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journalism

The boats may be sentient by the end of this post

These are Chaparral Boats. They must be coming out of Florida or beyond. There’s no dealer in Alabama between here and there. I think, after some surfing, they are something from the Sunesta class.

If it is a Sunesta, there’s a seat facing aft, with only two handrails to keep you on the vessel. There’s a ladder that slips into the hull. And there’s room for 14, the site says. The specs boast 320 horsepower, but don’t tell us a speed. You spend time in the next portion of your drive wondering what those cost. The low end of that model will only set you back about $75,000. If you spring for all of the high end accessories you’re looking at least $105,000. That’s before you get into the trailer, rigging, registration, shipping fees and so on.

Truck drivers routinely haul a great deal of valuable merchandise, but that guy might have a payload of something close to $250,000 on board and it is shiny and obvious.

Things to read … because it is obvious (to me) that I’ve got nothing else for the day.

Happy news! Referenced this in class today. The resolution was much more boring than the owners had originally feared, Service dog reunited with Cullman County owner after 5 days without food or water.

I mentioned that in class to point out that they have a Pulitzer Prize winner writing that stuff.

This does not say which schools, but you can be assured the comments get quickly political, Apple to give $100 million to schools, five in Alabama, CEO Tim Cook says:

Apple is awarding $100 million to schools in poor communities including five Alabama schools, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said Monday in Montgomery.

On the same day Cook was being inducted to the Alabama Academy of Honor alongside his co-inductees Nick Saban, Judy Bonner, John Croyle, James Hudson Jr., Margaret Porter, Jeff Sessions and Edgar Welden.

A fine honor for a real gentleman and his lovely wife. Auburn legend, Samford coach Pat Sullivan to have field house renamed in his honor:

Samford University will rename its football field house the Sullivan-Cooney Family Field House to honor current Samford head coach Pat Sullivan and his wife, Jean, the school announced Friday.

The field house was originally named for Birmingham business executive and 1974 Samford graduate Gary Cooney and his family. Cooney, a long-time friend of Sullivan, gave the lead gift that made the building possible.

“I have always felt through athletics it is the relationships that will last for a lifetime,” Sullivan said. “My friendship with Gary Cooney began when we were teammates at John Carroll High School. Gary’s generosity and the generosity of others enabled us to build this beautiful football facility.

And some good news down at the Gulf Coast, Museum dedicated to forestry and agriculture to open at the fairgrounds:

A new Agriculture and Forestry Museum will open at the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds Saturday, displaying exhibits on a number of plants and animals key to the state’s farm economy.

[…]

Lucas said the museum will be open to the public when there are major events at the fairgrounds.

And here’s some dumb news, but even the resolution to the overreaction has a happy ending, LAX flight delayed after WiFi hotspot name prompts concerns.

We just might have to start a “Good News Monday” feature.

When Jay Rosen is aggravated, it is always a good read, Facebook’s phony claim that “you’re in charge”:

It’s not us exercising judgment, it’s you. We’re not the editors, you are. If this is what Facebook is saying — and I think it’s a fair summary of Marra’s comments to the New York Times — the statement is a lie.

I say a lie, not just an untruth, because anyone who works day-to-day on the code for News Feed knows how much judgment goes into it. It simply isn’t true that an algorithmic filter can be designed to remove the designers from the equation. It’s an assertion that melts on contact. No one smart enough to work at Facebook could believe it. And I’m not sure why it’s sitting there unchallenged in a New York Times story. For that doesn’t even rise to the level of “he said, she said.” It’s just: he said, poof!

Now, if Greg Marra and his team want to make the point that in perfecting their algorithm they’re not trying to pick the day’s most important stories and feature them in the News Feed, the way an old fashioned front page or home page editor would, and so in that sense they are not really “editors” and don’t think in journalistic terms, fine, okay, that’s a defensible point. But don’t try to suggest that the power has thereby shifted to the users, and the designers are just channeling your choices. (If I’m the editor of my News Feed, where are my controls?)

