journalism « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

journalism

Stuff and things for Wednesday

A few people actually asked for this on Twitter — can you believe it? — and so I’ve compiled this list in Storify. It is found elsewhere on the site, but that just isn’t good enough. Your requested material should be everywhere. It started on Twitter, of course, but the biggest problem is that Twitter has a very temporary nature. Storify will, presumably, be more permanent. And I can edit it for later. So, then, here is the famous Twilight Twitter commentaries:

The Yankee tells me the next movie is set to underwhelm everyone 17-years-and-older this fall. I’m sure she’ll go. If so, I’ll go along to make fun of the thing on Twitter (I do it for you, Internet) and then put it there.

I’m beginning to like Storify. It makes sense, though I wish it would do a few more things, which would also make sense given what it is trying to be. But that’s the nature of things. I’ll take my mile now, you charming little free service.

Follow ups to things mentioned recently: The New York Times has have no interest in competing for digital-only dollars. Did I mention that in it’s present form the paywall is hardly daunting? I get my Times from Twitter, so it is free to me under this odd scheme. Meanwhile, USA Today is revamping. There’s promise and trouble there, I’d think. Their online presence will be the best part of their recently unveiled strategies.

About Libya. Scrambling, stumbling and fumbling. Oy.

The story here is that a guy stills a laptop from a young computer whiz. The guy then apparently recorded this video of himself and the victim tracked it all down through the power of ~~cheese~~ technology.

And finally, a guy I worked with in Little Rock years ago put this on Twitter today. Apparently that’s his great-uncle cutting Elvis’ hair. He says his grandfather swept it up. No word, yet, on whether anyone stashed it for the eventual creation of e-bay.

So, there, I have three degrees of separation from Elvis and my friend Grant Merrill has a really cool family story he’s probably heard all of his life. And Elvis hair, lots of Elvis hair. He’s just waiting until his daughter goes off to college, and then he’ll sell it off for tuition money. Grant’s a multimedia mogul now. Very impressive.

One day, when I need a loan, I’ll remind him of that time he crashed on my sofa.

This got me looking for an aircheck from the late, great Ray Lincoln who was simply one of the best people any of us ever worked with in radio. I only knew him at the end of his career when his health was failing, but his mind was razor sharp. In his prime he did a show where he performed two people, Ray and Ram, at once. And he did it well, I’ve heard snippets and the thing was amazing. Later I wrote a little copy for him and pitched to him as he did horse track picks. Lincoln was one of those guys who could do a lot of things well, and he was regarded as one of the best handicappers in the country. As was typical, he did that as a character, too. Sport Jackson was a no-nonsense personality and it was just inside the man. He was a method actor without a stage.

KTHV, when Lincoln died a few years back, did the best obit piece you’ve ever read, mostly because the man was one of those people you could imagine has existed anyway:

In January of 2000, deteriorating health forced Lincoln to quit full-time radio. His condition would worsen until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. “They cut me open and did six bypasses. They were gonna do five and I found out if they do six, you get the cell phone and the Internet and the dish.” His condition would deteriorate until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. He suffered six strokes which left him incapacitated and he was in dire need of a heart transplant. Lincoln was kept alive by a machine called an l-Vad. Eventually though, his family was faced with a decision. Lincoln explained in 2005, “It was not looking good. So, we had decided on Thursday, come Sunday, we’ll just turn this machine off.” Suddenly, there was a donor heart available that was a match for Lincoln. “This kid, his name was Dwayne Compton, 26 years old. He was killed in an automobile accident December 11th and the next day, I got his heart,” Lincoln says. “And his heart is in my chest right now.”

And they included quotes that probably are more in keeping with the character Ray Lincoln conveyed on air:

“The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long, plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

“Do I get credit for using those words? Look at my contract. I get a 50 cent bonus for large polysyllabic words that are obscure and seldom used except for people who are erudite and urbane.”

