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journalism

I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / photo / running / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Dec 14

There’s money big and small in this post

The view from my run this afternoon:

Today’s pace was 41 seconds faster than Monday’s run. I cut 4:07 of Sunday’s three-miler. Tomorrow I’m going to run at a different place, flatter, but with more boring views. I’m going to run farther, and probably slower.

We went back to Ulta today, the store I just learned about yesterday, because there was something there of a cosmetic nature we did not pick up yesterday.

Technology is great, not only does my phone time and map my runs and give me various breakdowns of the poor splits therein, it also gives me an excuse to stand near the front of the story and just scroll through things. I can give off the disinterested vibe without making anyone feel uncomfortable about their choices.

“Oh, no, not that blush, dear,” he never said to any stranger, “it will never work with your complexion.”

Things to read … because this stuff matches your tones.

The one everyone is talking about, Sony Pictures Cancels Holiday Release of ‘The Interview’ After Threats:

The film’s collapse stirred considerable animosity among Hollywood companies and players. Theater owners were angry that they had been boxed into leading the pullback. Executives at competing studios privately complained that Sony should have acted sooner or avoided making the film altogether. To depict the killing of a sitting world leader, comically or otherwise, is virtually without precedent in major studio movies, film historians say.

And some Sony employees and producers, many of whom have had personal information published for the world to see, bitterly complained that they had been jeopardized to protect the creative prerogatives of Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg.

[…]

The multiplex operators made their decision in the face of pressure from malls, which worried that a terror threat could affect the end of the holiday shopping season.

That movie cost $44 million to make, but the losses directly stemming from Sony’s entire cyber nightmare are piling up much higher. Sony’s Very, Very Expensive Hack:

(T)he corporate hack seems likely to be among the most expensive of all time – up there with the 2014 Target breach (price tag: about $110 million), TJX’s 2007 hack (about $250 million), and Sony’s 2011 Playstation hack (about $170 million).

It’s still too early to know just how badly the hack might hurt Sony’s bottom line, especially given that the hackers keep on putting out new leaks and new threats. But some early estimates of the corporate damage have started to trickle out. And $150 or $300 million does not seem like a bad guess at the moment, meaning the hack might wipe out half of the Sony pictures unit’s 2013 profits.

Big federal money coming into UAB … UAB’s annual NIH funding up 20 percent:

The University of Alabama at Birmingham received $225 million in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health during the 2014 fiscal year, which places the school 10th in NIH funding among public universities.

That total is up 20 percent from last year when UAB secured $188 million in NIH funding.

And smaller amounts, too … Meet the 5-year-old Ohio boy who sent his $1 allowance to try to save UAB football.

Rouble turmoil leads to Apple halting online sales in Russia:

The company stopped sales of its iPhones, iPads and other products in the country after a day in which the currency went into free-fall.

The rouble has lost more than 20% this week, despite a dramatic decision to raise interest rates from 10.5% to 17%.

By afternoon trade the rouble was flat with one dollar buying 68 roubles.

Its all time low, set on Wednesday, saw one dollar buying as many as 79 roubles.

Apple last month increased its prices in Russia by 20% after the weakening rouble left products in the country cheaper than in the rest of Europe.

That’s some serious volatility.

The amounts at play here are interesting. NowThis Media Raises Another $6M To Deliver Video News Stories In Less Than A Minute:

(T)he startup has become focused on “being a distributed media company and finding audiences where they live.” In other words, it’s less focused on drawing audiences to the NowThis mobile app and website, and more on finding viewers on social media.

Apparently the strategy is paying off — Mills said the company was seeing 1 million monthly video views as recently as early summer of this year, but it was up to 40 million monthly views in November. NowThis has also launched NowThis Studio, a division focused on branded content, and it acquired another startup, Cliptamatic.

That acquisition provided the foundation for a new platform called Switchboard, which is scheduled to launch early in 2015.

NowThis seems to work better in the app than in the browser, a good first step for social reach. I just watched four videos on it. Things move fast there. You get context, but not a complete story. There’s a fine idea there, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it matures.

errands / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
16
Dec 14

Where I amend my reindeer antler policy

Enjoy the Glomerata post I put up earlier today? Have you been checking out the Battle of the Bulge map posts? I’ve got about two more weeks of those, tracing my great-grandfather’s time in Europe.

I woke up this morning and did one of my favorite things, which is sit with breakfast, or tea or both, and read. I got a lot of reading in this morning and then we did some paperwork errands this afternoon.

