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journalism

Stuff, which is better than things

Every productive thing I did today was about work and class. And since I don’t want to bog you down with those details today, because you’ve had your own already, I’ll just share the leftover things that haven’t made it here this week.

I forgot to link to my football scribblings again this week. My friends at The War Eagle Reader made a post out of my tweets from the Arkansas game, similar to what you saw here on Saturday.

And then on Monday half of my Q&A ran on al.com:

Alabama question 1: … What can the Tide show against Tennessee to put restless fans at ease heading into a bye week?

As for Tennessee, that breaks one of two ways and Alabama can’t win it psychologically either way. Option one: Alabama dominates and we all realize, “Oh, UT is the worst team in the world since San Jose State. This proves nothing.” Option two: Alabama and Tennessee find themselves in the traditional knife fight-rivalry model and we say “Oh, they can’t even separate from a terrible Tennessee, who might need an overtime against San Jose State.”

Sometimes the third Saturday in October comes along at exactly the wrong time.

Especially since this game is played on the fourth Saturday. No one got this joke. Subtle humor was lost on this crowd. Today they ran the second half:

(S)haky as the defense is, there isn’t another team on the schedule where Auburn is going to have to score 50 to guarantee a win. This is the logical conclusion of what I was wondering aloud late in the fourth quarter at Jordan-Hare: Has there ever been a game when you could score 50 and STILL lose to Auburn? This has never happened in any modern context.

The Arkansas game, odd as it sounds considering they gave up 43 (and 330 yards and four scores to the number two quarterback), is thus far the most complete game of the season. It wasn’t complete, but the most complete so far. Blocked punt results in a touchdown. Two big kickoff returns, including a 99-yarder, turn into scores. The kicking game was solid. The offense was terrifying. The defense ultimately sealed the deal with turnovers. It’d be nice to see that for four quarters, but you have to think of that as an unexpected surprise if it ever does appear. And since that isn’t going to happen with any kind of regularity you have to readjust to the new reality: The Arkansas game is the new complete when you dress it up in orange and blue.

The formulation is simple. If Auburn scores points — and you’ve never, even in 2004, been so confident of Auburn’s ability to produce on any given drive — they win games. I’ll take Auburn over LSU, but with the caveat that it can’t be a one score game late, because there is one-sixteenth of Les Miles’ soul that he can sell for another bizarre finish.

Meanwhile, LSU’s Les Miles is thinking of invisible players to try to stop Auburn’s Cameron Newton. I wrote about that very thing three weeks ago. Nice to know coaches are reading your scribblings.

I added a new page to the War Eagle Moments blog. That one came from friends in Washington D.C. this weekend. Since it is football season and some of you are the Auburn traffic I get this time of year, feel free to check out that photo blog which exists simply to brighten your day.

This evening I visited Walmart. The entire trip, to a slowly remodeling, but working store, was to look for a picture frame. They did not have one I liked. But, at this price, I took two of everything on the shelf:

Finally, the update from yesterday’s Alaska journalism story. No charges for anyone.

And, apropos of nothing, this story features an Alabama lawmaker who was smart enough to physically threaten a television reporter while his camera was running.

Just makes you proud.

journalism / links / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
19
Oct 10

“One of those”

Have you ever considered what it really means to say “One of those days”? Is “those” a universal word? Maybe your reference and mine are different.

Perhaps you’re one of those people whom life gives you hard luck types, where you hear that expression, gauge it among the things that have happened to you on those days and thought “Oh, he must have been on a ferry that sang to the bottom of the lake, lost his car, was forced to swim out while fighting panicked passengers and exotic, invasive animals in the water. And then he lost it all in junk bonds.”

Maybe you’re one of those who enjoys perfection daily. When you hear about those days you just assume they had to carry their own groceries to the car, and the driver took the day off.

I had one of those days today, only my days like that are never bad, really. Things are merely not as convenient as I’d like, maybe, or the traffic isn’t especially cooperative on the day I got a late start on things. So I’m not going to use that expression anymore, because as I said it I thought That’s a silly list of things to complain about.

Today was majors day on campus, where all the departments set up table outside by one of the beautiful fountains. The breeze blows the handsome displays over, the water oak leaves spiral out of the trees and into our conversations and we all talk about our curriculum, the opportunities inside and the job prospects. Students who haven’t declared a major can see them all in one day if they want too.

