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Home light

The early evening light as it falls into our living room:

I do think that’s my favorite hour of the day in the house. It is full of hope and wonder, but it also has some melancholy, too. It is fleeting. And, soon, the light points out, it will be dark. So I’m always torn about it, but I do love that hour of golden light.

In the bedroom in comes in through a large laurel oak and if there is even a gentle breeze you get beautiful shadows dancing on the walls and the floor and the bed. As far as anyone can tell, that is one of the few redeemable qualities of a laurel oak.

Fall break at school, so I’m working from home. Two class preps. Emails to read and deliver. Work to dream up for student projects.

I also had to write a document on student achievements. We have impressive students. We have a lot of impressive students. And then we have some who just earn and win everything. I don’t know how they do it.

The most difficult thing, though, was trying to provide context. What’s the best way to distinguish this honor society from that one? And how do I explain this scholarship compared to another? Context is important, and it isn’t enough to say “Trust us on this, she’s an awesome person.”

Also, there was copy editing. There is always copy editing. Make your peace with it early, try to get useful at it. There is always something to read and mark up.

Things to read … because there is always something to read.

Let me guess! Because Alabama doesn’t have a rule on the books? Because Alabama doesn’t have a rule on the books, Why you may not know if your data has been hacked

What Buzzfeed, Medium and Adafruit Know About Engagement:

“When we have something that’s a hit, usually our response is not, let’s do more of those. Our response is, let’s figure why this is a hit and make variations of this. This was successful because it was tied to someone’s identity, it was successful because it had cats in it, or it was successful because it had humor, or it was successful because it tapped into nostalgia. If you’re making entertainment content, which is a big part of what we do, you look at that hit and you say, ‘Why was that successful? Can I do it again? Can I make something else that people really love and want to share?’ And you try to vary it, even though you know doing something derivative would work. Long term, you want to have a deeper understanding of how to make great things. That’s really the focus. That comes from people in a room talking and saying, ‘Oh, let’s try this, let’s try that.’ And valuing people doing new things, not just valuing people doing big things.”

Uh huh, NBC News’ Nancy Snyderman Apologizes for Violating Ebola Quarantine Guidelines

This is a great read on how the previous story came to pass, How local news site nailed NBC News top doc

Louisiana Attorney General halts Ebola waste disposal:

It was reported that six truckloads of potential Ebola contaminated material collected from the apartment where the Dallas Ebola victim became ill were brought to Port Arthur, Texas late last week to be processed at the Veolia Environmental Services incinerator.

From there the incinerated material was slated to be transported to the Chemical Waste Management hazardous material landfill in Calcasieu Parish for final disposal.

The temporary restraining order, signed by Judge Bob Downing Monday in Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court, requires Veolia to cease and desist any transport of the incinerator ash from the treated Ebola contaminated waste in Texas to the State of Louisiana.

This could be a big deal. Or it could be another Mobro 4000. Do you remember the 1987 garbage barge story? Last year’s 25th anniversary meant the New York Times revisited the Mobro 4000 story and concluded “little of what we thought we knew was true.”

One last game:

Yeah, that’s just the promo — the full package doesn’t seem to be on YouTube — but it is a great story.

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2
Oct 14

Sigoggling

Sometimes you spend all day in your office, doing office things. Sometimes you do office things and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve done office things. But, then, sometimes, you spend all day doing office things, questioning your progress on doing those things and then walk outside at just the right time.

And that, as they say, is its own reward.

My other reward was veggies.

Things to read … because reading makes us big and strong.

(That’s what you’ve been told your entire life, anyway.)

Help for victims of sex trafficking: priest Becca Stevens wants Birmingham to do more

This will stick with you, How to Spot a Trafficking Victim at an Airport

Here’s the trailer for American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper, detailing the nation’s best sniper. As movie trailers go, that’s incredibly intense.

This story never gets old, Sportsmanship allows middle school boy to live football dream:

Dalton, diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth, had just realized a long-time dream — playing football for his beloved Bears. Dalton had been hoping to dress with the team all season. Finally approved to participate, assistant Bears coach J.T. Lawrence and the other coaches had an idea.

