I found the perfect 20 mile route around town this evening. Leave the house, pedal around the loop and add on this road and that and come down the last hill and then up through the neighborhood and 20.00 on the Cateye, precisely. Remarkable.
And I was only almost hit by a car once. This never ceases to amaze me. On any country road around here people will move way over to the left as they go by. Get on one of the four lane roads and they’ll get as close to you as possible, even if every other lane is open to their use. Today this particular driver was obviously unprepared or unmoved by the three feet law — 36 lousy inches, that’s what you’re supposed to give. Had I been glancing down at my gears, and had my left shoulder or right foot been down at the time, I would have drifted just a bit and that car would have hit me. It was chillingly close, which is a delightful way to make you question if you’re full comfortable in the saddle again.
Anyway, lovely ride notwithstanding. A little faster than I’ve recently been, but still nothing worth mentioning. The heart rate is the thing, and all that.
Some things to read: Salesman: Bama players used spray:
Key said players bought products at a rate he cited as confidential.
“They want to win,” he said. “After the games they said they couldn’t believe how they weren’t tired and how much energy they had.”
I know they are sports writers, but even those guys should be able to identify when they are giving unscrupulous commercials to people. I don’t really care one way or another about this story as a sports story. It is frustrating how the reporters have really allowed themselves to be complicit in these miracle elixir pitchmen to glam themselves up. That’s a shame.
Oral history of the Super Bowl Shuffle, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Or taxes, if you prefer. Alabama tax system lands in ‘terrible 10’.
I like this one, Eight ways journalists can use SoundCloud:
1. To post news programming
2. To report from the field and post audio from interviews
3. Record, edit and upload a recording from an iPhone
There are a lot of great ideas and details there.
And, finally, a real thinker: How to redesign the beat for engagement, impact, and accountability:
Instead of going to the candidates and talking to them about their agendas, we flipped it. We made a public call: We’re coming to your neighborhood. Show us what needs fixing. We then sent a reporter into each district for one week. The reporters did ride-alongs with locals, quizzed residents, and found out what city-level issues mattered to them.
We wrote about those community needs. Then, we took that residents’ agenda back to the candidates and asked what they would do to address it.
The approach sparked a series of revelations that have reshaped how I look at the fundamental choices we make as journalists. It turns out our coverage for years had been focused on things that didn’t seem to matter all that much to even active San Diego residents.
There’s a difference between monologuing and conversing.
This is the sixth and cumulative point of a draft plan I’m writing on right now, it falls in step neatly with that, and may be helpful in preparing young journalists for the world they’ll one day enter:
Engage your audience. Ask for their questions. Get and share the answers from appropriate sources. Follow your most active readers and repost their most compelling material. Engagement becomes reporting, which draws more readers, who increase your engagement. Remember: the audience, in the aggregate, is always going to know more than you as an individual.
“‘Twas always thus, and always thus shall be.”
Check out the historic marker series earlier? Breeze through the full and growing site! There’s always Twitter! And Tumblr too!
