April « 2012 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

April, 2012

journalism / memories / Monday / Samford / video — Comments Off
16
Apr 12

Meanwhile, in the classroom

I taught about false light in two media law classes today.

The three criteria required for a false light case:

1. Publication of material must put an individual in a false light.
2. The false light would be offensive to a reasonable person.
3. The publisher was at fault.

Two anecdotes from the lecture:

The Sun ran a picture of Nellie Mitchell, a 96-year-old Arkansas woman, in a fabricated story about a 101-year-old female news carrier who had to give up her job because she was pregnant. The Sun’s editors needed a photo for their false story. They assumed Nellie was dead and pulled her picture from a previous true story. She was alive and, by then, feeling litigious. She sued. She won $1.5 million in 1991. (That’s $2.5 million today)

In the 1980s WJLA in Washington, D.C., did a story on genital herpes. The reporter shot b roll on a busy D.C. street. The videographer zoomed in on a woman who was easily recognized. In the 11 p.m. broadcast the anchor read the script “For the 20 million Americans who have herpes, it’s not a cure” as tape rolled with the woman’s image. She won her case and was awarded $750.

I like media law, but I think you have to have an anticipation of enjoyment of it before you take it as a class. I imagine that students who don’t have some inkling of that beforehand find themselves miserable. But it is a vitally important topic.

I think I enjoyed it, in part, was because the first media law case I ever read about was Carol Burnett v. National Enquirer, Inc. I loved Carol Burnett as a comedienne, even if her sketch comedy show (which I caught it in syndication) was for an older audience. It always felt like I was getting away with something to be able to watch it late at night, but I remember thinking that Burnett’s case, while important, probably felt ancient to most of my peers. It had happened almost 15 years before we studied it, an eternity to undergrads. (I did not talk about it in class today.)

And so I vowed to give contemporary examples in a media law context. Need to brush up on the dockets a bit.

To know the more than a name makes a case history more interesting. To see this makes it all stick in your head:

I actually remember that bit, which is remarkable with my memory. I suppose it speaks to the impression those talents could leave upon you. To this day my favorite stylings are physical comedy and the famous loss of composure. I blame Harvey Korman for that:

Had a guest in my Mass Media Practices class today. My old friend Napo Monasterio came over from The Birmingham News to talk about that happy, curious, more-flexible-than-ever place where journalist, coder and designer meet. Napo is from Auburn, though he was a year or two behind me. Now I see his work all the time.

Here are some of his page layouts and the online package that went with it. Now he’s developing apps.

He was formally trained as a print journalist and designer, but his desire to learn new things keeps opening doors for him. I hope students pick up on that.

“Just like a firecracker going off in the air — kabuuuuum.”

iPhone / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
16
Apr 12

Travel day

That long line of storms that covered most of the country today? San Antonio was at the very bottom of that, just as my plane was getting ready to fly. I got to travel in this soup:

The flight was entirely uneventful.

When I made it home, she quickly settled in. Think she missed me?

And so I’ll leave you with this, an almost hypnotic reminder to never put anything breakable in your checked baggage:

That’s all for now. More tomorrow, when life returns to normal. Whatever that is.

adventures / history / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
15
Apr 12

The River Walk

You probably can’t have San Antonio without the River Walk. It fills up with tourists at shops and bars and restaurants at night, but on Saturday morning, as The Yankee and I happily discovered, it is quiet, still and serene:

There are bridges for the over the road traffic passing just overhead, but that seems about as far removed from people on the walk itself as possible. There are also pedestrian crossovers to get you to that restaurant you really want to try on the other side without having to rejoin the land of the suckers.

There are also the boats, one part tour, one part mass transit system and, sometimes, a dinner cruise. Here the passengers were learning about the historic architecture overlooking the San Antonio River:

Among those trees and ducks and squirrels and ferns you can find too many people, or the feeling of a land lost. In the early morning hours only the odd mosaic are there to disturb you. One tells you that just a few feet away is a tree where a Mexican sniper hid to pick off Texan settlers.