“We thought it would be a great experience for Dalton and for the rest of our kids if he could get into a game and score,” Lawrence said. There was one problem. Dalton did not need to have any physical contact.

Lawrence talked to Prattville Christian athletic director Sam Peak and asked if his school would allow Dalton to go into the game and score a 2-point conversion if Billingsley scored a touchdown.

“That was an easy answer,” Peak said. “We coach our kids to be thankful for each opportunity to touch someone else’s life. This was an opportunity for us to do something good.”

A friend found the video:

UAB gets $47M grant for low-income education initiative

The Cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson

One System, Two Media: How China, Hong Kong Are Covering The Protests

The second half of this is great, Young Protesters in Hong Kong Have Found an Ingenious Way Around Cyber Censors

Occupy Hong Kong: Macro scale, micro-adaptations

Speaking of adaptations:

Could have told them that at the beginning … Facebook is more important to news distribution than you think, and journalists are freaked out:

At ONA, anxiety about Facebook’s increasing control over our traffic revealed itself in lots of questions: If I have 250,000 fans of my page, why don’t they all see everything I post? Why does my journalism seem to reach fewer people than it used to? Is Facebook trying to pressure my news organization to spend money to boost my posts or take out ads?

But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?

From the department of obvious things that could be understood but for interest, Editors who don’t use Twitter undercut their pleas to innovate.

If you’re from anywhere near where I’m from, this sounds a bit like home:

The sounds are the same, but those North Carolinians have their own unique vocabulary. You get the sense that even that language is falling away. Some of those words were things a parent said, some of them took some recollection. Good that it has been recorded in documentary form — and I want to see the full thing. How else would we have seemingly random blog post titles?

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1
Oct 14

The unknown stories of things

We hope you enjoyed Catember. Allie enjoyed being famous on the Internet. It was another successful month of showing off, cat hijinx and being cute. Life is hard for a black cat.

She’s curled up sleeping somewhere as I write this.

What do you suppose this is?

I caught the quickest glimpse of it on the freeway. The left lane is closed for repaving. The big orange barrels that come with road work are jutting out into the newly redone right line far enough that you’re driving at least halfway onto the shoulder. Fortunately, that was recently paved as well. At least the traffic is moving through the area, and the work is high quality. It is one of three or four stretches of road construction between here and there on that interstate.

None of which explains what that device does. I think it might perhaps have something to do with lane marking, but you can’t see a paint container there.

Things to read … because … we have to fill our own paint containers?

How media outlets are ‘gamifying’ the news:

News organizations are increasingly turning to video games to attract online readers, especially younger ones. The games hold promise — not just in terms of generating more readers and traffic hits, but in terms of helping people understand and consume news in different ways.

[…]

“It’s important for us and our journalists to not allow a medium to develop that we’re not going to at least explore,” Anthony DeBarros, director of interactive applications at Gannett Digital, said in a Digiday story this week. “It’s important to understand how we can be a part of an emerging medium.”

There are several great examples of emerging ideas in that story, including work from the European Journalism Centre and Al Jazeera.

How newsrooms can make the most of their archives:

In 1950 William Faulkner wrote “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” in his novel Requium for a Nun. However, the quote gained renewed attention in 2008 when then-candidate Obama gave a major speech on race in America. Obama was tapping into the archives of American culture to add context to the news of the day and connect that moment to the long and troubled history of race in America.

The Internet has made this idea of the past living alongside – and interwoven with – the present more true now than ever. Today, even relatively new newsrooms have vast and quickly growing archives of work to tap into and build upon. These archives hold huge potential to add context to current events, fuel community engagement and even serve as a new revenue stream.