I drove The Yankee to Target and she picked up two shirts. We walked down the street to a store called Ulta, which is not missing an R from the sign. I’m not sure I knew this store existed until this afternoon, but then I’m so rarely on the cosmetics market these days.

We picked up grain and sourdough bread at the grocery store. I remembered we needed some eggs, so I hustled to the back corner and got the six-pack container. The first one I opened had a busted egg, which reminded me of my best poultry story. I told it to my lovely wife and the cashier at the front of the store. One of them found it funnier than the other, but they both smiled politely.

We saw this car. Now, ordinarily, I’m not a fan of the reindeer antlers, but I’m willing to change this stance. The rule now is this: if you put those things in your windows, you must commit to the giant red nose on the hood of your car.

We had a dinner guest tonight, one of our sweet friends who brought a soup and stayed for brownies and a movie and uses the word “assuaged” correctly. It was a lovely evening.

Things to read …

I remember waking up on this December morning in a full sweat. It was unseasonably warm. That afternoon we watched the F-4 tornado ravage Tuscaloosa, just 35 miles away, on television. That night, up the road in Birmingham, I drove home under the largest snowflakes I’ve ever seen in the South. It was a tragic and weird day. Celebration Of A Life Saved

Many of your remember this remarkable photo by Michael E. Palmer that was in the Tuscaloosa News, the day after the December 16, 2000 EF-4 tornado that killed 11 people. Michael Harris carries an unconscious Whitney Crowder, 6, through debris in Bear Creek Trailer Park after the tornado passed through. Whitney’s father and 15-month-old brother were killed in the tornado.

That post is two years old, when young Whitney was graduating from high school. It was a nice bookend to that tale.

So these two guys are political activists. They represent different parties and they are brothers. They were on C-SPAN to promote this documentary about the weird dynamic all of that creates. They got into a political name-calling debate and then the show started taking phone calls. Then … well, just watch and see:

This is worth a read. Former AP Reporter: I Didn’t Leave Journalism, It Left Me

A journalist for more than 40 years, Mark Lavie was based in Jerusalem for most of them and then in Cairo for two – during the “Egyptian Revolution.”

Lavie is no longer a journalist.

But he didn’t leave the profession, “it left me,” Lavie says.

Now Lavie is speaking out in as many fora as possible. He seeks to alert the public about the dramatic difference between what journalism used to be – and still pretends to be – and what it actually is.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, Advertisers Will Pay Up To 40% More For TV Sponsorship Deals Linked To Social Media, Says TV4

“It means that we need to work with story-telling on digital platforms, and that we need to engage and potentially also reward our users,” she said. “This is obviously very interesting for us, both from our perspective, and also from a commercial perspective, in terms of what we can offer our advertisers on these platforms.”

Lundell said that TV4’s experiments with extending linear TV formats into the social media sphere had shown that “you need to pay more than for ordinary sponsorship – and advertisers are prepared to do that. So, yes, we’re making money.”

The first thing I thought when she said “work with story-telling on digital platforms” was wondering why plots of scripted shows aren’t continued on other platforms. You already see supplemental webisodes of some of your more engaged shows, why not story arcs on Instagram?

First there was ESPN, the movie channels, last month it was CBS and now … Up To Speed: NBC to jump into live-streaming

This is solid. 5 tips for streaming live video from a smartphone

Livestreaming video from a mobile phone is a way for journalists to get footage which may not be possible to film with more traditional broadcast equipment.

“There are sometimes these stories where you don’t want a big camera crew, you want to try and keep a relatively low profile, in riots, in public disorder, or in places where you need to be sensitive,” Sky News correspondent Nick Martin told Journalism.co.uk.

“You can use that technology which is smaller and more compact to still get what you want to, but not [have] all the big crew considerations that we have.”

Media organisations such as ABC News have also started looking at mobile livestreaming as a developing part of their video programming.

For journalists who want to incorporate video streaming into their work …

As I told a colleague this evening, within the next year or two we’ll likely say if you’re not doing video with almost everything, you’re going to find yourself behind.

That’s why I spent the better part of my Saturday night building up video templates for future projects.

journalism / links / Monday / photo / running / things to read — Comments Off
15
Dec 14

Look up, it is easier to breathe in the sunset

Lovely warm day. I should have started my run a bit earlier. We are in a weather system that means the temperature drops 15 degrees as soon as three tree limbs conspire to block the sun. Before that, though, it was bright and surprising. Short-sleeve weather if you’ve ever needed it in December — and who doesn’t?