So the late morning and the early afternoon was recruiting. And then emailing. The late afternoon was teaching, and then a sales meeting. And then I read while the student-journalist worked on this week’s paper. They are a quiet bunch tonight.

Journalism links: A Knight Foundation grant is going toward mobile transparency, via Sunlight Data apps:

“The Sunlight Foundation seeks to promote greater access to data from federal agencies for use at the national, state and local levels, said Ellen Miller, cofounder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. “These new apps will give the public unprecedented access to critical information that will bring us a step closer to closing the transparency gap in Washington.”

So you’re a reporter. You’re covering a senate candidate (at a function hosted at a local school) You work for a publication that isn’t exactly adversarial to the candidate. The candidate doesn’t want to answer questions about his previous experience in a public job. The candidate’s security, not police, but private security, handcuffs you. The police have to come and secure your release. Sound familiar? The new development in this bizarre Alaskan story is that the security included off-duty military. This story might not end well.

Shifting gears, been to France lately? Now is not a good time:

Americans arriving in Paris these days will notice that France’s planes, trains and automobiles are all being slowed or stopped by nationwide protests over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposal to raise the retirement age by … all of two years. Protesters are blockading refineries; truckers clog the roads, and yesterday air-traffic controllers walked off the job. Hundreds of schools around the country are closed, leaving students free to declare their solidarity with pensioners.

Sarkozy’s reform is intended to shore up France’s public pension system, which faces a $45 billion shortfall. But this modest reform, which has passed the lower house and is scheduled for a vote in the Senate this week, is merely a downpayment on France’s unfunded liabilities.

The larger issue is whether France and other Western nations will grapple with their entitlement obligations before it’s too late or sink under their weight.

Meanwhile, here at home:

New numbers posted today on the Treasury Department website show the National Debt has increased by more than $3 trillion since President Obama took office.

The National Debt stood at $10.626 trillion the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated. The Bureau of Public Debt reported today that the National Debt had hit an all time high of $13.665 trillion.

The Debt increased $4.9 trillion during President Bush’s two terms. The Administration has projected the National Debt will soar in Mr. Obama’s fourth year in office to nearly $16.5-trillion in 2012. That’s more than 100 percent of the value of the nation’s economy and $5.9-trillion above what it was his first day on the job.

But there’s good news! (It is not good news, no matter your frame of reference.

Just last Friday, the Treasury Department portrayed it as good news when it reported that the federal deficit in the fiscal year that ended September 30th was $1.294 trillion. That’s less than the $1.416 trillion deficit accrued in 2009 – the largest federal deficit ever recorded. It was also less than the $1.556 trillion that had been initially projected for 2010.

Yeah, sleep tight on that tidbit.

Alabama / Auburn / football / journalism / links / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
14
Oct 10

I cause trouble

I’ve neglected to mention, of late, my meandering contributions to the delusional football talk in the state. My friends and former colleagues at al.com asked me to participate in some little roundtable discussion they are running on one of their sports blogs, and I, of course, was happy to oblige them. On Sunday afternoons they send the questions, I dash off a few answers and, this week, they broke them up into two posts. Let the calamity begin!

Alabama question 2: Alabama was beaten pretty soundly in Columbia in all three phases of the game. What did Steve Spurrier and company do to stymie the Tide, and is the blueprint now set for future opponents? What adjustments can the Tide make before facing currently-unbeated LSU and Auburn?

Carolina wanted it more. Alabama looked flat and not nearly as fast as they normally do. The Gamecocks won on the defensive line, with a solid backfield and a talented receiver corps. I like to think of it as Alabama looking ahead to Ole Miss. You could chalk it up to want to or scheme, but probably, it was the perfect storm of a still-coming-of-age defense playing against a group of offensive players in garnet and black who just happened to be good where Alabama was exploitable.

[…]

Clearly Saban has anger issues when it comes to football — I’m sure it’s safe to visit the Saban estate for Halloween, kids, but don’t go dressed as a football player …

First of all, “unbeated” is now my new favorite word. But, more to the point, people go nuts in the comments. It is comical and almost painful to see how many joints are being strained and sprained to re-shape the narrative of the football season to fit a new reality. It just goes to show that the diehard sports fans of the world and the rest of us, grounded in “reality” or “pragmatism” or wherever else we might find our comforts, are really the ones that are lacking.

