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journalism

The most frightening Muppets

One of the most frightening Muppets, to me, was Grouch. Doesn’t ask me why. I think it was his appearance, home and his voice, which vaguely reminded me of one of my uncles. That’s what I’m going with. I bring this up because the other one that disturbed me is at the bottom of the post.

At lunch today I dropped a plate, basically right in the lap of a young lady who’d made the unfortunate decision to sit between my Point A and Point B. The plate was, thankfully, empty. And it did not break. But this is mortifying. There are eight young women sitting there talking about their studies or their sorority or boys or who knows, and then I happen.

Some distance away I could hear the slow clap starting. That hasn’t happened since high school. My innocent victim noted, as she picked up my plate and I apologized profusely, that at least her table didn’t chime in, an observation I’d already made, and a decision for which I was grateful. But no one else did, either, and the slow clap quickly died. It was probably only three people.

“Frat boys,” one of the students said.

I’m pretty sure they started clapping reflexively, but then stopped when they realized this was an old guy. Maybe one of them was a student of mine. Maybe it just isn’t funny if it isn’t your peers.

For example, the state troopers now say there were more than 700 snow and ice-related car crashes last week, not counting whatever the locals worked. That’s unfortunate for those people, to be sure. Nine people died in crashes. And in this vein some people are making their wacky “Haha, Southerners can’t drive in snow” jokes.

But, hey, we opened our windows and sat around in shorts last weekend.

Here’s another video, a short film featuring Ms. Alice Herz-Sommer. She is believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor, and, perhaps, the world’s oldest piano player:

Things to read … because your parents warned you about watching all of those videos.

I saw this story today and wondered what the reaction would be and how long it would take. CBO nearly triples estimate of working hours lost by 2021 due to Affordable Care Act:

A historically high number of people will be locked out of the workforce by 2021, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday.

President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law will contribute to this phenomenon, the CBO said, citing new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger-than-expected reduction in working hours—eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021.

The answers were not long, and bad enough that they should have taken a few more minutes to think up something not so insulting.

Health Care Law Projected to Cut the Labor Force

With the expansion of insurance coverage, the budget office predicted, more people will choose not to work, and others will choose to work fewer hours than they might have otherwise to obtain employer-provided insurance. The cumulative reduction of hours is large: the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time positions by 2024, the budget office said.

The report “rightfully says that people shouldn’t have job lock,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. “We live in a country where we should be free agents. People can do what they want.”

“Now you won’t have to work!” doesn’t sound like an especially compelling argument, really, Senator. But have at it.

Assault on California Power Station Raises Alarm on Potential for Terrorism

The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.

Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

[…]

The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.

[…]

To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. “The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented” in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, “appears to be preparation for an act of war.”

Have 24-hour TV news channels had their day?

The past two decades have seen a revolution in every aspect of the media industry – technological change has enabled consumers to develop sophisticated and subtle patterns of behaviour, constantly being updated from a variety of sources. Cable news established the 24-hour news habit, but today social media and mobile phones fulfill the instant news needs of consumers better than any TV channel can.

Yet around the world hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be invested each year in news networks. Is this money well spent? Or has the time come to rethink the TV news business? Were live channels simply the product of the satellite age which is now all but over?

[…]

News channels prize being first – a race that they can’t win, and nobody else cares about. “Did we beat CNN?” is a phrase often heard in a newsroom. But in the digital age social media will always win the race to be first (if not always the race to be right). And who, other than the inhabitants of newsrooms, is watching enough news channels simultaneously to know who was first anyway? Those 30 seconds might be important for commodity traders – but for news audiences?

In today’s media environment any broadcaster is first for minutes at most – by which time Twitter or the competition will have caught up. Being first – the primary criterion for 24-hour news channels – is increasingly the least interesting and effective value they offer.

What wasn’t included, but should be: The Weather Channel.

