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Where I amend my reindeer antler policy

Enjoy the Glomerata post I put up earlier today? Have you been checking out the Battle of the Bulge map posts? I’ve got about two more weeks of those, tracing my great-grandfather’s time in Europe.

I woke up this morning and did one of my favorite things, which is sit with breakfast, or tea or both, and read. I got a lot of reading in this morning and then we did some paperwork errands this afternoon.

I drove The Yankee to Target and she picked up two shirts. We walked down the street to a store called Ulta, which is not missing an R from the sign. I’m not sure I knew this store existed until this afternoon, but then I’m so rarely on the cosmetics market these days.

We picked up grain and sourdough bread at the grocery store. I remembered we needed some eggs, so I hustled to the back corner and got the six-pack container. The first one I opened had a busted egg, which reminded me of my best poultry story. I told it to my lovely wife and the cashier at the front of the store. One of them found it funnier than the other, but they both smiled politely.

We saw this car. Now, ordinarily, I’m not a fan of the reindeer antlers, but I’m willing to change this stance. The rule now is this: if you put those things in your windows, you must commit to the giant red nose on the hood of your car.

We had a dinner guest tonight, one of our sweet friends who brought a soup and stayed for brownies and a movie and uses the word “assuaged” correctly. It was a lovely evening.

Things to read …

I remember waking up on this December morning in a full sweat. It was unseasonably warm. That afternoon we watched the F-4 tornado ravage Tuscaloosa, just 35 miles away, on television. That night, up the road in Birmingham, I drove home under the largest snowflakes I’ve ever seen in the South. It was a tragic and weird day. Celebration Of A Life Saved

Many of your remember this remarkable photo by Michael E. Palmer that was in the Tuscaloosa News, the day after the December 16, 2000 EF-4 tornado that killed 11 people. Michael Harris carries an unconscious Whitney Crowder, 6, through debris in Bear Creek Trailer Park after the tornado passed through. Whitney’s father and 15-month-old brother were killed in the tornado.

That post is two years old, when young Whitney was graduating from high school. It was a nice bookend to that tale.

So these two guys are political activists. They represent different parties and they are brothers. They were on C-SPAN to promote this documentary about the weird dynamic all of that creates. They got into a political name-calling debate and then the show started taking phone calls. Then … well, just watch and see:

This is worth a read. Former AP Reporter: I Didn’t Leave Journalism, It Left Me

A journalist for more than 40 years, Mark Lavie was based in Jerusalem for most of them and then in Cairo for two – during the “Egyptian Revolution.”

Lavie is no longer a journalist.

But he didn’t leave the profession, “it left me,” Lavie says.

Now Lavie is speaking out in as many fora as possible. He seeks to alert the public about the dramatic difference between what journalism used to be – and still pretends to be – and what it actually is.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, Advertisers Will Pay Up To 40% More For TV Sponsorship Deals Linked To Social Media, Says TV4

“It means that we need to work with story-telling on digital platforms, and that we need to engage and potentially also reward our users,” she said. “This is obviously very interesting for us, both from our perspective, and also from a commercial perspective, in terms of what we can offer our advertisers on these platforms.”

Lundell said that TV4’s experiments with extending linear TV formats into the social media sphere had shown that “you need to pay more than for ordinary sponsorship – and advertisers are prepared to do that. So, yes, we’re making money.”

The first thing I thought when she said “work with story-telling on digital platforms” was wondering why plots of scripted shows aren’t continued on other platforms. You already see supplemental webisodes of some of your more engaged shows, why not story arcs on Instagram?

First there was ESPN, the movie channels, last month it was CBS and now … Up To Speed: NBC to jump into live-streaming

This is solid. 5 tips for streaming live video from a smartphone

Livestreaming video from a mobile phone is a way for journalists to get footage which may not be possible to film with more traditional broadcast equipment.

“There are sometimes these stories where you don’t want a big camera crew, you want to try and keep a relatively low profile, in riots, in public disorder, or in places where you need to be sensitive,” Sky News correspondent Nick Martin told Journalism.co.uk.

“You can use that technology which is smaller and more compact to still get what you want to, but not [have] all the big crew considerations that we have.”

Media organisations such as ABC News have also started looking at mobile livestreaming as a developing part of their video programming.

For journalists who want to incorporate video streaming into their work …

As I told a colleague this evening, within the next year or two we’ll likely say if you’re not doing video with almost everything, you’re going to find yourself behind.

