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My family is now convinced I am a picker

Which is funny, because when I first saw American Pickers, which introduced me to that entire group of people, I immediately thought “That’s the job I should have.”

It’s like they invented it for me. You get to prowl and learn things? And there’s money to be made doing those two things?

I’m pretty sure I developed my prowling and curiosity at my grandparents’ place. So many things you didn’t see all of the time, so many things that were different than what little you knew about anything. So many things that spanned ages of time — to a child at least. A lot of stuff got kept by my grandparents — and yet my grandmother also had a clean house.

But the storage building out back … well, I spent all afternoon in there today. We spent time in there as children, probably hide-and-seek and trying to figure out the boxes and stacks of things. I’m sure some of this stuff hasn’t been touched in years, or more. And today I glanced around a few rooms, but concentrated on the books.

Here’s something that belonged to my uncle as a boy. You can buy My Name is Pablo for pennies on Amazon or a few bucks on ebay. But that cover art is great:

This is on the inside cover of the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia aimed at elementary and middle school students. My mom told me she would sit and read these for hours. It was one of three encyclopedia sets I found, but it obviously has the best illustrations:

This car art just jumps out:

This is the cover to another book you can buy online for pennies, Fifty Famous Americans. The dust jacket is gone, which is a shame, because it apparently featured a great Wright Brothers illustration.

That book was written in the 1940s and so, happily, there isn’t a single reality TV star listed. Here’s the inside cover:

My grandfather was a ham radio operator and owned an electronics store and was apparently a varied reader. This isn’t a book I’d ever read, but you could see he might have a reason to consult it, also, the cover is terrific:

My grandfather was so cool, he had things like this:

And this just scratches the surface. I learned a fair amount about my grandfather today, just digging through dusty stacks of wonderful old pulp. I’m glad to have the opportunity to see and hold and laugh over some of the things he read and wrote. Inside those many pages there will be plenty more to share. Clearly I’m going to have to revitalize his section of my site.

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30
Oct 13

Signs of autumn: The absence of summer

It wasn’t fall today. It was 75 and clear, which means it wasn’t summer, so it may as well be autumn. The maple in the front yard, already giving up the fight, right in the heart of the tree.

The maples are always the first to quit, but they sometimes hang on a bit longer than some of the others in the yard. In the front yard we have this maple that goes yellow and a towering elm that flares yellow before burning out as a dry orange. In the backyard there is a southern red oak, a white oak and a few pin oaks — the oaks the rest of the oaks would disown if they had hardwood lawyers — another maple that turns yellow and a dogwood that will flame out as a defiant red any day now.

If you could get all of those in one spot they’d surely be a beautiful collection.

Had this in the office today:

I’m not a big pumpkin spice fan, but if you like pumpkin at all, you should try the Hersey’s Kisses. Two was plenty for me, so no need to share. But you’ll probably want to keep them all for yourself.

Things to read …

Or watch. The BBC now has a hexacopter. They have one more copter than I do. Maybe one day I’ll catch up. But check out those shots. (I’d embed it, but the Beeb’s code is ridiculous.)

I was reading last night, in Rick Atkinson’s book, about Lt. Ralph Kerley at Mortain. He only appeared briefly, but it was enough to make me look him up. Whatever happened to that guy? The Internet suggests he mustered out a lieutenant colonel and died in his native Texas in 1967.

He also shows up in this column by The Oregonian’s Steve Duin, which should really change your opinion of the deceased author/historian Stephen Ambrose:

Weiss also was furious that Ambrose had described his commanding officer, Lt. Ralph Kerley, as — after four days and nights of fighting off the Germans — “exhausted, discombobulated, on the edge of breaking.”

Not true, Weiss said: “To the dishonor of the man. Kerley was one of the coolest, most fearless men I’ve ever seen. The way (Ambrose) footnoted that looks as if he got the material from me. If in that little bit of material he took from my book he created that kind of fiction, how many other times has that been done?”