Making Failure Acceptable: Entrepreneurship in Journalism

Sochi facilities still a work in progress

From the multimedia blog:

Viral content, relevant news aimed at audience who offers excuses to news

Journalism trends? Let’s have some fries and talk about it

This will take two minutes

And, finally, the game is a-fruit!

The Count always scared me. But that’s a conversation for a different day.

journalism / links / Monday / Samford / things to read — Comments Off
3
Feb 14

Let’s try this again

The first day of class, take two. After Tuesday’s snow and ice event turned into a systemic and region-wide calamity, our campus was closed for a while. They sent down the CANCELED notices at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Things returned to normal on Saturday. Which is overstating things. Campus was passable by Wednesday. The roads were finally usable by Thursday, when the cold weather broke. But Friday, it just felt like people needed a rest. At least that was part of the reasoning.

Folks had been working for three days straight – and straight is used in the literal sense. You could tell that people just needed a break. I’m sure there were some other logistical reasons and probably even larger, perfectly fine rationale, but at the end of it all, the administrators decided that campus would be closed on Friday. Most on campus activities started again over the weekend. Classes resumed today. (And if you had a Tuesday afternoon class, or later, you hadn’t even met yet.)

Walking in today, then, we started all over again. It seemed liked it had been three weeks since we met last, anyway.

Various things in the class, as they were put into place, proved that missing last Wednesday because of the weather was actually a big deal. Many things had to be re-juggled. How this happened since we lost only one day, I’m not sure, but it took a while to put the moveable parts around the immovable parts in a way that made sense for the larger aims of the class.

So I rebuilt and rearranged parts of the syllabus.

This is the class where we ask students to start thinking about news products in critical terms. So I have them critique the news that they see and hear and read. I have them do this online, so they can learn at least one content management system this term and have place to start putting their news clips, too. We used to have students build faux-websites in Dreamweaver, but that presented unique problems on two or three fronts, so I’ve just streamlined the effort and now we use WordPress. Which means that, today, we spent all day talking about Dashboard.

It isn’t the most exciting day of the term, but it is useful. And I get to show off a cool site or two (like this one) and demonstrate how easy it is to be a modern publisher. I did not make, however, my international author joke. So I have to make sure to get that one in class next Monday.

Also, I need to remember, here, to cross link to things I publish on my multimedia blog. Here are the most recent items now:

Immersive media

Olympic tweets

Simple, effective storytelling

Writing with zeroes and ones

Images tell our stories in many ways

Just so you know the world you’re going in to …

Things to read … because you haven’t yet read enough.

High quality navel-gazing here, Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present:

Six decades after Hartley wrote his famous line, the past is no longer a foreign land. Instead we’ve brought a weirdly literal truth to William Faulkner’s famously sphinxlike aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Take the Kennedy assassination, for instance. In honor of the event’s 50th anniversary last November, CBS streamed four straight days of its news broadcast from the period surrounding the killing so you could experience what it had been like in real time. Or consider this: World War II buffs can download radio broadcasts and listen to the rise of Hitler or the news from D-Day as you would have heard them back then.

More often, though, we don’t immerse ourselves in history; it’s just there whenever we want it, living right alongside the present. We can trace ideas backward in time, either by searching Google Books or (for a sum) through thousands of academic journals, using a few keywords to find sources that once were the sole domain of historians. Pick any historical subject and the Internet will bring it to life before your eyes. If you’re interested in vaudeville, you’ll find videos galore, while college football scholars can browse Penn State’s 1924 yearbook, complete with all the players’ names and positions. And every day, more history keeps washing up. Not long ago the news went out that a Philadelphia woman named Marion Stokes had recorded 140,000 VHS tapes of local and national news from 1977 to her death in 2012. Her collection has been acquired by the Internet Archive, and soon it will trickle onto the web.

This omnipresence of the past has weird effects on contemporary culture. Take any genre of music, from death metal to R&B to chillwave, and the cloud directs you not just to similar artists in the present but to deep wells of influence from the past. Yes, people still like new things. But the past gets as much preference as the present—Mozart, for example, has more than 100,000 followers on Spotify. In a history glut, the idea of fashionability in music erodes, because new songs sit on the same shelf as songs recorded five, 25, and 55 years ago, all of them waiting to be discovered. In this eternal present, everything can be made contemporary.