That’s why I spent the better part of my Saturday night building up video templates for future projects.

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5
Dec 14

The end of the semester

Last day of class today, and so we wrapped it up with broadcast scripts. I gave them a Christmas tree story, a real lean-in piece about how it isn’t trees that give some people an allergic reaction, but the mold sometimes found in live trees that irritate people’s sinuses.

We’ve all been there, covering strange non-stories and trying to make it feel important trying to feel like it isn’t a waste of our time. I certainly did my share in this newsroom or that. Not every story can be a triple homicide, thank heavens, so then every example shouldn’t be such a thing.

At the end of the class we went over the ground rules of the Monday final again. I crossed the lowercase Js on the last details of the class, wished them a happy holidays and, as always, thanked them for suffering through the class with me.

And then back to the office to finish up this and that, a host of emails, the required moment of listening to Van Morrison, traditionally marking the last day of class for reasons I’ve already forgotten. Ordering this, checking off that, phone calls and the details, details, details that always mark the end of a week, the sigh of a Friday, combined with the exhalation of the term.

I got out of the office a little later than I wanted, but still beat the traffic, for the most part.

I found these in that archive folder I’ve been working through. These aren’t from the Crimson, but rather from the Birmingham News, which was still a daily newspaper back then. This first one blows out the site’s template a little bit — I don’t regularly publish squares — but this was an important story, the fight over changing the area was underway:

Basically, when the university’s board purchased, for a song, the Lakeshore property and moved from Eastlake in the 1950s they got the land on both sides of Lakeshore. On the one side is the campus proper. (There are a few things across Lakeshore now.) But they also go the land on the other side, which was a swampy lake undeveloped and, of course, back then the atmosphere through the area was a lot more quiet.

Now there’s the high school, a business park, some retail development down the road and so on. Also, a lovely recreational area. Of course the residents weren’t keen on all of that once upon a time. I don’t remember the area as they were fighting over it, but the building up over the years has been quite nice. There is more traffic, yes, and the road feels too slow while the traffic simultaneously feels too fast. They were concerned about flooding, but that has always seemed minimal in my experience. At the end of the day, if you’ve never been through there, you’d think it was a charming area, because it is.

There is so, so much local and campus history built up in all of those events of the last 60 years, and specifically since the development really kicked in during the 1980s.

This clipping, also from the Birmingham News, is from 1987 and it details the sell of some of that property to Southern Progress. They would ultimately build three nice buildings and a handsome campus for their various publications. But Southern Progress, which has been based in Birmingham since 1911, has fallen on hard times like many publishers in recent years. Time has owned them since the 1980s, one magazine was sold off a few years ago. There have been cutbacks and rollbacks and all sorts of restructuring.

Last month, Samford started the process of purchasing the property once again. Today, the university’s board approved the 28-acre purchase. The three buildings and parking on the Southern Progress campus will be shared by the pub pros and university units. Everything comes full circle.

This photo was on the back of one of those stories. I can’t now recall if I remember this name or if my searching my memory is giving me the wrong impression. Johnny Imani Harris pled guilty in the 1970s to a string of robberies and a rape. Apparently, his representation wasn’t very good and they convinced him to pled guilty or face the death penalty. He did. He got five life terms. He took part, or was caught up in, a 1974 protest of prison conditions that turned into a riot where a guard died. No one said in court that Harris stabbed the corrections officer, but nevertheless Harris was found guilty and given the death penalty.

When you dive into the entire Johnny Imani Harris tale, things quickly seem itchy. A circuit judge in 1987 agreed and overturned the death penalty. Somewhere in that part of the story is where we find this photo. The build up to that ruling and the finding itself brought up more demonstrations. He was paroled in 1991 on the rape and robbery. As far as I can tell he hasn’t showed up in the media since then.

Went to the last high school state football championship game at Jordan-Hare tonight. Sat in a booth with some folks from Clay-Chalkville. Two of them were on the last state championship team from that school. They both wore their letterman’s jacket from 2001. In the next booth was the grandmother of one of the Clay-Chalkville running backs. She said she’s raised him and we cheered for him because she was adorable and she kept bringing food over to our booth. Better, she said, than carrying it back downstairs. So go number 6, we said. Clay-Chalkville won in a blowout. Everyone we saw, then, was very pleased.

As we left the stadium from the nice little luxury boxes we poked our heads in the even-nicer president’s suite. Right by there is the elevator. Good to see Gene Chizik still hanging around:

I guess they figure “We’re still paying him, we may as well take advantage of the photograph.” He’s getting $209,457.84 a month, through the 2015-2016 fiscal year. Maybe he has pictures of key university players hanging in his home, too.