Bob Weiss was a Portland, Ore. lawyer who served under Kerley. Weiss took exception to the Ambrose depiction and then had a nasty bit of correspondence with Ambrose over some other questions of attribution. But, mostly, Weiss was worried about the way Kerley showed up in Citizen Soldiers — which also sits on my shelf, though today I’m a bit reluctant about that.

Kerley earned the Croix de Guerre, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. I was at Mortain for the exact same amount of time Ambrose was, which is to say not at all, which is also to say six days less than Weiss, Kerley and the 120th Infantry Regiment of the 30th Infantry Division. I just read the Ambrose passage again … given his history let’s just call it poorly-written narrative.

Anyway, local veterans are recalling their experiences in the military:

“I flew a B-25. That’s why I’m here,” Buford Robinson said, smiling. “I flew 43 missions.”

From 1944 to 1946, Robinson served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps. He fought in the Pacific Theater of the war and participated in the rescue of 500 American POWs at Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines.

Thom Gossom, the first African-American walk on at Auburn and the first African-American athlete to graduate from the university, got a bit of publicity today. He’s an actor today (and author), charming and engaging and wholly approachable. Here’s a story he told at homecoming a few years ago:

Quick hits:

ObamaCare screw up sends callers to cupcake shop

From Buzzfeed: Things That Took Less Time Than HealthCare.gov

How the NSA is infiltrating private networks

Insurance Insiders ‘Fear Retribution’ from WH Amid Pressure to ‘Keep Quiet’ About Obamacare

Broadcast’s Commercial Brake

And there are two new things at the Tumblr site I forgot to mention yesterday, here and here.

Allie? She’s right here:

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28
Oct 13

No pigs were harmed in this post; Ritz crackers damaged

Doctor’s appointment first thing. You arrive precisely at 8 a.m., you are seen right away. Didn’t even have the opportunity to get settled in the waiting room. Or in the examination room. Everything was … unsettled, then.

No. The doctor is a fine fellow, the very personification of sincerity. Firm hand, assuring tone, appropriate levels of sincere concern. We were in and out in no time. All things are proceeding accordingly, nothing to be concerned or alarmed about. All blue skies from here, as they say.

So the lesson is be the first appointment of the day, or you’re waiting for 90 minutes.

A grocery store run for provisions. This, too, is the time of day to be there. I found the crackers. Do you know how many varieties of Ritz crackers there are available to you today? I’ll document this on the next visit, as I was in a bit of a rush today, but there are more non-Ritz flavored Ritz crackers than there are Ritz crackers now. I just want a few sleeves of Ritz-flavored Ritz crackers.

That’s a problem of the 21st century, if ever there was one.

So while that was bemusing, the bread choices were underwhelming. We are a two-brand household. If it is on sale we get the Arnold bread, but it was not on the shelves and the buy-one-get-one signs were not on display. So I turned to the Nature’s Own, which has that comforting title and those marvelous symbols of Midwestern enterprise: wheat and a sugar jar. One loaf of that, one box of crackers, one box of Ibuprofen and (success!) I found English Teatime. Which means I should back up.

In the last half of the summer I cut way back on my tea intake. It turns out I can drink a lot of tea. So we’ve made exactly one large pitcher in the house since July. However, we’re enjoying more and more hot teas. We have an entire shelf in a cabinet stuff with packets we’ve purchased or picked up or been given over time. So there is a lot of sampling going on. Lately I’ve settled on three favorites (because I drink a lot of tea). The problem being I ran out of the preferred variety. I’d visited the giant box store with no luck, but now, at Publix, where shopping is a pleasure, I found the English Teatime again. So I bought a box today.