Just wait until the next time you see a favorite actor that you see regularly from some production from the 1980s or 1990s. And then, when you see them now, think of reading that again.

Why is local news innovation struggling financially while national thrives?:

Why does digital news media seem so vibrant on the national level and so anemic on the local level?

First, venture capitalists and other professional investors have little interest in businesses focused on one community. News is tough enough to make money on but at least if you’re national you can generate massive numbers of ad impressions and the possibility of Amazonian reach. Venture capital investors can only get 5x return or more for businesses that promise national or global scale.

[…]

Another challenge faced by local news startups relates to the nature of digital advertising. Because national digital properties – Google, Yahoo, AOL – can target ads to particular zip codes, local advertisers can reach their customers through them, without having to advertise with a local company. In effect, a local media company is now competing for ad dollars not only with the other media in town but with massive, national institutions with better technology and larger sales forces.

Also, infrastructure. The local shops need to be well-staffed with talented people. If you don’t have that, you won’t have much. Sadly, there have been a lot of cuts across the industry of old hands. Meanwhile, the younger staff that were hired to replace them, typically in a digital capacity or one-man band scenarios, are still learning their craft. Audiences pick up on that sort of thing.

The most convoluted lead of the day, and it isn’t the reporter’s fault. Kerry, Hagel urge ‘transatlantic renaissance’ to confront political and security challenges

MUNICH — In an unusual joint appearance overseas, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told European allies Saturday that Washington would depend more heavily on them to tackle a litany of political and security crises, even as the two pushed back against concerns that the Obama administration was abdicating leadership on the same issues.

And, finally, about that Super Bowl Coke ad:

So let me get this straight. A nation of immigrants is supposed to be offended that a happy song about it is sung in many languages?

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) February 3, 2014

journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
14
Jan 14

21st century living

I’m thinking of adding a new category of pop culture criticism … and this is going to take more caffeine. Pardon me for a second.

There. A hot tea on a cool day should do the trick. Don’t drink coffee. Never touched the stuff. My grandparents, who drank it like water, were convinced that if you gave a baby a tablespoon of coffee they’d never want it. Or so the story goes. Don’t know how old I was, or if this actually happened, but I don’t even care to go down the coffee aisle at the grocery store. I don’t even like the smell. So it is tea, for me, then.

Anyway. I’m thinking of adding a new category of pop culture criticism which is really just another opportunity for me to creep more steadily into the Get Off My Lawn subculture. In this, the neo-post-post modern age, I will call this category 21st Century Living, in that it is simultaneously obvious, conversant, ironic and has a whiff of both despair and angst, but not in a way that suggests I care that much, as I am already dismissive of the entire enterprise.

See? I’m not into the Get Off My Lawn subculture just yet. I understand things, I simply recognize the unworthiness of the general condition.

Take this commercial, for instance. Watch the first five seconds, over and over again, until you figure it out:

Or this CNN “package” where Anderson Cooper tries, really hard, to make some sort of wry observation by cunningly asking non-questions to a giggly reporter.

So I guess they don’t drug test at CNN? This is simply life imitating art. Consider Anchorman 2 (which, hysterically gives Ron Burgundy credit for the sad state of modern broadcast news):

About the commercial in the first video: Someone thought, “The stations that we are buying airtime, have stupid, stupid audiences. Someone will go try to build a time machine. We should stop that with some fine print, so as to ameliorate any potential culpability we have if some kid does invent the flux capacitor.”

And that’s 21st Century Living.

Things to read … because this stuff is worth your attention, no matter what century you’re in.

I collected a few of the reactions on an in-state “story” today. This is all about the headline.

