Today I was eating one of those fruit bowls, the sort you get pre-cut and ready to eat from the produce section. Munching away in the office and I come across this:
We are back in full stride with the Monday post of fun links to check out. A little something for a lot of people here. So just scroll until you find something that sings out to you.
Ever performed a track stand, where you keep your bike upright at a stop without taking your feet off the pedals? If you have, you’ll want to avoid trying that around Google’s self-driving cars, at least for a while. One Austin-based cyclist reports an encounter where one of the autonomous cars was comically unsure of what to do when it spotted him doing a track stand at an intersection. Every time his bike moved even slightly, the car would lurch forward and promptly hit the brakes. Nothing happened beyond some good laughs, but it was clear that Google’s self-driving code didn’t know how to handle a not-quite-stationary bike.
Humans can’t handle that either, in my experience.
The company explains that “while many of these movies are popular, they are also widely available on cable and other subscription platforms at the same time as they are on Netflix and subject to the same drawn out licensing periods.” Netflix instead wants to focus on original films and “some innovative licensing arrangements with the movie studios” that will result in “a better movie experience” for its members.
Also, “Starting next year, we will be the exclusive U.S. pay TV home of the latest theatrical movies from the The Walt Disney Company, including Pixar, Lucasfilm and Marvel movies.”
Foreign spy services, especially in China and Russia, are aggressively aggregating and cross-indexing hacked U.S. computer databases — including security clearance applications, airline records and medical insurance forms — to identify U.S. intelligence officers and agents, U.S. officials said.
At least one clandestine network of American engineers and scientists who provide technical assistance to U.S. undercover operatives and agents overseas has been compromised as a result, according to two U.S. officials.
The Obama administration has scrambled to boost cyberdefenses for federal agencies and crucial infrastructure as foreign-based attacks have penetrated government websites and email systems, social media accounts and, most important, vast data troves containing Social Security numbers, financial information, medical records and other personal data on millions of Americans.
Counterintelligence officials say their adversaries combine those immense data files and then employ sophisticated software to try to isolate disparate clues that can be used to identify and track — or worse, blackmail and recruit — U.S. intelligence operatives.
There is an adage in American politics: Campaigns don’t start until the first commercial appears on television. Despite the enormous growth of online campaigning, that half-century of tradition is proving a difficult habit to break.
Candidates and outside groups are expected to spend $1.1 billion on digital advertising in 2016, up almost 700% from $162 million in the 2012 elections.
“Everyone thought sports rights were the Holy Grail,” said Brandon Ross, an analyst at BTIG Research. “But if your revenues are not as high as you expected and you’ve signed long-term, high-priced agreements, that makes things tough.”
Live sporting events are a top reason people still pay for cable, so media companies battle each other for rights to broadcast athletic events. Sports traditionally have boosted ratings coveted by advertisers and driven up the fees paid by pay-TV operators such as Comcast Corp. to carry channels.
Yet sports haven’t shielded TV networks from subscriber casualties. ESPN has lost 3 million subscribers in the past year and Disney cut its profit forecast earlier this month, sparking a massive selloff in U.S. media stocks. TNT and TBS, which carry basketball, baseball and golf, each shed more than 2 million, and Fox Sports 1 lost 440,000, according to Nielsen data.
Not long ago, I taught a workshop on these topics to the young men of Poynter’s Write Field program, about 40 minority students attending middle school and high school. They found my lessons useful, so I thought I would pass them on to a larger audience.
I realize these dozen strategies constitute the basics. But when I am struggling with a craft – golf, music, writing – I find it helpful to remind myself of those basics, to climb down from the penthouse and visit the ground floor.
There are terrific extras in the comments covering most of the additions I’d suggest. So I’ll just add two more. First, pay attention to the subject’s nonverbals. More often than not, they won’t give you much. But when they do, they’ll make the interview. Second, if you’re in that person’s “home field” pay attention to the surroundings. Those details are often gold.
The following images show the evolution of one block in the Lower Ninth Ward that was situated directly in front of a levee that breached along the Industrial Canal ten years ago.
Some stayed to rebuild their lives. Others chose to move on. Some had to let loved ones go, while others are no longer here themselves. Along the Gulf Coast, the hurricane’s punishing winds pushed people in directions they never imagined. Here is where some of those people stood in the early months after the disaster, and where they stand now.
