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No wonder my links look so old

Class today. Sore today. Friday today.

I talked about online journalism in class today. I tried to distill the history of the thing into 40 minutes. So I only covered 20 years. My favorite slides included a picture of Kenneth Starr and the text “Starr bypasses the press & distributes a major political document online first — A new relationship between politicians & the public.”

Ahh, the Starr report.

Here’s your trivia for next year. The word hypertext turns 50 next February. Fifty!

There’s another slide that says something like ““Journalism is now a smaller part of the information mix. Advertising works differently online and advertisers may not need journalism as they once did.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. I can’t get to all of that in one class.

Got home to see the in-laws, which was expected. They’ve come to visit for the weekend. This is not a bad thing. They are lovely people. He’s retired and working and she’s an RN. Their daughter took them out to a program about town this afternoon, so I was actually there when they got back in.

We set out for dinner, had barbecue and learned the local high school team found themselves with a 4th and goal from way back. Two incompletions, a 12-yard sack and three penalties for 32 yards forced a punt from their own 46-yard line with 45 seconds remaining. The home team lost by four points in the first round of the playoffs.

A kid who is a junior cried on one team and kids who are seniors on the other team are very happy. We drove by the stadium to see the crowd, but it wasn’t that big, considering. We also let the folks listen to the accents on the high school football broadcasts. We could hear at least four games — down from the regular season numbers. Some of those accents are thicker than others, probably owing to how far in the woods someone is. Sometimes, apparently, you have to be from around here to pick up what was just said. It is pretty amusing.

Things to read … because one of these things will be amusing.

And here it is now, 11 Complaints That WPEC Photog Should Have Included In His Viral Resignation Email:

Perhaps you’ve read the resignation email sent this week by a photographer at West Palm Beach CBS affiliate WPEC. Vince Norman didn’t last three months on the job, informing the bosses that “I have reached the limit of what I’m willing to put up with.” My word. What did they do to him?

Here are the inhumane conditions this poor kid was subjected to, as he described in his email.

From a now legendary videographer to a legendary photographer, Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won’t look back:

Robert Frank is 90 years old on Sunday. The great pioneer and iconoclast has become a survivor, celebrated and revered, but still resolutely an outsider. One thing we can be sure of: he won’t be looking back.

“The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old,” he told me without a trace of regret in 2004, when I visited him at his spartan apartment in Bleecker Street, New York, where a single bread roll and a mobile phone the size of a brick sat forlornly on the kitchen table. “There’s no point in it any more for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, ‘why should we remember anything?’ There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.”

Here are some astronomically important photographs, Rosetta Spacecraft Sees the ‘Dark Side’ of a Comet . And you can expect more from Rosetta in the coming days, too.

That is the question, no? How to Win Anyone’s Attention:

The average person now consumes twelve hours of media, checks their phone close to 110 times and sees an estimated 5,000 marketing messages each day. When most of us also regularly put in 8+ hours on the job, it’s no wonder our collective attention span is more taxed than ever.

[…]

As a marketer or advertiser, all this is also a reality check and constant reminder about how precious attention has become. If you’re thinking about what this means for your marketing efforts, or you’re producing a lot of quality content but struggling to get noticed, here are four principles you can apply to win anyone’s attention.

This piece is running at a slight angle to that, For Millennials, the End of the TV Viewing Party:

To be sure, the notion that the television may go the way of the Sony Walkman may sound like hyperbole. Some 34.5 million flat-screen televisions were shipped in the United States last year alone, according to figures compiled by IHS Technology, a global market research company — a substantial number, even if sales are down 13.75 percent, from 40 million, since 2010.

Yet by another, more geek-futurist view, it seems easy to start their obituary, even as manufacturers race to keep up to speed by churning out web-enabled smart TVs. The smartphone age has been cruel to devices that perform only one function.

I’m thinking I should perhaps rename things around here “Multiple.” The other day I pointed to a story that hints at the need to consider your multiple audiences on multiple platforms with a unified theme. A week before I offered you an essay with this basic premise: In many companies, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question, “What business am I in?” The answer seemed obvious to me, you’re in multiple businesses. That is the adaptation that technology is offering you — pretty much in every field.