But I did my little neighborhood run late in the afternoon and into the early evening. It turned to a chill just as I wrapped up, but I had views like this:

And there is nothing wrong with views like that.

So another three miles down, after three miles yesterday and before a bunch more this week. I’m trying to make my run fast.

“Fast.”

There’s a word that mean a lot without any context. Let’s give it some: I look like a shuffler, I want to look like a runner. That, to me, would be fast at this point. In truth, I haven’t been fast in decades, and even then I was only faster than a person running slowly. I grew up around plenty of fast people.

I wonder if any of them had the chance to go for a run today, or got to see a sunset like that, wherever they are.

Things to read … because this stuff is good no matter where you are.

A nice example of dogged persistence, Meet the reporter who broke Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture story—two years ago:

Two years ago, an investigative reporter named Isaiah Thompson exposed the massive and troubling scale of “civil asset forfeiture” in Philadelphia—that is, how law enforcement exploited its authority to seize cash and personal property suspected to be connected to a crime. The idea is to take ill-gotten gains from drug dealers or other criminals, but Thompson showed that Philly authorities routinely claimed property in cases where the owners were not convicted—and in some instances, not even charged.

[…]

“It shows there’s no substitute for true reporting,” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with IJ. “He’s not just reading the law and talking to a couple people. He went to the courtroom over and over and over, and really explored what happened.”

There’s an accidental insight here, I think: A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link:

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent.

That’s not the problem it used to be, unfortunately, even for the Times. I think I liked it better when that would have been the cause for some consternation.

We’re starting to see this sentiment in more and more think pieces, Defining quality in news has to value the user experience:

You could frame the big challenge for the next few years of digital news this way: How can we create a news user experience that’s as easy and friction-free as Facebook — but as good as the best a dedicated news power user could assemble?

[…]

“Quality” isn’t just about how many foreign bureaus you have or how long your big features can run. It’s about every step of the process that moves from a reporter’s idea to a reader’s eyes. Too many news outlets make too many of those steps frustrating — and frustrated readers are all too happy to go back to playing Candy Crush.

That conversation is a good and needed one. It signals a maturation of the medium. And what the author, Joshua Benton, is saying ultimately leads to an effort to create a variety of interfaces for a spectrum of users. Not every story must be print, or video, no. And not every example in this enterprise need to be the TV attempt at multimedia: the broadcast package over the text of the story. There comes a time where we ask consumers to choose what they want, and we shunt them into not only the stories they want and the format they want (and the advertising they’re looking for) but also give them control of those capsules. We build it, they select how they want these stories and where. We get it there. They move back and forth through the media.

They’re doing that already, just not under one shingle.

And here’s another way the audience is doing it, How Wearable Technology Will Impact Web Design:

A lot of naysayers are quick to write off wearable technology as a fad, but a recent report from Pew Research Center Internet Project indicates that 83% of industry experts believe that wearable technology will see huge growth within the next 10 years. By 2025, we’ll be fully immersed in the Internet of Things (IoT). This means that users will be accessing websites from various platforms, not just desktops and mobile devices.

As technology expands and more users embrace wearables, more of your clients will want to their sites to be accessible. If you’re unprepared for such requests, clients will search elsewhere to fit their needs.

Although wearable technology is in its infancy now, it’s rapidly growing. Expect it to develop like a kid in puberty– overnight.

Slowly, and then all at once.

My friend Ike Pigott wrote this fine piece, The Mammals of Journalism:

A weekly newspaper, serving three cities with a combined population of less than 40,000 people… has a TV studio.

The ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing
The great disruption has happened. It didn’t smack the Earth with a blinding blast; rather, it carried its impact more slowly over decades. The internet, and mobile technology, and codecs, and smaller gear that people can afford, and the ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing… blame them all.

A weekly newspaper has a website, and now it has a TV studio.

The Tribune’s publisher, Scott Buttram, likes to say that the very technologies that have disrupted network television and movie studios and large daily newspapers have also empowered his end of the food chain. The small can feast on the big, because the rules of our media world favor the nimble and the swift.

Flexibility, low inertia, is a terrific attribute these days.

A great show, A&E’s highest rated show, was canceled. But along came Netflix: ‘Longmire’ Season 4 News: Why Cancellation Might Have Actually Helped The Series. These are truly strange times in the entertainment business.