Anytime you curate replies you are liable to get some colorful retort. And if you publish them you are just as likely to get someone accusing you of cherry picking. Doesn’t mean you use the most off-color one as a headline if you are aspiring to be the premiere news outlet in the state.

Todd Stacey is a staffer for U.S. Rep Martha Roby in Washington D.C. He previously worked in Montgomery, hence Chuck Dean’s “you guys” swat. But see what Dean did there? “Hey, it isn’t my fault. What’s more, if you don’t like what I wrote, go do something about it. But it is just a heads up, really.” This entire piece provides little to no public service, which is still the publicly stated goal for news outlets, but it could also do as much with a more appropriate headline.

AP’s Carvin: News Battle Near For Twitter, FB

Twitter and Facebook are setting themselves up for a battle for news supremacy among social media networks. Twitter, though, holds the upper hand, according to Eric Carvin, social media editor at the Associated Press. Twitter has “come to realize the value that the news industry has in terms of what people want to consume on social,” Carvin says. In an interview with NetNewsCheck, Carvin discusses potential news moves from those social platforms, along with the sleeper potential of Google Plus.

Half of U.S. Counties Haven’t Recovered From Recession

About half of the nation’s 3,069 county economies are still short of their prerecession economic output, reflecting the uneven economic recovery, according to a new report from the National Association of Counties.

The overall U.S. economy had reached its prerecession level of gross domestic product three years ago, Commerce Department figures show.

National statistics “mask the reality on the ground.”

There is an interactive map. How is your county faring?

If graduation rates is your metric of choice, this is good news: Alabama public schools set state record with 80 percent graduation rate in 2013. Or, even if you take the skeptical — “school was just made easier” — perspective, you at least have a new state record. This is using the on-time method.
Doesn’t 80 still seem low, though?

The individual school breakdowns aren’t out yet, apparently, but we can look at some recent numbers. Here are the superlatives for the state in the 2011-2012 year. Charles Henderson High listed a 58 percent graduation rate, the lowest in the state. Coffee County boasted a 94 percent.

Must be the caffeine they have down there.

journalism / links / swimming / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
8
Jan 14

The cold, the pool and more

The freezing weather has broken. You may call it a polar vortex, the now popular, misused term found so often in the media. I just call it cold. We’re due two or three seriously cold days a year here, and, before today, we’ve endured about 36 hours of them.

It came in Monday night, when just before midnight the wind chill was -1.8. Early Tuesday morning it was -5.5 and the low was 9 degrees.

Have I mentioned we live in the Deep South?

Today the high was 45 degrees, so we’re on our way out of this. We may as well have a picnic.

During the cold snap we also had a fire warning. Things were dry. It was windy. Also cold. And fires sounded great. So we burned everything. It was terribly romantic, and now everything is covered in soot.

OK, we didn’t. But it was tempting.

Returned to the pool today. This was the first time there since October and that’s embarrassing. Did 1,000 yards.

This is a warmup for swimmers. But we’re talking about me here and 1,000 yards is a cause for celebration. I fought my goggles and complained almost the entire way.

And now I have tiny bruises on my maxilla bone, because I can never get the straps on my goggles right. They’re constantly squeezing and still letting in water and fogging up. All of which is silly. I can control that in a mask. I can fix all of that on a mask at 80 feet underwater.

Goggles? Total mystery, apparently.

Parks and Recreation, the quiet little show that could, is celebrating 100 episodes. That’s the magic syndication number, which is why you’ll soon see this show in the most inexplicable places. Here’s a 100 episode special, which starts with Perd Hapley, who would easily be my favorite character on the show if Ron Swanson wasn’t my spirit animal.

Things to read … I find ’em, I share ’em.

The Dominance of Loooooong in the Age of Short and, essentially, the opposite view, in The blog is dead, long live the blog.

We seemingly have an incessant need to call things dead in the media. Formats and a medium may change or even contract, but that doesn’t mean they are dead. (Newspapers aren’t dead, but they surely are different.) Tumblr and WordPress alone boast more than 164 million blogs. Even if half of those are stagnant, well, that’s hardly dead, or even on life support. Hyperbole, happily, is alive and well.

