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No title Tuesday

When we got in last night, the first thing I did was put my things down.

No, that’s too early, let me back up.

When we got in last night, we stood on the curb at the airport for some time. The place we used as a park-and-ride had one shuttle running to the airport the week before Christmas, which seemed smart. It was cold. We waited. But it was at least night to be out of an airport, off of planes. Our trip began just before 6 p.m. and we landed just after 11 p.m. Not bad, considering we had a short layover in Detroit. It turned out that we took the same plane, so we disembarked long enough to grab a bite, and then get back on the plane. For our first leg of the flight I sat next to a retired Delta pilot. He is now flying rich people around out of Detroit. There are, he said, five wealthy families in Detroit and six jets. Then he showed me his Christmas card from Bob Seger, who is one of those families.

We covered a lot of ground as we were flying over the ground. The styles of flying, how much money people typically earn before they buy a plane of their own, some of his anecdotes, and so on. He asked me what I do for a living, and I told him, and he found this interesting, so we talked about media for a long while. One of my former students is in Detroit, and he has surely seen him on CBS. He was very curious about the nature and process of media, and the conversation gave me more grist for my “people don’t understand what we do” mill.

It goes both ways, of course. I’ve been on many planes, and I can fly one just as well as he could produce a media product. We think we know about other things because of our experience, but it’s not an expertise. He told me the progency of the plane we were on, and told me about the insulation properties of the fuselage. I know nothing about his business. Now, let me explain the basics of local media economic models.

There’s going to be a hypothesis in there, somewhere, eventually.

We left him in Detroit, it was his last work for a week. It sounds like has a pretty good gig for a retired man. On the second leg of the trip I sat with my lovely bride. She watched a documentary, I caught up on the day’s news. I also learned that one of my former students will be on national television on Christmas Eve. She’s a meteorologist, having gone from Greenville, North Carolina to Albuquerque to San Francisco, a real talent, a credible forecaster and now she’s getting turns on national TV.

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I bet she could have told me whether I had on enough layers for the curbside cold. Standing there, getting on the shuttle, getting to the car and getting home, might have taken about the same amount of time as either one of our flights this evening.

And so, finally, the first thing I did was put my things down. Then I petted the cats. They were very insistent and full of attitude, as if to say “These are the hi-jinx you could have enjoyed if you’d been here the last week.”

Today, there has been a lot of desperate cuddling.

And a lot of loud complaining.

One of their friends spent the week with them. They had a good time. I saw the photos and videos. I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling with this act.

But the kitties are doing well. And all of the cuddling slowed down today’s grading. This last batch took the afternoon and the first half of the evening. Much longer than necessary, but the class was the class was the class.

I’ll submit the final grades tomorrow, marking the end of the fall term. I’ll take a few days off. And then, starting Saturday, I’ll go back to designing a new class for the spring term. This will be my third brand new class in as many terms, and my 11th new prep in six semesters.

That, if you are not in this business, is a lot.

friends / journalism / links / Rowan / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
2
Dec 25

New look to the front page, btw

For fun, I made some certificates for colleagues. They’re all inside jokes for conference friends. Polite, smart, funny, kind-hearted people. One of them was about one guy picking on another guy. That second guy got one for being up for anything. Another certificate for was for someone running the circus. A third was for another guy, “and he knows why.”

He does not know why. But, you know, I don’t know why either. He’s just about the sweetest, most decent guy you could meet. If he’s ever done anything out of line no one knows about it and he’s buried it deeply in his subconscious. I could go on and on, but, really, we’re just lucky he’s a good friend.

Anyway, we all attend this one conference. And we’ve all held various leadership positions there over the years. We’re trying really hard to become the cool club within the club. Or just to amuse ourselves. One year, my lovely bride won the junior scholar award and at the conference and got a nice plaque. The next year, she won a top paper award and got a plaque. The year after that, I got a top paper award there. (I got nothing.) She also has some certificates from when she ran different divisions of that conference. I’ve run the same ones. (I got nothing.) In our text chat, the rest of the group realized they have been similarly shortchanged. So I made certificates.