I’m trying to arrange the part of the day I would drink these in: English Breakfast, Mint and English Teatime. The mint is obviously an after-dinner treat. The Teatime varieties that I’ve had have, thus far, seemed strong than the Breakfast stuff. Though there are people who disagree. All of those reviews came from 1,367 reviews of the Bigelow brand on Amazon. Of those, 15 mentioned Teatime. If there’s one thing we’ve come to love, it is sharing our sometimes-insightful opinions with others. Here are a few more reviews. The downside, of course, being you don’t know what is going on with these folks, and how do you address the reviews that diametrically oppose one another? Of course the lay review is sometimes better than a professional effort, which can seem officious for tea.

Even better are the reviews on Steepster. There are some people in that community who are very casual with their reflections, and others who are trying a bit too hard. (Simply put, did you like it? Was it strong or weak? What was the flavor like? Let’s move on.) Some of them, however, offer incredible bits of biography into the things they write. Seule771, who has commented there 587 times, and presumably mostly about tea, writes:

This tea belongs to my mother-in-law yet, I help myself to a cup of this tea every now and again, as she takes notice of the tea bags missing. I take one tea bag and put it in my cup adding the boiled water to it. Tea colors right away to a pinkish dew, not dark red but more like mahogany; rose-wood red and smells very robust as fine black teas tend to. When sipping of the tea it is malty with creamy texture. This is a fine cup of tea and I don’t need to add a thing to it.

In all, this tea has a lovely color and aroma of a freshly brewed cup of tea; robust in texture and body with an invigorating aroma to waken or refresh one’s mid-day drawling of sobering thoughts. This is an ideal cup of tea for all occasions.

Makes you wonder what the mother-in-law thinks of the tea, and tea theft in general.

Steepster invites you to “dive into the universe of tea.” But they still don’t offer a simple chart that has “Ease into a restive night” on one end, “Tea for brunches sanguine or sublime” in the middle and “Pulls your taste buds through your eyelids with a domineering efficacy that will remind you of countries lax on human rights policies” on the other end.

This is a tea chart we could all use.

But I digress. Purchasing crackers, bread, Ibuprofen and tea I wondered what the cashier thinks when you checkout by the handful. No one ever gives a consideration to the idea that he or she is judging you when you have a great big cart full of groceries. “Restocking the shelves at home. Big weekend ahead, no doubt,” is about all that the unimaginative cashier could have for that. But when you bring up four items, you get judged, pal. “This guy is having cracker sandwiches. Guess he never heard of Atkins.” And from there that imagination really kicks in.

The great mystery of the day was also found at Publix, where the staff is under strict order to be conversant with everyone that it could be said made plausible eye contact. I guess they have meetings after hours and watch the camera footage. “Jenkins, you ignored two ladies on the canned veggies aisle. One more of those and you’re gone!”

An assistant manager, I saw him just enough to catch that part of his tag, did the standard hello and how are you today. He was walking one way and I was walking the other. By the time I’d given the expected reply he was already ticking off inventory on the cake aisle. Hard to see the point.

Class today featured profile features and editing and the great question “How do I find out about a person’s warts?” One student searched and searched and finally pronounced that Josh Groban, in fact, has no warts. He is, it was revealed, perfect in every way. So there you have it: Jesus and Josh Groban.

She did find a Groban wart — which sounds like an unfortunate looking thing that can be removed in an easy outpatient procedure — but then later conveniently discarded it. The previous narrative was better.

Also, in the class I discovered a book on the Three Little Pigs. This edition was a bit more detailed than I remembered.

It seemed the momma pig pushed them out. The first two got by on begging and convincing naive farmers to gimme gimme. Alas, the most jubilantly drawn wolf possible blew down their homes of straw and sticks. The pigs disappeared just in time, never to be seen again. (One had a racquetball tournament, the other a drinking problem.) The third pig won some bricks in a radio station contest — or stuck up a brick mason, I forget — and built Fortress Porcine. It could not be defeated without air superiority, of which the wolf had none.

