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I’d like my blue skies back, please

Cold. Rainy. Miserable outdoor experience. The high was 46. The low was only 41, but even thermometers can be fooled. Just gray and yucky all day. Yucky is the preferred meteorological term.

I went out for a run, but it was drizzling and I realized I didn’t need to run that bad.

So I didn’t run, except back inside to put on warmer clothes.

More phone calls and other assorted things, all of which make for riveting site reads, I’m sure. Instead, we’ll move on.

Things to read … The Guardian’s Gabriel Dance on new tools for story and cultivating interactive journalism:

I can go to someone on my team, give them a topic, and ask them to report on that topic and the process is very similar to how that might work with a more traditional print reporter. They go out, they explore it, they see what information is available. They schedule some interviews, they gather data, and they come back and we work on what form it might take.

Are we producing articles with strictly text? No. But I think what we are producing is much closer to what you saw in Decoded, which is what I guess I’d call web-first journalism.

When people talk about this as new and different, it only really is if you’re looking at the old things as the status quo.

This would work for branded journalism, too. That’s a great Q&A, worth your time if you’re interested in the topic. Also, I have other topics.

Gene Policinski, whom I’ve had the good fortune to meet and spend a day with, writes: Inside the First Amendment | Privacy the impetus for conflict

(I)n our lifetimes — and more since just last June — privacy and its implications for First Amendment areas ranging from free speech to the freedom to assemble have taken on a new urgency prompted by government surveillance of the World Wide Web, phone calls and high-tech gadgetry.

Beyond questions of how much does the government know about our individual lives through captured emails, online search logs and records of whom we telephoned, where and for how long, there’s the looming impact on whether we will feel free to speak our minds even in “private” moments, and whom will we be willing to be seen with?

US B-52 bombers challenge disputed China air zone:

The US has flown two B-52 bombers over disputed islands in the East China Sea in defiance of new Chinese air defence rules, officials say.

China set up its “air defence identification zone” on Saturday insisting that aircraft obey its rules or face “emergency defensive measures”.

A Pentagon spokesman said the planes had followed “normal procedures”.

The islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are a source of rising tension between the two nations.

Turn an eye to the east. That is getting interesting in a hurry.

Sports fan? TV buff? This is a great read. Inside the chaos and spectacle of the NFL on Fox:

To watch a football broadcast is to see much more than a football game. There are only about 11 minutes of actual action during a three-hour game, which means 95 percent of the time there’s something else going on. The graphics, replays, highlights, and analysis that make a football game into the at-home experience millions of people know and love — it’s all from Fox, and it’s all done on the fly. Nearly everyone on the crew says that while they broadcast the game, what they really do is make television.

It starts at 6AM on Saturday, in the cold, dark Foxboro morning, as the Fox team shows up to unload three 53-foot trucks. Stadiums don’t have much in the way of built-in A / V equipment, so Fox (and every other network) carries everything the crew will need for the weekend inside those trucks — the show has to be built and broken down every weekend. This Saturday, it has to be even faster: there’s a college football game at 4PM.

That those things never occur to you is a testament to the quality of their work, really.

We’d like you to meet a paralympic sprinter Blake Leeper. He was a guest on Arsenio Hall’s show. Hall brought on a surprise special guest. Leeper’s reaction is priceless.

This is a candid and refreshing read. If you followed Auburn last season, it is a nice way to, maybe, finally, close the door on all that. The former head coach, forever gracious, gave a wide-ranging interview to USA Today. Coach Gene Chizik on Auburn ouster, team’s current success:

I think you’d have to start with the players. What people don’t understand is from a coaching perspective when you struggle like we struggled last year, you hurt so much for the players. The players, you brought them there and told them that this is the way it’s going to be and give them this vision of championships and things of that nature. And when it doesn’t unfold exactly like that and go through the struggle we went through last year you hurt for the players. So I’m ecstatic for the players.

I couldn’t be happier to sit there and watch them win these games, particularly these close ones, however they pull it out and we all know how that’s gone this year. It’s an absolute joy for me to watch them celebrate and be happy and win. I think without question, that’s what I get the biggest joy out of.

Gus has done a fantastic job, and he and I worked together for three years and he’s done a fantastic job of regrouping the troops and them buying into him and the staff he brought in and it’s really nice to see those guys rebound and do what we recruited them to do and that’s win. They’re definitely a talented group of young men, and they’re great kids and they deserve this.