Tablet Magazines Are Lousy, But J-Schools Can Make Them Better:

Though Apple claims it has sold more than 200 million iPads since 2010, not many of those users subscribe to magazines. Replica digital magazines accounted for only 3.8 percent of total paid circulation in the first half of 2014, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. To put this in perspective: National Geographic won the National Magazine Award for best tablet magazine this year. The Geographic’s paid print circulation is 3.5 million. Circulation for the tablet edition: 164,408. The “best” the industry has to offer amounts to less than 5 percent of paid circulation. (Blame the AAM, in part, for the industry’s reliance on tedious replica apps; they are the only versions counted in a publication’s rate base, which help determine its ad rates.)

While magazines are still producing tablet issues, they haven’t saved the industry like we hoped. But that doesn’t stop journalism schools from making them a focal point in the curriculum.

The White House Wants to Reveal Where Government Drones Fly:

The White House is getting ready to send out an order to make agencies open up data on where they fly drones and what happens to all of the data they collect.

Right now, only the government is actually allowed to fly drones legally. Commercial drone use is banned by the FAA, although it gave out several permits to movie and television production companies to let them use drones, and gave unique permission to a company in Texas to let it use drones in a search and rescue mission.

The new executive order would specifically tell federal agencies to open up data on its drone fleets that it has kept secret for years. Although the new rules would cover all federal agencies, the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have the largest fleets and would be most affected by the disclosure rules.

We talked about this today in a Crimson meeting. I am no expert on the extent of this issue, but it is an interesting topic that comes to light from time to time, and should be held up for examination more frequently, Reports on college crime are deceptively inaccurate:

The crime statistics being released by colleges nationwide on Wednesday are so misleading that they give students and parents a false sense of security.

Even the U.S. Department of Education official who oversees compliance with a federal law requiring that the statistics be posted on Oct. 1 each year admits that they are inaccurate. Jim Moore said that a vast majority of schools comply with the law but some purposely underreport crimes to protect their images; others have made honest mistakes in attempting to comply.

In addition, weaknesses in the law allow for thousands of off-campus crimes involving students to go unreported, and the Education Department does little to monitor or enforce compliance with the law — even when colleges report numbers that seem questionable.

Here are Samford’s published data covering 2011 through 2013 and for September 2014. I wonder if there is a story there …

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24
Sep 14

A good man, a good plan and a good brand

I never met Mr. Davis, but I worked with his daughter, Tiffany. She was fresh out of college and I was about two years removed. She was smart and talented and charming. She was friendly and amusing. She learned a lot and worked hard and got better. She was a lot of the things that we probably all hope we are. She talked about her father an awful lot. They always sounded like a devoted family. He sounded like a good man.

She still is all of those things, by the way. She’s moved out west, but we’re still friends online. I imagine her brother is all of those things too, but we’ve never met. You’ve probably seen him on television, where he comes off as an incredibly likable man who works hard and knows his craft.

It seems to me that to have raised two children like his, you must be some kind of lucky and some kind of parent. Mr. Davis just recently passed away. Rece wrote about his dad, a wonderful and intimate remembrance proving the kind of man he was.

Those are my favorite verses, too.

Spent the afternoon counting things. I do this every year, taking stock of the department. Demographics are important, and one must always know how many of these and those there are, to say nothing of the thoses and thises. I do this every year and this is still the best method I have thought up:

You don’t change the classics. What you can change is the spreadsheet which holds the data and digests it into simple charts and graphs. There are pages and pages of data, and I get it down to one page of information, all thanks to the humble and inconsistent tally marks.

Things to read … because reading leads to pages and pages of information.

First, the quick list of journalism links:

How social media is reshaping news

Harnessing the power of immersive, interactive storytelling

The secret to BuzzFeed’s video success: Data

New York Times is retiring the Managing Editor title in favor of four deputy executive editors

Forest Service says media needs photography permit in wilderness areas, alarming First Amendment advocates

How TV Everywhere strategy is evolving in the world of cable news

Advice for real-time reporting from BBC, Guardian, Telegraph

Tool Called Dataminr Hunts for News in the Din of Twitter

And now for something delicious, The Creation Myth of Chocolate-Chip Cookies:

What’s less certain is why, exactly, Wakefield put the chopped-up chocolate into her cookies to begin with. A few versions of the story have her creating the recipe accidentally—she was out of nuts, she thought the chocolate would melt into the batter, the chips fell into the bowl by accident. Wyman, in her book, argues that Wakefield was too much of a perfectionist to have come upon the recipe so haphazardly. In support of her argument, she cites a few accounts from the 1970s in which Wakefield tells reporters that she’d been planning experiments with chocolate chunks.