Her certificate recognized her many conference achievements. So meta.

And so as to inoculate myself from a return joke, I made one for me.

That’s one of the two or three semi-notorious things I’ve said at that conference over the years. We were participating on a panel on the social constructs of this or that and I held up my phone and said something like, “We are all roaming little balls of hate with hate rectangles in our hands.”

Actually, I said exactly that. The quote was immortalized by someone who got a certificate today.

I get to see them in April, and I’m excited for it.

This evening I updated the images on the front page of the site. They look similar to the most recent version, but different. They look like this.

They are photos from a particular tree-covered road that I shot in October. And here I am, finally getting around to uploading them. This being one of my core hobbies, and being about five weeks behind on getting them here says a lot about my time management lately.

Maybe I’ll get better at it later this month, when the term is over, and the grades have been submitted.

At which time I’ll take three, maybe four deep breaths, and start planning for the spring term.

The good news is I only have one new class prep in the spring! (Three this semester was … a lot.) One class I have will be unchanged. The one will be new. And I’ll make some small adjustments to the criticism class. I’ll refine the details for that in a few days.

Yes, I have carved out two 15-minutes blocks of time, Thursday and next Tuesday, to figure that all out.

In today’s installment of the criticism class, we discussed this story. I chose it because it is a different sort of piece than anything we’ve read all fall. And I wanted the class to see the mechanics of how the writer wrote about the mechanics of deaf soccer. I played when I was a kid, and when I first saw this story last summer I thought, “How do they do that?” Soccer is basically played, and communicated, from behind you. But if no one can hear …

Soccer — and life — through the eyes of the U.S. deaf women’s national team

The first thing to know about deaf soccer is that it is soccer, and a match looks the same as at any level of the sport.

Instead of a loud, profanity-laced pregame speech from the most extroverted leader on the team, players gather in a circle and execute a synchronized movement of quick fist bumps and back-of-hand slaps. During the game, the center official raises a flag in addition to blowing their whistle for fouls and stoppages of play, and games are typically quieter than the average match that features more verbal communication.

From a technical standpoint, players must have hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in their “better ear” to qualify to play deaf soccer and, crucially, hearing aids are not allowed in games, ensuring all players are on a level playing field.

On a hearing team, communication often comes from the back. The goalkeeper and defenders see everything in front of them and can direct their teammates accordingly — and verbally.

“For us, that’s not possible, that’s not realistic,” Andrews says.

The process is more about inherent understanding and movement as a team. If a forward pushes high to chase a ball, everyone behind her must follow. Halftime or injury breaks become more important, Andrews says, because they represent rare opportunities to look at each other as a group.

One guy, at the bginning of class, wondered the same question. How does that work? I said, “You should read the story. It gets explained about 20 percent the way through the story, and it’s a good one, and you’d like it if you read it.”

He just smiled an embarrassed smile and put his head down for a while. We carried on.

We also read and discussed this story, How the Texans and a spa enabled Deshaun Watson’s troubling behavior, mostly for the troubling headline, so I could make some important points about headlines. But the copy is worth reading, too, if you can stomach it.

The accusations have been frequent and startling: more than two dozen women have said the football star Deshaun Watson harassed or assaulted them during massage appointments that Watson and his lawyers insist were innocuous.

Two grand juries in Texas this year declined to charge him criminally and, while the N.F.L. considers whether to discipline him, he has gotten another job, signing a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns this coming season.

It is time, Watson and his representatives say, for everyone to move on.

Yet a New York Times examination of records, including depositions and evidence for the civil lawsuits as well as interviews of some of the women, showed that Watson engaged in more questionable behavior than previously known.

The Times’s review also showed that Watson’s conduct was enabled, knowingly or not, by the team he played for at the time, the Houston Texans, which provided the venue Watson used for some of the appointments. A team representative also furnished him with a nondisclosure agreement after a woman who is now suing him threatened online to expose his behavior.