Enjoy rounding that corner, friends.

Another mosaic, for reasons never explained, lays out the city’s interstate grid. A better one shows the modern route of the carefully controlled river. From that one you can start to figure out how all of this came together.

For if you can’t have modern San Antonio without the River Walk, you can’t have the River Walk without Bowen’s Island.

In the middle of the 19th century they called it Galveston Island, but it was technically a peninsula bordered on three sides by the river and on the fourth by an important local irrigation system. The local postmaster, John Bowen, built his home there. When he died in 1867 it turned into a beer garden, a market and what we today would probably call a recreational area. Gymnastics, picnics and religious meetings all took place there.

The Bowen family held onto the land until 1910. Developers rerouted the river, made the nearby streets longer and put to work their vision of a 10-acre site for buildings, including a hotel, the Federal Reserve Bank and commercial buildings.

None of that could have been done, perhaps, without Robert H. H. Hugman. He was the architect that had the idea to spruce up the place. His fingerprints are everywhere, as are these bronze plaques, replicating the stamp he placed on all his drawings:

And so here we are today.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of these restaurants where the gimmick is the waitstaff gets to treat you horribly bad. We’ve been to two locations of Dirty Dick’s. One, in Boston, because we were hungry and they sat us for lunch right away. Tonight we ate at the one on the River Walk … for much the same reason, actually.

At lunch they have perfectly good burgers. And, for whatever reason, the guy we had in Boston was relaxed and chatty with us. Meanwhile they were simply abusing other tables. This is probably good therapy for people who’ve waited tables one-shift-too-many, but I’m not sure why the customers show up.

Anyway, the dinner was OK tonight, though not as good as the lunchtime burger half a continent and almost a removed from my memory. We had a large group tonight, six adults, all people with way too much money invested in their brains, and a really sharp four-year-old.

The waitress tonight started out to give us a little grief which, I don’t know about you, but no thanks. And then it just … stopped. It was like she just noticed the child sitting with us. Oh you get the hat with the stupid insult on it, there’s no escaping that, but she was fine, left us alone, didn’t overtly scar the kid and we all pretended like we didn’t notice.

Maybe there’s a vibe some tables give off.

So the little boy, the son of two of our friends at dinner with us, gets into a dance contest with me. And he was awesome. Remind me to never do that again. The restaurant had a local band playing, and we caught maybe their first two songs, including something from the early 1960s soul era that I’ve already forgotten. I just sit in the chair and bop along a bit because the boy and I have become buddies.

I break out the classic stupid dances of our generation: the shopping cart, the sprinkler, the Q-tip, making the pizza.

The child responds with what he calls the Lighting Lawnmower. He sticks out his hands, tenses up his entire body and starts a little shimmy which soon turns into a full-on, almost violent shake. Suddenly the lawn mower image is out of control. He’s not pushing the mower, but hanging on for dear life as it runs over everything in site.

It was awesome. No one knows where he got it from and all agreed he easily won our dance competition. Even me, and I don’t mean in that “Sure, you were better than me kid” way.

At the end of the night he gave me what he called dinosaur hugs, which seem to involve choking me out, tackling me and roaring a lot. He’s a cool kid, despite his need to defeat me in light saber duels and mock finger-pistol shootouts all weekend.

adventures / Friday / history / iPhone / photo / Samford — Comments Off
14
Apr 12

My day, and a bit of recent San Antonio history

Busy conference day. I presented two papers. The first was a piece I co-authored with my pal Skye titled “In the Huddle: SCCT Analysis of NFL and Players’ Association 2011 Lockout Strategies” which looked at that particular piece of business through the Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory. In the final analysis they followed part of the model perfectly, but blew it elsewhere.

The second paper was a piece on the Colbert Super PAC, which was one part history of PACs that led to this moment, one part speculation on what Colbert was doing, where Super PACs are taking us and, finally, announcing the latest financials they’ve raised and spent. That is a lot of money.

