My class visited Alabama Media Group today. I saw old friends, nice folks with whom I used to work that I don’t hardly get to see enough today. I didn’t even see everyone that I still know from al.com, but I saw enough of them to build that sense of melancholy of friends on hold or, the silly notion of being placed on hold. Silly because we are all still moving, because perhaps one day some of those circles will become concentric again.
Alex Walsh, an economist who does data journalism for AMG, was one of the people who spoke with my students.
The layout will be different. There will be less floor space in general and more room for collaboration. It is meant to be more open and inviting to the public. The new building will probably re-shape the culture of the company in ways they don’t understand yet. I suggested they need to install a Waffle House.
Then I’d have more reasons than friends to go visit.
Hit the pool tonight. I did it despite, for most of the first half of the thing I was trying to ignore my brain, which was urging me to get out of the water. My collarbone hurt. I drank a bit of the pool. The pool was closing soon. You’re surrounded by other people plodding along.
I don’t know how to process the information that I am faster than someone in the water. (I do not know what is happening.)
So I didn’t drown, but I did swim 1,750 yards. That’s still a mile.
Showered. Had dinner at Chic-fil-A and then visited Walmart. So I have a half-dozen new Walmart stories.
No?
Things to read … instead, then. This is another one of those quick, link only versions. But they are of high quality:
Everyone seemed OK. The troopers were there. We had just a slight slowdown and I met no ambulances coming the other direction for the rest of my drive. Even still, you see these small accidents and know that these people just had their week ruined. And on a Monday morning, too. But at least everyone is OK.
And now, to change the subject, here’s another hit from Kid President:
It is probably selfish to say, but I hope that guy never changes.
In class today we talked about mobile marketing. This is the part of the conversation where students always find the line dividing acceptable and creepy. Say you’re walking down the street and your phone buzzes, “Hey! We noticed you’re just a block away from Starbucks. Couldn’t you go for a nice coffee and muffin? Here’s a coupon!”
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
In November, the Macy’s department store chain began testing a product called ShopBeacon at stores in San Francisco’s Union Square and New York’s Herald Square.
The app, created by Shopkick Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., enables a merchant to offer discounts on specific products that a customer has expressed interest in or, perhaps, has lingered near, prodding him or her to buy.
“We can find out where you are standing and how long you’ve been standing in front of the Michael Kors handbag and if you haven’t purchased,” Macy’s Chief Executive Terry Lundgren said at an analysts conference in November. “And if you haven’t, I’ll send you a little note to give you encouragement to do so.”
And that’s the new world in which we shop. Or does something like this just push you further away from brick and mortar stores?
I didn’t mention it but I did have a nice, brief bike ride yesterday evening. I got in a quick 14 miles, wherein I managed to have two thoughts. The first was that I haven’t been riding my bike enough. I knew this because I hit too small little uphill segments and pushed my feet down and accelerated and that was a wonderful feeling. The ride was really meant to be the first half of a brick workout, where I would take on a long run. Just as I went back outside, though, it started to rain. And while I enjoy riding in the rain, I don’t much see the need to run in it. But the other thought I was continually having on the bike was “I wanna run.”
I do not know what is happening.
I did not run, however, because of the rain. This evening I swam a mile, 1,750 yards. It even felt pretty good, which doesn’t happen often. Didn’t want to run, though!
Things to read … because I still don’t want to run.
“It actually started with me reading an article by Steven Levy in Wired about algorithms and news content — ‘Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” Christer Clerwall tells Wired.co.uk. “My first thought was ‘maybe it doesn’t have to be better — how about ‘a good enough story’?” Sadly, Wired may turn out to be the architect of its own destruction. Because Clerwall, an assistant professor of media and communications at Sweden’s Karlstad University, has found the answer to this question. And it’s yes.
This is the second small study I’ve seen like this. Both have to do with sports copy, which probably means something. What may be promising, however, is that as the algorithms improve this could free up writers from the more basic stories and allow for better storytelling.
Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was jolted awake at 6:25 a.m. on Monday by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and went straight to his computer, where he found a brief story about the quake already written and waiting in the system. He glanced over the text and hit “publish.” And that’s how the LAT became the first media outlet to report on this morning’s temblor. “I think we had it up within three minutes,” Schwencke told me.
If that sounds faster than humanly possible, it probably is. While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.
The copy, which you can read in that story, was basic, to the point, and not perfect regarding style, but it shared the pertinent information, apparently within three minutes. What happened afterward was telling. ” Quakebot’s post had been updated 71 times by human writers and editors, turning it from the squib above into this in-depth, front-page story.”
This first story, the early morning Quakebot copy, is a first step. It didn’t save the day, or save even a big part of a reporter’s day, but it is the sign of a utility to come, or, rather, a tool that is already here.
Daily time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the U.S. for the first time, according a newly-released 2014 AdReaction study from Millward Brown.
Americans now spend 151 minutes per day on smartphones, next to 147 in front of TVs. But the numbers are even greater elsewhere.
“2013 was the first year for multi-channel video industry losses, but the modest losses represent only about 0.1% of all subscribers,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “While the overall market remains fairly flat, further share-shifting has taken place. Cable providers now have a 52% share of the top multi-channel video subscribers in the US, compared to a 58% share three years ago.”
We are at something of a hinge point in entertainment history.
The three news reports followed the same format: Television reporters walked into schools with hidden cameras, under the premise of testing the security measures. Each time, the anchors provided a sobering assessment of the findings.
[…]
Critics say these kinds of undercover efforts do not provide an accurate portrait of school safety, and question whether they serve any public good. Some journalists question whether the news organizations become too much a part of the story, and whether it is dangerous for reporters to wander into schools now that students and staff are often on heightened alert.
Freshman Keegan Thompson threw his second consecutive complete game, striking out 10 and scattering four hits while allowing two runs. (So it was a disastrous 5th inning by his standards.) He threw 121 pitches. His 111th pitch was clocked at 91 mph. The kid is unbelievable. I hope they don’t break him.
Auburn won the first game 5-2 to take the series from the visiting Aggies. Thompson came out in the second game and played first base for a while. Auburn was put away easily in the last game of the series, falling 9-0.
So let’s talk fans! This group includes two of the four new Aggie friends we made today. Scroll beyond the photographs. There are things to read below the pretty pictures.
Things to read … because today hasn’t been all about baseball.
International news: Venezuela is likely more important to us than Crimea, though whatever Putin is doing in the home office is interesting. Meanwhile, just common sense suggests that of all the places you could cut the military here, slicing off parts of the navy is an inherently risky strategy.
Journalism items of interest: The lengths people will go to try to prevent reporters from doing their jobs often borders on the absurd. Here are two examples, and correspondence from Great Britain, which has been milling about on the wrong, lost, broken path for a while now, it seems.
Just stories: The first one is just strange, the kind where you know you don’t know the whole story, where maybe the whole story doesn’t matter so much, so long as the person is OK.
I had a four-and-a-half mile run this morning. I felt it through the first part of the afternoon. And by felt it I mean “Would you mind getting that for me so I don’t have to get up? Or even raise my arms?”
My office has been hot all week — spring almost shows up and they finally figure out the heat in our part of the building. That, combined with a base temperature that stayed around the “Oh yeah, we ran a lot this morning” range, I’ve tried not to move so as to not break into a sweat. This is considered a problem in my world. I’m pretty fortunate, I know. I’m starting to get into the running.
I do not know what is happening.
Had guest speakers in class this afternoon. Jeff Thompson is the executive editor and Madoline Markham is the managing editor of Starnes Publishing, a five community newspaper chain in the Birmingham metropolitan area. They talked about what Starnes does and what their careers held before their current stops. Somehow we got into a metaphor about how journalism is like heroin production. (It was a supply/demand example and turned out to be useful.)