Tomorrow, we run errands! And probably some more fun stuff, too.

errands / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
11
Dec 14

Why I’m still wearing broken glasses

Before Thanksgiving I broke my glasses. There was a wire bookshelf thing in the newsroom, it fell and a bundle of newspapers landed on my nose. Somehow the arm of the wire frame snapped off right at the lens.

Life, being so busy, meant that I could finally this week get an appointment to go get new glasses or contacts — which I was due for anyway. So I booked that appointment on Monday. That appointment was today.

I drove over, parked, walked in, announced I was there for my 1:15 and was directed to sit down. I sat down.

For the next 65 minutes I watched people come in, sit down, get called back and take their appointment. For 65 minutes I did this. And then I left. That was better than trying to express how off putting the entire situation felt. There are, after all, other eye doctors in town.

Smith’s Rule of Business: Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.

And so I now have an appointment on New Year’s Eve, at a different eye doctor.

Things to read … because I can see up close just fine, thank you.

How newspapers lost the Millennials:

The inability of newspapers to resonate with digital natives has left them with a daunting demographic challenge. Two-thirds of the audience at the typical newspaper is composed of people over the age of 55, according to Greg Harmon of Borrell Associates. “The newspaper audience ages another year every year,” he adds. “Everyone’s hair ought to be on fire.”

As the newspaper audience grays, the readers that newspapers – and most of their advertisers – would like to have are, instead, busily racking up page views at places like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox.

(I)t is easy to see that publishers and editors have a higher regard for their products than the next-gen consumers they need to attract. Now, the only question remaining is whether newspaper folk have the gumption – and time – to turn things around.

‘Experiential Journalism:’ How Virtual Reality Could Depict News in 3D:

The news industry is currently grappling with a challenging problem: How can it make news interesting to the younger generation?

Virtual reality offers one solution: Strap them in vision-encompassing helmets and let them experience the news like a video game.

This is about three kinds of silly. Google axes News in Spain in response to royalty law

We’ll let our old friend and colleague Jeff Jarvis take it from here. Spain’s link tax forces Google News to shut there:

Thus a link tax intended to protect Spain’s publishers will only end up harming them — depriving them of untold audience — and could even end up killing the weakest among them. Spain will also bring damage to the web itself and to the country’s reputation, establishing itself as a hostile environment for investment in technology.

Be careful what you wish for, you old, threatened institutions of media and government, huddling together against the cold wind of the new.

A lesser thing is that it helps diminish the spread of information, but that’s most likely a tertiary concern here.

3 Steps to Leveraging Storytelling in Your Presentations:

We no longer want to be lulled to sleep by complicated graphs and bullet points. We expect to be excited, challenged and to reflect on our own experiences. And you can do that many times with the use of stories.

Here’s how you can harness your own personal stories and use them to touch your audience the next time you present.

That’s a fine essay from SlideShare. Click on over.

For a different kind of thing, Storytelling on the Radio Builds Community, On-Air and Off:

What separates radio documentary from any documentary? And what separates public radio journalism from any journalism?

Radio gets inside us. Lacking earlids, we are defenseless, vulnerable to ambush. Sounds and voices surprise us from within. As radio documentary makers, we have this tactical advantage over our colleagues in print, film, television, photography. Our tool is aural story, the most primitive and powerful. Invisibility is our friend. Prejudice is suspended while the listener is blind, only listening.

This is a great read. Just after her retirement from ABC, Ann Compton offers a great look back from her ringside seat for some of our most important recent history. I Spent 40 Years Covering the White House:

I retired from ABC News on September 10, 41 years to the day after I arrived as a network correspondent in 1973. Back then, the Cold War was hot, the Middle East was in flames and Watergate was coming to a boil. When Richard M. Nixon finally resigned to avoid impeachment the following year, the president of ABC News in New York deployed me, his youngest recruit, to the White House beat. No network had ever assigned a woman there, and coverage would demand near constant travel. Being the first woman assigned was not the challenge. It was age. I was 27 years old, inexperienced and untested.

These go together, in order:

Police officer buys eggs for woman caught shoplifting to feed her family in Tarrant:

A woman caught shoplifting eggs in Tarrant Saturday didn’t leave with handcuffs and a court date. Thanks to a Tarrant police officer, she left with food for her family.

