October, 2012


26
Oct 12

Fortune-ate one

We had Chinese for dinner tonight. We’d ventured out to watch major league baseball players take some batting practice for a good cause. It was a home run derby and some of these guys needed the cuts.

The Atlanta Braves’ Tim Hudson does this every year for his foundation, which provides financial help to children and their families living with a life-altering or terminal disease. He put pitchers against field position players this year. The pitchers had a shorter fence, and that brought the entire event down to the last at bat, by Hudson, a pitcher, who happened to be an excellent batter in college.

And so he won the thing. The fix was in, surely. But probably not. No one cared. They raised almost $15,000 tonight.

So we had Chinese after, because nothing sounded good to anyone and I thought Chinese would be convenient and everyone likes Chinese and the place we go would still be open for takeout.

Only they were still open for dine in, so we ate there and got fortune cookies and everything.

Mine was pretty good:

fortune

Pretty good “news” for a Friday night.


25
Oct 12

APA journlism panel

We held a panel at Samford today for the journalism students. Publishers and editors from papers across the state came in to visit as part of a visit with the Alabama Press Association. Pictured here are Dee Ann Campbell from the Choctaw Sun-Advocate, a weekly in southwest Alabama, and Leada Gore, who just left the editor’s desk in Hartselle to join Alabama Media Group as the statewide military reporter:

panelists

Hopefully it was very insightful for the students. If nothing else they heard the industry leaders telling them the same sort of things we in the faculty tell them. Stuff like:

The secret to getting an internship: keep bugging the person in charge without being a pest.

Learn the skills that you’re taught in school. Then expect to learn many more different skills on the job.

There is a story everywhere. You just have to listen and watch for it.

Bring ideas. Don’t wait for your editor to give you leads.

Get ready to work hard and do a bit of everything.

Don’t think you’ll get to go home at 5.

Writing is writing, but design, photography and videography are important. No one just writes.

Don’t limit yourself (to a style or beat).

Write wherever you have the opportunity to write.

If you don’t read, read, read, you can’t write at all.

Look at the way things are designed. It is having an eye that you can only develop over time if you pay attention.

There is a degree of flexibility that you won’t find in other jobs. This is different every day.

For a young reporter to have a sense of news judgement, you’ve got to develop that, and you do that by reading, meeting people, talking and listening.

Start looking for a job now. Don’t wait until April.

Read their (newspaper’s) copy. Get familiar with the publication, style and coverage.

You can’t have enough internships.

Student newspapers are great, but you need to treat that like a job.

It was a fine panel. We hope to put another one together for the public relations students in the spring.


24
Oct 12

Mussolini at Chick-fil-A

Had dinner at Chick-fil-A tonight. Took a piece of paper to give to one of the guys I often see working there. He always asks me what I’m reading. We’ve talked about the various things we enjoy. I read a lot of history. He said he reads a lot about the Revolutionary War period.

So I’d promised I’d bring him a list of things that I’ve read. I spent a few minutes in my library one day last week writing down names and titles. I pulled images from Amazon to put over the names of the books. I gave it to him tonight. He was happy, smiling, pleased, thanked me.

But then I wondered: Maybe he doesn’t really read about this period. Maybe he was just being nice. Now, maybe, he’s wondering why some guy brings him this piece of paper.

So I got my food, found a table and continued reading Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope — which is good, if you like Alter or Roosevelt. Alter is a fine writer, but he’s a Roosevelt apologist and, really, there’s been enough of that. But I did learn about Roosevelt’s role in contributing re-writes to Gabriel Over the White House, a movie meant to “prepare” the American constituency for a dictator who, ultimately, executes his enemies in the shadows of the Statue of Liberty. This was actually produced and put in theaters. There’s some of that about 62 minutes in and then you’ll see a Star Chamber immediately thereafter. Roosevelt wrote to William Randolph Hearst, who produced the film, that he thought it would be “helpful.”

You can watch the full movie here:

The Library of Congress says about the film, “The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: he’s Mussolini.”

Happily we didn’t go down those roads, but then again, in 1933 with the Depression on, people in the U.S. thought a lot about Mussolini. Il Duce was in the midst of his successful years. He was winning people over as a dictator with public works, improved jobs, public transport and more. It’d be a few more years until everyone turned on the guy. In 1933 desperate people looked at him and thought, Why not?

So anyway, I’m sitting there, trying to wrap up this book so I can move on to the next thing, and these two ladies sitting nearby are discussing the music they’ll perform in their church choir’s Christmas performance.

