journalism


19
Jun 14

Things to read

I am resting my legs. I am resting my legs because I’ve ridden two days in a row. I’ve ridden a paltry 28 miles on Tuesday and Wednesday, my first two rides on a real bike in a calendar month. Both rides felt like bad first rides. They weren’t even particularly demanding rides. I sought out easy routes. My legs are in no kind of form and that’s unfortunate.

And so it seems clear to me that I need to find a way to travel with my bike wherever I go because this is silly.

I have a lot of catching up to do.

Things to read … because I can catch up there more easily, I’d bet.

At the New York Times — A Paper Boat Navigating a Digital Sea:

The morning meeting is one of two large news meetings each day, with the other at 4 p.m. (For the record, of the 23 people seated around the main table, as opposed to the periphery, seven were women; two, both men, were African-American.)

The focus at the meetings, and The Times, has come a long way since the days when “what’s going on page one?” was the biggest question. Clearly, there’s an effort to make this, more than ever, an “all platforms” newsroom.

But the structural changes at The Times and in the larger media world are even more striking. And therein lies a problem that has no easy solution: how to fully transform for the digital future when the business model — and the DNA of the newsroom — is so tied to the printed newspaper.

The source may be anonymous, but the shame is all yours:

How did anonymous sourcing become the rule rather than the exception in American journalism? Journalism professor Matt J. Duffy informs us in a new (and securely paywalled) paper that anonymous sourcing was sufficiently rare in the first three decades of the 20th century that none of the journalism textbooks and guides he examined made mention of the practice. The first textbook mention Duffy encountered was published in 1955 — An Introduction to Journalism: A Survey of the Fourth Estate in All Its Forms, by Fraser Bond. According to Bond, anonymous sources appeared primarily in foreign diplomatic reporting and in those cases that reporters wanted to attribute information from the president.

How mobile is your strategy?:

Luca Forlin, Head of International Product Partnerships at Google, shared several thoughts on where mobile publishing is headed. “There are two things right now. There are two things right now. The first is the around the devices and the second is around usage.”

Around devices, “the interesting element is that we have seen huge growth in smaller tablets – phablets – which are taking a huge share of the market from the bigger tablets. Does that change much in terms of what publishers do? The truth is we are not yet sure. What is clear is that publishers must abandon the idea of designing something one way and move to a world where content actually adapts. Optimisation is really important. The second thing is that, while phablets are taking over, in reality they belong to the smartphone family, which is entirely different from big tablets. That again forces them to abandon their old habits. Small screen sizes require much more simplicity, different design logic and different content.”

Think about it: text is text, but images are hard in some mobile platforms. Some videos work well there, others less so. We have to think not only about the content, but where it is going and, now, how it is going to look in several different places.


3
Jun 14

Not sure of my time zone

What day is it? What planet am I on?

Transnational travel in a day is a surrealistic thing. On the other hand, we traversed almost 7,000 miles in a day.

I ran one mile today, having not put on those shoes in a week, and my body feeling pretty terrible both because of that and the travel and the sleepiness and it all just hurt. So I sprinted, which still felt like a slog on my wife’s high school track.

Saw this truck while we were ordering sandwiches. I feel like they got the tint of the paint job just about perfect:

truck

These were our collective fortunes at dinner tonight. One of them makes no sense and, thus, all of the sense in the world:

fortunes

Things to read: because reading always makes sense.

What passes as sports journalism at home today: Alabama All-Americans on the same bench as AJ McCarron meets Forrest Gump. I’ll leave it to you to decide if I mean the subject matter or just writing things from social media accounts you follow.

Something more important, Exclusive: Sharyl Attkisson on Journalism’s Very Dangerous Trend:

Sharyl Attkisson, an award-winning investigative reporter who resigned from CBS News earlier this year, says the news media are heading down a dangerous path with attempts to “censor or block stories” that don’t align with their preferred agenda.

“There’s a tendency in the news media, on the part of some managers, to censor or block stories that don’t fall in line with the message they want sent to the viewers,” Attkisson said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal. “I think that’s really a very dangerous perspective to have.”

This makes sense, and you’ll see a lot more stories like it. Online, mobile consumption soars among sports fans means you should go where your audience is.

Internet Use Over Time is an excellent resource from Pew.

FAA Weighs Letting Film, TV Industry Use Drones reminds me: I still need a drone.

And, possibly, a good night’s sleep.


20
May 14

I do believe I ran my foot off

These dogwoods are in the neighborhood park where my wife grew up playing:

Cranbury

This is also the park where we took engagement pictures during a Nor’easter. It is also the park where I come to torture myself whenever we visit her parents. Today I ran far enough that I couldn’t feel my foot.

Yesterday, at her high school track, I ran 440s, which I haven’t done since high school, and which I did poorly back then. But, I told myself, running 440s will build up speed! I do not know what is happening. These are the first two workouts after the most recent triathlon and a day in the car. A handful of 440 sprints and running my way into a numb extremity. I am counting the days until our next race, which is in July. And that will come with only a few weeks of “training” after about two weeks of downtime. What could go wrong?

Here’s something I ran along today. Pretty nice, huh?

Road

I learned something about myself today, as I told my mother-in-law. We were driving from here to there and it occurred to me. I see people running and think Oh, that’s nice. Good for them. I see people cycling and think I wish I was riding right now. I never think Oh I’d love to be running just like they are!

Funny how that works.

Things to read … because reading always works.

Wonder how this plays out: Without changes, Alabama’s pension funds could run dry within decade, study warns.