Grandmother caught stealing eggs to feed hungry children ‘overwhelmed’ by kindness of police:

By Saturday, the family had gone two days without food. Johnson went to Dollar General on Pinson Valley Parkway with $1.25 and thought that would be enough to buy a carton of eggs. When she realized she was 50 cents plus tax short, she stuffed five eggs in her pocket out of desperation.

Tarrant police officer delivers groceries to woman caught stealing eggs at Dollar General:

Helen Johnson stared in amazement at the piles of food accumulating in her small Tarrant apartment on Wednesday.

“The last time I saw my house this full, I was 12-years-old and staying with my grandmother,” said the 47-year-old mother and grandmother. “I’ve been crying all day.”

Score one for the good guys.

journalism / links / photo / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Dec 14

A flea mall trip

I mentioned on Monday that I was withholding the most fun part of my afternoon’s adventures. I wanted to share some of the pictures with you today. Here are a few of them now.

For $20, you can pick up a five-album set of the Boss.

They looked good, too.

There’s this collage of paintings you see in one or two places. One of the pictures is a color version of this old hand-drawn shot of Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum and Cliff Hare Stadium. I’m assuming this is an original draft from the artist, then. That it is labeled as Cliff Hare means this board, if it was drawn contemporaneously, is from at least 1973. It can be yours for $9.

They used to do these in the textile buildings, as part of the students’ work, I guess. I used to see them on ebay and the like, but I haven’t run across them in a while. Who knows how old they are:

When was the last time you saw a postage stamp vending machine?

I saw other things in my quick stroll. Also I picked up three Gloms for my collection. I also met Mr. Brewer, the owner of Angel’s Antiques. We talked about my collection — I now have 101 books, 86 percent of the entire series — and he promised to keep an eye out for me.

Also, I just realized how many of those things I need to scan. We’ll have weeks of covers to look at soon.

Things to read … because you can check this stuff out right now.

This is a long excerpt, but you need it. And it isn’t every day you read about high school journalism. This one you should read, because it is awesome: Student journalists learn to cover scandal from Stamford High School halls:

After the newspaper staff returned to school in the fall, the story ratcheted up. In October, Stamford police charged the principal, Donna Valentine, and an assistant principal, Roth Nordin, with failing to report what they knew about Watkins and the student to state authorities.

Rebecca Rakowitz, features editor of The Round Table, said Ringel asked the staff whether they wanted to report the news by summarizing the work of outside organizations or “whether we wanted to go to the courthouse and the police station and take it on ourselves. We wanted to take it on ourselves.”

They ran into barriers. They learned nothing more from police than what was said during a news conference that followed the arrests of Valentine and Nordin, for example.

And teachers weren’t talking.

[…]

Sports editor Bailey Bitetto said the newspaper has a role.

“Teachers are supposed to be the voice but now we are the voice, because the teachers are too scared,” Bitetto said. “It’s a lot of responsibility but we understand that their jobs could be at stake.”

Four news stories:

‘I don’t feel like he’s dead’: Son vindicated as father rescued after 12 days at sea

Police look for clues in case of Mississippi teen burned to death

Credit unions: Retailers “should be held accountable” for data breaches

Instagram Hits 300 Million Monthly Users To Surpass Twitter, Keeps It Real With Verified Badges

I kinda hope this goes to court. I don’t have any strong feelings about it in any of the possible directions, I simply think this would be an interesting First Amendment case — assuming the issue of “tag as state property” was mitigated. Is ‘No Homo’ license plate free speech? Alabama Revenue Department says no, recalling tag:

Amanda Collier, spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Revenue, confirmed the tag saying “NOHOMO” does exist and was approved by mistake.

“By law, the issuance of motor vehicle registrations is not centralized and must be processed at the county level. However, the Motor Vehicle Division of the Alabama Department of Revenue does hold the authority to approve personalized messages on license plates,” she said.

[…]

When a person buys a tag, the county employee enters the desired message into its system. Those on the banned list are supposed to be automatically rejected, but that didn’t happen here.

And a thought exercise, what if the plate had said “YESHOMO”?

How would you like to be on the plate approval committee? Well, a 1982 DMV rule, by the way, says they’ll turn down any plate “which contains objectionable language or symbols which are considered by the Department of Revenue to be offensive to the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama.”

They are typically very proactive in their refusals. And you better like the E-Street Band. You couldn’t get H8BOSS, for example. But you can get those records at Angel’s …