journalism


7
Apr 15

Time to pack

It occurred to me today that I now travel enough that I don’t bother so much with the packing. Oh it has to be done, and sure, you need to make sure you bring enough socks and the right shoes, but it doesn’t require a lot of planning, or even concentration.

So it is that, on the night before a five day trip, I’ll probably get around to putting things in a bag around midnight.

Also, I’ve improved on the art of over-packing, so there’s that. Running shoes do take up a fair amount of space in a roller bag, though. And maybe I’ll actually use them. I haven’t done much of anything lately. No energy whatsoever, so there’s been no exercise. Probably because I haven’t done anything. Whatever it is, I’m sure it is a vicious cycle. Or maybe it is just a spell.

Things to read … because you can’t read without spelling.

*RImshot.*

Alabama and the Cycling Frontier:

We were in Alabama to speak at the first statewide bicycle summit, and to meet with a few communities interested in bicycle tourism. We were excited (after all, the South is the frontier for bike advocacy), but we truly had no idea what to expect from our week-long visit. Would it be a living stereotype? Would there be more to eat than fried chicken? Was it a joke to think that anyone might ride a bicycle there?

And if you follow along there’s a nice little travelog of these cycling advocate’s visits in stops around the state.

Overlooking yet another person’s need to think in stereotype, I rather like the idea of being on a frontier.

Talking to Female Cyclists 101:

Let’s face it, women that ride bikes are attractive. If you need a word for it, try using callipygian. Look it up. Not only does cycling build great muscle definition and lean characteristics, it also takes a “special” kind of person to be willing to push their limits, set goals, ride a bike for hours, and enjoy this sensation of training. I know it is tempting to ride up to that woman on the bike path and express your appreciation of her fit, form, and bike, but before you do, think before you speak. Complimenting a woman on her bike and her fitness may be one of the biggest compliments that can ever be given, but just like everything else you say to women, it is all in the way it is said and the context. Beware, she may be able to beat you up that climb, or have better power to weight ratio. If you make her mad, you may never see ride with her again.

It doesn’t take much to beat me up a hill. And I’m probably not talking to anyone while it is happening either.

‘Godmother of VR’ sees journalism as the future of virtual reality:

Like shoulder pads or frosted hair, virtual reality is often viewed as an relic of the 1980s, but not by former Newsweek reporter Nonny de la Peña.

The Los Angeles-based “Godmother of VR” is at the forefront of an endeavour to use the technology to usher in a form of immersive journalism in which viewers are placed within news stories and experience them viscerally.

Next week, De la Peña will unveil the latest in a series of graphic 3D reconstructions: the story of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old African American fatally shot by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in February 2012.

We’ve been talking about this for a few years, futurist friends of mine who let me daydream with them, and in a few more years we’re going to see how right and wrong we were. It should lead to fantastic storytelling, either way.

A business plan canvas tool made for reporters, entrepreneurs and teachers:

Van Achter recently open-sourced a prototyping canvas that was used by each of the 30 projects he has mentored at Lab Davanac. He calls it the “Lean Journalism Canvas” and it’s based off business modeling tools that outline partners, resources, value propositions, and revenue streams. For each journalism project, Van Achter has students plan out things like hypothesis, team’s legitimacy, storytelling strategy, audience makeup, how they’ll track impact, and how will they generate revenue.

This prototyping tool helps surface many of the questions a media venture or simple reporting project should consider. This tool helps journalists and media entrepreneurs young and old think beyond the elevator pitch. It also makes a great journalism school teaching tool.

It’ll take more than a few players behaving badly to slow down that juggernaut: Despite Image Issues, NFL Grew Sponsorship Revenue.

South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott:

A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.

The Times has the video, but if you don’t want to watch the video, the piece will also walk you through the few chaotic seconds that end in tragedy. This story is wholly different without that bystander’s phone video, which makes a strong argument for body cameras.

That is a lot of powder: Colombian navy seizes more than 5 tons of cocaine on ship.

Hard to not find the foreboding anymore, isn’t it? Report: Russians Hacked White House:

The Russian government is responsible for a known cyberhack on the White House, according to a new report by CNN. In a segment with reporter Evan Perez, CNN said the hackers were able to access President Barack Obama’s schedule and call information.

This cyberattack on presidential privacy is related to a 2014 hack of the State Department, unnamed sources told CNN. One official said the hackers “owned” the State Department system during the hack, though the implications of this description are unknown.

I wonder if all of those old typewriters are in a warehouse somewhere. Maybe someone will want to dig those out of mothballs one day for some project or another. Hard to hack a mimeograph, too.


