We hope you enjoyed Catember. Allie enjoyed being famous on the Internet. It was another successful month of showing off, cat hijinx and being cute. Life is hard for a black cat.
She’s curled up sleeping somewhere as I write this.
What do you suppose this is?
I caught the quickest glimpse of it on the freeway. The left lane is closed for repaving. The big orange barrels that come with road work are jutting out into the newly redone right line far enough that you’re driving at least halfway onto the shoulder. Fortunately, that was recently paved as well. At least the traffic is moving through the area, and the work is high quality. It is one of three or four stretches of road construction between here and there on that interstate.
None of which explains what that device does. I think it might perhaps have something to do with lane marking, but you can’t see a paint container there.
Things to read … because … we have to fill our own paint containers?
How media outlets are ‘gamifying’ the news:
News organizations are increasingly turning to video games to attract online readers, especially younger ones. The games hold promise — not just in terms of generating more readers and traffic hits, but in terms of helping people understand and consume news in different ways.
[…]
“It’s important for us and our journalists to not allow a medium to develop that we’re not going to at least explore,” Anthony DeBarros, director of interactive applications at Gannett Digital, said in a Digiday story this week. “It’s important to understand how we can be a part of an emerging medium.”
There are several great examples of emerging ideas in that story, including work from the European Journalism Centre and Al Jazeera.
How newsrooms can make the most of their archives:
In 1950 William Faulkner wrote “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” in his novel Requium for a Nun. However, the quote gained renewed attention in 2008 when then-candidate Obama gave a major speech on race in America. Obama was tapping into the archives of American culture to add context to the news of the day and connect that moment to the long and troubled history of race in America.
The Internet has made this idea of the past living alongside – and interwoven with – the present more true now than ever. Today, even relatively new newsrooms have vast and quickly growing archives of work to tap into and build upon. These archives hold huge potential to add context to current events, fuel community engagement and even serve as a new revenue stream.
Tablet Magazines Are Lousy, But J-Schools Can Make Them Better:
Though Apple claims it has sold more than 200 million iPads since 2010, not many of those users subscribe to magazines. Replica digital magazines accounted for only 3.8 percent of total paid circulation in the first half of 2014, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. To put this in perspective: National Geographic won the National Magazine Award for best tablet magazine this year. The Geographic’s paid print circulation is 3.5 million. Circulation for the tablet edition: 164,408. The “best” the industry has to offer amounts to less than 5 percent of paid circulation. (Blame the AAM, in part, for the industry’s reliance on tedious replica apps; they are the only versions counted in a publication’s rate base, which help determine its ad rates.)
While magazines are still producing tablet issues, they haven’t saved the industry like we hoped. But that doesn’t stop journalism schools from making them a focal point in the curriculum.
The White House Wants to Reveal Where Government Drones Fly:
The White House is getting ready to send out an order to make agencies open up data on where they fly drones and what happens to all of the data they collect.
Right now, only the government is actually allowed to fly drones legally. Commercial drone use is banned by the FAA, although it gave out several permits to movie and television production companies to let them use drones, and gave unique permission to a company in Texas to let it use drones in a search and rescue mission.
The new executive order would specifically tell federal agencies to open up data on its drone fleets that it has kept secret for years. Although the new rules would cover all federal agencies, the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have the largest fleets and would be most affected by the disclosure rules.
We talked about this today in a Crimson meeting. I am no expert on the extent of this issue, but it is an interesting topic that comes to light from time to time, and should be held up for examination more frequently, Reports on college crime are deceptively inaccurate:
The crime statistics being released by colleges nationwide on Wednesday are so misleading that they give students and parents a false sense of security.
Even the U.S. Department of Education official who oversees compliance with a federal law requiring that the statistics be posted on Oct. 1 each year admits that they are inaccurate. Jim Moore said that a vast majority of schools comply with the law but some purposely underreport crimes to protect their images; others have made honest mistakes in attempting to comply.
In addition, weaknesses in the law allow for thousands of off-campus crimes involving students to go unreported, and the Education Department does little to monitor or enforce compliance with the law — even when colleges report numbers that seem questionable.
Here are Samford’s published data covering 2011 through 2013 and for September 2014. I wonder if there is a story there …