Fortunately the diehard fan’s comments on the most useless of ephemeral blog posts can show us our error. Read them all if you need to re-evaluate your life choices.

I enjoy games for the athletic prowess on display and (as I get older) for the potential that it offers talented young people to use their physical gifts to better themselves in other ways. I enjoy the pageantry of the event and the emotion of the experience. I like to think I can leave all of that at the stadium, or at the end of the broadcast, and continue with my life. There are a segment of people that don’t do that, or don’t see the need to do that, and we all thank them for building such incredible page view numbers.

That was on Tuesday, and today they ran the other half of my dashed-off observations, including talk of the upcoming Arkansas at Auburn tilt and thoughts on the now imploding SEC East. But, first the Auburn question:

Auburn question 1: The tables have turned, as Auburn is now ahead of Alabama in the SEC West, the major polls and number of wins against South Carolina this year. Tell me why it’s great to be an Auburn Tiger.

Because being better is always better. Because that makes the insecurities of others so much more delicious. Because despite all that you have said — and despite the inevitable heartburn we’ll all have after Thanksgiving that has nothing to do with the meal — Auburn is 6-0, No. 7, leading many offensive statistics obscure and mainstream, and the Tigers have STILL not reached their full potential. And if they do, woe be unto those standing across the way.

The real reason it is great to be an Auburn Tiger as readers of other sections of this site know, is that “… a part of Auburn always goes with us.”

What I’ve been reading: Enhanced Information Scent, Selective Discounting, or Consummate Breakdown: The Psychological Effects of Web-Based Search Results is the study you’ve been waiting for on the valence of relational ads to search engine queries. Before you rush over there and read that, promise to come back, OK?

Now that you are back, you should also check out The Effects of Message Valence and Listener Arousal on Attention, Memory, and Facial Muscular Responses to Radio Advertisements, which is a fine paper. And I’m not just saying that because I know the author and because commercials make my face twitch. That’s a nicely designed experiment, which is the point of our Researching Media Effects class, to find those studies that make us appreciate the methodology they used. We considered another study in class today that was … less than well received … and so it gets the non-link of doom.

Jeff Jarvis, a former boss and presently a professor of journalism at CUNY, takes NPR to task:

NPR has told its staff they may not attend the Stewart/Colbert rallies in Washington at the end of the month. I think they’re terribly wrong here, following the journalistic worldview Jay Rosen calls the view-from-nowhere to its extreme and forbidding employees to be curious.

Or as I tweeted: So I guess NPR reporters aren’t allowed to be *citizen* journalists.

[…]

But my real problem here is, again, that NPR is forbidding its employees to be curious. There’s a big event going on in Washington. It could — just could — be the beginning of a movement mobilizing the middle. But NPR people are not allowed to even witness it, to go and try to figure it out, to understand what’s being said and why people are there. No, they can do that only if they are *assigned* to do that. Otherwise, it might seem as if by merely showing up they might have a forbidden opinion.

Gasp.

Very intelligent comments take place below Jarvis’ spot-on argument.

Mindy McAdams, a professor of journalism at the University of Florida, writes the sort of mini-essay that should be standard issue:

In hindsight, I have felt enormous gratitude for every D I got in my first media writing course, every cruel red comment my professors scrawled in the margins of that rough newsprint paper we typed on with our IBM Selectric typewriters, and every deadly boring school board and city council meeting I sat through, struggling to stay awake.

I learned how to conduct long and short interviews, take rapid and accurate notes, and write on deadline. I learned a lot about media law, the First Amendment, journalism ethics, and accuracy. I’ve been grateful ever since.

Then as now, however, the context was missing. I had no clue that what I was learning would be of value to me in my career, because all my professors were focused on an old-school model of hard news and daily newspaper journalism — which I deemed wholly irrelevant to me.

[…]

And for all the journalism educators who complain that they cannot teach any new tools and software because they don’t know how to use those tools and software — what is your excuse for not putting context into your teaching? Are you oblivious to the Internet, online news and information, social media, and smartphones? Are you unaware of how journalism skills are used in all kinds of media and all kinds of jobs?