Programmers refer to the phenomenon as GIGO. You could change the noun, it doesn’t have to be Garbage, but you’re still getting the high dose of Facebook’s choice. Because you don’t have control.

But, then, we knew that. We’ve long since known that. We’re ceding control, aren’t we? Only now we’re starting to realize what that means when the control isn’t to our liking. But that’s beside the point, Professor Rosen is discussing the journalism involved rather than just Facebook.

Also, “Friend, Like, Comment, Unfollow, Hide” aren’t controls. They’re feeders. They’re sensitivity meters to the algorithm, feeders. But that’s all they are. Someone else has the control point: Facebook, specifically the programmers.

The algorithm dictates what you see, which changes what it is to be a tech company, which is now a publisher. And what becomes of a publisher? Perhaps they turn into a speech engine?

Which is as good a point as any to bring this piece in, How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition:

Information technology is revolutionizing products. Once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts, products have become complex systems that combine hardware, sensors, data storage, microprocessors, software, and connectivity in myriad ways. These “smart, connected products”—made possible by vast improvements in processing power and device miniaturization and by the network benefits of ubiquitous wireless connectivity—have unleashed a new era of competition.

Smart, connected products offer exponentially expanding opportunities for new functionality, far greater reliability, much higher product utilization, and capabilities that cut across and transcend traditional product boundaries. The changing nature of products is also disrupting value chains, forcing companies to rethink and retool nearly everything they do internally.

These new types of products alter industry structure and the nature of competition, exposing companies to new competitive opportunities and threats. They are reshaping industry boundaries and creating entirely new industries. In many companies, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question, “What business am I in?”

Multiple businesses, of course.

(Oh, you thought this was random?)

As my friend, Professor Chris Arnold, suggested with that link, you’ll see systems of systems built on interdependent and emergent behaviors. And, I think, re-dedicated and repurposed systems and behaviors as well.

You see this all the time. That’s not just a ski boat up there. That’s a 14-person party platform. And now you can custom-select the dash.

So it won’t be much longer, then, before that boat can select your provisions based on your previous activities, or the new dash in its replacement craft. When your pleasure boat has you figured out … well, that’s going to be a pretty good Monday. Especially if the boat can also call in sick for you. Why would you go to work if you had a vessel like that?

Friday / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read — Comments Off
24
Oct 14

To live in repeat

“I’ll be out here for days. Phew. Hurting my knees!”

How many of these do you have to do?

“All of them. A lot.”

He’s painting all of those little fence posts. The new look, Charles says twice, will match the paint scheme on the entrance gate down the hill. He’s sanding and scraping and painting and he figures it’ll take him two or three more days. He says it is about 15 minutes or so per post. But, when he’s down, they’ll all match the entrance gate, you know what color green it is, he says for a third time.

There is not a dot of green paint on his white pants.

A gentleman walks by as we’re talking and they know each other. He shifts the little cushion he’s kneeling on, happy for the break. Happy to be outside, happy for nice weather. And, when he’s done, they’ll be easier to repaint the next time. They’ll already match that gate.

I took this picture like this, with his face underexposed, for two reasons. I noticed, in the few minutes that I talked with him, that none of the students passing by even seemed to notice he was there. They were too distracted thinking about their next deadline or the latest drama or whatever was going on in their phone.

Second, I’m forever telling our journalism students that the best stories we never write about on campus feature the people who make the place neat, keep it so clean and treat it so lovingly. We’re only here for a few years. For some of these folks, this is a career. And the beautification of things is an important aspect of the job. We take a lot of things for granted.

Things to read … so we don’t take everything for granted.

The Mysterious Polio-Like Disease Affecting American Kids:

More than 100 cases of a polio-like syndrome causing full or partial paralysis of the arms or legs have been seen in children across the United States in recent months, according to doctors attending the annual meeting of the Child Neurology Society.