I didn’t know him especially well, but he was always a decent guy and a great talent. Sadly, there isn’t any audio of his to be found on the Internet. This is an oversight.

We’re going to Little Rock this weekend for a conference. I must resist the urge to try and remember stories to tell. I was only there for a year, after all. But I certainly met some characters.

journalism / links / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
22
Mar 11

I have no quote for this space

Wrote a big long policy memo today. It was suggested we needed a new policy for a particular thing. The task fell to me. I eschewed the urge to write the thing in bullet points. Sometimes bullet points work very well. The aesthetic of bullet points is ruined, however, when the explanation that goes with the bullet runs onto a second line. And the problem with writing a policy on something or other is that they often run longer than one line.

So I started “Thou shalt not.”

Or I would have if I’d thought of it at the time.

Had lunch with Brian, where we enjoyed barbecue at Moe’s. We talked of home repair, website work and company trips. For example, did you know the new New York Times paywall, which is in effect in Canada and will soon go into effect in the United States with all of it’s many tiers — You want to talk about policy memos, how many did this plan take? — but the workaround has already been found.

They say there’s $40 or $50 million invested in this paywall, and it can be defeated by four lines of javascript:

That last bit gets at the issue: You can afford to let nerds game your system. You probably want them to game your system, because they (a) are unlikely to pay, (b) generate ad revenue, and (c) are more likely to share your content than most.

The danger is when it becomes easy for non-nerds to do it. And that’s the risk of any leaky paywall — the risk that you might calibrate the holes incorrectly and let too many of your would-be subscribers through. Something like NYTClean — or the many tools that will soon follow it — could be the kind of thing that tips the balance in a way that hurts the Times.

There are pluses and minuses to this system the New York Times is putting in place, as is the case with most anything. The more I read about it, though, the more I wonder where the $40-50 million went:

The full text of the article is still visible in the page source. And as I mentioned in responding to a commenter — and as is evident to anyone who can right-click on a page and choose “Inspect Element” — the overlay is nothing more than a little CSS and Javascript.

There has to be more to this, somewhere, or that just sounds borderline criminal.

So let’s review: you can use an applet, see a small amount per month for free or surf right in from Facebook or Twitter (@nytimes is an enabler) and the paper feels as if your eyes-to-ads will be worthwhile. You can simply click View–>Source and read it directly in the code. If you are the most faithful consumers, customers of the paper, you’ll be charged.

You couldn’t write that memo in bullet points. And it has the feel of a lot of memoists working through lots of drafts.

In the comments people are leaving even more suggested hacks. Information wants to be free. The readers seem to want it that way, too.

Today I learned that big moments in journalism include Jessica Simpson photographed in her underwear for a magazine cover, Brittney Spears pregnant and the Miley Cyrus photo shoot of ill-repute and Charlie Sheen’s contrived craziness.

I interjected with Watergate and the Pentagon papers, but was rebuffed by “Those things happened before we were born.” That’s the case for me too, of course, but apparently if it is older than you it doesn’t matter. And so with this as the platform for perspective, I chose the somewhat journalism-related death of Diana (the headline was hanging on the wall nearby), the introduction of color in the New York Times and so on.

So that was fun.

And then more office work and emails and phone calls and meetings and still more emails. It doesn’t seem like it should take the full day, but somehow it does. All good, gratifying, hopefully productive and hopefully useful. That’s what we all want out of a Tuesday, no?

May your Wednesday be equally gratifying.

Auburn / baseball / iPhone / journalism / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Mar 11

I can’t believe it is already Saturday

If you left it to some media outlets you’d think the South was still living in the 1960s.

But no one talks much about Worcy Crawford, who died in July at age 90, leaving a graveyard of decaying buses behind his house on the outskirts of Birmingham.

His private coaches, all of them tended by Mr. Crawford almost until the day he died, do not have the panache of the city buses that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to ride. But they have significance nonetheless.