That paper, which I co-authored with The Yankee, was well received. It won top paper honors. I got a plaque and everything. Not too shabby.

And immediately after that session I served as a respondent in another session.

How this works: someone has grouped a small handful of papers together for the researchers to discuss their examination and findings to their audience, as I did twice earlier today. Another person, the respondent, is assigned to make some larger sense of it all. The respondent’s job is often to find a common thread, but also give some feedback on the papers, deliver some helpful criticism as they continue their research and so on.

I was asked to be the respondent on a mass communication panel titled “‘Talking’ with the People We ‘Know’ Best: Traditional Interaction as it Happens Online.” (Academics aren’t known for riveting titles.) I had four fine papers to read, which makes being a respondent enjoyable. You read things beyond your area and, if you are conscientious about it, you find yourself working hard to make your actual response worthwhile.

It takes some time and sometimes a bit of trepidation. One of those papers I knew nothing about when I started reading. The nice person that wrote it is the expert. What can I say to that person? But eventually you find something. No study is perfect and all that.

And this might be a first: the timekeeper flashed me a one-minute sign. Not sure I’ve ever seen a respondent threaten to go over the allotted time before.

I hope it was at least a little bit worth it to the researchers.

This is Schilo’s:

Pronounce it “She-Lows.”

This is one of those downtown dining institutions. I’d had lunch there two days in a row. Yesterday it was the Wienerschnitzel of breaded pork and a side of red cabbage. Today I had the Friday special, which was a deliciously salty roast beef with mashed potatoes and green beans.

(UPDATE: The next day, Saturday, we returned for breakfast. I had the potato pancakes, which were not the best potato pancakes I’ve ever had by any measure. But the lunches? Oh they know their lunches.)

A man named Fritz Schilo opened a saloon 90 miles away in Beeville, Texas just after the turn of the 20th century. In 1914 he packed up his family and moved his booze joint to San Antonio. Three years later: Prohibition.

So the saloon business dried up. He opened a restaurant. His wife made the food for a location not too far away from this one. He moved next door in 1927, and Fritz Schilo stayed on through the first part of the Depression, until he died in 1935. His son, Edgar, took over and in 1942, during another war, they moved to the current location. You wonder if the family, before they sold the business sometime after the war, ever measured big personal events around big international events.

You’d think, from the perspective of history, everyone did. But do we? Aside from the occasional “Where were you when?” moment, probably not. Still, that Prohibition timing was pretty rough on ol’ Fritz.

A bit more local history, John Wayne stayed at our hotel twice during premieres of two separate movies. He charmed them so well the second time they named a suite after him:

And here’s the man John Wayne wished he could have been. That’s Audie Murphy, second from the right:

The man next to him, unknown to whomever wrote the caption below the picture on display in the hotel lobby, looks positively beside himself with nausea. You would, too, if you were taking a picture with Murphy. If you don’t know what that’s about, you should do a little reading.

(UPDATE: The guy on the far right might be Harold Russell a World War II veteran who is one of only two non-professional actors to win an Oscar for his acting in The Best Years of Our Life. Russell had an amazing life.)

The hotel itself is lovely, in the lobby. The rooms are a bit shabby for the $160 rate they’re asking from conference-goers. We got a slightly better rate. The joke of the conference has been “What broke in your room this morning?” Oh, roughly everything. We’ll see about those rates again later this weekend.

Oh? The Alamo? Everyone says it is smaller than you’d think. And there’s no basement.

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13
Apr 12

The historic marker series

Welcome to the seventh installment in the series that promises to photograph all of the historic markers in the county.

(Just because I travel doesn’t mean I can’t put together this little feature.)

I’ve been riding around on my bike to find them all and sharing them on the site one at a time. Jump on over and see the story that goes with this beautiful house:

Enjoy, happy pedaling and happy reading!