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journalism

The day the links took over

Straight into the links: The NASA yard sale is underway.

One piece, at least is coming to Alabama:

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville will receive a space shuttle orbital maneuvering engine for display as NASA begins parceling out parts of the shuttles. The shuttle program is ending in June after two more flights.

“It’s fantastic,” Center Director Dr. Deborah Barnhart said shortly after the announcement. “Anything having to do with propulsion, that’s us.” Barnhart was referring to the fact that the shuttle’s propulsion system was developed and managed at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

After this summer’s last flight the only place you’ll be able to get a sense of size of shuttle plus rockets will be in Huntsville. Apparently they have the only full “stack” around. And in as much as the shuttle program was a detour of sorts, this is still somewhat sad. Given the nature of things the detour isn’t being corrected with newer and better rockets to the moon and Mars. Right now we’ll be lucky to hitch rides to the space station and send robots out beyond a Terran orbit.

If we stay here at home it’ll just be that much easier for the ads to find us. It is about to become a lot more easy:

Far surpassing the powers of print, broadcast and the web, a host of new technologies is converging on the opportunity to use smart phones to intercept – and influence – the consumer as she walks past a store, wheels through a supermarket or reaches toward a product on the shelf.

The technologies include not only the increasingly ubiquitous GPS-equipped smart phone but also window stickers that broadcast messages, interactive bar codes that instantly link to a website and increasingly sophisticated databases that track your individual activities so they can precisely target products or deals to you.

This has been discussed for several years now, but this particular future is here. How it is received will be interesting. I bring this up to students and they always gringe. They don’t want advertisers to know where they are. But they’ll grow used to it.

Just imagine what Don Draper would do with that. There are a few ideas.

From squirrels to statues:

Jeremy Davis can remember a picture he sketched at the age of 3, a squirrel sitting on a stump his mother always held in high regard.

[…]

It took years for him to get from a small town without a stop light to the University of Alabama in 2007, when he truly began to develop his artistic side.

Davis’ decision to return to school after a brief hiatus to earn more money resulted in the ultimate lesson while working on a unique project. Davis is credited with sketching and sculpting what developed into the Nick Saban statue.

Leaving aside the Alabama part and the inherently creepy statue-of-a-living-person discussion, that is a neat story.

Auburn, in keeping up with the Joneses at Alabama and Florida, is unveiling statues of the Heisman winners. If one must have statues I’d prefer a different group of individuals. We venerate football players enough and they’re in little danger of being forgotten, but that’s neither here nor there. The Auburn statues were designed and created by a Montana sculptor. He’s incredibly talented, his work is on display at the University of Texas and across the country, but it would have been nice for an Auburn artist to get the commission. It isn’t like they don’t have an entire academic department devoted to the discipline.

I go straight to the links today because one of my RSS feeds found this morning to be a good time to cough up 209 posts it had been saving for a while. I was goaded into reading them all. And, completist that I am, I would have. But they were all old posts from a year or two years ago. I’ve already read them. So now I’m giving my RSS reader a hesitant look. What else is it planning? And will it carry me away in the scheme?

The problem of the information age, really, is that no one moment will be the SkyNet moment. But any number of them could be the cumulative steps to getting there. By the time you, you pesky human, figure it out, the thing will be over. It will be too late. And then you’ll just try to remember what you learned from Noah Wylie in his gripping summer television series on how to fight back.

You are going to watch, aren’t you? Because this is the sort of information that could be useful at some point.

Class today. More Dreamweaver. That will be the operating condition between now and the end of the semester, as we work our way through the perplexities of fairly powerful software which is useful when it wants to be, and mysterious whenever a student comes up with an outside-the-box idea.

I come back from each class with a small list of things I’ve promised to investigate and resolve because “Why isn’t that working as it should?” is not a fun question for anyone.

Critiqued the paper today, where we were a bit late in getting the dormitory bathroom explosion prank story. We’ve only two issues left on the year. I hope they solve the mystery so we can put it in the paper.

Else we might have to do follow ups on snake sightings. They are prolific on our wooded campus.

Also had the first talk with next year’s editor today. He’s a sharp young man. I believe he’ll have a fine year.