So the wolf went the other direction, guile. There are turnips nearby, let’s go get them together. This pig, smart enough to take out a loan from Freddie Mac to obtain bricks and mortar, went early and enjoyed the turnips. So tomorrow, the wolf said, let’s try this apple orchard. The wolf, wise to the pig’s game yesterday, also arrived early, but not earlier enough. An hour earlier still, because this pig has insomnia, the pig was up a tree. Never mind how that pig got there. He escaped by the ancient art of distraction and Canidae ADHD.

So the wolf later said, hey, I know this fair, only we have to go there at 3 a.m. The pig, desperate to watch another installment of Adam Levine on a late night Proactive infomercial, reluctantly agreed. But, again he went early. And, again, the wolf almost caught him, but the pig, remembering his ancient Greek — remember, this is the big that baked his own bricks and watches television and scales trees — hid in a butter churn and rolled home right past the antagonist. Porcum ex machina, if you will.

These are the geekiest jokes I’ve made in some time, no?

Recruiting calls into the evening. You leave a lot of messages, you slow down to say your phone number so it can be written down. You always are a little concerned that you might have transposed a few digits.

Occasionally they call you back. Every so often you catch a student at home and they are very excited about the prospect of talking to you. You get to tell this young person all of the cool things that are going on in your department. You mention the neat places students intern and the awesome jobs they get one day.

You forget entirely that, for some reason, there was a Three Little Pigs book in the classroom today.

Then a bite to eat and reading and writing this and doing other things that I couldn’t make into a silly play on words. It is a fine life.

Things to read …

This story has the best quote about a silly adventure imaginable. People wobbled but the record didn’t go down:

“Everything that could go wrong went wrong between rehearsal and execution,” she said at halftime. “We had some folks to come late, we had microphone problems, we had sound and speaker problems, we had some timing problems. But it does not mean we’re going to give up.”

Not to worry, Gene Hallman, president of the Alabama Sports Foundation, tells us: “The Mayor will make sure the PA works properly next year.”

This is a great relief to everyone, except people holding the current Wobble record, one assumes. I’m uncertain what that number is, or if Guinness recognizes it. None of the stories I’ve read so far have addressed that angle.

Here’s one of those obvious stories that only clicks when it is actually written, and it has given rise to a terrific expression. The Information-Gathering Paradox:

The Internet industry, having nudged consumers to share heaps of information about themselves, has built a trove of personal data for government agencies to mine — erecting, perhaps unintentionally, what Alessandro Acquisti, a Carnegie Mellon University behavioral economist, calls “the de facto infrastructure of surveillance.”

This is interesting. There was an unfortunate bomb threat at Central York (Penn.) High School recently, but … Central York High School journalists tweeted live updates about the bomb threat:

Students turn to social media when something happens, and Fuhrman and Kristen Shipley, editor-in-chief of On the Prowl, the school’s entertainment magazine, began tweeting the news through @CYHSProwler.

They reported as the students moved from the football stadium to the baseball field and finally to the soccer field. They reminded everyone to remain calm. They informed students about when they could return to the school building to retrieve their belongings.

The student journalists also tweeted pictures from the scene and interacted with those on Twitter. They responded to questions, saying they would seek answers if they didn’t know.

Sounds like they handled it like pros.

Meanwhile, Old Meets New: Newspapers Take to Instagram:

Newspapers haven’t flocked to Instagram the way they have to Facebook and Twitter. Which makes sense. Instagram, unlike the other platforms, can’t drive people back to the site because the photo-sharing platform doesn’t embed live links. Also, they can forget about monetizing.

Still, some papers that do real journalism (and are looking to attract real readers) are on the photo sharing site, if only to have another venue to showcase their occasionally stellar photography – or, at the very least, remind the digital kids that they still exist.

What about that other shoe? Some health insurance gets pricier as Obamacare rolls out:

Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don’t qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.

“It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” said Harris, who is three months pregnant. “This increase is simply not affordable.”

[…]

Pam Kehaly, president of Anthem Blue Cross in California, said she received a recent letter from a young woman complaining about a 50% rate hike related to the healthcare law.

“She said, ‘I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,'” Kehaly said.