Symptoms have ranged from mild weakness in a single arm to complete paralysis of arms, legs, and even the muscles controlling the lungs, leading in some cases to a need for surgery to insert a breathing tube, doctors said.

The outbreak, which appears to be larger and more widespread than what has largely been previously reported by medical and news organizations, has neurologists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrambling to find out what is causing these cases and how best to treat it.

“We don’t know how to treat it, and we don’t know how to prevent it,” said Keith Van Haren, a child neurologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. “It actually looks just like polio, but that term really freaks out the public-health people.”

10 Tips for Delivering Awesome Professional Development

The star makes all the difference … Slow STARt: Fewer than 1 percent have registered for new secure IDs:

Alabamians are slowly moving toward new federal identification standards the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says will go into effect sometime in 2016.

As of most recent numbers, about 37,000 Alabamians have registered for a “STAR ID,” the new secure driver’s licenses and identification cards that in coming years will be required for things such as boarding airplanes and entering federal facilities.

That’s fewer than 1 percent of the state’s estimated 3.8 million licensed drivers and ID card holders.

The state literature on the subject is here. Aside from additional documentation to get that little star, I haven’t yet seen an explanation as to how this is helpful — or keeps you safe — or why it is important. But, hey! If you don’t fit neatly in the arbitrary schedule the state has established here, you can pay for a new license because you’ll need that star! Don’t ask why you’re getting taxed again; just pay, I guess.

This is super cool. Why The New York Times built a tool for crowdsourced time travel:

Flipping through old magazine and newspaper ads is like throwing the switch on the world’s simplest time machine. Suddenly it’s 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts have just made the round trip from the moon, Abbey Road just dropped, and for the low price of $29.95 you can enjoy an “electric computerized football game [that] lets you and your opponent call offensive and defensive plays.”

This is the benefit a paper like The New York Times finds in its archive: the ability to pluck moments from the historical record out of the past — the small steps and giant leaps, but also the assembled fragments and cultural artifacts that often share space on the page. While you can dig deep into the stories of the past with TimesMachine, uncovering specific ads isn’t as easy. The team in The New York Times R&D Lab wants to rectify that with Madison, a new tool for identifying ads across the newspaper’s archive. What makes Madison different is that it relies on Times readers — not a bot or algorithm — to do the tricky work of spotting and tagging the ads of the past.

I wish every news center could pull this off tomorrow. I’d love to see that.

Talked about this profile in class today, Michael Jordan has not left the building:

Back in the office after his vacation on a 154-foot rented yacht named Mister Terrible, he feels that relaxation slipping away. He feels pulled inward, toward his own most valuable and destructive traits. Slights roll through his mind, eating at him: worst record ever, can’t build a team, absentee landlord. Jordan reads the things written about him, the fuel arriving in a packet of clips his staff prepares. He knows what people say. He needs to know, a needle for a hungry vein. There’s a palpable simmering whenever you’re around Jordan, as if Air Jordan is still in there, churning, trying to escape. It must be strange to be locked in combat with the ghost of your former self.

Smoke curls off the cigar. He wears slacks and a plain white dress shirt, monogrammed on the sleeve in white, understated. An ID badge hangs from one of those zip line cords on his belt, with his name on the bottom: Michael Jordan, just in case anyone didn’t recognize the owner of a struggling franchise who in another life was the touchstone for a generation. There’s a shudder in every child of the ’80s and ’90s who does the math and realizes that Michael Jordan is turning 50. Where did the years go? Jordan has trouble believing it, difficulty admitting it to himself. But he’s in the mood for admissions today, and there’s a look on his face, a half-smile, as he considers how far to go.

You live with the notion of age and you grow to realize it is coming for you. Maybe you even make your peace with that in your own good time. Either way, there are some institutional figures, you figure, to whom entropy should not apply. Michael Jordan is one of those. I can slow down (even more), MJ should be able to dunk from the free throw line forever.