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13
Nov 14

History, the leaves of the present, and the news of the future

A little cool, out, and yet bright and sunny. From the parking lot to the office I get to pass under and by a few bright trees, here are some maples I picked up in Talbird Circle — named in honor of the antebellum president of the university.

He accepted a captain’s commission in the 11th Alabama, stepping down after three months in 1861. The 11th Alabama fought in Virginia, but Talbird, older and not in the proper condition, mustered out before the shooting began.

He returned to Marion, to the school, and then took a colonel’s commission in the 41st Alabama infantry in May of 1862. The 41st marched and skirmished and fought in Tennessee, Mississippi and, briefly, in Virginia, but Talbird wasn’t around for all of that. He served for only a year, primarily at a prison camp, and then perhaps went with the regiment where they fought at Murfreesboro, before leaving the 41st because of a disability.

After the war, Talbird did not return to the university, but went back to the pulpit.

James E. Sulzby, Jr., a Samford grad and lay historian, wrote of Talbird:

It may be said that during the presidency of President Talbird, the college enjoyed its greatest prosperity until that time, yet experienced discouragements and disasters. President Talbird worked diligently on the endowment funds in an attempt to relieve the college of any indebtedness and to guarantee its future success. President Talbird, by his consisten Christian spirit, his fine administrative qualities, and his devotion to the Confederate cause, won in the estimation of all who him a position of wide influence.

Sulzby quotes an 1857 clipping from the Marion Commonwealth where a student wrote “There are not three students in the College by whom President Talbird is not dearly loved.”

And, hey, if only two people don’t love you, that isn’t so bad.

The modern campus has the cul-de-sac named after him. And there are pretty trees, with pretty leaves. I am sharing five of them with you here, having picked them up and carried them into my photo studio. There is more to read, after these:

Things to read … because sometimes words are worth a thousand words.

I hope we’re pleased with ourselves, Rural hospitals in critical condition

Since the beginning of 2010, 43 rural hospitals — with a total of more than 1,500 beds — have closed, according to data from the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. The pace of closures has quickened: from 3 in 2010 to 13 in 2013, and 12 already this year. Georgia alone has lost five rural hospitals since 2012, and at least six more are teetering on the brink of collapse. Each of the state’s closed hospitals served about 10,000 people — a lot for remaining area hospitals to absorb.

The Affordable Care Act was designed to improve access to health care for all Americans and will give them another chance at getting health insurance during open enrollment starting this Saturday. But critics say the ACA is also accelerating the demise of rural outposts that cater to many of society’s most vulnerable. These hospitals treat some of the sickest and poorest patients — those least aware of how to stay healthy. Hospital officials contend that the law’s penalties for having to re-admit patients soon after they’re released are impossible to avoid and create a crushing burden.

So this sounds bad, Hearing aids stolen from 88-year-old retired naval pilot, but the update suggests one of two happy endings. Company to replace hearing aids reported stolen from 88-year-old veteran plus, the end of the story says the hearing aids were miraculously found. I thought, in reading the first story, that that would ultimately be the case. Funny how calling the police and finding the news media is calling the office can make that happen.

This is one of those shame-it-happened-but-the-timing-was-good kind of stories, Alabama team doctors help save life of LSU policeman struck by car after game:

Alabama team doctors Lyle Cain, Norman Waldrop and Benton Emblom climbed into a motorcade leaving Tiger Stadium on Saturday night, expecting to chat about the Crimson Tide’s thrilling 20-13 overtime win over LSU on their way to the airport.

Less than a mile from the stadium, however, they found their skills needed to save a life, as a car had struck an LSU campus police officer who was escorting the motorcade on a motorcycle.

“Our first thought goes from, ‘Wow, we just won a huge game,’ to ‘Wow, we need to try to save this person’s life,'” Waldrop said.

You don’t say … Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program:

The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Is it just me, or have you noticed fewer “But if you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” replies to news like that these days? Seems like you get a lot more “Meh,” instead.

An idea whose time has come, StoryTracker is a new tool to track how news homepages change:

Hopefully you know about PastPages, the tool built by L.A. Times data journalist Ben Welsh to record what some of the web’s most important news sites have on their homepage — hour by hour, every single day. Want to see what The Guardian’s homepage looked like Tuesday night? Here you go. Want to see how that Ebola patient first appeared on DallasNews.com in September? Try the small item here. It’s a valuable service, particularly for future researchers who will want to study how stories moved through new media. (For print media, we have physical archives; for digital news, work even a few years old has an alarming tendency to disappear.)

