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iPhone / journalism / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
20
Feb 12

Monday Monday

Ike Pigott, former television reporter and Red Cross strategist, is now a spokesman at Alabama Power. He is famous for his ability to deliver an entire half of a presentation with his eyes closed, as he is simulating here. Pigott spoke in my class today, we filled one room with two classes worth of students and I believe we all learned something. I know I did.

He did not deliver his presentation with his eyes closed. Every other picture I have, however, suggests he has an awkward posture. And since everyone blinks …

Pigott was kind enough to discuss crisis communication and did so through the prism of strategy and social media. It was a great presentation, which you’d come to expect from a pro like him. As I said on Twitter, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking an Ike Pigott up.

Recruiting phone calls into the evening hours. “Have you heard about all the cool things this department does? And the interships our students routinely land? Did you know about our scholarship opportunities? What questions do you have that I can help you with?”

I like doing the recruiting phone calls. Most of the kids are interested in what you have to say, and they’re excited to get the phone call. You have to be careful about how many you make at one time. Somewhere around 25 phone calls in one evening you start to feel incredibly repetitious.

But the program at Samford does a nice job of selling itself. The are great opportunities behind the Samford gates. And then there are plenty of places in the city and across the region that have a high reputation, built of years of experience, with the quality of interns the program produces. Then they go out in the world and get really cool jobs, from coast to coast, in the NFL and national magazines and the Washington Post and big PR firms, or they start their own companies or work in huge churches and find incredible opportunities to take what they learned on campus and turn it into something they are passionate about.

And then there are the scholarships. So, really, it sells itself.

Still, you have to reach out and contact potential students. There will be a lot of that this week.

cycling / errands / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Feb 12

These stories have thin morals

Eggs. Eggs. Must get eggs. I’d been tasked with this important task because it wouldn’t be a weekend without breakfast.

To the meat lab. This is all in the timing. If you went early the eggs would not be there yet. If you show up late they’ll be gone. (They are a good deal, and popular with the in-crowd. They have a sign with the bad news that they’re out of eggs. They do not have a sign for when they run out of pork chops.)

I walk in. There is one flat of eggs left. Thirty delicious eggs at a terrific price and these are the last ones for the evening. I ask the lady working there if they are spoken for. She says yes. Crestfallen, I glance around at other things and, having failed at the original mission, decide to purchase nothing. I turn to leave.

“You’re not going to buy the eggs?”

Didn’t you say they were someone else’s?

“No. I meant that’s the last of them.”

Well. They are spoken for, then.

Moral: Don’t count your eggs before they are in your refrigerator. (If you count them in someone else’s refrigerator, you should get permission first.)

Visited the big blue box store, because I had to see what the hubbub was about. The place was packed like Christmas was coming or snow had arrived. It was all very orderly though, with people stopping and staring at exciting things like brushes and notebook paper for the longest amount of time.

I checked out behind a handsome elderly couple. They just managed to sneak in under the draconian Express Lane rules that most people do not bother to acknowledge. The lady staffing the register checked them out in silence. And then she struck up a conversation with me, offering me a credit card application and asking about my day and wishing me well. She did none of these things for the couple. Maybe she just talks to every other customer.

Moral: A leopard can’t change his spots, but you can pick yours.

Also hit the local bike shop, where I needed their help making two small adjustments to my bike. They have a tool I don’t — they have a lot of tools I don’t — which is required to make this particular pedal-to-crankset change. I learned this important, and costly, lesson last spring.

Picked up some new shoes, talked about chain lubrication and the upcoming chain replacement that I’ll be due. Chain work, he said, can sometimes open a Pandora’s Box. Because, really, my repair-and-upkeep luck needs the help.

“It might be more than the chain,” he said. “There could also be problem with the cassette.”

Or the derailleur. We could find out I’ve been riding around on the wrong tires. There could be a problem with the satellite in a neighbor’s home, and this responsibility to fall to me.

“But it could be just a chain,” he said.

Moral: It is never just the chain.

Alabama / errands / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / Storify / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off
14
Feb 12

Valentinus, the unknown, celebrate him!