With their cracked windows and rusting engines thick with brambles, they are remnants of something that was quite rare in the South: a bus company owned by an African-American.

Mr. Crawford’s work was simple. He kept a segregated population moving. Any Birmingham child who needed a ride to school, a football game or a Girl Scout outing during the Jim Crow era and beyond most likely rode one.

That’s a neat piece, don’t misunderstand. But let’s also be clear: the latest development in that particular story is Crawford’s death, last July. Everything else dates back two generations.

The reporter certainly has her share of accolades, but she’s from California and Alaska, so maybe that’s the problem. Every time you send another person South they have to gain some sort of institutional history and the Civil Rights Era is one place to start. Certainly this is a worthy era, but it discounts more than a little about what has happened in this region, you know, in more recent decades.

Just off the top of my head there’s biomedical research, medicine in general, automotive growth, the transition from heavy industry to service industry (which would be a nice follow up after the typical Civil Rights, five decades-old reporting), more corruption and governmental unscrupulousness than you can cram in a newshole and so on.

None of these things will ever be covered by that particular newsroom. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

One more journalism note. I foudn these three headlines grouped together. Google calls it an algorithm. Really, this is irony:

Arianna And AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Teach Journalism Class At Brooklyn Middle School.
AOL to De-emphasize Journalism, Focus On Brand.
Huffpo Claims Its Bloggers Aren’t Writers. Is That True?

So I guess my one recent visit to HuffPo might be my last. We’ve seen AOL brand things before, and this is just going to get unfortunate, I’m afraid. Shame, too, they have been massing together a lot of resources and talent, but if the point is just to get the logo on my browser, I’m going to be less and less interested.

Meanwhile, from the Middle East, comes a fascinating insight into life in Syria:

Syria recently gained the unpalatable title of being the most restrictive Middle Eastern country for internet censorship, formally held by Tunisia. Syria blocked (and still blocks) a number of sites ranging from pornography to Kurdish websites. These restrictions however are not uniform and inconsistencies such as blocking Hotmail but not YahooMail are not uncommon.

More or less every internet cafe I visited (albeit these were in the more touristy areas) already had the settings changed so that a proxy computer, usually in Saudi Arabia, was used so the public were free to browse banned sites at their leisure. There were even computer programmes that people would pass around to find a new proxy number should one stop working. Sometimes I had to ask for the proxy to be put in which the staff would do without a bat of the eye.

[…]

Speaking to my friend recently he told me people are still frightened because although these sites are now allowed, the internet is still heavily monitored and the rules may change at any time. As there has been no official announcement of the ban being lifted, predicting the mood of the regime is difficult.

The full piece is definitely worth a quick read.

More baseball today as the Tigers looked for revenge against the visiting Arkansas Razorbacks. The bases were loaded, Kevin Patterson had been in a mini-slump, but he’d been hacking away like someone kicked his puppy. And then the pitcher grooved one which wound up behind him, about 385 feet in his bullpen. That grand slam helped the Tigers win 9-5.

Also, they had fireworks.

(That’s from last night, but they go better with a grand slam story than an extra-innings loss.) If you’ll watch the video there’s something a little different in the second half.

errands / journalism / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
2
Mar 11

About being out

Churned through the remainder of my stack of papers to grade today. I’m now all caught up, which seems a small miracle when I considered the pile of things to work through.

Also had a sit-down with the boss today.

Had a meeting with the editor-in-chief of the paper this afternoon where we critiqued this week’s edition of the Crimson and started thinking about the last six issues of the year. They go by so fast, but I’m always proud of how far the staff progresses in that short amount of time.

Had a meeting with the sales manager, too. She’s selling things that need to be sold. That makes everyone happy. As a salesman friend of mine says, though, you can always sell more. Sales: not for the faint of heart.

All of these things seem safer than my errands of late.

