Tonight we had the last newscasts of the year, which means we’re really sneaking up on the last IUSTV programs of the year, and we’re saying goodbye to a few more talented seniors.
That’s Anna Black, on the right. She’s been doing more job interviews than I can count. She’s interned at CNN and at WRDB in Louisville. On campus, she’s produced shows, directed, reported and, at IUSTV, has hosted What’s Up Weekly for the last two years.
She’s a member of two or three different honors programs on campus. I wasn’t previously aware you could find that much time in a day, or that anyone could even be eligible for more than one. She has the most kind and generous disposition, and makes friends quickly and everywhere. Whatever station ultimately is lucky enough to hire her will be getting a great asset.
Which leads me to Ella Rhoades. Ella has been passionate about the news and broadcasting from the beginning. She’s been at IUSTV for four years and she was news director for her junior and senior year. She helped produced some impressive collaborative journalism with the other student media outlets here, streaming an all-night election results newscast. She also held down an incredible day of breaking news on campus, reporting live with some of her reporters in the warm sun when we were on lockdown.
Whenever she’s doing these things, no matter what role she is playing, her eagerness to to do great work is palpable. She leans into the news with a great gusto.
Ella is a team player and all of those positive personal attributes are right there on her sleeve, for everyone to see. This year, in addition to her quality news work, she’s done a masterful job working with younger students, helping us get the freshmen started on the right foot, and pushed the sophomores and juniors to up their respective games. Their individual and collective successes show in the finished product, and how they’re talking about next year.
My friend Ella is taking her energy — and her enthusiasm to learn, to share and to report the news — to WFTX FOX 4 in Fort Myers, Florida. That Scripps shop is getting a great, talented, young reporter. She’s going to grow and grow and do some great things in Florida. I’m incredibly excited — almost as excited as she is! — to see what she does next.
The other woman, in both of those photos, is a rising senior. Carly Rasmussen has served as assistant news director, and she will take over a growing news division next year. She’ll run a young unit, there are a lot of rising sophomores who have been developing some great experience this year, and they’ll have great momentum. In a year, there will be a huge applause essay for her, I’ve no doubt.
After we left the studio, when I made it back to my office, this was the view.
Seemed fitting. Three more productions to go for the year.
IU / journalism / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on If I jot down enough notes, I will most surely be correct 12 Apr 23
I’ve been working on my trauma interview syllabus. I have a small stack of books and, so far, a half dozen pages of notes and ideas, this first part all about the considerate efforts one should undertake in the interview approach and process, and it is all quite fascinating,.
There are a few industry pros holding workshops with their peers on this sort of thing now. Anyone that’s had to do enough interviews following death notifications, or asked by their editors or producers to sit down with abuse or attack survivors has the beginning of this insight. Right now, though, it is hard-won experience handed down from people who are, most often, not practiced in psychology.
I can almost quote, verbatim, what I was taught about this in J-school, because it was quite brief. A professor said. “You’ll be told to interview someone who’s just lost a loved one. Ask the family members politely if they’d be willing to talk to you. Some people will want to talk with you. Some people will think you’re horrible. Accept whichever response you get, and know it isn’t personal.”
And that was it. It was the nineties.
There’s a lot more to this, a lot more particulars that students should understand. (There was never anything said, nothing at all, about the trauma reporters face and self-care.) If you think of the stories that reporters chase. Think of the places they often find themselves, this stuff will come up for them, and in a hurry.
That’s why I’m cobbling notes and dreaming up a syllabus. It could be useful, and so I look forward to pitching it. I hope I get to teach it one day.
Anyway, the office all day. The studio all night. Sports night there, so there was a lot of baseball talk. It’s the changing of the guard portion of the year. The seniors are getting ready to fly the coop, and the younger students are getting all the heavy lifting. What’s always amazing to me is how, each year, the rising seniors are all just that much better prepared, just that much more comfortable, for their new, bigger roles than the people that came before them.
And while those graduating seniors are now going over details of their contracts or are engaged in in-depth interviews, we’ve got rising sophomores who are ready to take on the world, to say nothing of some rising juniors who are industry ready, right now.
The day-to-day stuff is fine enough, but watching and charting that progress of students, following them as their skills, and their confidence, grows, that’s gratifying stuff.
I always feel like this in the springtime, the bloom of pride in the observation of self-recognition. It’s probably something to do with the flowers.
I suppose it could be the pollen.
cycling / Friday / journalism / links — Comments Off on A note to self about coasting, and other things 3 Mar 23
I’ve been mulling over creating a syllabus for a trauma interview course. The idea starts with understanding that not all interviews are the same. Some of them require a more delicate care than others. Some would benefit from having some purposeful training.