And, of course, she had no idea what it would all become. It says she gave permission to Nestle to reprint her recipe. It does not say what she got in the deal. There’s also a link to the original cookie, if you’d like to try it.

Websites Are Wary of Facebook Tracking Software:

Online retailers and publishers are pushing back against Facebook Inc.’s efforts to track users across the Internet, fearing that the data it vacuums up to target ads will give the social network too much of an edge.

Web traffic experts say there is less data flowing from some sites to Facebook, suggesting they have been reprogrammed to hold back information.

Because they figured out what they were giving away, that they weren’t a partner with Facebook, just a vehicle for it.

Snapchat and your higher ed social media strategy:

When this social media tool first came out, many people were worried that certain *ahem* risque behaviour would take place at a much higher rate. However, since its launch in late 2011, it’s became pretty clear that college kids mainly use Snapchat for selfies, pictures of their pets and photos/videos of the events they attend. And seeing as a new study by Mashable reveals 77 percent of college students check their Snapchats daily, it’s definitely an outlet not to be overlooked when planning your higher ed social media strategy.

We’ve considered that, put it on the back burner and considered it again. I’m sure it will ultimately happen. We do like stories, after all.

This I want to see: Coca-Cola vintage ad will be unveiled at Opelika’s Smith T Building Supply:

Opelika-area residents and Coca-Cola enthusiasts are invited to the unveiling of one of the oldest untouched Coca-Cola painted wall advertisements in existence.

The unveiling event will be held on Oct. 9 at 4 p.m., at Smith T Building Supply in downtown Opelika. Historians from The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta and community leaders will be in attendance. Vintage bottles of Coke will be given away while supplies last.

The experts think the sign was painted in 1907 or 1908. The ad is being seen for the first time in more than a century. How about that?

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22
Sep 14

Some of these children are our future

Some friends and I have a little joke on Twitter we call Why I Love The Internet This Week or #WILITW. Usually the subject matter is a video, but the premise is always “Without this amazing tool, we would have never had the opportunity to enjoy this.”

But for the Internet. I gave you this week’s entry:

Isn’t that adorable? Two cheers for the Wallkill Mighty Mites from Wallkill, New York. But now let’s watch it again and analyze some of the constituent parts. The first thing you notice, while keeping in mind this is in slow motion, that the entire team was running through that sign no matter what. That’s an admirable esprit de corps from such a young team so early in their season.

The second thing is the cheerleaders. Those girls never gave up the fight, and that’s a great demonstration of boosterism and support.

Which brings us to the mom in the foreground. She held her end of the sign for several waves of the team to break through. That’s dedication. That’s belief. That’s probably a mom who thought her son could get through the thing.

As opposed to the woman holding the other end of the sign. She literally turned her back on the pile up.

Meanwhile, the cheerleaders are cheering and clapping and jumping. And a half dozen kids will always remember this, all through their football careers, and they’ll never feel the need to be at the front of the team to break the paper on the high school gridiron.

The good news is they brushed it off and, apparently, won the game.

I got in a 43-mile ride yesterday evening. I was hoping for about 46, but I had to cut it short because of darkness. So I came home the slightly shorter way, with the big hill, which I was in no condition to deal with after 43 miles, thinking I need to start my rides earlier in the day.

My route was an amalgamation of two that I’m familiar with. It took me through a modern residential area, a shopping mecca, a historic part of town and then out through the countryside. I sailed by the old union headquarters that is now apparently a church and another old plant that will probably never have a new tenant. I was almost clipped by a pickup and the trailer he was hauling. And I worked my way back out into the countryside, where I turned off of a road with a name onto another with just a number.