This only gets harder and stranger, I suppose. With everything so mediated, movie stars will remain trim and handsome through all time, musicians will always rebellious and Jordan will be young in highlights forever. Who ages when everything is available for recall and repeat?

journalism / links / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
23
Oct 14

Where can I get a mace?

They sang “O Canada” in Pittsburgh for the hockey game last night. The Philadelphia Flyers faced the Penguins and they did both anthems and Penguin fans sang “O Canada.” Is it nationalism when another nation is involved? So, yeah, I watched Lyndon Slewidge sing it once more.

Here’s the video you really need to see. Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, now a Canadian hero, returned to his regular duties this morning.

It is possible that he is going to start a renaissance of emotional stoicism. He might also make it fashionable to carry a wicked mace.

Much more at the CBC.

Things to read … because I don’t have a mace to give you.

Infiltrating people’s habits: How Time works to engage readers:

Time’s editors meet every morning at 9:45 to discuss stories for the upcoming day. After that meeting, Schweitzer, Ross, and Borchers gather to discuss the 15 or so stories they plan on promoting heavily and how they’ll use what Time calls its “external levers of distribution” — which range from its daily email newsletter and cross-promotions on other Time Inc. websites to working with the Time Inc. PR department and, of course, social media — to ensure that their stories are widely read and shared.

Of the three, Schweitzer is the longest tenured Time employee, having joined the company all the way back in August 2013, and their roles are emblematic of Time’s revamped digital strategy. Time had about 50 million unique visitors in both August and September, more than doubling the roughly 20 million it attracted the year before.

Their efforts go beyond social as well. The Ebola story discussed that morning, covering how some people are surviving the virus, was the top story in Time’s daily email the next morning. Called The Brief after the central feature of Time’s homepage, the email lists 12 things readers need to know each day, and it has an average open rate of around 40 percent. Time has more than 6 million likes and followers on both Twitter and Facebook, but Time assistant managing editor Sam Jacobs said the newsletter, which has about 650,000 subscribers, can drive significant traffic.

Terribly sad, Doctor in New York City Is Sick With Ebola:

A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea became the first person in the city to test positive for the virus Thursday, setting off a search for anyone who might have come into contact with him.

The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center and placed in isolation at the same time as investigators sought to retrace every step he had taken over the past several days.

At least three people he had contact with in recent days have been placed in isolation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team to New York, is conducting its own test to confirm the positive test on Thursday, which was performed by a city lab.

While officials have said they expected isolated cases of the disease to arrive in New York eventually, and had been preparing for this moment for months, the first case highlighted the challenges involved in containing the virus, especially in a crowded metropolis.

The next sentence discusses his subway trips. What a logistical challenge. Tomoorrow, I suppose, we’ll begin to talk about the media onslaught.

Where did everybody go? Construction labor shortage more severe in Southeast:

According to data released this week by the Associated General Contractors of America, 83 percent of firms that responded to a recent survey said they are having trouble finding qualified craft workers to fill open spots, and 61 percent are having trouble filling professional slots like project supervisors and engineers.

According to the survey, the Southeast has been hit the hardest by this shortage, where 86 percent of the contractors polled said they had a hard time filling positions with qualified workers.

You haven’t seen a lot of stories about booming construction sites, so did the workers and the professionals have moved on or moved out.

Maybe they’re mace shopping.

journalism / links / memories / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
22
Oct 14

Remembering Ottawa

Five years ago we were in Ottawa at a conference. It was a low key trip in a busy time. The conference only allowed for one paper each, so The Yankee and I got to be tourists. We took a walking tour of Ottawa one day, and it was lovely. The sky was overcast and chilly. We got snow flurries and red poppies for Veteran’s Day. We met exceedingly nice people at every turn. We walked through incredibly moving memorials and beautiful gothic revival architecture. It was, I said on Twitter today, a wonderful place to visit as an American. Some things I wrote that day:

We toured Parliament. I gave security fits. It seems the metal detectors there are set to the highest sensitivity. Wrists make them beep. Not watches, but the bones in your body. The security officers were very patient and polite, almost apologetic. But, then, everyone we’ve met in Ottawa has been unfailingly nice.