A nice Samford sports story, too: Summerlin And Shade Named Players Of The Year:

Samford senior quarterback Andy Summerlin and senior linebacker Justin Shade were named Southern Conference Offensive and Defensive Players of the Year, respectively, by the SoCon Sports Media Association, when the league released its postseason awards Tuesday morning.

They’ll start a playoff run this weekend.

Leaf update:

It is gone. Fell this morning or overnight. A new picture would just be of branches and twigs. I wouldn’t want to embarrass the tree that way.

Tomorrow it will be sunny again. And warmer. Has to be, right?

Alabama / Auburn / football / video / weekend — Comments Off
23
Nov 13

One week

No. 1 Bama. No. 4 Auburn.

This video plays. The horizon explodes. Time ends.

War Eagle.

Auburn / football / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
21
Nov 13

I did not write about meetings

Coca-Cola is getting set to dump press releases. They’ve found something better. Brand journalism, of which I approve, as it can be a powerful tool when used correctly. As this Ragan piece demonstrates, there is a paradigm shift coming:

Perhaps you caught the story in Mashable, The Daily Mail, Adweek, or The Huffington Post.

Coca-Cola’s Singapore team designed a novel double can that
splits into two, so customers can share the fizzy beverage with a friend.

Fantastic PR. But one major reason it got so much play was “because we covered it,” says Ashley Brown, who leads digital communications and social media for The Coca-Cola Company.

The rest of the piece is worth reading, do check it out if you are interested in journalism, public relations or marketing.

Here’s something of an example at Auburn:

Nosa Eguae just graduated with his first degree and his pursuing a second while finishing up his playing days terrorizing quarterbacks. The guy is 22, telling you the children are our future. Here you see him away from the field, the roaring crowd and the mixed life of a student/celebrity, like he is pretty much everywhere in town.

Auburn’s athletic department is putting considerable resources toward telling stories like this, humanizing the young man behind the face mask:

I shot that of him at an equestrian meet last year.

Every team has at least a handful or more of hardworking, successful on-and-off-the field people like Eguae. We should see more of the great stories our institutions are producing in the young men and women that attend there. This is one of the great victories a university can demonstrate to the world, after all.

(Samford does a good job of this, too. They have an incredibly strong social media presence and interaction with all of the university’s various stakeholders. Freshmen are published on the university’s home page. The athletes are widely accessible. There’s even a reality show being shot on campus by the students in our department. There are plans in place to expand on those efforts, too.)

Here is the other side of the “branded” coin. One must find the right balance of telling stories to your multiple audiences and working alongside the traditional (and nontraditional) media. No one has arrived at a formula for this, but you have to develop a deft touch. Otherwise, you might hear about it, as you’ll see in the first of these two quick links:

Photojournalists want better access to the White House

Obama’s Image Machine: Monopolistic Propaganda Funded by You

Cyborg Journalists: How Google Glass Can Change Journalism

And, finally, this: When an artist allowed her 4-year-old daughter to finish her drawings, something awesome happened. Great art there.

And that’s enough for one night. I’m tuckered.

Auburn / football / weekend — Comments Off
16
Nov 13

Georgia at Auburn

I’ve been to a lot of football games. I’ve been happy. I’ve been thrilled. I’ve been pleased and surprised and shocked. I’ve been sad. I’ve been numb. I’ve sat through a 3-8 season and a 3-9 season. I’ve watched the slow, inevitable loss of a game to a rival you can’t control because you know your side has no answer. I saw a juggernaut produce an undefeated season. I watched a championship unfold in front of hopeful, too-nervous-to-believe-it eyes.

This game was altogether different than any of those things.

In the first half you abused the other team’s defense, gashing them for 246 yards rushing when they allow about half that per game. You had a 20-point lead, but you’ve lost all of the momentum. In the second half, your defense begins hemorrhaging yards and points against an incredible comeback helmed by the most prolific scorer in the history of the conference. There are six minutes on the clock. You have a narrow lead.

And you go three and out on three pass attempts. Those kids had played too hard and did not deserve to lose, and that’s what the play calling set them up for.

Very frustrating.

And then you punt. An ill-timed shank gives Georgia, and the best scoring quarterback in the history of ever, the ball on your 45. They score. Now you’re behind with under two minutes to go. That sequence starts here.