In org comm we talked about crisis and conflict. Specifically, what are the differences between crises and scandals. This is one of those classes where you get to use popular instances of players the class knows and try to understand why things transpired as they did. For us, it is all building to next week’s work. And toward the final, but they don’t know that yet.

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21
Nov 25

There are many questions

We had a faculty meeting today. Many speeches and introductions. It is part of moving into, and creating, a new college. There are many questions, we don’t yet have all of the answers, but good and talented people are working on it. Answers will be found. These things don’t happen overnight.

Here’s how overnight they don’t happen. We’re in a one-year status quo pattern. As that happens many new procedures are implemented. It’s the first year of a three-year fact-finding and solution-creating process. Sometimes it seems like three years might not be a long enough for that. Sometimes you’re made aware of all that goes into it. And then you’re made aware of all of these other things too. And then there are concerns you aren’t familiar with. There’s a lot that goes into it. You can see that even if, like me, you’re only familiar with just the trees in your section of the giant forest. And people get highly specialized, of course. Also, this is not a thing that happens all of the time, these big department-college merger things. No one specializes in that. But campus communities do love making committees, and sometimes you get some great work out of them. I’m sure that’ll be the case in this instance.

This meeting was held in a building with a big auditorium, because this new college is a huge college and it needs the space for meetings such as these. Down the hall from this auditorium are the offices of the RTF department, and parts of the journalism department, which is moving in there. And on the walls are a lot of old newspaper front pages. These are always such great displays. Maybe I’m one of the only people that stops to look at them, but that’s why they’re there.

Those walls have framed prints of local and campus papers, as all journalism departments seemingly have. The farther you get from this January 1991 issue, above, the less frequently new pages appear. It occurs to me that one of the less important, but nonetheless sad, side effects of ending newsprint is that one day we’ll have no more displays such as these. The last yellowing page on the wall there is a 2018 installment of a local paper (then in the process of being assimilated by a larger entity) running their Super Bowl edition. I wonder who was in charge of deciding which ones to keep. Some are obvious, some may take a little more contextual appreciation.

You could study the look of this paper, and I have considered it. For its day, that’s a strong small paper design. The layout only feels long in the tooth to my 2025 eyes. You’re nine years into the influence of USA Today and all of the influences that emanate from there. I can’t speak to the history of that particular publication, but a quick glance at their digitized archives on newspapers.com suggests they were pretty responsive to industry and consumption trends in that era. Most importantly, it is sharing the information you need, and you know there’s more inside.

Also, there are no ridiculous SEO headlines. It was also all done locally. In 1991, the layout was made with some relatively basic software. If they were using QuarkXPress, this paper was very much an innovator. It would be five more years before a version worth talking about was released. It’s also possible that they did a lot of that with razors and glue. Old school.

Not that you came here for a lot of thoughts on old software. Not that you knew what you were getting here to end the week. I didn’t know either, to be honest. I also don’t know what we’ll have here next week. There will be something, though. We’ll need to check in on the kitties, for instance. There will be some other stuff, too. What will it be? It’s a good question. There are many questions. We’ll find out together.

journalism / links / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
Nov 25

I saw no electrically charged particles released by the sun

We had a special visitor in my criticism class today. My lovely bride joined us to take part in our conversation on one of the articles the students selected for us to read. I was glad to have her there. A lot of times you just need more expertise than you have. And my expertise — such as it is — is limited to begin with. The story was actually an opinion column, which allowed us to discuss some of the differences between them.

From MTG to Charles Barkley, ignorance was on display about trans athletes:

Even on positive stories, like Tifanny Abreu ending a playoff hot streak with a Superliga title in hand or Nikki Hiltz on the charge in Grand Slam Track, the level of anti-trans ignorance is toxic.

This year, and especially last week, has been one long real-life comment section if you are trans, and especially if like sports. Politicians put on a show of ignorance at a hearing and then Charles Barkley — purportedly an ally — continued that ignorance with his insulting comments about trans athletes.