The idea, for me, started several years ago. I read a profile, which I can’t re-locate, about a reporter in New York renowned as the guy that interviews people immediately after they’ve just found out a loved one has been killed. (What a thing to be noted for, huh?) He talked about his process — the respect involved, the solemn decorum, even the way he dressed for it. It was a thoughtful thing, and it’s worth expanding on.
I remember discussing this in a reporting class during undergrad. I think we did about 20 minutes on the concept. It was essentially, some people want to talk. Some people will not be prepared to talk. Some people will think you a ghoul. Accept whichever response you get, and don’t take it too personally.
It was, I guess, a different time. I think we can do better. Perhaps some people, in some classes, do. But I would argue it needs to be more than a simple unit.
Trauma is a response to anything that’s overwhelming, that happens too much, too fast, too soon, or too long — coupled with a lack of protection or support. It lives in the body, stored as sensation: pain, or tension — or lack of sensation, like numbness.
That’s from a 2020 interview, but I ran across it again the other day, and an entire lecture or conversation — a conver-lecture — sprang to mind fully formed.
The back-of-the-envelope notes suggest there’s a mini-term class here, easy. I am sure, the more I dive into it, there’s a full semester in the idea. Perhaps there is more. You don’t know until you really get into it. And I’ll get into it after Spring Break.
I, of course, think of this in a journalism context, but there are institutional approaches here, as well. And, furthermore, there are other elements to this, most critically, the second-hand trauma that impacts journalists from time-to-time. This was never discussed in any class I took, or any newsroom I worked in. There’s no newsroom I can think of why that shouldn’t be approached. There’s no reason why I can think of that isn’t taught, considered, and re-visited.
So I’m speaking it into existence, as it were.
Rode my bike this evening. It goes like this: following all that climbing last weekend, there were rest days — brought on by necessity and scheduling — on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then a brief ride yesterday. It felt rough. Tonight’s ride was faster, but maybe felt worse.
That avatar in front of me was fun. We paced one another for 10-plus miles. This was my first time ever on this particular route (though some of the roads on this one are on other Zwift routes) and I could tell from the HUD that this was his second lap, at least for the day. He knew the course, which is important.
We took turns pulling, which is the polite thing to do. Everybody gets a little draft and conserves a tiny bit of energy that way. Somewhere along the way he got tired of that and attacked. I let him go, but pulled him back a short time later. Then I started toying with him. For the next two or three times I pulled through I stopped pedaling for just a moment. It’s a question of touch and timing, but you can pass the other person when your avatar’s feet aren’t moving. It’s a funny joke, to me anyway. Look at me! not trying! Now I’ll pedal some more …
So we kept taking turns. Him in front, me drifting by him, then taking a quarter-mile pull or so, then him in front again. I like to think that my little joke aggravated him, and then made him grin with grim determination.
On that route there’s a little climb over the last mile and he was waiting for it. Just after the bottom of the hill that guy exploooooded. He was gone, suddenly 30 seconds ahead of me, and then a minute. I got about half of it back, but he buried me something good.
I learned this: I should coast less — or is it more? And, hey, it’s the weekend …
2023 Zwift route tracker: 78 routes down, 46 to go.
Here is shaky visual evidence of my first robin(s) of the spring — another of the false signals. The first being two days in the 60s. The next will be emerging tulip leaves. But, for now, a small flock of robins are flittering around looking for worms.
It was snowing on me at the time.
We are 63 days away from spring arriving here.
Also, does it look like that robin might be a bit of a litterbug and a smoker? I think that robin is a bit of a litterbug. And I have to think that this bird is setting itself up for some longterm health problems.
This was going on in the studio this morning.
Members of the university’s fencing club came to give a demonstration for the morning show. I talked with their two student coaches. Fencing, it turns out, is a thing that enjoys competition against other club teams and varsity programs. They said there’s a big difference between varsity and club teams. And, sometimes, they face off against teams that have people in the Olympic pipeline. That, they said, is another sort of thing altogether. It was interesting to hear them talk about that. And, having run by an Olympic distance runner, and swam in a pool lane next to an All-American, I can appreciate, a little, what they’re saying.
So I said I just wanted to get all of this kit and then spar a bit with my lovely bride on the walking path near our house, just to make the neighbors wonder what is going on. Apparently the equipment isn’t that expensive. They priced it all out, and I figured it’d be more.
But the skill, I don’t have any of those.
What was fun, though, was watching the fencing team members give a crash course to the show hosts, and then watching the two of them face off.
That was good fun, and now I have one more anecdote about the things that take place in our television studios.