This is just about the sweetest, saddest story you’ll read today. ‘Best thing I’ll ever see’: McAdory senior receives diploma in bedside ceremony hours before grandmother’s death

5 in China Army Face U.S. Charges of Cyberattacks

Chinese military officials charged with stealing US data as tensions escalate

Poll Says Anti-Semitism Is Global Matter

Businesses are dying faster than they’re being created, and economists are worried

AT&T Aims for TV’s Future With $48.5B DirecTV Deal

Will we run out of adjectives before we run out of scandal? Nope. Exclusive: VA Scandal Hits New Hospital

VA investigating Florida hospital wait lists

Federal health-care subsidies may be too high or too low for more than 1 million Americans

From Idea to Story: Planning the Data Journalism Story

We live at an interesting point in media history. Internet Ad Spending Beat Broadcast TV for First Time Last Year


15
May 14

My new spring wardrobe: My winter wardrobe

Of course we received a temporary fix to our air conditioner problems as the temperatures dropped 20 degrees. But today’s overcast skies didn’t include any rain, so I was able to get in a little bike ride. I took a simple 15 mile spin around the neighborhood as I try to save my legs — the legs I haven’t built up whatsoever recently — for the weekend.

I had two disparate thoughts on the bike.

On the flat stuff, which was much of the route I chose: I’ll have a great race this weekend!

On the hills, which are somewhat unavoidable: I’ll have a lousy race this weekend …

And so it goes.

So we bundled up in sweatshirts for tonight’s baseball game. An outdoor event which took place in May in Alabama:

baseball

In the sixth inning I was chosen to take part in a promotion. And I won! They walk you down to the dugout and they present two Yeti coolers. You open one and there’s a gift inside. Then you play Let’s Make A Deal. Do I want what I found in the white cooler? Or should I try my luck with the blue cooler?

The white cooler held a broken fungo bat and a few baseballs they haven’t been able to give away all season. They’ve sweetened the offer with a t-shirt that features the new baseball coach. It is a line art likeness of his face, but the mustache is creepy. So I opened the other cooler and won a gift card to Kinnucans. That’s great timing, I need new outdoors shoes, so I’ll be there tomorrow.

Oh, and Auburn lost 10-0 to LSU. LSU, which is a very good team, has scored 37 runs in their last 15 innings of play. Auburn is still looking to find itself, and this loss all but sealed their fate of being shut out of the postseason. The dream isn’t over yet, but drubbings like that aren’t a good way to start the last series of the season.

Things to read … because reading is always a good start.

This is gobsmackingly foolish. Newspaper nabs website’s article, claims most of it is ‘public domain’ — The Georgia Press Association’s non-action is disappointing as well.

This isn’t the sign of a healthy democracy. Where are the candidates? No contests in 20 of 35 Alabama Senate districts on June 3:

All 35 seats in the Alabama Senate are up for grabs this election year.

But candidates are sparse.

There are no contested races in 20 of the 35 districts in the June 3 primary, now less than three weeks away.

In fact, 14 senators – eight Republicans and six Democrats – will coast to new four-year terms with no opposition in either party.

Job growth! 2013 New & Expanding Industries Report highlights solid year of economic development in Alabama:

Companies launching operations in Alabama or expanding existing facilities in the state announced nearly 17,000 new jobs and more than $4.4 billion in capital investment during 2013, according to a report released today by Governor Robert Bentley and the Alabama Department of Commerce.

There are plenty of details at the link.

Are you building for mobile? Quantcast: Social drives 34 percent of mobile Web traffic, 17 percent of desktop traffic

In Kansas, Professors Must Now Watch What They Tweet

One of these is a former student of mine. He’s a sharp young man. I knew him when: Three From Samford Earn Fulbright Grants


13
May 14

‘You’re going to need a bigger sack’

Auburn hosted UAB in baseball tonight. The Blazers had a 10-game winning streak (the sixth longest in the nation) on the line. Auburn had beaten UAB 15 games in a row in the series. So naturally it came down to a bases loaded walkoff walk:

Auburn won, 6-5, and they did the traditional baseball “We won the pennant!” dogpile after that.

Just before the game several of the electricity transformers just behind the baseball stadium exploded. We were treated to green smoke and acrid smells for a while. Eventually the scoreboard and the lights were restored, and that became just one more story in the baseball season. Dude. Green smoke.

Speaking of things you never want to hear about: our air conditioner is definitely broken. Two days in a row I’ve worked in the yard and now I’m sweating as much inside as I do outside. (Though half the yard looks much nicer now, thanks.) So the A/C guy will be by tomorrow.

Here’s something that could happen at a lot more local television stations:

She got a lot of pats on the back for that around the office, I promise.

Things to read … because I put the words here.

This is the first story that the new staff for the Crimson has published. They did a nice job, especially considering it is an under-deadline, semester’s-end, big story assignment: Memorial service remembers Foreman as a ‘blessing’

The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Reputation Management

I only have a minor in economics, but if you’re counting on a late Easter to give the national engine a nudge … you’re living on the margins: Retail sales flatline, disappoint in April despite warmer weather

There is an impressive picture with this story, just so you know. Woman gets slithery surprise when she finds a 12-foot snake in her bathroom:

“When the officer showed up, he came with a brown paper sack,” she recalled. “I told him, ‘you’re going to need a bigger sack than that.'”

Gonzales, who’s been with the police department about five years, said he’d previously responded to three snake calls, but nothing like that.

“When I opened her bathroom door, there was a 12-foot python,” Gonzales recalled. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with a snake that large.”

He asked dispatchers to send animal control officers. Shortly afterward, another College Station officer arrived, also armed with a paper bag, and soon the animal control officer showed up with a 10-gallon bucket.

And then they had to fight to get the thing into a large garbage can. Close your doors.