I’m not letting the students off the hook, though. What is wrong with young people who think that the only way to learn anything is to sit in a room with someone talking to them?

Meanwhile, online sales revenues are up, according to Alan Mutter’s analysis:

For the first time in 3½ years, digital sales at newspapers caught up with the growth of the rest of the online advertising industry, according to newly released data.

In a bright note for publishers, figures provided this week by the Internet Advertising Bureau showed that sales in all online categories rose by 13.9% to $6.2 billion in the second quarter. The industry-wide advance precisely matches the 13.9% gain in digital advertising by newspapers in the same period. The newspaper stats, which are compiled by the Newspaper Association of America, previously were detailed here.

As illustrated in the graph below, the last time publishers kept pace with the online ad industry was in the fourth quarter of 2006, when digital sales at newspapers rose 35% while volume for the industry as a whole rose 33%.

ANd now for the non-journalism, 98 years ago today Theodore Roosevelt was shot, and still delivered a long-winded speech. Of all of the Roosevelt anecdotes, this is the one you’d say was too much, if history didn’t verify it.

Did you know that Roosevelt hunted bears? Did you know he did so in Mississippi? I just finished reading about that in Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior, which proves you can write 800 pages about one man’s conservation efforts. I’m going to finish that book one day soon. I keep making this promise to myself. But I digress. Mississippi black bears, that’s the new Ole Miss mascot. The comments, as always delight, enlighten and then cross the event horizon to disappoint you.

And now, since you’ve been so patient and kind, a picture:

There are four of these, right up front and in the center of the store’s parking lot. The handicapped customer and the expectant mother had to travel a few more feet to make it inside, but that was well worth the smug satisfaction that gave someone to design and hang these signs. All four spots were empty.

Because I love the earth enough to not deplete it of one more receipt, I purchased nothing. You could rant about this sort of thing, but then you’d find that it has been done, at great length.

Dinner tonight with friends. One of the friends is our realtor, who just returned from a vacation to northern Europe — where he got engaged in the coolest sounding way — in time to hear about our burial ground theory. He does not believe us, but he will in time.

I hope he comes over for Halloween, when I expect a full court press of psychotic appliance happenings to occur. Should be a fun weekend.

So is this weekend. Is it here yet?

journalism / links / site / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off
6
Oct 10

Wednesdays go so fast

Early morning at the gym where I did as little as possible to justify the trip. Some days you don’t have it for the weights. And those are the days that are hard to push through. So I only did four short groups.

Spent the late morning talking to newspaper executives. One gentleman was from North Carolina and we chatted about Appalachia State football at great length. App State recently put a beating on Samford, so there was that. There’s talk that the Mountaineers are once again considering moving up to DI ball — the newspaper guy thought not. I told him a story about a Samford-App State game a few years back, it was a nice chat.

Later I called another newspaper company. The person that answered told me the person I wanted no longer worked for the company. That’s never awkward. Played phone tag with the new person I wanted for much of the day before we finally caught up with one another.

Swapped out some computers. Talked a little football with the IT guys.

Critiqued the Crimson. Nice paper this week, with only a few real layout problems to fix. They had a little coverage of the gambling indictments from earlier this week. There have been a few bike thefts. And there’s an advance on the Marine Corps band playing on campus this weekend.

You can see more here.

I ran into one of my students who is working on a video assignment for another class. “These cameras are amazing,” he said. We shoot in high-def. We love telling that to high school recruits, too.

Spent the evening studying. Reading for researching media effects, where I have now filled an entire three-ring binder with assignments. Much of it is on the limited capacity model, so I wonder, ironically, how much of it I’ve retained.

I also have to review and critique an article for class tomorrow. The article I have was co-authored by one of the founding members of our department. No pressure there. The article was about Applachian ticks. Well, it just used the ticks and a new fictional disease to prove a point about visual story telling toward exemplification theory, which is one of Dolf Zillman’s main areas of research. I actually wrote part of the Wikipedia entry for it last year.

And that accounts for most of my day.

Journalism and Internet links: Oh Leonard. Spread it around a bit more:

I remain convinced that, with exceptions, citizen journalism is to journalism as pornography is to a Martin Scorsese film; while they may employ similar tools — i.e., camera, lighting — they aspire to different results.