Two things going on in this story. One is the headline, the other is this nugget, “While it sits in the heart of San Francisco’s startup community in the SOMA district, the Chronicle has lagged in its coverage of technology and social media. Its circulation plummeted by 50% between 2009 and 2012. ” Newspaper to Put All Reporters Through Social Media Boot Camp

Still want a drone. Still window shopping and daydreaming. This doesn’t change that: FAA on drone recordings by journalists: ‘There is no gray area’. Mostly because it is 100 percent incorrect. Happily, the comments set this entire story upside down, which means it is right side up.

Finally, the much-anticipated rollout of the New York Times new site is upon us. Here’s a review. Also, here’s a TouchCast discussion about the redesign.

Love TouchCast. There is a lot of amazing stuff there, for your iPad and browser viewing. Make interactive, realtime video products with the swipe of your finger. What a world. I’ll be using it soon, too, I hope.

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17
Dec 13

Smaug the Stupendous

Oh just a fine day. We caught a matinee of the new Hobbit movie:

Better than the first Hobbit movie, with fewer plot elements that were recycled from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But if the existence of them annoys you, sorry. (And don’t pretend like you didn’t notice.) There were drunken elves. Legolas and friends had a fine, running fight among the barrels. Loved the barrel chase. Hated the spiders.

The elvish love triangle is boring, and surely directive from some studio suit. Legolas seems like a different character. Older and harder, though it is the better part of a century before the other movies. This is another way prequels (let’s call the Hobbit a series of prequels) are difficult to swallow.

I’m sure it abandoned Tolkien — I don’t care; I read the Hobbit years ago and found it tedious and not worth my time, feel free to leave now if this is what you judge people against. — but it also gives you Martin Freeman, who is better than you realize. And Smaug is a grand visual thing. It takes a lot to visually impress us in movies these days, but the dragon should.

I wanted Smaug to be Benedict Cumberbatch, but this is a dragon, and they’ve modulated the voice so much that it isn’t Cumberbatch, which is fine. I’m ready to be free of the mercurial dwarves.

But a good movie. It cost $8 per ticket. This was a matinee. Back in my day, and get off my lawn.

We had Mexican with our friend Sara, whom we have not seen in a long while. We had cookies after that. We watched a comedian perform on Netflix after that. It was all a very fine day.

Things to read … These first few are submitted without comment or, simply put, have a nice day:

Capitol Hill Reacts to Judge’s NSA Phone Surveillance Ruling

Expanded Medicaid’s fine print holds surprise: ‘payback’ from estate after death

In Alabama, car insurance premiums jump an average of 22 percent after 1 claim, study finds

Sometimes I think the people in Washington over-complicate things. (Which is a naive way of suggesting that they’re actually doing things without grand and sweeping ulterior motives, but we all know better.) So allow me to simplify this. Let’s keep the obligations we have to those with whom we’ve obligated ourselves. Sen. Jeff Sessions: Leave military retiree pay alone, close tax loophole for illegal immigrants:

Sessions said lawmakers should “scour the federal budget for other available savings,” before cutting veterans benefits.

“America’s service members have already sacrificed so much on our behalf and Congress should not put additional burdens on them even as it spares federal civilian workers from the same treatment,” Sessions said. “Removing this unbalanced treatment of our military retirees ought to be one of the key actions we should take before this legislation moves forward.

Disregarding veterans is no way to run a government. You could put a lot of things in as the subject of that sentence. You’d be right. I feel like this is one of the important ones.

This is neat: The story of Bud, the Toomer’s Oak offspring that refuses to die.

Some of these I wouldn’t have put on such a list, but there are some real gems here: 54 Reasons to Love Photography in 2013. That will just make you want to click the shutter button a few hundred more times.

Speaking of photos, the next several days here, at least through Christmas, will likely be just that: snapshots. Come for the ornaments, and come back to see whatever surprises turn up.