The view in the Caf:

Step Sing, “Samford University’s most time-honored tradition. Since 1951, students” have been preoccupied from their classes while producing this song and dance revue show. It takes place this weekend. There are 14 teams competing for top honors. Thousands of people (tickets sell out in about an hour) will come onto campus to see the shows, which donate large sums to their annual philanthropy benefactor — this year it is Cornerstone Schools of Alabama.

The shows are great fun, very clever, inventive and entertaining. But the banners may be my favorite part.

And, yes, I went to lunch early, which is why the tables are empty in the photograph. There were things to do. There was a trip to take. I had to travel to Tuscaloosa to get a piece of paper filled out. One piece of paper, five signatures, or, more precisely, initials. This can’t be done electronically or by fax, because it has always been done the old fashioned way, I guess. I figured I wouldn’t get all five people, and I did not.

That was a three hour round trip for two sets of initials.

At least I got to see this:

Classic.

Late night for the student-journalists at the Crimson. Step Sing has an effect on everything. When I left sometime after 10 p.m. most of the staffers were still working on their dance steps. So they won’t sleep much. The things you can do when you’re young, right?

Things to read: Who advertises on news sites and how much those ads are targeted:

A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.

Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.

[…]

Overall, the analysis finds that while news organizations have tried to persuade their advertisers to buy space across multiple platforms, there was little evidence that they had succeeded. The kinds of products and services being advertised online were quite different than in legacy platforms, and often were seen across multiple websites.

Interesting findings, but they were only looking at the front page of sites. A lot of traffic comes from search engines, directly into interior pages. Indeed, many front pages aren’t built for the human aesthetic, but rather for the search engine spiders.

Sites selling specific ad space, or clients buying ads exclusively on sports pages or on automotive stories, don’t seem to figure into this. That’s worth studying (or practicing) but it would be incredibly labor intensive.

Seven ways the New York Times is using social media for ‘deeper’ engagement has two really interesting ideas. The rest aren’t bad, they’re just obvious or common. But check out numbers three and four:

3. By “revamping the liveblog template” and turning it into a “second screen”

Heron recognises she is “lucky to count on about a dozen interactive developers as colleagues” on her team, “which is kind of a dream come true for a journalism nerd like me”.

She told the news:rewired conference that the “team of developer-journalists has rebuilt our traditional liveblog and transformed it into more of a second screen, social media-heavy experience – a one-stop-shop for reporting, analysis, newsworthy tweets, reader engagement, and interactive election results”.

4. By creating a “liveblog about liveblogs”

The New York Times team decided it should provide its “own coverage and analysis” for the “aforementioned media cacophony”.

Media reporters Brian Stelter and David Carr have been using Storify to collect the “news media’s tweets, videos and Facebook posts on primary nights”. They have been adding their own analysis as narrative within the Storify.

The future of location-based marketing is cool. . . or scary. Yes it is. You knew that, but read that piece and see if your position changes.

Did the AP just declare war on news aggregators?

(T)his disruption has been even worse for AP and its ilk because they are primarily distributors, and the web has fundamentally democratized content distribution. Instead of trying to find ways to adapt to this new reality, however, the AP seems determined to fight it with everything it has, including lawsuits: On Tuesday, the service launched a lawsuit in New York against a digital news-aggregation service called Meltwater, accusing the service of copyright infringement and “free riding” on its content. The AP says it isn’t going after news aggregators as a whole, but this is clearly meant as a show of force.

The AP may try to charge me for linking to their release. (If they do, let’s all laugh at them together.)

Finally, one of the best Valentine’s tales you’ll read today. It is told through Twitter, making it unique in a way, but it has great pictures and a lovely story, making it traditional. The best work always stems from great stories.

history / iPhone / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
13
Feb 12

Monday the 13th

Shouldn’t this really be the scary day. The 13th is a 19th century conceit, but the Friday business goes back to The Canterbury Tales at least. So much of Chaucer is often forgotten. Friday is frequently seen as the beginning of a good thing.

Monday the 13th still offends the apostolic notion of completeness. And yet we’re all back at the office. Monday the 13th. That’s disconcerting. Imagine the marketing the Jason people could have had there.