A House subcommittee hearing last week was another opportunity to show how ignorant and bigoted the GOP majority can be toward transgender Americans and how they use sports drive it home with pride. The focus was on trans women in fencing. It centered on a match where a cis woman fencer forfeited a match against a trans woman fencer and became a cause celebre to the anti-trans movement.

We talked about some of the specifics in the column, we talked about the outlet, Out Sports, and we talked about the power of the context of the links the author shared, including this really useful primer, Cracking the code of bias against transgender athletes:

The anti-trans crowd relies upon the fact that most readers and/or sports fans will not bother to check the facts for themselves, in part, because the sport is more obscure.

[…]

Fact checking would have perhaps saved Chesworth some embarrassment, but that’s the rub here. A transphobe counts on the general public to not research the claims for themselves.

I’d given that additional read, because it had some key terms to it, but it also allowed me to make a different and larger point. You could change some of the terms and that guide would help readers understand any sort of propaganda.

From time to time, as we discussed the piece, I would steal a little glance to my left to see if this was where the eminent Dr. Lauren Smith would chime in. She is an expert in this field, after all, and I just happen to listen to her talk about it. But she never interrupted me, never felt the need to correct me. So I guess the details are rubbing off.

Then we discussed this other story which I assigned to the class, The predatory web of sextortion increasingly ensnares young athletes:

John DeMay and Jenn Buta say that since they’ve made Jordan’s story public, they have heard from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who have been victims of sextortion at some level.

“Just this week I had four reach out in a 24-hour period,” Buta said.

The parents’ advice for teens getting targeted is simple: Shut off the computer as soon as a questionable message pops up, walk away and then go tell a trusted adult. The criminals are looking for money, and if they think an avenue has dried up, they’ll likely move on. It’s like a fish wiggling off the hook. But if they believe a fish is still on the hook, there is no amount of appeasement — or payouts — that will stop them from pushing for more.

“If you don’t engage with them, they’re going to stop and move on,” John said.

Meanwhile, NCMEC suggests immediately reporting the account to a social media platform and reaching out to the organization’s hotline: 1-800-843-5678. Laws and policies can help keep the image off the internet.

“We can help,” Coffren said. “We can handle it.”

A slew of new state laws — often pushed into passage by victim families — have made sextortion a felony. Law enforcers say that since most of the international criminals don’t believe anyone will actually take their own life, they won’t actually face criminal consequences for what they believe is just a minor financial crime.

It’s why a message had to be sent.

It’s a horrible story, shocking in its details. Important in every respect. In this class we ask a set of questions about who a story is for and who the disadvantaged people are, and this story had plenty of obvious answers, and some thoughtful and unexpected one from a few students, as well.

For a lighter time, after that class ended and I moved to org comm, we talked about the concepts of conflict. (Later this week and next we move to negotiation.) The class broke up into four groups, each had a different sort of sports-centric conflict they had to resolve. One had two teammates pursuing the same woman. Another had a play-coach disagreement on tactics. There was a third conflict about playing time on a co-ed intramural team. The fourth was a conflict stemming from a captain’s favoritism among teammates. They had to understand the problem, detail the framework of solving it and create reasonable solutions. They were into it, right until the end. I think the windows face the wrong way in that room and when there was nothing in the sky above the gloaming, that was pretty much it.

Maybe they were looking ahead to seeing the Northern Lights. They were probably disappointed. We had good skies for it, for the most part, but nothing out of the ordinary. Still, it’s a delight to go outside, shiver, look up and see all of this.

It is even nicer when you rush back inside nine or 10 minutes later, because it is that time of the year now.

The time of year where I have already decided which jacket I’ll wear to campus for tomorrow’s faculty meeting. The time of year when I wonder when we’ll see the 60s again. The long-range forecast says we’ll get 60 on Sunday. But I think that’s just an automated template from the weather site. It’s also the time of year where you wonder how long I’ll complain about this. That’s a fair question. The answer is: until April, for some silly reason.

football / journalism / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Oct 25

Today flew by, unnecessarily so

It was a mild day. Just below the seasonal averages, but not bad. No rain. Windy at times. Blustery you might say. Why did I sit in front of a computer all day when there was a day like that, just outside of these windows. Ahh, yes, work.