The Los Angeles Times goes on to note that some of those who will actually benefit will do so because “the federal government picks up much of the tab” to demonstrate they couldn’t connect a straight line with a ruler and a dotted path.

Quick hits:

Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov’t Benefit Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers

America’s New Lost Generation, in One Map

Army Fleet Service at Fort Rucker to lay off 300 workers by year’s end

Hundreds attend vigil for shot Mobile bicyclist Joe O’Brien

Toddler battling leukemia crowned homecoming queen

Owing to the wise decisions of the good people at News 4 San Antonio I could not embed the video from that last story. That’s a beautiful little girl though. Here’s her homepage. That’s two leukemia stories I’ve seen in six days. Here’s the National Marrow Donor Program site, which explains the donation process and lists all of the drives going on around you.

More on Tumblr and plenty more on Twitter.

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23
Oct 13

Darth Vader is bad and his assistant is a mouse

I wrote, on Monday, about my lunch book, Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, the last installment of his trilogy on the European Theater of World War II. I discussed Atkinson’s descriptions as “filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.” This passage is in his prologue which, again, is 41 delicious pages long:

One concise paragraph touches on a millennia of history and technological firsts. It offers a description, a quip and a
discarded plan on how to address the English Channel problem. The guy is good.

Who else is good? The staff at the Crimson. We held our weekly critique meeting today. We’re almost a third of the way through their production run and we’re down things like punctuation in quotes and synonyms. They are working hard and showing their talent. I’m quite proud for them.

This video showed up somehow today, in that delightful way that modern life gives you things from so many directions you’re never sure from which they came. It is, as the kids say, completely insane.

Turns out this guy only finished second in this ridiculous display of gravity, speed and a complete disregard for survival instinct.

This is an entirely different kind of ride than I’d ever want to do. The first time I ever heard people talking about mountain bikes they were celebrating the ways they got hurt, like that was the competition. That’s not for me. One of our friends is a big time, travel across the country, day-long race mountain bike types. I sent him this video and he carefully noted “We can’t all do that!”

Not sure that would have been my first response.

But what a great testimonial for the GoPro camera, no? Ours will not be pressed into such a service.

We fired up the grill at home this evening. The Yankee made a London broil. We kissed it with just enough flame and it was delicious enough for seconds. Adam came over to enjoy the flank steak and catch up on a bit of Game of Thrones.

We’ve been watching them all again. They actually get better on the second viewing. There’s a lot you didn’t catch the first time.

For example:

Things to read …
You wonder how Netflix will stay on top of their entertainment niche as others build their own platforms to compete with in-house productions. They have some plans. Five things Netflix is going to disrupt next

The company has big plans for next year, and its executives previewed some of them during Netflix’s Q3 earnings call earlier this week.

This is a topic that’s been going around a few days because of an essay at The Atlantic, which for about 48 hours tried to be something of a continental divide in journalism and education. USC’s Professor Robert Hernandez chimes in. Those required courses in journalism school are there for a reason:

A modern journalist needs to know how the web works, needs to be exposed to and respect all journalistic crafts (including code), and needs to know their role in working with others. And that role is an active role, not a passive one. They need to use these digital tools to produce relevant, quality journalism.

A digital journalist (or web journalist) focuses on producing journalism of the web, not just on the web. That can manifest itself in a diverse set of roles — being the homepage editor, becoming a multimedia storyteller, or developing a news app, alone or with a team. They can use the tools, but they can also build tools when needed.

If you’re a student, I’m not going to debate which path you should take. I’m not even going to debate what level of instruction in digital journalism or code you need to take. (It’s 2013 — are you really arguing against learning technology?)

But what I will say is that, like those other required parts of your education, you are better off for being exposed to it, whether in a journalism career or in life.

How Website Statistics Changed Our Programs

Good news we can all use. Alabama’s economic development prospects improving, officials say:

Birmingham and state economic development experts said plenty of new projects and expansions are looking to invest money and add jobs, but recent history has proven there is a big difference between getting looks and breaking ground.