We talked about all of the bad stuff. How hard it is to land the job. The hours you sometimes work. The frustrations that you sometimes encounter. I want the students to have a worts-and-all perspective. Give ’em everything, I always say.
I asked “Short answer, is it worth it?”
So you are listening to a guy who takes on the crusty, hard-bitten, cynical newsman role. You let him go on and on until you think he’s turned off the entire crowd, two classes worth of students, and then he gives a sheepish little grin.
“Yes. Winning is good. Every small victory is a big thing.”
The amount of data collected on the Internet is overwhelming. Facebook alone collects 500 terabytes a day. As of 2013, there are 667 exabytes of data flowing over the Internet annually. And these numbers, as hard as they are to wrap our heads around, are only going to continue to increase — rapidly.
In the journalism sphere, massive data collection has produced data journalist roles. These writers and editors use data collected by third-party agencies to create some of the most viral images on the Web. Anytime The Atlantic publishes a map of the states with the highest poverty levels, they use big data. Anytime The New York Times publishes a quiz about where your accent comes from, they use big data.
These stories and photos get shared hundreds of thousands of times and are driving much needed traffic to publishers. This is about much more than an interesting listsicle. Data journalism is about taking big data concepts, visualizing them for the audience and showing readers who they are — or at least, who the data says they are.
This, as they say, changes a great deal about the active role of journalism. Read on to see how.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, sat in his small office at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva and started work on a new system called the World Wide Web.
On Wednesday, that project, now simply called the web, will celebrate its 25th anniversary, and Mr. Berners-Lee is looking ahead at the next 25.
But this moment comes with a cloud. The creators of the web, including Mr. Berners-Lee, worry that companies and telecommunications outlets could destroy the open nature that made it flourish in their quest to make more money.
This is an important topic, so here’s another excerpt from the same story:
The idea behind net neutrality is simple: The web material we see on our laptops and smartphones, whether from Google or a nondescript blog, should flow freely through the Internet, regardless of its origin or creator. No one gets special treatment. But companies like Verizon hope some people will pay more to get preferential treatment and reach customers quicker.
“The web should be a neutral medium. The openness of the web is really, really important,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s important for the open markets, for the economy and for democracy.”
He worries that people online have no idea what could be at stake if large telecommunications companies took control of the web and the type of material we now have access to without any blockades or speed barriers.
(U)sers coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.
[…]
The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do.
Two Alabama men will travel the country opening lost and abandoned safes as part of a new TruTV series called “The Safecrackers”.
The show, which will center around locksmith Phil Crawford and his safe-cracking partner Blaze, will allow viewers to get a look at lost valuables from various eras as the duo tracks down and cracks a range of safes, including giant bank vaults, intricate antique safes, armored vehicles and more.
I hope this is, shall we say, less fake, than the warehouse storage shows.
Medal of Honor recipient Ola Lee Mize dies at 82. The story doesn’t offer an appropriate summary, so I’ll do it the old fashioned way. The son of a sharecropper, Mize would become a member of special forces, serve in Korea and VIetnam. It was in Korea, when he was about 22, that he took part in a fierce battle which would ultimately make him a recipient of the Medal of Honor. His face was supposedly so badly burned that, after the battle, his officers couldn’t even recognize him. He retired a colonel.