I’m often asked, as the person who was running FEMA when Hurricane Katrina hit, why I didn’t evacuate New Orleans. My response is simple—FEMA had no authority to do that under the Constitution, which clearly establishes a system of federalism in which state and local governments are autonomous governmental entities. We call first responders “first” for a reason. When you dial 9-1-1 your call isn’t answered by an operator at 500 C Street SW, Washington, D.C., 20472. Your call is answered by a local government entity that has first and primary responsibility for a disaster.
Could FEMA have ordered the evacuation of New Orleans? Yes, had it waived posse comitatus and invoked the Insurrection Act, which Congress ultimately amended in 2006 to permit deployment of troops in response to natural disasters. That unprecedented action was actually contemplated days after landfall aboard Air Force One—and I advocated for it. After I advised the president to federalize the response, he sat with Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Air Force One and outlined his plan. We immediately started drafting the federalization documents for the president’s signature, but Governor Blanco requested time to think it over and the president acquiesced. While the governor considered her options, the city became more and more dysfunctional. Blanco ultimately rejected the president’s plan, and political considerations eventually pushed the idea aside.
By the time federalization was seriously considered, the biggest mistake had already been made: evacuation began too late. And even if FEMA had been given the power to order citizens out of New Orleans days earlier, it didn’t own the helicopters, military transport planes and amphibious armored personnel carriers necessary to carry out the evacuation of a major American city.
As the storm neared New Orleans, all I could do—and did do even before the federalization debate got underway—was go on television, radio and any media outlet my press team could find—and encourage people to “literally get your butts out of New Orleans before the storm hits.”
Can’t wait for the rebuttal to Michael Brown’s essay.
In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014. People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.
And they’d be right. Because from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit — the equivalent of the dot com names of 1984.
Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”
So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet.
I got home and plopped down and didn’t want to move. I wanted a nap, but forced myself outside.
This was the better choice.
It was just a 15 mile ride, but it was better than a nap.
There’s not really a lot to say about the events of the day that hasn’t already been said. Terrible as this was, the people in Virginia have covered their own tragedy with great aplomb. Media criticism will probably continue on with the New York tabloids tomorrow. But outside of that, it has been one of those days where the media somehow manages to rally around itself. Mostly because they think it could have been any of them.
To a degree, that is true. At least, I suppose, this horrible thing wasn’t entirely random, but that is surely coming. And it is a terrible thing to contemplate.
Watching media reaction is informative. How many times have we all stood somewhere doing a story, harmless or dangerous, and thought nothing of what might be lurking around the corner? How does a story like today’s change how we view remotes, covering violent crime or the privacy of others?
Don't watch the shooting video. Watch Bruce Springsteen instead: https://t.co/KiKzTSpqVf Sometimes we need the Land of Hope and Dreams
Something happier, then. The 10-year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall was the subject of today’s podcast. Specifically, this cool story from the New York Times.
Andre is such a fun storyteller, particularly about the role that “place” has in telling the story of “us.” I was pleased he took the time to join us for what became a pretty far-ranging topic. And that Times piece he chose is pretty impressive, too.
Having just celebrated the big Netscape browser anniversary and then the 10th anniversary of YouTube it is fitting that we lunge headlong into the next phase of the internet. First there was text, then the images, now video is yielding to streaming video … Why live streaming is important for Facebook. Don’t forget, meanwhile, the booms from Meerkat and Periscope. The market is clearly ready for live streaming.
And sometime soon thereafter, virtual reality for everyone. All of this that has come before is the foundation upon which that will be built. Exciting times.
Exciting for different reasons, even though it is just a picture of a sign:
Today we had the privilege of meeting Amanda Farnsworth, and Bella Hurrell, the editor and assistant editor of visual journalism at the BBC. They gave us a tour of their new, amazing, newsroom. Here’s the overhead map:
Farnsworth told us the BBC will be merging more of their products now that their national elections are over. She said it is already happening in video “with a vengeance. You can see even at the technical level TV and the web are coming together. We are trying to make that happen everyday.”
Visual journalism at the BBC is staffed by TV graphics personnel, editors, online designers, developers and coders. They’re faced with eternal challenges and goals of standing out distinctively, being lively and modern and creating understanding.
