November « 2014 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

November, 2014

Does this guy look familiar to you?

Yesterday I spent a few minute hanging some newspapers in our newsroom. I took a few ancient issues from frames that were tucked away in a corner and replaced them with more recent and better copy. Now we have a wall that shows off a strong front page from each of the last four years. It looks nice.

But that means I have some old yellow newspapers on my desk. And that means I got to read through them today. And that means I took pictures of the good stuff. Like this guy:

This pair were in the paper because they’d just had a great run at a national debate tournament. They placed in the top 10, having beaten Harvard and MIT and others along the way. Samford’s second team had a great showing, too, but, really, I think we can all admit now that the hair had something to do with it.

He has a very common name, which is a bummer, or I’d look him up and see what what road life has offered him. The newspaper is from 1978, and so many of the folks here are often well placed in their careers. Indeed, among the 1978 newspaper staff there is now a university provost, a reverend, an attorney, pediatrician, professor and more. They seem to have done well for themselves.

You can see a few more items from this 1978 newspaper on my Tumblr site, here, here, here, here and here.

The lead story in that issue was this guy who would soon have a concert on campus:

I have an entire drawer of clips from the 70s and 80s in my office. I’ll get to them soon. The Crimson is celebrating its 100th anniversary in the spring, so we’ll be looking at things a lot farther back than the Carter years. Even still, that hair was worth seeing, right?

The best 3:40 commercial you’ll see this year, and it is based in historical truth some 100 years ago:

There’s also a “making of” video and an “about our video” video. Because if you’re going to run a 3:40 spot, even online, go all out.

A history teacher friend of mine found that online. I was just having a conversation about why history is or isn’t interesting to people, and it so often comes down to the person in the front of a classroom somewhere. I had one great history teacher that made the things she taught about people and their emotions and motivations and not just names and dates, and here I am. I suspect that my history teacher friend, passionate as she is about her subject matter, inspires her students too.

Things to read … because a simple story can inspire, too.

100 years young, Tennessee woman sees the coast for the first time in Orange Beach:

Ruby Holt has seen a lot of things in her 100 years and counting (she’ll turn 101 next month) on this earth. She’s seen two world wars, a Great Depression, 17 presidents and more than a few hard times. But she’d never seen the beach until this week.

Holt made the six-hour trip from the Sterling House senior living facility in Columbia, Tenn., to fulfill a long-time dream of seeing the shore.

(That story made it on the BBC, too.)

Unfortunate news here, Boeing layoffs target 130 jobs in Huntsville, elsewhere

I’d want to change them too often, so I better not put my pictures on my shoes, How adidas puts your images on their shoes:

adidas has let the buying public in on a little secret: the ability to step into a production line with their own shoe design.

[…]

The concept started when adidas began promoting their own product with satellite images of cities such as London, Moscow and Berlin. “The design team was really amazed by the quality of the prints, which led to lively discussions about what other prints we could create,” Schumacher says. “This sparked the idea for an app.”

Customization, the micro-wave of today, the artist’s feet of the future.

The rhetoric being used here is something else, Apple and Others Encrypt Phones, Fueling Government Standoff:

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department delivered a blunt message last month to Apple Inc. executives: New encryption technology that renders locked iPhones impervious to law enforcement would lead to tragedy. A child would die, he said, because police wouldn’t be able to scour a suspect’s phone, according to people who attended the meeting.

If Disney features animals and toys talking behind our backs, and Tron was about the inner-workings of video games … well, wait until someone like Pixar gets a line on this, The Secret Life of Passwords

And that should just about be enough for today. Come back soon. There is always more to see.

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20
Nov 14

The historic marker series

We return once more to documenting the county’s historic markers, where I pedal my bicycle all over the county looking for the markers. This makes the 32nd you’ve seen in this series so far:

This field had corn in it in this picture, but the plot allows agronomists to study fertilization on a 3-year rotation of cotton, corn, wheat and soybean. The researchers would tell you there are few places in the country where you can see the effect of such dramatic deficiencies of plant nutrients. The experiment continues now into its second century. You can read about it on the markers page. And you check out the full run of markers here. (Click through the pins on the map on that page’s banner to explore some of the other local historic locations.)

Enjoy, happy pedaling and happy reading!

journalism / links / music / photo / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Nov 14

Winter breaks, and now to spring, right?

It has been cold. We have enjoyed bitter cold. Or, perhaps, the opposite. These last few days a few places have reported wind chills at 12 degrees. Twice we’ve had weather stations reporting morning lows lower than you can find on the northern shores of the 49th state.

When it is warmer in Barrow, Alaska …

But it has all turned a bit today, when it is only chilly. It isn’t the sort of “Oh we’re used to it, and so now it is just chilly” sort of day, but rather an invigorating sort of “take it outside while there’s still warmth in the sun to enjoy” kind of chilly.