I wish there was the same sort of thing for old broadcasts. When you invent your time machine, take something like this back with you and just scoop the radio and television signals out of the air, would you?

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11
Nov 14

Veterans Day, the last warm day

Winter is coming, and months early. But we were warned. Our friendly neighborhood meteorologists and our bombastic national media chicken littles have been trying to get our attention about it for days. I haven’t doubted the forecasts, but it would be hard to believe based simply on your observation.

It was beautiful today. Chamber of commerce weather doesn’t do it justice. Someone struck a Faustian deal for the conditions we enjoyed today and at least one end of that ill-considered deal was upheld. This might be the end of our peak fall.

(It usually lasts about three days to a week.)

Knowing that it would be the last pleasant day for a while — there are models that suggest we won’t be warm again the rest of the month — I went out for a run this evening. I’ve never been on the trail across the street from campus, but I figured out a way to do a little extra and make it a 10K.

I finished up in darkness, on a part of the path where I couldn’t see my feet. Fortunately no ankles were twisted. But I did run through sections where it was remarkably cooler here than it was there. This wasn’t just my perception, I had to run through it twice. It was like being in a canyon where the temperature drops 10 degrees simply based on the terrain. Only I wasn’t in a canyon. More like a tunnel. An office building sealed off the big road artery, woods were on the opposite side and there was a strong tree canopy overhead.

But it was a fine run. I even did some intervals.

Intervals at the end of a six-mile jog. I do not know what is happening.

Things to read … so you’ll know what is happening.

Happy Veterans Day, indeed, and thank you to my many family members and friends who have served or continue to do so. All four of my grandmother’s brothers served. That whole family is full of camo, olive drab and a sprinkling of Air Force blue. I have had the good fortune to be friends with Marine reservists, Army veterans and active duty personnel and I read a lot. All of that tells me only this, the sacrifice others make through hardship, deprivation and loss are things that the rest of us will have difficulty ever knowing. And we’re definitely blessed in what we don’t know; but perhaps we shortchange all of those between us and that by not having a better understanding.

My great-grandfather would have been 95 today. He served as a combat medic in the Battle of the Bulge.

I had the great privilege of seeing these Marines graduate a few years ago:

A friend shared this link today and it is a reminder that it isn’t just the serviceman or servicewoman who is given a sacrifice: A Marine’s Parents’ Story

And, as I said on Twitter this evening, every war is different, indeed every person’s war is different. But if you read nothing else after the story above, I encourage you to read Ernie Pyle’s A long thin line of personal anguish:

Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out – one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.

Here are torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits and jumbled heaps of lifebelts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.

That line, for a reason I have never been able to explain, punches me, hard, every time. That entire column, like so much of Pyle’s war work, gets right to the heart of what it is to be in a hard time.

Plenty of wonderful stuff here, Pulitzer Winning Photographer David Turnley’s Advice to a Class of Photojournalism Students:

David Turnley had so much to say on the matter of street shooting and his experiences of so many decades of work, and I was so overloaded with joy and the relevant information he brought to the table based on real experience from a career as a humanitarian and war photographer, that it was hard to capture everything he was saying, but some important things he shared with us did manage to stick with me.

I love this stuff, programs, projects and efforts like these provide some amazing results, “No Local Radio History Is Too Small”:

The task force says radio is “perpetually declared to be a dying medium” but nevertheless attracts dedicated listeners and commercial and public support. The organizers believe radio’s history is a chronicle of our country’s culture and a potential trove for historical researchers, but that much of it is “untapped” because of radio’s live nature and problems of accessibility to content.

Almost every day there’s something in the bygone ether that I wish I could find online. We’ve become great archivists as amateurs, but if you think about the decades of important work that might have disappeared …

We’ll be talking about this in class soon … UGC Use In Local News Is Growing:

TV stations will one day get a large percentage of their breaking news video from viewers, predicted Rebecca Campbell, president and CEO of the Disney ABC Television Station group.

Speaking Friday in a keynote interview at LiveTV:LA, Campbell said producing local TV news is an increasingly interactive affair, with producers using social media to alert followers to breaking news, and viewers shooting video and sending it to newsrooms.