When we finally made it in we sat through a few minutes of the House of Commons, including their regular question period. We made our way up to the Peace Tower and Memorial Chamber. The Memorial Chamber is a very solemn, quiet place. So much so that I didn’t even take any photographs there. Everywhere else, yes, and they’ll eventually make it into the November gallery when I get that section of the site back up to speed.

The picture above is from the gift shop in the parliament building. The kids working the cash register were not prepared for my line of questions about the Speaker’s Selection syrup. Peter Milliken has been the speaker for forever, they said (since 2001) and so this has likely been the syrup since he took office.

How did he decide on this particular syrup?

“I think it was a blind taste test,” one young lady offered.

But surely not. Milliken is from Ontario, but imagine if he’d chosen a syrup from British Columbia in a blind test. That’d be a bit embarrassing. No, he probably brought his favorite from home. Surely this producer is among his constituency.

Unfortunately I couldn’t bring some home with us. The humorless TSA would not allow it. Perhaps I can order some online.

We visited a fancy mall while looking for hats. Turns out this was the coldest day of the season so far. It was 30 degrees with the occasional flurry and we were out taking pictures all day. The guy working the desk at our hotel directed us to the mall, telling us “You can’t get more Canadian than Roots.” He told us to look for a toque.

This was the sort of mall that made you feel poor just by walking inside. “Authentic Canadian” must mean fooling the Americans. Before we found Roots we found Old Navy. Figuring they would be cheaper we steered that way. Right next to Old Navy was a store called Buck or Two.

Why not? We walked in, found hats right up front and bought two of them. Four bucks.

We found Roots, found the toques. Twenty-six dollars, each.

On our way out of the mall I noted my hat couldn’t get any more American: Made in China.

Take that, desk clerk! You will not be getting any kickbacks tonight!

Sure, we’re staying at the downtown Radisson, but we booked through an online discount site. We = Cheap.

We met some striking museum curators — a noun and modifier that could lend itself to a great band name or a magazine layout. These nice, freezing folks were trying to get better wages and less contract labor in their field. Museum curators are important; these are being replaced, the woman said, by non-experts at a lower wage.

Not Canadian, but what can we do? They urged us to drop this note of protest in the mail to our representatives. My guy wasn’t on the mailing list, what with him living in a different country, but I picked a good sturdy English name from a place I’d like to visit and dropped him a note in the local postal system.

We also saw the Notre Dame Basilica. It is across the street from the art museum — we didn’t go — with the giant spider on the corner. If they make a Night at the Museum III they should start with that. Creepy.We saw black squirrels, the famous canal from which all of Ottawa sprang, Quebec on the other side of the river and some very nice, funky shops.

And, sadly, today all of that was locked down after a shooting at Parliament. It seems the Sergeant-at-Arms put a stop to the chaos. More details will emerge, but at this point one victim, a reservist, and the shooter are dead. The soldier was killed at the national war memorial. The shooter somewhere inside Parliament itself.

A writer wrote that this wasn’t supposed to happen in Canada. We can all sympathize; this sort of thing shouldn’t happen anywhere. Parliament member John Williamson wrote “Parliament Hill is never going to be the same.”

Sad to think of that.

Things to read … because there’s always something to think of.

One more note from Canada, these are the running announcements from the Ottawa police.

We see people starting to talk about this subject. I’ve mentioned it and linked to some essays here. Today is a good reminder that it is a conversation worth having. There are plenty of great points here. User Generated Content: time to consider the ethical conundrums as well as the opportunities:

Steve Herrmann says verification is the main challenge when dealing with user-generated content.

“The biggest challenge of all is establishing something is true and retaining peoples’ trust at a time when information is moving so fast it can be very, very hard to check.”

He says that although the speed of the news cycle makes verification difficult, newsrooms need to make sure it’s correct before publishing or broadcasting.