The road bottoms out at a creek bed and you’re surrounded by judgmental cows and someone shooting a nail gun nearby. I went by a man sitting on his porch and another working on his roof. I cruised by the brand new post office that is shiny and new for a community that consists of a church, one store and a volunteer fire department. Just past that is a stop sign and that store, a junk store, where I years ago discovered my love for junk stores. If you go straight you find yourself on about a mile of the worst chip/seal pavement you can find in the rural South. But then you go under some trees, round a curve, pass a pasture and you find yourself on a brand new and nearly pristine asphalt and large rollers.

I did about five or six miles on that, surrounded by red clay and pine trees and only the most occasional house, before I turned around for home. I stopped there and took a few of the pictures that were shared here yesterday, where I was talking about the lumber yard and old wood. I also took this picture there:

What is in those woods? The whole road which, again, has always been eerily empty, is covered with various posted and no trespassing signs. But a human silhouette target sign? I didn’t previously care about that gravel path, but now I’m curious.

Things to read … because reading keeps us curious.

These first two are about the opposite of transparency … City of Anniston institutes policy change for media interaction

8 ways the Obama administration is blocking information

And a few more quick journalism links … How 5 news orgs have updated their apps for Apple’s new operating system

News for the Minecraft generation: Gannett experiments with virtual reality

This is amazing work … Photographer Captures Tens of Thousands Fleeing ISIS, Entering Turkey

We’ve been banging this drum for a few years now … Brace For The Corporate Journalism Wave:

In short, while the journalistic staffing is shrinking dramatically in every mature market (US, Europe), the public relation crowd is rising in a spectacular fashion. It grows in two dimensions: the spinning aspect, with more highly capable people, most often former seasoned writers willing to become spin-surgeons. These are both disappointed by the evolution of their noble trade and attracted by higher compensation. The second dimension is the growing inclination for PR firms, communication agencies and corporations themselves to build fully-staffed newsrooms with editor-in-chief, writers, photo and video editors.

That’s the first issue.

The second trend is the evolution of corporate communication. Slowly but steadily, it departs from the traditional advertising codes that ruled the profession for decades. It shifts toward a more subtle and mature approach based on storytelling. Like it or not, that’s exactly what branded content is about: telling great stories about a company in a more intelligent way versus simply extolling a product’s merits.

The invasion of corporate news:

With the president-felling image of Woodward and Bernstein still hanging over the profession, and a geekily hip narrative of data-driven analysis pointing to a new future, few journalists like to acknowledge the role PRs play in their stories. Many are well-informed, professional, clever, helpful and fun. Some are former colleagues. Some become friends. But for most journalists, it is an involvement we put up with warily. PRs are spinners of favourable stories, glossers-over of unfavourable facts and gatekeepers standing between us and the people we want to get to.

But as journalists bemoan such PR obstacles, they rarely admit an important fact: the PRs are winning. Employment in US newsrooms has fallen by a third since 2006, according to the American Society of News Editors, but PR is growing. Global PR revenues increased 11 per cent last year to almost $12.5bn, according to an industry study entitled The Holmes Report. For every working journalist in America, there are now 4.6 PR people, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.2 a decade ago. And those journalists earn on average 65 per cent of what their PR peers are paid.

More sad news in Africa … Lockdown Begins in Sierra Leone to Battle Ebola

And happy news … Marine severely wounded in Afghanistan marries the woman who helped him hold on

Grand Prairie Homecoming Queen Shares Her Crown:

On Friday night, in front of thousands of friends, family members and fans at the Gopher-Warrior Bowl, that is exactly what happened.

Principal Lorimer Arendse, now in his fourth week at the helm of Grand Prairie High School, was let in on the plan shortly before halftime and the planned announcement of the homecoming winners.

“In all my time in school, this is probably the greatest moment I’ve ever experienced as a principal,” said Arendse, who has five years of prior experience in school administration.

Kids these days, eh?