A panel of economic development experts spoke to members of the Society for Marketing Professional Services Alabama at a luncheon in Vestavia Hills today.

And two items from the multimedia blog:

Twitter, Vine and people the world over make a film

Google media tools

Thanks for stopping by. Much more on Twitter. Hope you have a great day tomorrow.

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21
Oct 13

I write of fine days, burgers, radio and books

Just another fine day, where most people struggle with Mondays I can look at this one as one that just came my way, sailing through like a leaf on a calm, moving stream. The weather was delightful. Sunny and warm, a nice change after I had climbed off my bike last night, panting a little more than I should for the regular ride, walk out from under a dark sky into the chill borne of damp clothes and a tiny breeze. That was the first signal of the changing seasons. Today was the rebuttal.

And a fine one it was today, too. Sunny, with high skies. I don’t think that means anything, but I use it on days like today, when the sun is always out of the way of the direction you’re looking, you have just enough clouds to give some perspective and set off the cobalt blue sky.

I was enjoying myself well enough that I drove right past the exit where I occasionally pick up a Whataburger. No matter, there was another one a few stops down. The one I usually hit has great fries and the buns are perfect. And something on the burger there always falls onto my shirt, which I hate, but I can set my clock by it.

The one I visited today, the backup spot, has perfectly reasonable bread, which is to say like most places, but you don’t really talk about it. Now the first one has bread so good you say “Get a load of this bread! Taste the flour signature! Can you smell that baking!?” or whatever you say to your friends. And no one ever says those things, but they would there.

The one I visited today, the backup spot, did not have perfect french fries. And at my regular stop I have had near-perfection in a fried length of salted tuber. They were fine, today, but trending to old. The tea, however, was perfect. The preferred Whataburger has lousy tea.

So, would it be odd to order just the sandwich and fries at the one place and then stop again, later, to get a drink?

They are both owned by the same guy, I read today in that restaurant standard, the food review mounted on the wall. The reporter asked him what he’d have as his last meal. He said he’d have the number two. I prefer the single, myself.

In class today we worked on polishing and editing stories. And so students wrote and rewrote and we came up with new ways for them to see old things. Writing, I tell them constantly, is a process. And you have to love the process. If you become infatuated with what you think is your finished product you’re going to have a hard time in many respects.

I was talking with a glass blower a few years ago, and he said that about his craft. It takes about 10 years, he said, to master the art, and you have to love the work, because you will break your heart breaking glass for 10 years. When he said that I knew precisely what he meant. Though that gentleman, I’m sure, is a better writer than I am a glass blower. But we could relate. And he had huge furnaces.

Never mentioned that I finished reading Hello, Everybody a few days ago. I probably never mentioned I was reading it, either. It is a history of the rise of radio in the United States and the author has plenty of terrific personalities to illustrate his tale, which chronologically starts with KDKA, the famous and historic AM station in Pittsburgh and goes through the end of the Hoover administration. Like so many aspects of society, we find ourselves looking at FDR as a new chapter. In the story of radio, however, the story was prior to and during the Hoover years. He was, as secretary of commerce, the man instrumental in the early years. He played, as president, an active role during the maturation process. All of that is in Anthony Rudel’s book, which starts with the legendary tale of John Brinkley.

All Brinkley wanted to do was to put goat glands into men suffering from impotency and other maladies. And sell people miracle elixirs. And tell everyone about it on his huge transmitter. And get filthy rich doing it. His is a great tale, one of those that is probably slipping away into history, but is worth reading about. And when you read about him, the image you picture looks almost exactly like the man himself. It is uncanny.

That’s just one story. You’ll learn about evangelists, crime and entertainers, including Roxy Rothafel, who was perhaps the nation’s most famous performer during his run. Ever heard of him? Funny how that happens. Turns out, though, that Rothafel was the type that launched a thousand ships. He gave a lot of mid-20th century performers their start. He was an enduring influence on even more. So everyone that was old when I was young, they were young on his show once upon a time.