Leonard Pitts, who I’ve admired for a long time, picked James O’Keefe and tried to paint everyone with that brush — a traditional journalism technique, generalize everything through one anecdote. He helpfully forgets every problem traditional journalists have ever been caught in and actually gets a few of the details wrong in his own column. Several people helpfully point that out in the (incredibly binary) comments.

The problem here, then, is one of identifying credibility. Traditional journalists proudly carry the mantle of the masthead they broadcast for, or the mic flag from which they broadcast. In most cases that’s something an audience can expect to rally around. The real uphill battle, and the real danger in an online context, is establishing, maintaining and spreading a similar credibility in an environment where developing an official looking platform isn’t especially difficult. That’s something I’d like to study in the near future, actually.

For example, which one has more credibility at this point? The Daily Beast or Newsweek? What about if they combined? The sites are looking a lot alike these days … But what about someone who produces a similar looking page, puts out some slick content, satire or outright libel? How will we discern between online offerings? Media literacy is a critical function and an important area to study.

Hey, did you see CBS’ Les Moonves: “(T)hey have to come to us for our content.” I read that on Mark Coddington’s, not CBS.com site, which helpfully proves the point that we’ll be able to find content elsewhere.

In online news, I’m making it a regular habit to visit bamafactcheck.com for the latest dose of truthiness. In case you were wondering, that’s a site run by traditional-style journalists, like our friends at The Anniston Star and other media across the state.

Have you tried examining your Tweet Reach lately? I like it (because it gives me healthy numbers). Though I’ve no idea the methodology they use, over the course of my last 50 tweets I’ve apparently reached more than 40,000 people and made something like 52,000 impressions. Even if you divide that by some number of skepticism the returns aren’t bad. Since it is apparently basing this on the most recent tweets your numbers will fluctuate, but still. If it is correct it goes a fair way to answering the question of the power of that tool’s reach. Check it out.

And be sure to check out the 1939 World’s Fair post, below. That’s ready for your perusal. And now I must return to studying, because that is what I do.

journalism / links / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Oct 10

A teaching Tuesday

Quotes

View more presentations from Kenny Smith.

That was my class today, a big handful of slides on quotations and attribution. Nothing mysterious or earth-shattering, but since I uploaded it I thought I’d share it.

It was such a nice day we held our afternoon sales meeting on a park bench in the sunshine.

And then I went back to my office and shivered a while. It gets chilly in the evening and it is a late night since the student-journalists are putting their paper to bed next door in the newsroom.

In keeping the theme, then …

Journalism links: here’s a discussion on the future of journalism. The most important part thing to note about this panel discussion are the participants.

Here, meanwhile, is an open letter from the Dallas Morning News’ publisher:

* The newspaper companies that will survive will not consider themselves to be newspaper companies. They recognize that they are local media companies. They will distribute content on paper, through the internet, via the mobile web, through applications and any other way technology lets consumers access news and information. They will make themselves an indispensable resource of local news and information for citizens of the communities they serve.

* To be indispensable, these local media companies must provide relevant local content that is differentiated by the consumer’s inability to get it from any other source.

* This means that who, what, when and where are table stakes. They don’t provide a winning hand. Everyone has them. They are commodities. The differentiation will come from using the scale of the newspaper’s newsroom to give the consumer perspective, interpretation, context and analysis. It’s the columnists, the beat reporters, the subject matter experts that will drive value. It’s enterprise and investigative journalism that will be distinguishing.

It is, he says, about the newsroom’s scale, large customer base and monetizing that audience. And, also, getting mobile right. You have to be careful that you aren’t fighting the last war on some of that. But, he’s at least saying things you wouldn’t hear from a publisher a few years ago.

But, but, the iPad was going to save everything! Not really:

(Television show My Generation) — which followed the personal stories of nine friends through the camera of a documentary film crew — was shelved despite ABC’s My Generation Sync iPad App, which the network developed with Nielsen based on the ratings company’s Media-Sync Platform.

That’s just poorly worded. There was a show. The numbers were bad. The network canceled the show, despite the show having an app.

Just so long as ABC doesn’t blame all this on Apple. Steve Jobs would not like that.

Randomly, here are the final choices for the new Ole Miss mascot. Those aren’t good.

I hope I don’t have nightmares of walking sharks.

Black and whites in a bit.