M/Sgt. Mize, a member of Company K, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and outstanding courage above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. Company K was committed to the defense of “Outpost Harry”, a strategically valuable position, when the enemy launched a heavy attack. Learning that a comrade on a friendly listening post had been wounded he moved through the intense barrage, accompanied by a medical aid man, and rescued the wounded soldier. On returning to the main position he established an effective defense system and inflicted heavy casualties against attacks from determined enemy assault forces which had penetrated into trenches within the outpost area. During his fearless actions he was blown down by artillery and grenade blasts 3 times but each time he dauntlessly returned to his position, tenaciously fighting and successfully repelling hostile attacks. When enemy onslaughts ceased he took his few men and moved from bunker to bunker, firing through apertures and throwing grenades at the foe, neutralizing their positions. When an enemy soldier stepped out behind a comrade, prepared to fire, M/Sgt. Mize killed him, saving the life of his fellow soldier. After rejoining the platoon, moving from man to man, distributing ammunition, and shouting words of encouragement he observed a friendly machine gun position overrun. He immediately fought his way to the position, killing 10 of the enemy and dispersing the remainder. Fighting back to the command post, and finding several friendly wounded there, he took a position to protect them. Later, securing a radio, he directed friendly artillery fire upon the attacking enemy’s routes of approach. At dawn he helped regroup for a counterattack which successfully drove the enemy from the outpost. M/Sgt. Mize’s valorous conduct and unflinching courage reflect lasting glory upon himself and uphold the noble traditions of the military service.
He is believed to have killed as many as 65 members of the enemy in that one engagement. In his career, he earned five Purple Hearts:
“That terrible night in 1953 in Korea at Outpost Harry was one I would never want to repeat,” he wrote in a foreword to “Uncommon Valor,” a book about Medal of Honor recipients from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Too many good young men . . . gave their lives to take or hold that miserable piece of high ground.”
In conclusion, the embarrassing gentlewoman from Texas:
Serious question:
Who's more dumb, Sheila Jackson Lee or the people who keep voting her into office?
This little bush in our side yard always seems to have the first blooms. They showed up last week, finally. I thought it’d be nice to show them off, finally.
Two trees on campus, that I drive and walk past every day, have turned into lovely lavender explosions. Everything is about to surge forward. Spring, finally.
My swim was much better this evening, thanks for asking. I swam 2,000 yards. That’s 1.14 miles to you and me. I’m pretty sure I’ve consciously gotten into my car and deliberately driven it a shorter distance. It isn’t fast, or especially pretty, but there’s distance, and I don’t feel bad during it. Except for being constantly winded.
I’m told this is because I don’t know how to breathe. I’m beginning to believe that.
Things to read … because we want to believe everything we read.
The body found last Wednesday in Pontiac is that of Pia Farrenkopf — according to her sister, Paula Logan. Authorities investigating the case haven’t released her name, but they have said that the woman apparently died in 2008 at the age of 49.
According to a report in the Detroit Free Press, records show Farrenkopf as voting in the November 2010 gubernatorial election. Officials say, however, that it may represent an administrative error. Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard says the information must be checked out.
Officers found the 33-year-old male suspect in the living room with blood dripping from his head.
The 82-year-old victim, George Bradford, who was inside the home, struck the suspect with the hammer in an effort to protect his family. George says his mother was in an upstairs unit and that he’s owned the duplex on Whitfield since 1968.
I don’t know about you, but I always enjoy when the aggressor is the one who gets hurt and the victim is the person with the hammer.
The piece features stories of three rape victims. Their names have been changed in the story.
On Monday Fond du Lac High School Principal Jon Wiltzius told journalism classes new school guidelines require that all stories meet his approval before publication and are subject to rejection.
“This is a reasonable expectation,” Wiltzius said. “My job is to oversee the global impact of everything that occurs within our school and I have to ensure I am representing everyone and there was some questionable content.”
Here’s a rule of thumb: If someone can fairly say you have a rape culture on your campus and you’re talking about how everyone is represented and you are questioning content, it is possibly possible that you are asking the wrong questions.
Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s initial proposal for what would become the World Wide Web. Think about how different media and technology were in 1989 from today. Now imagine how different things might look at a year that sounded like science fiction not that long ago: 2025.
And, now, Kevin Bacon:
You can’t just swipe away the hurt. Also, the Soviets had nukes for a lot longer than 20 years. Or maybe they ran out after nuking Bacon’s friends.