Here’s a glimpse of the newsroom from what would be the top-left corner of that graphic above:
There’s a challenge the BBC has that you don’t see framed the same way at home. Everyone in the UK pays 145 pounds annually and gets the eight channels, radio and on demand. That drives a lot of programming, Farnsworth said.
“We have to produce content that appeals to everyone. We have to produce content that does appeal to a narrow group.”
One of three identical control rooms the newsroom can use:
Farnsworth showed us a few apps they’ve developed, and then discussed how they’ve used those to create web and television packages. They have some called “personal relevance calculators,” like the “What class are you?” app. They put a reporter on the street and stood up passersby, asking questions from the app which were derived by sociologists work. The data then tried to help the audience determine where they fit in the social strata.
Hurrell showed us the video. “For us what was important is that it worked across (media) platforms.”
And of course all of that is shareable, linkable.
“We think of something that tells a story that’s reusable. That’s where the personal relevance comes back into play. How much property do you have? What’s your health like? How much money do you make compared to big sports stars?
Farnsworth showed us their green screen room and the interactivity they’ve created from it. They put a reporter in there for a piece on “How to put a human on Mars.”
The Mars model was made by a TV 3D designer and the video was a 3D virtual reality design. Farnsworth said that’s something they’re looking to do more of in the future.
She showed us another video of an interactive video using TouchCast — which I have and love and should actually use — that helped tell the Deepwater Horizon story. This was an interactive video, using the TouchCast technology that lets you manipulate things within the video rather than clicking items outside of the video box.
Farnsworth says they’ve done a great deal of experimentation with that sort of thing, but they aren’t very successful. (Yet, I’d say.)
“They’re not very popular because, I think, people don’t know what to do with it, but we want to lead the way.”
Aside: Do you know what I hear from media entities everywhere I go? (No matter what country I’m in … ) “We’re behind in that.” Daily Mirror and BBC would each tell you, for example, that they were late into jumping into the social media pool. Farnsworth essentially told us that today. But now, here, the Beeb is saying they want to lead the way. When a humongous property like the BBC, or some other national/global property, decides to make the imprint, they’re going to dictate usability terms, rather than the users doing it from bottom up. This is going to be fascinating.
One of the boards they use to observe realtime status updates on stories. It is like air traffic control:
She talked about some ISIS projects they’ve built with an in-screen graphic overlay that promotes interaction. This is about “putting users in control versus watching, giving users choices.”
The BBC was a big part of this incredible, incredible, Bob Dylan project. You can’t embed it, and I can’t do it justice, but go watch this presentation by Dylan and Interlude.
That’s an amazing promotional, entertainment tool. But it isn’t all fun and games. The BBC, of course, still does the heavy lifting of traditional journalism and the even heavier lifting of data journalism. Hurrell said they’re crunching huge sets of data, often down the postal code level. She said they’re also doing one global data project each month. One of their recent projects had to do with tracking global jihadist attacks.
And all of this has to be done with an eye toward designing across platforms. Which device for this? Which device for that? Here’s the note that makes you stand up in take note. On the weekends, the majority of the BBC’s consumption takes place on mobile devices. That’s a trend that started in 2013.
An overhead view of a portion of the BBC newsroom:
Then Hurrell talked about #BBCGoFigure, which was one of my favorite things about the meeting — and there was plenty to love. But this is a social first infographic strand, atomized data journalism with just two data points. This is a daily infographic. You can see examples of it here. Why everyone isn’t doing this escapes me.
The plan with social media, Farnsworth said, is that you go to the best place. (This varies by time and circumstance.) The best social media, she says, is one that engenders conversation. (See the #BBCGoFigure note above.)
“During the campaign,” Farnsworth said, “we did a lot more social media because we could see how important it has become.”
And this impacted their TV work. They used similar color palettes for the web and television, and put movable, shareable policy cards into action to help explain the political parties during election season. The interactive cards looked the same as the ones you could see on broadcast.
Then there was election night. It comes once every five years in the U.K., so the BBC pulls out all of the toys. They shot Downing Street and then put it up on their green screen for wonderfully immersive segments on explaining the election results. Here’s a short clip:
Here’s another one from “inside” the House of Commons:
The BBC is a great trip. They had to get back to work, but I want to see the entire operation. You get the sense that this is, perhaps, what a modern newsroom should feel like. And you wonder how many of them there are. Not nearly enough.