6
Apr 15

Things to read

Since it is Monday, and since this is the new gimmick for the day, you can find a ton of links in this post. But first, one of the best stories I read all last week: Anthony Ray Hinton free after nearly 30 years on Alabama Death Row:

After nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row, Hinton this morning walked out of prison a free man and into the arms of his sisters and friends.

He was freed when prosecutors dismissed the charges for his re-trial in the 1985 deaths of two fast-food manager after new testing on Hinton’s gun couldn’t prove the crime scene bullets were fired from the weapons.

“The sun does shine,” Hinton said as he was released.

“I want you to know there is a God. He sits high but he looks low. He will destroy but yet he will defend and he defended me,” Hinton said.

He said he wanted to say to the victims families that it was a “miscarriage ” of justice for them too.

Bad prosecution and bad evidence made for a bad conviction. I was in elementary school, but I remember the story of those murders. Something about how the shooter put the victims in the walk-in cooler before killing them really stuck with me.

Hinton, now out of prison, said he was going to find a buffet. That seems like a reasonable enough short-term plan for a guy who has been on death row for decades.

This is a terrific collection of presidential first pitches. I pretty much love everything about that series of photographs. How could you not?

Since this is, in part, the point of the day’s post …

A batch of journalism links:

DHS journalists recognized for spurring school board to action on MPR
A coast-to-coast newspaper shuffle is taking shape
Seymour Hersh on My Lai and the state of investigative journalism

And now a section on the Rolling Stone journalism review:

That last one might be hard to prove in legal proceedings, but it doesn’t mitigate the problems Rolling Stone has just now.

A batch of digital media links:

Meerkat and Periscope are fun apps but beware the sting in the tail
Here’s proof people are cutting the cord on cable TV
Twitter Publicly Launches Curator, Real-Time Search And Filtering Tool
Snapchat cuts off third-party apps, releases its first transparency report
‘News doesn’t belong on paper anymore’
Let’s talk about user-generated data
Augmented, Virtual Reality To Hit $150B, Disrupting Mobile By 2020
10 trusty digital tools journalists should try right now
In a bid for modern coverage, student paper tries a new Medium
The app Fradio allows you to create your own radio station

That last one is about a custom music show, but wait until the tech builds out to a Talk format.

And two quick advertising links:

The Economist’s Tom Standage on digital strategy and the limits of a model based on advertising

Digital Advertisers Focus on Holistic Customer Experience

And, if you’ve read this far, here’s the oral history of Max Headroom. Sadly, none of my students know who that is.


2
Apr 15

Here’s a read that’s getting attention

Our editor-in-chief, Sydney Cromwell, wrote a great editorial about the conditions that her staff had to deal with in covering the former first lady last week. It has been noticed by the publisher of the Anniston Star, the Student Press Law Center, Alabama Media Pros and the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and the Alabama Media Group (which reprinted the editorial):

So, what did the reporters of the Crimson, Samford News Network, AL.com, the Homewood Star and others get within those precious few minutes? Generic statements about Bush’s enjoyment of Samford and an update on the Bush family. Oh, and #SamNotStan.

If they wanted to report any of her statements on life in the White House, 9/11 or education – the actual reason for her visit – they had to rely on their memory alone and hope they could remember everything they needed.

That, in itself, is galling. Laura Bush is a public figure and invited to speak as part of a lecture series to students and the public. After living in the White House, I’d think she would be familiar enough with the media that a few pencils scratching away at paper wouldn’t ruin her time on stage.

It’s also just ridiculous. If you’re there to speak on education, why not let reporters use your actual statements on education? That’s a chance to extend her words beyond the Wright Center, and she wasted it.

And Sydney says she can’t write opinion pieces.

Also, there’s a new Crimson photo feature on Instagram: Humans of Samford.

One of the first things I saw this morning: The Price is Right aired a great gag yesterday, guaranteed to make you smile:

Two class preps tonight. Two-thousand yards in the pool. Not bad since I felt rough and the swim felt fairly rough. Not sure why I’m sore, but there I was all day, wondering if this will be another motion that hurts. The true feeling-out process. And, in the final analysis, most everything hurts. No idea why.

But Bob Barker makes everything better, right?

The man is 91, and we should all be so lucky.

There are a lot of gameshow bloopers online.


30
Mar 15

Things to read

The Monday update is pretty close to becoming a “Things to read” tradition. It comes about because I need something here, Mondays are usually fairly busy and, often, I have links waiting to be put somewhere. All of this is in play today, and so here we are.

