge. It was age. I was 27 years old, inexperienced and untested.
These go together, in order:
Police officer buys eggs for woman caught shoplifting to feed her family in Tarrant:
A woman caught shoplifting eggs in Tarrant Saturday didn’t leave with handcuffs and a court date. Thanks to a Tarrant police officer, she left with food for her family.
Grandmother caught stealing eggs to feed hungry children ‘overwhelmed’ by kindness of police:
By Saturday, the family had gone two days without food. Johnson went to Dollar General on Pinson Valley Parkway with $1.25 and thought that would be enough to buy a carton of eggs. When she realized she was 50 cents plus tax short, she stuffed five eggs in her pocket out of desperation.
Tarrant police officer delivers groceries to woman caught stealing eggs at Dollar General:
Helen Johnson stared in amazement at the piles of food accumulating in her small Tarrant apartment on Wednesday.
“The last time I saw my house this full, I was 12-years-old and staying with my grandmother,” said the 47-year-old mother and grandmother. “I’ve been crying all day.”
Score one for the good guys.