Know what else isn’t? Walmart. I went there late last evening and, I can’t recommend it. I like to compile a short list of things to seek out, lest I feel I’m braving that parking lot for only one item. Two things — a garage door switch and a particular type of bottle — I could not purchase there last evening. A third I decided against. That worked me down to cards and candy. This is why I sat at that weird light and made an almost-unprotected left turn.

Also it means I’ll have to visit a home improvement mega center later in the week. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, because it might be worth a full-length essay all of its own. Come back Thursday or Friday for that.

Just as fun, though, was taking my life into my own hands tonight. I’m walking from a parking spot across a lane of parking lot traffic to get from car to the door at Jason’s Deli. A car is coming through the parking lot lane and accelerates toward me. This was shocking to me as I am not in a drama/action film, but merely a mild-mannered professor carrying a book about the history of the House of Representatives. (Really, this is the person you’re aiming at, dude?)

Fortunately his aggression was all for naught. He was driving a Volkswagen. If he had more than four cylinders that could have become messy.

Which makes you think, high speed accidents will decrease when we all inevitably buy those magic unicorn cars. Incidences of road rage will skyrocket because it’ll take you four minutes to clear an intersection, but there are always trade offs in life.

Like this. I’m going to end this now so I may begin watching The Tudors. I’ve just finished the first two discs of Rome, Season Two (see how I deftly avoided the Roman numerals there?) and am in a television period piece frame of mind. I’m so comfortable with the notion of period pieces I won’t even mind when they obviously veer from history to try and tell a tale.

(But I’ll surely tell you about the egregious oversights. For example: Henry isn’t this young when these things happen. But look at those clothes! It must be legit!)

journalism / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
19
Feb 11

On-site, outta sight

SEJC business meeting this morning. I’ve been to this conference twice. This is my first business meeting. I managed to get myself on an awards committee.

Not sure how that happens.

We had a sandwich luncheon today, including keynote addresses by WAKA-TV’s Stefanie Hicks and Jeff Sanders, both Troy graduates, and their colleague Glen Halbrooks. They all gave the students wonderful advice, the most important parts being “This is a hard business requiring long hours and not the best pay. Work hard. Say “Yes.” Be patient.”

An award was given to the journalism educator of the year, who has been doing this for an incredible 42 years. I do believe they caught her by surprise with the honor.

The journalist of the year award was given to Alex McDaniel of Ole Miss, for whom this was a well-deserved honor given the last year of journalism on her campus.

Mississippi won the overall competition. They always seem to do well, bringing lots of talented students (151 participated and I think at least 95 of them were from Ole Miss) who place well in the competitions.

Samford had another nice day, too. One student placed third in the editorial competition. Another won the radio anchoring competition. Exciting stuff.

And then the drive home. Less exciting.

But I stopped at Crowe’s Chicken. My students were kind enough to indulge me the detour. I haven’t been to Crowe’s in more than a decade, but this is the place for chicken fingers. Yes, yes, I know all the others. Zaxby’s is fine. Whatever. I went to school and live in the town where Gutherie’s started. Tenda-Chick is wonderful.

But Crowe’s. Oh, Crowe’s. Sam Cooke was playing on the radio when we walked in. And that’s all you really need to know.

The place looks like a dank old Hardee’s. (At least the one where we stopped. There are apparently two of them?) It smelled of chicken like your Southern grandmother would make. And if you don’t have a Southern grandmother, I well and truly apologize for how life has short-changed you in this simile.

So I ate Crowe’s as we drove by Sikes and Kohn signs and nut huts. The Wiregrass experience doesn’t get more profoundly accurate than that.

We made it back to Samford much faster than the trip down. The students slept or studied. I dropped them all off, returned the rental van, wrapped up my trip with the paperwork and Emails that bragged of the students accomplishments and started to do a little more comps work myself.

And then I decided to head home.

There was a steak waiting.

So The Yankee and I had a delicious steak. And that was pretty much the night. She had a bike race this morning (and is claiming third place) and I’ve been traveling for a few days. We’re exhausted, party people.