In local news:

Alabama’s rate of uninsured children is falling, beating national trend

Patience pays off in Magic City’s bid for Senior Games

Alabama Power Foundation gives university’s largest research gift

In different ways and for different reasons, those are all big deals.

Finally, a slideshow. I link to Mobile is eating the world because I think Benedict Evans is saying something I’m saying, only more eloquently. He’s arguing that, essentially, you don’t need to define the future of technology and the future of mobile, because they are the same. Technology, he says, is now outgrowing the tech industry.

The first inkling of that I got was when we saw the mobile data outpacing the adaptable — and amazingly fast, rapid-fire — world wide web on growth and standards. To Evans, a strategic consumer technology analyst, this comes down to the availability of tech. (If I understand him correctly, that is.) Those are issues of supply and logistics and resources and global wealth — in the macro sense. This is not, then, the technological singularity. That comes later.

I wonder if that happens on a Friday.

It might. The odds aren’t terrible — one in seven, I’d say — but it isn’t happening tonight.

adventures / Auburn / football / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
25
Oct 14

A day in the sun, night under the lights

Just a perfectly lovely day. I spent some time in a lawn chair with the sun peering through this tree. My head tilted back, aviators on and my eyes closed. Everyone thought I was sleeping. I could have been. I’m tired enough. But I was just enjoying the barest of breezes and that tinkling dance of the sun through the thinning shade.

A perfectly lovely day.

Two private school kids, separated by 800 miles, telling the same private school jokes to one another. We public schoolers can only pretend to know:

Penguin mascots make little sense anywhere, but certainly not in October in Alabama.

Spent the afternoon with friends. Football was played this evening and we watched it. Late into the night we enjoyed the company of friends and made it home in time for pizza at around 11 p.m. and more football.

No wonder I’m still tired. Tired, but pleased.

A perfectly lovely day.

Auburn / football / photo / weekend — Comments Off
4
Oct 14

LSU at Auburn

The Yankee, playing cornhole at the tailgate. I don’t think she’s ever played before. Of course she won.

What follows are just fan pictures. Scroll through and enjoy. It will only take a second:

This first batch are all at the tailgate, of course:

Some people just drink too much …

The hostess of the best tailgate in town:

Her shirt stands for “What Would Bo Jackson Do?” Behind her, he was receiving the Walter Gilbert Award, sort of a lifetime achievement honor. All of this was awesome:

We’d said something to her like “We have guests here and we have to show off. You’re going to be loud, right?” She took this as a personal challenge.

This is what happens when you use one shaker for 11 seasons:

This jacket, you know you want it:

Photobombed!

Auburn / football / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
30
Sep 14

It must be Tuesday

A passing thought this morning, as I walked from here to there: I am not sure if I’ve ever been on the Samford campus when the power went out. All of the lines here are buried and the service has always been excellent. The things we take for granted, no?

So late this afternoon the power blinked. And it blinked again and then once more. After a few minutes, wherein students in the newsroom were confessing their fears of the dark and people and clowns and four-leaf clovers and who knows what else, the power blinked one more time.

We noticed the hardwired connection first.

The wireless was down as well. There’s a router right outside the window. Turns out that continual green ring of light means something. You never notice it until it is a pale red, which means you don’t have an Internet connection, so you have the opportunity to notice the telltales on routers:

Telnet was beginning the march.

All of our phones and Internet are tied together in a VOIP, so they didn’t work. Some of the locks on campus are tied into that network, so those doors didn’t work.

I raided my emergency peanut butter stash.

Also, the printer died, because today was a Tuesday:

I’ve renamed that machine the Lazarus. It keeps coming back, though we’ve been worried about it for almost four years now.

Somehow, the cash registers in the cafeteria and food court were online. So the crisis was merely humanitarian rather than truly dire. And the IT people here know their stuff. In perhaps an hour or two — who can tell the passage of time without the web? — things began returning to normal.

But all of that let me hear this:

Student 1: “What did we do before the Internet?”

Student 2: “We were prepared for it.”

For a group of people who grew up with the Internet always at their beck and call, this is an interesting point. There’s a story in this. I wonder if anyone will write it.

Things to read … because people went to the trouble to write it.