They’re flipping through three-ring binders. As it often happens when music people discuss music things there was a bit of singing. The lady on the right was pointing out parts to the one on the left.

singing

A guy comes up, a contractor of some sort based on his clothes, and he says “You sure make that beautiful song beautiful.”

She did have a nice voice.


23
Oct 12

Pictures, lots of pictures

Did a photojournalism presentation for my class today. I showed the Taylor Morris photo essay I mentioned yesterday. I handed out some notes. I showed off some audio/visual slide presentations, silly stuff really.

I talked about all of these photos for an awfully long time:

If you’ve been visiting the site — or lurking in the photo gallery section — over the years you’ve probably seen many of those.

Just remember, some of the shots in that slideshow are meant to be bad. Most of them are average, at best. I told the students today that I had one photojournalism class with a brilliant professor and another photography class with another talented teacher, but I’ve had photos sprinkled in newspapers and magazines and on websites and in books here and there over the years. Not because I’m a great photographer. Click through there, you’ll see.

I’m a serviceable photographer, I told the students. Being there, researching the subject matter, knowing how to tell a story visually, anticipating the action, knowing your equipment, understanding a handful of basic photographic techniques and having extra batteries … that counts.

Link bait from the school blog: What will the iPad mini mean for journalism? I wrote that on my phone. Technology is amazing.


22
Oct 12

Padding with pictures

Nothing but pictures and slideshows and more photos and then some camera things. I’ve stared at so many photographs today I’m not sure what is in focus any more. This one is going in tomorrow’s presentation as the thrill of victory:

SpringGarden

That was in 2008. Time flies. She’s gone on to college, made the dean’s list several times and probably graduated by now.

Twitter! For grades! It isn’t just for your breakfast anymore.

It hasn’t been about breakfast since roughly ever, but people that don’t understand it tend to default to such things. A television producer asked me once if I could learn as much about news on Twitter as I could on television. I told him of all of the tidbits I’d learned that day — there happened to be a plane crash and I knew as much or more as you’d get in a television recap of any story — and apologized for not knowing more; I hadn’t been online as much as I normally was.

I think I sold him. But I digress. There is a study that suggests “>Twitter is good for learning:

(C)ollege students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades.

“Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice,” said Greenhow, who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers. “It’s changing the way we experience what we read and what we write.”

[…]

Greenhow analyzed existing research and found that Twitter’s real-time design allowed students and instructors to engage in sharing, collaboration, brainstorming and creation of a project. Other student benefits included learning to write concisely, conducting up-to-date research and even communicating directly with authors and researchers.

I have a Twitter paper that will be published later this year. It will be more about the communal nature of the tool. I look forward to telling you all about it.

I’ll be using this photo essay in class tomorrow. This is the story of a naval EOD who became only the 5th quadruple amputee survivor at Walter Reed, but also his long road back and the love he’s walking with once again. Amazing story, all right there in pictures.

That Buzzfeed piece has turned his friend and photographer, Tim Dodd, into a star. “The site went from boasting 220 views per day at its peak, to 36,000 views per day literally overnight.”

And then The Chive got hold of it. They say they’ve raised $250,000 for Morris in a matter of days.

Media law: SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte on the creep of Hazelwood:

When Hazelwood was decided, First Amendment advocates comforted themselves that the ruling affected only minors enrolled in K-12 schools – and then only in the limited “curricular” setting, such as a class-produced newspaper. That was a logical reading of the case and, as time has proven, an overly optimistic one.

[…]

The creep of Hazelwood onto college campuses is troubling because, in practice, courts regard Hazelwood as a “rational-basis-minus” level of review, under which censorship decisions need only reside in the deferentially viewed vicinity of reasonableness.

[…]

That level of control would be unthinkable in college, where principles of academic freedom are widely accepted to give instructors the latitude to air provocative and even offensive topics. But the inescapable conclusion – that a student could be disciplined for speech that would be constitutionally protected if uttered by a nonstudent – is equally unsustainable. If words are inappropriate for a college audience and might be confused for the government’s speech when uttered by a student, then they are doubly so when said by an adult authority figure.

Quick, fun read: Superman quits the paper.

Tomorrow I’ll use this picture as an argument for taking your camera everywhere:

truckfire

Took that picture five years ago and remember it like it was yesterday. Not for the picture. I just happened upon that as I drove to a visitation.