The first day of class, take two. After Tuesday’s snow and ice event turned into a systemic and region-wide calamity, our campus was closed for a while. They sent down the CANCELED notices at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Things returned to normal on Saturday. Which is overstating things. Campus was passable by Wednesday. The roads were finally usable by Thursday, when the cold weather broke. But Friday, it just felt like people needed a rest. At least that was part of the reasoning.
Folks had been working for three days straight – and straight is used in the literal sense. You could tell that people just needed a break. I’m sure there were some other logistical reasons and probably even larger, perfectly fine rationale, but at the end of it all, the administrators decided that campus would be closed on Friday. Most on campus activities started again over the weekend. Classes resumed today. (And if you had a Tuesday afternoon class, or later, you hadn’t even met yet.)
Walking in today, then, we started all over again. It seemed liked it had been three weeks since we met last, anyway.
Various things in the class, as they were put into place, proved that missing last Wednesday because of the weather was actually a big deal. Many things had to be re-juggled. How this happened since we lost only one day, I’m not sure, but it took a while to put the moveable parts around the immovable parts in a way that made sense for the larger aims of the class.
So I rebuilt and rearranged parts of the syllabus.
This is the class where we ask students to start thinking about news products in critical terms. So I have them critique the news that they see and hear and read. I have them do this online, so they can learn at least one content management system this term and have place to start putting their news clips, too. We used to have students build faux-websites in Dreamweaver, but that presented unique problems on two or three fronts, so I’ve just streamlined the effort and now we use WordPress. Which means that, today, we spent all day talking about Dashboard.
It isn’t the most exciting day of the term, but it is useful. And I get to show off a cool site or two (like this one) and demonstrate how easy it is to be a modern publisher. I did not make, however, my international author joke. So I have to make sure to get that one in class next Monday.
Also, I need to remember, here, to cross link to things I publish on my multimedia blog. Here are the most recent items now:
Simple, effective storytelling
Things to read … because you haven’t yet read enough.
High quality navel-gazing here, Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present:
Six decades after Hartley wrote his famous line, the past is no longer a foreign land. Instead we’ve brought a weirdly literal truth to William Faulkner’s famously sphinxlike aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Take the Kennedy assassination, for instance. In honor of the event’s 50th anniversary last November, CBS streamed four straight days of its news broadcast from the period surrounding the killing so you could experience what it had been like in real time. Or consider this: World War II buffs can download radio broadcasts and listen to the rise of Hitler or the news from D-Day as you would have heard them back then.
More often, though, we don’t immerse ourselves in history; it’s just there whenever we want it, living right alongside the present. We can trace ideas backward in time, either by searching Google Books or (for a sum) through thousands of academic journals, using a few keywords to find sources that once were the sole domain of historians. Pick any historical subject and the Internet will bring it to life before your eyes. If you’re interested in vaudeville, you’ll find videos galore, while college football scholars can browse Penn State’s 1924 yearbook, complete with all the players’ names and positions. And every day, more history keeps washing up. Not long ago the news went out that a Philadelphia woman named Marion Stokes had recorded 140,000 VHS tapes of local and national news from 1977 to her death in 2012. Her collection has been acquired by the Internet Archive, and soon it will trickle onto the web.
This omnipresence of the past has weird effects on contemporary culture. Take any genre of music, from death metal to R&B to chillwave, and the cloud directs you not just to similar artists in the present but to deep wells of influence from the past. Yes, people still like new things. But the past gets as much preference as the present—Mozart, for example, has more than 100,000 followers on Spotify. In a history glut, the idea of fashionability in music erodes, because new songs sit on the same shelf as songs recorded five, 25, and 55 years ago, all of them waiting to be discovered. In this eternal present, everything can be made contemporary.
Just wait until the next time you see a favorite actor that you see regularly from some production from the 1980s or 1990s. And then, when you see them now, think of reading that again.
Why is local news innovation struggling financially while national thrives?:
Why does digital news media seem so vibrant on the national level and so anemic on the local level?
First, venture capitalists and other professional investors have little interest in businesses focused on one community. News is tough enough to make money on but at least if you’re national you can generate massive numbers of ad impressions and the possibility of Amazonian reach. Venture capital investors can only get 5x return or more for businesses that promise national or global scale.
[…]
Another challenge faced by local news startups relates to the nature of digital advertising. Because national digital properties – Google, Yahoo, AOL – can target ads to particular zip codes, local advertisers can reach their customers through them, without having to advertise with a local company. In effect, a local media company is now competing for ad dollars not only with the other media in town but with massive, national institutions with better technology and larger sales forces.
Also, infrastructure. The local shops need to be well-staffed with talented people. If you don’t have that, you won’t have much. Sadly, there have been a lot of cuts across the industry of old hands. Meanwhile, the younger staff that were hired to replace them, typically in a digital capacity or one-man band scenarios, are still learning their craft. Audiences pick up on that sort of thing.
The most convoluted lead of the day, and it isn’t the reporter’s fault. Kerry, Hagel urge ‘transatlantic renaissance’ to confront political and security challenges
MUNICH — In an unusual joint appearance overseas, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told European allies Saturday that Washington would depend more heavily on them to tackle a litany of political and security crises, even as the two pushed back against concerns that the Obama administration was abdicating leadership on the same issues.
And, finally, about that Super Bowl Coke ad:
So let me get this straight. A nation of immigrants is supposed to be offended that a happy song about it is sung in many languages?
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) February 3, 2014