But these boys have a bit of John Paul Jones in them. And, of course, the perfectly insensible and the divinely improbable happened at the end. This is Rod Bramblett’s radio call, which is instantly a thing of lore:

We had a great view of the final scoring play, standing directly over Nick Marshall’s shoulder. He threw the ball and it was instantly recognizable that the flight path of the ball and the line the boy in blue was taking were not to meet. Hope sank immediately. Then the bounce and the deflection through the unholy Georgia trinity and Ricardo Louis, immediately a living legend as a freshman, kept running. Turns out he turned his head in the last moment of a hummingbird’s heartbeat to find the ball as it fluttered near him.

I covered my mouth. “What the War Damn?”

Angels didn’t sing. They roared. Jordan-Hare Stadium, at the end of the night, was as loud as it has been in the last 20 years. The old Tiger decibel lights on the south end zone scoreboard would have surged, flickered, browned out, returned and exploded. They would have burst into fireballs and landed on the Georgia sideline. There would have been nothing else to it.

How do you react to that play? A heaved prayer that should have never been answered was addressed in most convincing fashion. It happened at the end of an equally inconceivable series of events too dense to unpack and process, even during the tediously long CBS commercial breaks. You saw those young men realize what the writer and philosopher Joseph Campbell meant about not “looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” That’s what they found. I turned to the lady behind and said “We should hug.” And we all did, we hugged everyone, everywhere, mostly because we couldn’t hug Ricardo.

And, in the end, it was the somewhat-maligned defense that sealed the day. Dee Ford’s crushing fait accompli, a bruising blow to Georgia’s Aaron Murray, ended the game as the Bulldogs were looking to score while the final flickering filament in the scoreboard shifted from 00:01 to 00:00. Some of the people there rated it a two on the Rapture Scale. Some folks in the Southern endzone saw it as a three.

Despite the questionable play calls, and an officiating crew no one on the field liked, Auburn won tonight because they never quit. A team that was accused of that and worst last year, showed their moxie and their talent and their grit. They fought hard. As hard as any team we’ve cheered. If they hadn’t already satisfied the sports cliche, they learned how to win. Tonight they deserved it.

We reflected on all of this in the stadium. At the tailgate. Watching it again at home. We reflect on all of this each time we watch the Jordan-Prayer. Still not sure what we all saw. Still anxious about the outcome, even as I watch it a third or fourth time.

My in-laws were here for this game. They are 4-0 across four seasons. They’ve seen a homecoming, a conference game and a cupcake. Today the weather was perfect, the tailgating was amazing, the friends charming and they were there for the most breathtakingly incredible finish of the year, and perhaps in the history of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry.

Now what do I do for an encore?

Here are the game’s Auburn-centric highlights, with more calls from the great Rod Bramblett:

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13
Nov 13

I ran a lot, let’s just leave it at that

Here are two extra photos from last week’s fall foliage kick. This tree probably won’t have anything left on its limbs the next time I see it. But it is flaring beautifully:

This, more about the sun and the darkness, really, is at my grandparents’ place. While I prefer the longer days like everyone else, we do get some great angles from the sun this time of year:

Elsewhere, I ran my first 10K tonight. I was going to run the usual five, but everything felt OK, so I kept going. When I got to five miles, my previous personal best, I decided I could press on to get the nice round kilometer number. And everything felt more or less OK.

And that continued until I stopped running and took a shower. After that it all seemed like a bad idea. Since then, through the night various and different parts have been achy. My feet and my knees. My feet and my quads. My feet and my calves. Always my feet.

Clearly I have room for improvement.

Things to read …

Which brings us to this, from the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of considerate opinion and coverage of serious issues: OK, You’re a Runner. Get Over It. Once upon a time, kids, the Journal did write about serious things. Promise. I suppose we should blame the Internet.

I learned new terms today: “Snowplow parents” and “teacups.”

This young woman was on track to graduate early. And then she had a bad car accident, with a traumatic brain injury. She had to learn to walk and talk and feed herself again. And then she went back to school and graduate. That’s the short version of a remarkable story. Now her brother is trying to raise money for continued therapy. Read about it, and please share that link.

My friend Jeremy from The War Eagle Reader recites the greatest story ever written about a college football game. Worth a listen for football fans:

Here’s the text version.