Mike Lutzenkirchen is an incredibly brave man, Philip Lutzenkirchen’s father uses son’s life — and death — to motivate high school players:

Mike Lutzenkirchen, standing before the James Clemens High School football team in its weight room Tuesday afternoon, called out Logan Stenberg, the Jets’ offensive tackle, and had him leave the room so that Lutzenkirchen could illustrate a point.

After Stenberg obliged, Lutzenkirchen said, “He just stood right there in the flesh. Now he’s not here. A teammate. That’s how quickly it can happen. That’s how quickly you can lose somebody.”

His son, the former Auburn star Philip Lutzenkirchen, one of the Tigers’ most popular players in recent seasons, was killed in a car wreck in Troup County, near LaGrange, Ga. He was 23 years old.

Mike Lutzenkirchen, who also spoke to the Huntsville High football team Tuesday evening, shared an array of statistics about his son’s sensational career. There was one stat he saved until the last, the one that is most staggering and devastating.

“Listen to this closely: Point three seven seven,” Lutzenkirchen said. “That was Philip’s blood alcohol content.”

Hard to imagine what he must be going through.

And now, for something a bit lighter:

Journalism and tech links:

VR journalism! Harvest of Change: Iowa farm families confront a nation in transition

A Wearable Drone That Launches Off Your Wrist To Take Your Selfie

The (surprisingly profitable) rise of podcast networks

Staying connected with college graduates: Social media and alumni

Magazines Get a Way to Measure Their Reach Across Media Platforms

Things you don’t want to hear from your doctor, American Family Care alerts customers of stolen laptops containing patient information.

I’m having my students read this story this week, Dispatcher reflects a week after Birmingham UPS shooting: ‘I asked God to lead my words’:

“The officers, they did a great job,” said Davis, otherwise known as Operator 8061. “They did a good job in responding and getting me notified so that I could make my notifications.”

Davis, an 18-year BPD dispatch veteran, said she was just one of many dispatchers who sprang into action when the first call from the UPS customer center on Inglenook Lane came into the radio room at 9:21 a.m.

“Had it not been for my coworkers helping me, it would not have gone as smooth as it did,” she said. “It wasn’t just me. It was a team effort. I was proud to be a Birmingham Police Department dispatcher that day.”

The challenge of that day isn’t unusual. Dispatchers and officers deal with a crisis of some sort almost each and every day, though not usually to that extent.

About 10 calls came in to the radio room almost simultaneously after the shots erupted in the UPS warehouse. Those nearly dozen calls accounted for one dispatch, one of 11,663 dispatches handled by BPD last week alone.

And then there’s this stupid story, New York artist creates ‘art’ that is invisible and collectors are paying millions.

If the empty art studio burns down, how much does the insurance company pay out?

You can only figure that out with an Internet connection.

Auburn / football / friends / Thursday / video — Comments Off
18
Sep 14

A game was played, we allegedly watched it

We had friends over to watch the game this evening. So it all felt like this:

I’m not sure I watched much more of the game than that, which is odd.

But, I’d wanted to see people last weekend and we managed to see almost no one, so having a house full of company for the first time in a long time was a nice thing. The conversations were pleasant. We brought in office chairs and camping chairs and had quite a few smart people — an Emmy winner, an art historian, a lawyer, an architect, a tech wizard and more — sitting around trying to not talk about work.

We had finger foods. And the parts of the game that we saw were often underwhelming.

Hey, no matter, the team you wanted to win went on the road and played a team of strong reputation and managed a win. My impression of the game was that it was a good game from which to be distracted. Looking at the stats was somehow more intriguing than watching snippets of the game without continuity.

I’m probably a terrible host. I’m too casual and we’re so very laid back about everything in general. We get by on our good humor and the forgiving nature of friends, I suppose. You may have a snack. You will laugh at my joke or at my expense. You’ll forget that you had to fight the cat away from the food, but you’ll remember I offered you your choice of ice.

Football was played and new friends were made and plans were laid to see them again, so a good evening all around.

Thursday night football is a strange thing, but it is a fine excuse to see people during the week. Sometimes you need the excuse, I suppose. Sometimes you need only the snippets of a game to go with it.