Tomorrow we will watch three TV-sized packages in my criticism class. It’s a quick nod to how the storytelling must change when you’re more compressed for time than a typical documentary. In org comm we will continue our discussion about ethics, but I’m going to sit back and listen to the class discuss pressing matters of state. Somehow, this all requires planning. Also, I spent the day trying to get ahead of next week’s documentary. There’s a film I want to show that is the runtime of the class. My goal is to leave room to talk about the thing. But I can only really cut about nine minutes out of the film without losing the spirit.

What to do, what to do. I think, what I’ll do, is show it next Thursday and come up with some way for us to talk about it the following Tuesday. On the one hand, there’s more time to consider your thoughts and impressions. On the other hand, that’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to lose all of your thoughts and impressions.

Maybe it can become a writing exercise.

If you are the sort of reader who can never get enough of these sorts of stories, then you, my friend, live in the right era.

Louisiana officials waited months to warn public of whooping cough outbreak:

When there’s an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, state health officials typically take certain steps to alert residents and issue public updates about the growing threat.

That’s standard practice, public health and infectious disease experts told NPR and KFF Health News. The goal is to keep as many other vulnerable people as possible from getting sick and to remind the public about the benefits of vaccinations.

But in Louisiana this year, public health officials appeared not to have followed that playbook during the state’s worst whooping cough outbreak in 35 years.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, is a highly contagious vaccine-preventable disease that’s particularly dangerous for the youngest infants. It can cause vomiting and trouble breathing, and serious infections can lead to pneumonia, seizures and, rarely, death.

Complete medical disregard for the local community by the health care professionals aside … In the 28th paragraph the NPR affiliate finally gets to, “A spokeswoman did not answer specific questions about the lack of communications but referred to a Sept. 30 post on X by the state surgeon general.”

Which — in a story about time, responsibility, and children — should maybe be in every other paragraph.

Murrow would weep.

Bari Weiss this week clocks up four weeks on the job as chief booker (sorry, editor-in-chief) of CBS News. Breaker hears that she has unimpressed staffers with a series of bold ideas in the 9 am call.

Last week, following the jewel heist at The Louvre, Weiss suggested they interview author Dan Brown. Staffers questioned what expertise in the matter Brown would provide CBS News viewers? Brown is well known as the bestselling author of the 2003 mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code, about a murder at The Louvre.

On Tuesday’s 9 am call, Weiss suggested a story about how people who are scared of climate change aren’t having children. “She is showing her worst self,” one CBS News journalist told Breaker. “People are running to avoid her.”

Pretty regularly now, when Sen. Tommy Tuberville finds a camera, someone comments about the Alabama education system.

I, a product of that system, understand the joke.

Tuberville on Trump's third term: "He might be able to go around the Constitution, but that's up to him."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) October 28, 2025 at 4:30 PM

But dear commenter, I need you to know: Tommy Tuberville is from Camden, Arkansas and holds a BS in PE from Southern Arkansas University.

Speaking of Alabama. More than 750,000 Alabamians are enrolled in SNAP — almost 15 percent of the state — including 7,800 who work in grocery stores. But we must also think of the trickle down effects.

The grocers association said any cuts or interruptions to the program could cost Alabama up to $1.7 billion in annual federal funds, resulting in a $2.55 billion economic loss. That would put “rural grocery stores — often the only food source for many communities — at risk of closure,” the association said.

Grocers in Alabama were already warning about the impacts SNAP cuts would have on them when the Big Beautiful Bill was passed in July, cutting $186 billion in funding for the food program.

Jimmy Wright, who owns Wright’s Market in Opelika, told AL.com that about 35% of his customers use SNAP.

“It could have a huge impact on our business,” Wright told AL.com “If business drops by 20%, I can’t cut off 20% of my lights or call my insurance company and tell them I’m going to have to reduce what I pay them to compensate. All that’s left is payroll.”

OK, back to work for me. And, for you? Something more fun than work I hope.