Some of the historians on campus are running a blog about interesting moments in Samford history. This is a great anecdote, March Madness: Dead Cats and Burning Bulldogs:

In addition to the attempted arson of the Sherman Oak, the Birmingham News reported a few Howard girls being woken up in the middle of the night because they heard men chanting “Down with Howard, Up with Southern!” When they looked outside, there were three crosses on fire in front of the burning tree–an ominous warning and a symbol of Aryan superiority during the Civil Rights era.

By gameday, tensions had reached their boiling point. With less than four minutes left in the first half of the game, Howard was beating Southern 33-24. Chriss Doss later recalled the chaos that unfolded when a Southern player named Glen Clem took a cheap shot at Howard player Rudy Davidson.

Two private schools. The 1950s. Who knew?

This is really cool, Loachapoka High robotics team to compete in World Games:

The robotics team has been around for a few years, according to Thompson. Robert Harlan has been the head coach for two years.

Eight of the program’s 25 students will make the trip, Thompson said.

The school’s robotics program begins in third grade and goes all the way up to 12th grade, according to Thompson.

I did not know this was such a thing. I wonder, now, if this is the big threat to the brick-and-mortar car dealerships that we saw for music stores, video stores and all of the other things disrupted by the web: Online car dealership expands delivery service to Birmingham.

It takes a village … Boy’s ‘military haircut’ spurs suspension threat, outcry:

A young boy’s high and tight haircut meant to honor his soldier-stepbrother earned him the threat of suspension from an elementary school named for a Medal of Honor recipient, and the fallout from the incident has led a Tennessee school district to increase security measures.

There are educators and then there are “educators.”

Some journalism links:

HBO-Vice Deal Should Scare the S*** Out of TV News
The evolution of NPR’s picture stories
Math for journalists: Help with numbers
How news sites handle content around sensitive stories
30+ free tools for data visualization and analysis
Online Video Exploding Globally

Here’s an interesting essay on Periscope, the new livestreaming platform that Twitter recently purchased and rolled out for use. It is quickly — possibly, perhaps, who knows? — taking over the universe. Or is that still Meerkat? Maybe both. Perhaps neither. This essay is about the activity, not the branded platform. And there’s a great passage in this piece:

(T)his isn’t about money, this is about the bleeding edge. And that’s what’s so exciting about Meerkat and Periscope, it’s all brand new.

Like I watched a sunrise in New Zealand. A cove in Australia. Someone making coffee in Amsterdam and a snowy spring in Siberia. Call me a voyeur, we’re all voyeurs, and right now regular people are letting you into their lives, just for the fun of it, and it’s strangely riveting.

They do it for the love. No one wants to be alone anymore. They want hearts and comments and interaction. They’ll perform if you show up and comment.

And who are these people?

Nobodies. Those with time. Who are not reading the newspaper, who listen to the tribal drum and want to participate.

Huh? Huh?

Finally, it seems hard to believe, but it has been 10 years since Mitch Hedberg died. I saw him for the first time before anyone really knew who he was. I don’t even think he’d been on Letterman yet. I took a date to the Comedy Club and he was the attraction and the show was good. He just got better and better over the years, until his far-too-soon death. Here’s one of the many videos of his comedy you can find online.


26
Mar 15

The saunter of spring

Oh, sure, it is spring. But we are going to have one of those years, it seems, where two seasons are battling it out. Spring will win eventually. Winter isn’t giving up easily this year. Winter is the guest that doesn’t know how to leave. Maybe it is a season that can’t pick up on the social cues. Or maybe it is looking for the graceful exit, the last joke, a tender poignant moment or an uneven silence. But it won’t show up, and so winter continues to linger inside our door. There are still a few unnecessarily chilly days and too many clouds ruining sunny afternoons. But spring will win out. The clues are all here.

dogwood

Spring will win out. Unless summer rides in at a full gallop.

Put in 2,000 more yards at the pool this afternoon, a mystifying exercise of good and bad experiences. I’m getting better in some aspects of my swim and seem fairly static in others. It all comes down to breathing and technique, two things which I don’t do very well.

But at one point, around 1,100 yards or so, my shoulder and collarbone hurt so bad that I was nauseated. That didn’t happen when I broke it or had surgery or anytime since. I was at the wall and wondering what the pool deck protocol was for violent sickness. It was a weird moment. But it passed with a few more laps. And then I went upstairs to the locker room and then out and upstairs again to an indoor track and ran three miles.

They were playing volleyball on the gym court below the track. Someone launched a ball into the rafters, where it got stuck. I was able to free the ball, but I was not invited to play. Just as well. I haven’t played volleyball in years and years. I bet I could still serve, though.

Things to read … because serving up links is one of the things we do around here.