I watched a lot of it pass by from my window, as usual.

So this guy goes on Chatroulette and gets people to sing songs with him. This is very helpful since I somehow found myself in a conversation about Taylor Swift today. I was able to retort with this:

If you didn’t watch, allow me to try one more time: I’m not sure if I preferred the Spiderman-Batman interaction or the grandma making it rain.

In class today we talked about user generated content, which I can sum up in one business card-sized image for anyone interested in curation and aggregation:

The Verification Handbook, an invaluable resource, has more on the subject if you’re interested.

That’s what they don’t see …

Sometimes that song isn’t so good, no?

One of our students, who is awesome:

@kennysmith My friends asked me why they haven't seen me in 9 days. I told them the @SamfordCrimson is a lifestyle, not a hobby.

— Emily Featherston (@feathers_878) November 20, 2014

Things to read … which are also awesome.

Polygraph Critic Charged with Training People to Thwart Polygraphs:

Williams is admitting to the charges. But why is his action a crime? Polygraphs have been notoriously unreliable for decades and their results are inadmissible in court because of that. A campaign to further undermine confidence in the technology is, if anything, laudable.

Nielsen to Measure Netflix Viewing:

Even as Netflix Inc. and other streaming-video providers have expanded to reach 40% of American homes, they have largely remained black boxes. They have refused to share data on how many viewers watch TV shows on their services, and there has been little independent data.

This looks to be about licensing, but I wonder if it will account for the times I inevitably fall asleep watching while I’m streaming something.

family / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
18
Nov 14

‘Oh, I remember that’

Had dinner with my mom tonight. She was in town and this was the first time she’s had the opportunity to see my part of campus. We ate Italian and almost closed that place down, and then she got the nickel tour of my office and the newsroom and our department.

She got to meet most of the editorial staff and watched them wrestle with the thorny issue of the day for a tiny bit.

I walked her around and showed her our Wall of Fame and the old newspapers framed in the classrooms. She remembers this and that — and she’s welcome for my not tipping off her age by historical allusion.

She didn’t remember anything from the 1925 paper, of course.

Sadly I remember most of the front pages we display, too. Our students would remember one, but even that only vaguely.

I sat in one of our classrooms and we watched the beginning of the Arab Spring streamed from the BBC. Hard to put a web stream in a frame, unfortunately.

Things to read … because you could print these out and frame them, I guess.

She was from a locally prominent newspaper family and an accomplished writer, Elise Ayers Sanguinetti dies at 90

Here’s something she wrote decades ago, Elise Sanguinetti’s ode to the Kilby House:

Perhaps houses are like people, after all. They are born, pass through their youngling years, stand in middle age, receive the patina of age, and when it is willed, die – in spite of words like “best” and “progress,” the latter so often ill-defined.

Yesterday we walked through the grounds of the Kilby house on Woodstock Avenue. It was drizzling and in the distance the fine old Georgian house stood before us, its dark green shutters closed, the red brick veiled in mist. And like a trick of the mind it was only as if someone were merely away for a while. Soon there would be returnings; it would all be as it was before–twenty years and more.

The past is a still-life, a moment caught in time: We are 10, perhaps nine, a speck in a fading day. The high-back wicker chairs are on the terrace front. The men are talking. They are talking rather excitedly, it seems to us a child, of the Scouts, the price of cotton, unfair freight rates, political frailties. When will the South recover? They ask. How? When will it EVER recover? And over the pines there is red in the sky and we, a shadow, vaguely listen, for time stretched out forever then, and this was only an afternoon, one late afternoon in a series of noons and afternoons and nights, sitting and listening and watching the sky grow red above the pines.

She had a way about writing about being in a room without being too much in the room. That’s a great compliment for a writer.

Nothing about this story surprises anymore. Shame, that. New data show long wait times remain at many VA hospitals:

More than 600,000 veterans — 10% of all the Veterans Affairs patients — continue to wait a month or more for appointments at VA hospitals and clinics, according to data obtained by USA TODAY.

The VA has made some progress in dealing with the backlog of cases that forced former secretary Eric Shinseki to retire early this year. For instance, the VA substantially cut the overall number of worst-case scenarios for veterans — those who had waited more than four months for an appointment. That figure dropped from 120,000 in May to 23,000 in October. Much of that improvement occurred because patients received care from private providers.

The wave of the present, Publishers Sell Sponsored Content Made for Instagram, Snapchat:

Campaigns like those from Wired, InStyle and Teen Vogue are attractive to advertisers looking for new ways to connect with audiences, said Mr. Shlachter at DigitasLBi. “To breakthrough in the media ecosystem today requires a myriad of tactics,” he added.