ABC stations are promoting the trend, Campbell added. “Many of our stations brand themselves as ‘Eyewitness News’ and they’ve begun encouraging viewers to become an eyewitness and send in video when they see news,” she said.

This is the fourth such story I’ve seen recently. We’ll be at critical conversation mass soon, Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize:

The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.

In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar.

“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” he explained. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’ ”

Carole Hinders at her modest, cash-only Mexican restaurant in Arnolds Park, Iowa. Last year tax agents seized her funds.Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime RequiredOCT. 25, 2014

Mr. Connelly was talking about a practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government, without ever securing a conviction or even filing a criminal charge, to seize property suspected of having ties to crime.

And one of “those” stories. $40G per bird? California cormorants refuse to budge from bridge being demolished:

Now that a crucial section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has been replaced by a new $6.4 billion span, nobody needs it anymore — nobody except about 800 birds who call the decrepit, 78-year-old segment home.

The double-crested cormorants – protected, though not endangered – have nested along the bridge for decades, and have so far shown no interest in relocating to the shiny new section that replaced the eastern section of the famed bridge. Officials have tried pricey decoys, bird recordings and even specially-made nests installed underneath the new span to lure them roughly 100 feet next door. The effort to demolish the old section, damaged 25 years ago in the massive Loma Prieta earthquake, is being held up by the birds’ unwillingness to move, and critics, who say the delays could cost taxpayers $33 million, are crying fowl.

The first two comments I see on that story?:

Gee I wonder how some moonshiners from Alabama would handle this technical problem? LOL

I guarantee you that Alabama moonshiners would handle it with a lot more logic and common sense than the Californians are handling the problem. By the way, I am not from Alabama so here is no bias on my part.

A few scare shells would probably do the job. Just like the ultimate removal of their preferred structure.

Hey, they’ve already built the birds a replacement home.

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10
Nov 14

The delta comes to campus

I have a very musical sense about things. I know this: One day, many decades hence, before they put me in the cold ground, there’s going to be a ragtime band playing a few tunes. Some of it might sound like this:

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the great Allen Toussaint are touring together — they’ve never done that before, somehow — and they played Samford tonight. It was a terrific show. Toussaint has 20 records, two Grammy nominations and the National Medal of Arts award. The band goes back 50 years with a rotating cast of members. Some of the current iteration have been onboard for decades. Seeing them all on one stage feels like you’re reaching elbow deep into the hopes, history, irreverence and dreams of Americana. To see great talent like those men playing together is to, perhaps, get a small inkling of jazz as the American art form. Within it all there are discordant notes and spaces and wandering musicians and multiple instruments and it all comes back together again. Americana. They all count their time in music and New Orleans in generations.

Charlie Gabriel, for example, is 81 and has been playing music for at least 67 years. He has four generations of New Orleans musicians behind him and three generations playing below him.

Also, if someone can book a singer that sounds like Charlie Gabriel for that day many decades hence, that’d be splendid.

They did play St. James Infirmary, two versions in fact. One of them was perhaps the happiest tune about death you could imagine. The other was very angry, as it should be. Part of that is in the clip above.

Things to read … because there are clips below, too.

Supremely well said, Open Letter to the Auburn Family.

Also, if you were there, you got to see a Medal of Honor winner:

Student assaulted, accused of recording Ferguson protest meeting:

A University of Missouri-St. Louis student who uses an online platform to live-stream protests in Ferguson was hospitalized last week after five or six people threw him out of a church, where protesters had gathered to strategize, and beat him.

The student, Chris Schaefer, began live streaming Ferguson protests and interviews on Oct. 23. But during the protest strategy meeting at St. Mark’s Family Church on Nov. 6, he was not recording, he said in a video from a hospital bed.

[…]

Schaefer told police five or six people assaulted him at the meeting because they believed he was recording the meeting, said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a St. Louis County Police Department spokesman. Schaefer ran out of the church to a Walgreens about a half mile from the church, where police responded to a 911 call, Schellman said. Police are looking for the suspects.

Russia is changing their media laws, and so … CNN To End Russian Broadcast By Year’s End

Here’s another demonstration of the need for multiple platform idea Millennials Spend 18 Hours a Day Consuming Media — And It’s Mostly Content Created By Peers:

New research by social-influence marketing platform Crowdtap indicates that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media.

Those hours represent a total across multiple media sources, some of which are consumed simultaneously.

We all need to develop effective (meaning, sometimes, different) messages across platforms within our unifying themes. It is starting to sound like jazz, no?