A new study published in Communication Research sought to find out what types of conversations people need to have, and how often they should have them, in order to improve their well-being. The researchers found that having at least one conversation with a friend can increase happiness and lower stress levels by the end of each day.
“While other research on well-being focuses on things like grateful thoughts or journaling, my focus as a researcher is about what we can do in our interactions to improve our well-being. This gives us a valuable list of things people can do to improve their days,” Jeffrey Hall, one of the researchers, told VICE.
Previous research showed that talking about one’s problems can reduce stress, strengthen our immune system, and reduce physical and emotional distress, but this study suggests that people don’t necessarily need to bond over their misery.
Hall and his team identified seven types of communication that are commonly found in social interactions: catching up, meaningful talk, joking around, showing care, listening, valuing others and their opinions, and offering sincere compliments.
Most stories about active research want to jump the gun, but this seems straightforward, which is a good sign.
Google’s Nest smart devices are always listening — their microphones detect loud noises and cameras track sudden movements in a home, and can start automatically recording at any time.
Because of that, Nest owners should probably warn their house guests that they’re on camera, according to Google devices chief Rick Osterloh.
When asked by a BBC reporter whether homeowners with Nest have such an obligation, Osterloh first said he hadn’t considered it.
“Gosh, I haven’t thought about this before in quite this way,” Osterloh said. “It’s quite important for all these technologies to think about all users… we have to consider all stakeholders that might be in proximity.”
Osterloh then acceded that warning houseguests about Nest devices’ recording capabilities is proper etiquette, stating that he already does so.
Do you see the contradiction?
Then again, we’ve come a long way with reconciling contradiction.
COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for more than 940,000 people in the US, including over 1,300 deaths among children and young people aged 0–19 years. Until now, it had been unclear how the burden of deaths from COVID-19 compared with other leading causes of deaths in this age group.
[…]
Among children and young people aged 0 – 19 years in the US, COVID-19 ranked eighth among all causes of death; fifth among all disease-related causes of death; and first in deaths caused by infectious or respiratory diseases.
By age group, COVID-19 ranked seventh (infants), seventh (1–4 year olds), sixth (5–9 year olds), sixth (10–14 year olds), and fifth (15–19 year olds).
COVID-19 was the underlying cause for 2% of deaths in children and young people (800 out of 43,000), with an overall death rate of 1.0 per 100,000 of the population aged 0–19. The leading cause of death (perinatal conditions) had an overall death rate of 12.7 per 100,000; COVID-19 ranked ahead of influenza and pneumonia, which together had a death rate of 0.6 per 100,000.
This is where I always bring up my carefully researched polio trivia.
The polio epidemic in the United States peaked in 1952 with 57,000-plus cases. That year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with paralysis. Stark contrast.
“The reason why credit scores are so low in the South has gotta be connected to medical debt, because that’s the most common type of unpaid bill that people have,” Braga said. And the South, he said, easily has the highest levels of medical debt in the country.
Of the 100 counties with the highest share of adults struggling to pay their medical debt, 92 are in the South, and the other eight are in neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri, according to credit data from the Urban Institute. (On the other side, 82 of the 100 counties with the least pervasive medical-debt problems are in the Midwest, with 45 in Minnesota alone.)
And sure enough, when you look at areas across the nation where adults are struggling to pay down medical debt, they have similar credit scores.
That’s some map. Click through and check your county.
And then go out and have a great weekend. You’re due!
I have next to nothing today, but there’s always the weather! Before I woke up, some rodent had doomed us to more winter. The high here today was 39 degrees. The low was 19. It was sunny.
Why is it that some creature elsewhere determines my weather? Don’t I have any agency here? Of course, I don’t. The weather is a part of a global meteorological system barely within our understanding, and certainly beyond my control. But, really, the lack of agency is galling. Not me, but some critter that’d just as soon stay in his hole, honestly.
I know how he feels. As soon as I read about the shadow, I wanted to climb into a hole, or at least back into the blankets.
Groundhogs. What a silly, successful bit of marketing. We persist in this because it is fun, right?
And also tourism.
We haven’t looked back at the old college paper in a month. When last we had a look, we poked around in 1929. We’re jumping forward a bit today, to 1940. On this day, 82 years ago, there was a new committee that was formed to think about cheating. I wonder what they thought.
Oddly enough, this guy was on the same front page. R. Temple Greystoke was a man named Ray Price.
He started in the magic business in 1921, and can’t you imagine that was a challenging lifestyle. It begain with kids shows, a dog act and he eventually developed what is called a Spook Show, and became a famous and popular act through the 1930s. Soon after he played at Auburn he returned to a more conventional stage show. He moved home to Alabama when his health began to fail him in 1955. He passed away in 1973.