Chaucer to Jason in under 45 words. And they said it couldn’t be done.

(The exception to this hasty Friday the 13 is a good day idea being if you are paying for a service. Think long and hard about tire rotation or a roof repair done on Friday. Those diligent and hardworking people could be distracted by thoughts of the weekend too.)

Monday the 13th is a good day here. A great day, even. They often are. Taught a class, answered a lot of questions, discussed resumes and style. Generally tried to be helpful. Wrapped up a few small projects. Got handed a few more. Great Monday. For a 13th, that is.

I love this. Some of our classrooms have old newspapers on display. Some of the newspapers are national, historical front pages. This one is from the first issue of the 1925 edition of the Howard Crimson. The paper was just 10 years old at the time when students were still studying on the old Eastlake campus. This was a front page ad. Imagine the scandal of such a notion!

They led fashion, they did not chase it. What a great ad. Someone should run a mini campaign in this still today, just to see how it stands out from the contemporary fare.

Blach’s was a family-owned department store chain founded in 1885 by German immigrant Julius Blach. At it’s peak in the 1960s and 1970s they had five stores. In 1987, Blach’s filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but the reorganization couldn’t revive the company and they closed for good that same year. The invaluable BhamWiki records:

During the 1945 printers’ strike, which stopped the publication of all three of Birmingham’s daily newspapers, WAPI-AM posted news stories in two of Blach’s windows, organized by various categories. The resulting crowds, according to Time magazine, “all but blocked traffic past the store.”

The Blach’s building started as the Hood, built in 1890 to serve as the storefront for the Hood-Yielding General Merchandise Store. In 1910 it was converted into the 100-room Bencor Hotel and in 1935 it took the Blach name.

Here’s a view from just a few years after that ad. And this is it today:

It sat stagnant for much of the time after bankruptcy and was renovated in 2007, before the bank foreclosed in 2009. Now you can rent a loft there, apparently with the original hardwood.

Do you know what’s great about 100-year-old hardwood? No splinters! Makes every Monday better.

Auburn / iPhone / memories / photo — Comments Off
12
Feb 12

Catching up

Of all the random Auburn folk art — this stuff becomes generational or iconic, it ages well or it disappears — I’ve never run across this one. But in my quixotic quest to get my car fixed I found this in the office of a body shop. The tiger ate the Alabama A logo. And the poor predator looks miserable:

If you look closely, however, you might realize that it isn’t folk art. That’s why it would be unfamiliar to young eyes. It is, in fact a newspaper editorial cartoon. Someone clipped it from the Mobile Press Register and had it matted and framed. I believe the date says 1985. That tiger and Bo Jackson ate the A.

I wonder what was on the other side of the newsprint.

At the famous Drop It Like It’s Hot church on one of my bike rides:

Coach Frank Tolbert, you see, is such an important man that near the end of his career he gets both sides of the church sign. That’s a rarity in this part of the world, where a common approach is to assume that the people going east might need a different message than the people going west.

When I was in college I had the good fortune to broadcast the postseason run for one of Tolbert’s trips to the Final Four in basketball. He is a stern, but kind man. He doesn’t suffer nonsense, but it isn’t hard to see how the kids he works with are where he starts and stops. The community has been fortunate to have his help in shaping lives for more than four decades.

This gas station cover is at Niffer’s, hence the charming graffiti and the unfortunate security sticker. (Pro tip: When people sign their names to things, don’t put an adhesive on that surface. That isn’t advertising, it is an annoyance.)

Interesting, though, is to wonder how old this thing is. Niffers just turned 20 last year, so it could be in that ball park. But it has to be earlier. Note the total sale. No one anticipated you buying more than $9.99 at a time from this pump. The price registered in cents per gallon. (As it should, say car drivers everywhere.)

Sort of makes you miss the old days of the plastic tumbling numbers rather than the digital displays now sucking your wallet dry.

Directly above our table at Niffers, meanwhile:

Phone numbers were four digits when that sign was installed at its original location. Dunlop & Harwell is still around today, but it is a small firm. You don’t see many of their signs, metal or otherwise.