But there are also risks involved. A tin-eared brand showing up in a publishers’ social feed might turn off followers. That’s why, for instance, Wired tapped influencers for the Victorinox campaign and InStyle enlists its own staff to create Instagram and Snapchat content for advertisers. “Above all, no matter what you’re doing, be authentic and true to your brand as well as the audience,” Mr. Shlachter said.

It isn’t every day I link to PR Newswire, but, USA TODAY Introduces First-Ever Customized Campus News App:

USA TODAY announces the launch of The Buzz, a mobile app that delivers customized news to the digital-first generation of students across the country. A first-of-its kind, The Buzz reinvents campus news by offering college students access to targeted and relevant information, incorporating national, world and personalized campus news into one, easy-to-use mobile interface. Content will be specifically gathered from USA TODAY and USA TODAY College, as well as individual college papers. Future product integration will include content from Gannett’s U.S. Community Publishing newspapers and user-generated content.

The Buzz is the mobile extension of USA TODAY’s celebrated Collegiate Readership Program — which originated at Penn State in 1997 and is now present at over 350 campuses — combining USA TODAY’s rich tradition of delivering news and information on the national and local level with the inclusion of a robust digital product. Designed and tailored specifically for each individual school, The Buzz app lets readers search their national, regional, and campus news – most of which is student written, tapping into more than 3,000 USA TODAY College contributors – by topic areas such as news, sports, tech and opinion.

And, finally, Getting a job in journalism code is a good Q&A from recent grads. That could be juxtaposed with What journalism students need to learn now. It is a sophisticated world out there.

New update to the Glomerata section below. More tomorrow.

Glomerata — 1 Comment
18
Nov 14

Glomeratas

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 1924 edition. If you click this book’s cover you can see the 1920 Glom.

It was only 94 years ago when this 1920 book was landing in students’ hands for the first time. Teddy Roosevelt was gone. Woodrow Wilson, himself ill, stepped down. World War I was still very much on the top of minds, even as the wartime economic boom evaporated. Treaties, the League of Nations, and non-intervention policies were the big national topics. The year previous there were widespread streaks in meatpacking and steel. Race riots in major cities and anarchist attacks in New York. Warren G. Harding would that fall be elected president. Thomas Kilby, a Tennessee boy, was a railroad agent and successful businessman who had made his living in Anniston. He became mayor, a state legislator and then the lieutenant governor. In 1919 he took the oath as governor of Alabama. The next year he ended the deadly 1920 coal strike. No one ever talks about that. It is easy to see why.

Numismatic trivia: Kilby was put on the Alabama centennial half dollar in 1921, making him the first living person to appear on a U.S. coin.

Across the state, lawmakers and the University of Alabama were playing political games that would cripple Auburn for years. It hampered and highlighted the administration of the university president, Charles C. Thach. He served as president from 1902 until 1919. When he started the university’s only income was from a fertilizer tax. An illuminating oil tax and a barely upheld contribution from the state legislature helped. A little. Also, in the teens:

Not long after the Carnegie Foundation report appeared in print, an employee of the Montgomery Advertiser forwarded to API a draft article President Denny had submitted for publication in that paper. The informant believed the article contained thinly veiled attacks on API. Among other things, Denny wrote that the “choice young men and women” of the state wanted to attend the University of Alabama because it was known throughout the country, not within the “narrow confines” of a single state. He charged that some of the “so-called colleges” had been accepting students without adequate high school preparation. Shortly thereafter, API began to require the standard fourteen units of high school work for unconditional admission. Under President Thach’s calm and cool leadership, Alabama Polytechnic Institute weathered the storm of criticism with dignity.

By the time of the 1915 quadrennial session, API still had not received the $200,000 approved by the legislature in 1911.

And that’s the way it went for Thach. When he stepped down for health reasons at the end of 1919, and died the next year, that state money was apparently still out there, somewhere. It was all just the opening act for what would be a tumultuous decade in the 1920s.

In the fall of 1919 the first Army transcontinental motor convoy, an expedition across America, reached San Francisco. A young unknown lieutenant colonel, Dwight Eisenhower, was a part of the 3,251 mile, 62 days journey. Chicago had its Black Sox scandal. The Spanish flu petered out. Andy Rooney, Jackie Robinson, Pete Seeger and George Wallace were born in 1919. In the first half of 1920 API students heard about the New York Yankees acquiring that guy, Babe Ruth from Boston. Prohibition began. That June, The United States Post Office Department ruled that children could not be sent via parcel post. Apparently that happened, and it is important that you know it. James Doohan and Jack Webb were born in 1920, as was Karol Józef Wojtyła, who you would know as Pope John Paul II.

Anyway, you can walk through all the covers if you start here. For a detailed look at selected volumes, you might enjoy this link. Here is the university’s official collection.