Went to the movie trailers tonight. I watched a movie after sitting through 28 minutes of previews. I go to the dollar theater, so I’m always a little behind, but there are some woofers in these promos. As for the best commercial:

True Grit, though, was pretty good. At least Jeff Bridges is playing the part of Rooster Cogburn, rather than John Wayne saying Rooster’s lines and wishing he were Ted Williams. On IMDB the original film lists Wayne, and then Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf (also considered for the role: Elvis) and then Kim Darby as Mattie Ross. In the modern film the listing is Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross and then Matt Damon as LaBoeuf. That’s about right.

Darby, meanwhile, has played in 82 movies and last worked in 2007. Hopefully Steinfeld will still be working in 2051.

Did you see the LOMO blog today? Tree new entries for you there. That’s it for here. More fun will be had tomorrow.

books / iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
12
Apr 11

Look at what he created!

I call it Thinking Sphinx.

If ever there was a device that science needed to bring us, it would be the one that tells us what our animals are thinking. There’s no thing as fascinating as the inscrutable, unknowing of knowing that goes on inside of a furry creature’s —

“SQUIRREL!”

You’re hoping for more, of course. Something just before Aristotle, and a full stop or three before Che because, let’s be honest, when the plotting gets too intricate, we’re toast.

So I’m sitting on one end of the sofa pecking away at the keyboard and The Yankee is sitting on the other end reading and she jumps up, crosses my lap, confusing the computer with the intricate kitteh combination of things she touches simultaneously while walking across the keyboard and track pad.

Did you know a Macbook can open a transwarp conduit? Oh the key combination is a bit more detailed than the digit-twister required to do a screen cap. I’ve yet to figure out how to fire up the tachyons, but I’m sure the Thinking Sphinx will demonstrate it before next weekend is over.

Where would we be without cats? I mean, aside from asleep at 7 a.m. like I should be? She thinks differently. I’m thinking of inventing a feline tossing sport.

On campus today there was class, where we are in full-on learning Dreamweaver mode. If you can sympathize, you can sympathize. If you can’t, don’t try. Dreamweaver, I mean. Don’t try it. Hire a third-party. Go push-button. Or write your code by hand. (I do. I find it relaxing. There’s probably a small problem with that.)

The student-journalists at the Crimson are churning out another copy of the paper which will be on newsstands tomorrow.

Over dinner I started a new book. I finished Sledge’s With the Old Breed. For me it was a fast read — which is saying something — and a look into the war in the Pacific. The focus is on Sledge’s war, not an overview or a recounting of general’s. Particularly you gain his insight into the horrible fighting on Peleliu, which has been all but forgotten, and the long trials of Okinawa.

The book went largely undiscovered for some time, but has always been well praised. It is a straight forward and feels as honest as a memoir possibly can. Sledge’s telling is gripping, but at times it feels as if things are missed. I’m calling it the passage of time from enduring those terrible experiences and writing it, but also possibly the desire to not put ink to paper. That reads as if he glossed over things. He did not. There’s more gruesome detail in this book than anyone should ever have to endure, but you get a sense that it isn’t everything.

Sledge came home after the war, the Mobile, Ala. boy had become a man and he enrolled at Auburn University. He’d settle as a professor at the University of Montevallo and live out his days in relative peace. This book was a key part of HBO’s miniseries, The Pacific.

That was the book I finished last night.

The book I started today was a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law. She picked it up, she said, because it seemed like something I would like. She was right. Every review has glowed and the subject matter is great. This is Daniel Okrent’s Last Call, the story of Prohibition.

I’ve read the first chapter thus far, and am hooked. I’d like to share with you a paragraph:

When Dr. Dioclesian Lewis showed up in town, he could usually count on drawing an audience. Dio, as he was called (except when he was called “beautiful bran-eating Dio”), was no doctor — his MD was an honorary one granted by a college of homeopathy — but he was many other things: educator, physical culturist, health food advocate, bestselling author, and one of the more compelling platform speakers of the day, a large, robust man “profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own ideas and the uselessness of all others.” He was also the inventor of the beanbag.

This is going to be grand fun, this book.

friends / journalism / links / memories / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Mar 11

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.