I mentioned this in a class yesterday and it received a nice reaction. StoryCorps Using $1 Million TED Prize to Become an App and Go Global:

For the past decade, StoryCorps has amassed more than 65,000 recordings of ordinary individuals interviewing one another and telling extraordinary stories.

In doing so, StoryCorps has amassed the largest collection of human voices ever recorded, but is still limited by the time and expense of its approach, which relies on professional radio recording equipment and dedicated volunteers to act as facilitators.

Thanks to a $1 million prize from the TED conference, the organization is turning its process into a smartphone app in an effort to ensure even more stories get recorded, especially outside the U.S. The free app will allow anyone with an Android or iOS device to record an interview and have it uploaded for distribution and archiving into the Library of Congress.

But everyone is talking about Facebook today. Here are some important links:

What brands and publishers need to know about Facebook’s developer conference
Facebook Takes Aim at Google’s Ad Tech Clout With LiveRail
The beginning of the end of Facebook’s traffic engine
It’s the relationship, stupid

“Now is the time to get access to the data that will build more than today’s cash flow but will instead build tomorrow’s strategy,” Jeff Jarvis writes in that last link. Data is important. I hope the point gets across. We seem to be at the event horizon for all of the things Jarvis has been discussing for a decade or more.

You’ve heard about this for a while now, too. Coming, a major shift to mobile ads:

Mobile advertising is increasing at a shockingly fast pace.

This year, it will make up nearly half of all digital spending, up from just under 25 percent two years ago. And by 2019, it will account for 72 percent of online dollars.

It will also make up more than 28 percent of overall ad spending.

And yet so many aren’t ready.

This is both unfortunate and terrific. As professional news outlets vacate state capitols because of budget constraints, student journalists move in to fill the gap:

When Jessica Boehm interviewed a state senator for Arizona State University’s Cronkite News for the first time, she worried about saying the wrong thing or asking a question she shouldn’t ask.

Researching bills and interviewing lawmakers weren’t tough tasks, she said, but “knowing you were talking to someone that wielded a lot of power and probably didn’t want to talk to you, that was really intimidating.”

Boehm reported on the state’s spending transparency, bills on a texting-and-driving ban and off-highway vehicle enforcement during Arizona’s 2013 legislative session for Cronkite News, a student-produced news organization with a wire service that serves about 30 print, broadcast and web outlets and a 30-minute nightly news broadcast for the local PBS station.

Boehm spent eight months co-writing a story for News21, a special projects arm of the Cronkite School of Journalism, that compared Arizona and Connecticut’s gun legislation after shootings in both states — the 2011 Tucson, Az., shooting that killed six people and injured Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the 2012 Newtown, Conn., shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 20 students and six teachers.

The Washington Post published the story in August 2014. She said it took most of the semester at the statehouse to get comfortable interviewing lawmakers, but after the experience she is now able to “ask what I need to ask and not need to sugarcoat anything.”

That’s a long excerpt on an important story about watchdog journalism. And my good and bad reaction to the idea — pros leaving the capitol and students stepping in — which has been around since pros started abandoning capitol coverage a decade or more ago is simple. There’s nothing better than experience and there’s nothing better than experience.

I covered a state capitol for the better part of a year. I was a professional journalist by then, but still very young. The bureau offices had been turned into storage spaces because there were only two of us still visiting the capitol on a regular basis: one newspaper guy and one broadcaster. Others would show up when big stuff was about to happen. They got a tip or a release or they found out through us. But the two people were the only ones covering an entire state’s lawmakers and one of them was very young. But I was a much different reporter after that year there. There’s nothing better than experience.

We live in the future. :

Under command of that small spot on Jan’s cortex, the machine hums into action, picking up an object in its robot hand and moving it to a shelf or table.

At first the researchers kept the arm across the room, worried that Jan might inadvertently punch herself. As Jan gained skill, the University of Pittsburgh researchers brought the arm near Jan’s side to let the paralyzed woman fulfill her greatest wish.

In the video shown at the Bevill symposium, Jan grabs a bar of chocolate with her robot arm. She haltingly brings it to her mouth and, then, takes a big bite.

“One small nibble for a woman,” she proudly says. “One giant bite for BCI (the brain-computer interface).”

There’s video, and you just know that was the most delicious chocolate she’s had in a long, long time.

We find ourselves railing against the insertion of writers into the stories they write.

I call it Grantlandization, since the folks at Bill Simmons’ project do it with almost perfect consistency. But I have a new, easy to grasp standard. It goes like this. You can’t Grantland, you can’t insert yourself into a story, until you can do it like this. It is an almost-maudlin P.J. O’Rourke piece remembering John Hughes, so good luck.