Dawson Mullen here, he was a BMOC. He was an electrical engineering manager, honor society member, he was on the mysterious leadership council of his time, president of something called the engineer’s council, colonel in the ROTC, captain of the rifle team. And, in this same issue, we learned he was on that cheating committee.
I’ll have to look ahead and see what, if anything, that august panel resolved. Anyway, Mullen, I believe, found his way to Georgia. If I have the right one, he died in 2001. There’s not a lot on him, however.
This bit of copy is a hoot.
The building being referenced here is, I assume, the Auburn Sports Arena. We called it The Barn. It housed basketball starting in 1946. Likely a project put on hold during the war?) The basketball team moved one block over in 1968. The Barn was right across the street from the football stadium. It housed the gymnastics team, it was old and scheduled for demolition. And then it burned to the ground during the LSU football game in 1996. (A different, better, story.) There’s a parking deck in that spot now.
We like to think of the 1940s as being a fully modern time and, in many respects, it was. They were still trying to get driveways paved and sidewalks pour on campus. The depression, in-state politics, and subsequent decades of inattention were just starting to be remedied.
Scandal! Bottom of page one! Oh … never mind.
Grady Young graduated from Georgia and then studied to be a vet, like his father before him. He had three kids and seven grandchildren, and he ran Young’s Veterinary Clinic in Georgia for 42 years before his retirement. He died in 2021, at 82.
Here’s a man that made an impression, and you get the feeling the multi-sport coach (they all coached more than one thing back then) was well liked and would be missed.
Dell Morgan died in a car accident, in Texas, in 1962. He’d spent the day watching his Rice players practice, and was headed out to go fishing with a buddy when another car crossed the center line. Four people were killed.
(I wonder if that tweed jacket ever turned up. That’s one of those mysteries that will stick with you the rest of the week.)
I love the old phone numbers. Dial 611 for flowers. Cracks me up. I don’t know anything about the florist. This isn’t the sort of history anyone on the Plains is good at making readily available, and contemporary florists using SEO has basically ruined any searches of this sort. H. L. Welsted, based on the ads, was around for at least four years, but, again, he falls in the analog canyon, but he is interred in Virgina. He passed away in 1961. The Welsteds had two children, Harry Lee, junior, and Mittie, who had just graduated from AU the year before. Harry the younger became a chemical engineer, and worked in New York and Charlotte. He passed away in 2010. Mittie studied dietetics, got married and died in 2002.
Here are the Welsted kids, from the 1939 Glom. They had long, and hopefully, full and complete lives.
Their parents ran a boarding house. Moved to Auburn and set that up, specifically, so the kids could get an education. That’s what Harry Lee Welsted’s obituary said. And while I learned one or two more things about the Welsteds, but not many, it is important that we don’t stray too far afield. Because that image above is really about the Grille.
I remember the Grille. Dined in it, frequently. One night a week they did a spaghetti plate dinner. If you finished it, they’d give you a second plate free. You could get in there, stuff yourself with two plates of spaghetti, a soft drink and a brownie for about five bucks, and that was one of the better, cheap meals in town. The walls were covered in local lore and history. And in that one particular booth is where the legendary football coach sat.
And then the rent got too high, and the Grille closed in the late 1990s and it still feels like one of the saddest things that could possibly happen in a place like that. We kicked ourselves that we didn’t eat there more — maybe we could have helped save it — but we are all starving and broke college kids and downtown was changing. Downtown was always changing, every so often.
My time was more than a half-century latter, of course, but I don’t have any knowledge of these places, either. Ball’s Bakery was in the neighboring town, but clearly everyone knew of it.
They stayed in business through the mid-1950s. Reed’s? Absolutely no idea. But with a “stay out of the cold” you have to think they had their moments. Winter moments.
The Martin Theatre was still relatively new. It opened in Opelika in 1938, with 1,600 seats, and lasted until 1970 or so. Martin replaced it with one in the strip mall. That joint was the barely-hanging-on dollar theater a quarter century later. I remember watching a few movies there.
The movie they were showing? Wonderful pre-war propaganda. The film highlights the real (and dramatized) exploits of a New York unit during World War 1. Also, the picture was just released the week before. In a time when movies weren’t in theaters everywhere simultaneously, it is amazing that this was on a screen in little Opelika, Alabama, six days later.
The Martin must have truly been the place to go.
Olin Hill? The man with the tape? He’s buried in nearby Notasulga. The headline in the (Mobile) Press-Register obituary was “Auburn clothier Hill dies.” Imagine all the things he saw from 1907 until 2003.