“Or at least if you’re not quite sure, you need to be very clear [about that]”

However, Claire Wardle says the phrase ‘we cannot independently verify this’ is doing a disservice to the audience.

“Until we sort that out, we’ll have content being run too quickly with these caveats, and this isn’t transparent,” she says, indicating that there needs to be more transparency when dealing with UGC.

It is booming. Inside Bloomberg Media’s digital video business:

Bloomberg.com’s desktop site racked up over 5.3 million unique video viewers in September, more than triple the amount it ran a year earlier, according to comScore. Making that more impressive, overall unique visitors to Bloomberg.com declined slightly during that period, from 8.7 million to 8.2 million. That’s important, considering Bloomberg fetches $75 CPMs for its video ads, according to Marcum.

“The world leaders in business are tremendously appealing to advertisers, and we have them,” he said.

These are ambitious numbers, and even if they are close to accurate … Worldwide Subscription Video-On-Demand To Grow Nearly 30% In Revenue In 2014:

Information research company Gartner expects consumer spending on SVOD services to grow 28.1% in 2014 and 18.2% in 2015. Gartner says spending on SVOD services in North America is on pace to improve 28.5% in 2014 and 18.6% in Western Europe. Emerging territories will see a 53% growth rate in 2014.

What Journalists Worry About in the Middle of the Night: I find items 10, 9 and then, ultimately, 2 particularly worrisome.

Thursday update: A cartoon from Halifax’s Chronicle Herald by Bruce MacKinnon, with proceeds from the reprints going to the family of the fallen soldier:

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21
Oct 14

I will, in fact, run to wait

Looking forward to tomorrow. Our student journalists have a big story coming out. It is complex and sensitive and it is well done, a compliment to the people who’ve worked on it. I read it tonight — which is unusual, as an adviser I do not interfere with their editorial decisions, meaning I generally see everything as a regular consumer — and I’m proud of the work they’re doing.

This is a fun, loud, sharp, sarcastic group. They do their work throughout the week and they put their newspaper to bed early on Tuesday nights. But not this week. Tonight was a late night with lots of copy and good quotes and ink on hands. There was plenty of layout experiments and squibble marks and bleary-eyed readings of federal definitions.

The work is good. It is honest and fair and thorough. Our editor-in-chief has spent a lot of time writing it. She’s proven why the job is hers and is proving why she can handle the investigative work. I think she’s going to be proud of it all, after she has put the story to bed and steps away from it for a minute or two.

In the copy room … I’m making copies. I had to re-load the machine with paper. No one ever considers the humble wrapping paper that holds the copy paper together. Maybe we should:

But I always like jam with my paper.

International Paper, under their Hammermill brand, has a program with St. Jude. One of their patients drew the fish.

Now I want to copy more things, to see what is on the next ream of paper.

Things to read … because someone put it on paper. Or a server.

Getting the truly geeky out of the way first: How A/B testing became publishers’ go-to traffic builder.

Journalists’ obituaries are usually a bit self indulgent, but this is a good one about an important figure in the industry: Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor, dies at 93:

See? Ben Bradlee and ‘the best damn job in the world’.

Few ever think about the importance of Barber, just north of Birmingham, but that place is important: Motorsports museum’s economic impact far reaching.

I’m not going to think about racing for at least a week, but here’s one last important economic story: Talladega Superspeedway impact transcends the track.

In a random musical moment I wondered: Whatever happened to Live?

Turns out they have a new album, their first in something like eight years, coming out next week. Here’s one of the new tracks:

But that’s not Ed Kowalczyk. He’s not been with the band in years. (Apparently it was not an amicable breakup.) He has a solo album out. And, in this just-released video, he smiles. This seems unnerving, somehow:

That’s what happens when you wonder about things from 15 years ago.

Here’s a thought exercise: Isn’t it interesting how things are so different for you than they were 15 years ago? Isn’t it even more interesting how things are so similar? Discuss.