Also, and most interesting, you can take significant passages of this book detailing the growth of radio. Take out that word and put the words “world wide web” in those places and you’d see incredible parallels.

So I put that book down, which is great because I’ve been reading it forever. Today I picked up Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light. He’s finally finished his trilogy of the European Theater of World War II. They are heady books, filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.

The books are fairly dense, but they are hardly complete. (Which is not a criticism.) The first thing I did when I picked this up today was to flip through the index. No one I’m related to is there. I looked up the regiment my great-grandfather was in. It is listed exactly twice, almost in passing. I’ve recently condensed that unit history into a chapter-sized file for family reading, and those troopers did stuff. (France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, was given to 67 members of my great-grandfather’s division. His regiment alone earned 24 of those. The division scored 651 Silver Stars, 35 Distinguished Service Crosses and one Medal of Honor.) But they don’t even make it into Atkinson’s book. It is a telling example of how big the war was. Hard to wrap your mind around if you weren’t there. Probably impossible when you were in it.

And you’ll pardon me if I get nerdy here: Atkinson’s prologue is 41 pages. It starts, after a bit of scene-setting in Britain (and oh, how Atkinson can set a scene) with the famous meeting at St. Paul’s. It looked something like this:

Though I never bought Selleck as Ike.

Anyway, I made it 10 or so pages in to the Atkinson book over dinner tonight. Good book.

Things to read, which I found interesting today … This was written by the president of the state press association. It is an important, if technical and legal, piece. State Supreme Court demolishes Alabama Open Meetings Act:

“Justiciability.”

“Redressability.”

These two tortuous legal terms were used by the Alabama Supreme Court last month to deliver a devastating one-two punch to Alabama’s Open Meetings Act.

First the court proclaimed that our state legislators do not need to hold any of their meetings in public and do not even need to follow their own rules. Then the court placed severe limits on the qualifications of persons who can sue under the open meetings law, although the law plainly states that “any Alabama citizen” can bring such a suit.

Speaking of media and the law, Samford just announced a six-year journalism and mass communication-slash-law degree track. You can read about it here.

Get ready for something new from the Associated Press. Associated Press Is the Latest News Organization to Try Sponsored Content

The Associated Press is planning to introduce sponsored articles into the stream of news stories on its mobile apps and hosted websites. The rollout is expected in early 2014, with potential sponsorship deals centered around major events the AP is planning to cover, such as the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the Academy Awards.

[…]

The move to sponsored content is part of a broader effort to open a new line of revenue at the AP, where just 2% of total revenue comes from advertising, including mobile banner ads and units across a handful of websites populated with AP content. Another 13% of comes from services the AP offers media outlets. And 85% comes from licensing content to subscribers such as TV stations, newspapers and websites, where the AP is not hopeful about expanding income.

They’re getting in the game a bit late, in terms of platforms available to advertisers. However, not every company and agency have gone this route yet, so who knows how it will work.

I fear they will all be even more 45- or 60-second spots in the style of television commercials that get in the way of some important story. The best video ads online are at YouTube, the ones that you can skip. Make a great ad and keep the audience, maybe even for your mini-opera. Can’t hold us after six seconds? Well, you tried. Sorta. Now we’re going to see what Lady Gaga is up to.

This is unfair, as AP’s video is usually quite good, but one of their lead pieces as I wrote this was “Sleeping Driver Wakes Up, Causes Atlanta Crash,” which is almost one of those “We have video, and so this is news stories.” I’d share it with you, but AP doesn’t allow for their videos to be embedded. Maybe they can work on that next.

Oh here’s the actual raw footage, sans the carefully re-enacted emergency phone call that they put into the AP package:

Something the video is strange. It feels incomplete, somehow. Particularly when you read WSB’s accompanying story. Weird scene, bad wreck. But you would have never heard about it if not for the videographer who was already there.