journalism

collarbone / cycling / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off on I played the waiting game
3
Oct 13

I played the waiting game

My doctor’s appointment almost made me late for physical therapy. That’s what you get for scheduling those three hours a part.

The receptionist at the doctor’s office kindly explained that they only had two doctors working. This, after you’ve been there 82 minutes, suggests a scheduling error and not a problem on the patient’s part.

That this has happened twice here, well, that suggests I’ll try not to come back.

Curiously, as soon as you say “I don’t want to be that guy” while proceeding to be that guy, they manage to find a room to put you in. And then, of course, the extra waiting begins.

Eventually the doctor shows up. Nice guy. He’s intent. He listens. He’s happy for your successes. He’s a shoulder expert. He does things to my shoulder, is proud of our progress and then, without thinking, claps me three times, right on the trapezius. Thanks, doc.

So I barely made it to physical therapy in time, where today they gave me a series of weights and we swapped up a few stretches. Everyone is pleased with the progress, me most of all. The doctor rightly noted that what we’ve done so far is basically with a month of new therapy work. In three or four more months, he said, I’ll be good as new.

And the equally good news is that I didn’t have to schedule another doctor’s appointment in the near future.

Picked up my bike from the bike shop this evening, where it has been held since last Friday. It needed a new front derailleur. They were so excited to give it back to me that they called twice yesterday.

When I picked it up tonight I was happy to have it back, too. I set out for a quick twilight ride … and the chain is rubbing the new derailleur cage. So I guess I’ll take it back to the bike shop, because one visit begets three.

But I rode the time trial route, and then climbed up two of the ‘biggest’ hills we have. They are tiny, really, but they are in a sequence. The second one is the largest. Today it was the easiest.

I turned left instead of right. Right was home, but the thing was already clicking and there was a little descent to take and then weaving through some easy road construction, past the museum, through a park and then back up the other side of that earlier big hill. There’s a side road there that takes you down into the neighborhood, and for a minute or two it makes you feel like a real rider. There’s a curve, a right turn that falls immediately into a curve and then a switchback to the left. Then there are houses, kids on bikes and adults unloading their cars with groceries and old men walking dogs. It keeps swooping down until it has to go back up and that’s the point where the darkness started to seep in under the tree canopy.

I met a cyclist going the other way. I only do that when I’m soft pedaling. So I had to stand up out of the saddle and finish the last bit of the neighborhood route home.

Can’t believe I have to take my bike back again.

We had dinner tonight, pizza, with our friends Adam and Jessica. Mellow Mushroom put us in the very back of the restaurant. We had pretzels, of course, and pizza, of course. And we had a fine time with friends.

They’re getting married next weekend. We were there when they got engaged. I get to be in the wedding.

Tonight I told him that I’d contemplated backing out as I paid to rent the tuxedo.

He joyfully threatened me with physical harm.

Things to read which I found interesting today …

This will only get worse. And more incorrect. Doing drone journalism in Texas? You could be fined $10,000 or more:

As of the first of this month, taking aerial photographs of someone’s land in the state of Texas, without the landowner’s permission, is punishable by up to $2,000 and 180 days in jail, each time such a photo is distributed. Journalists are not exempt from this law.

[…]

The law also applies to photos taken in public places, at an altitude greater than eight feet above ground level (AGL)

That’s a good site about drones, by the way. (I want one.)

I remember the first time this happened to me. Rep. Todd Rokita To CNN’s Carol Costello: ‘You’re Beautiful But You Have To Be Honest’ OK, maybe it wasn’t that. But a senator told me I asked too many questions. The nerve of a reporter to do such a thing. When an interview subject says things like this, the odds are good that you’re taking them somewhere they don’t want to go. Keep at them, I say.

A followup from yesterday: 2 of 4 found shot to death in car in Winston County faced child molestation, pornography charges in Tennessee, sheriff says

Mice and fungi and skin scrapings are on the line: How the Shutdown Is Devastating Biomedical Scientists and Killing Their Research. This is actually an interesting perspective and a necessary story. There are many of them. None of them come with easy answers. You wonder how many times we can cut research budgets and stay on the forefront of science.

Some things shouldn’t be made to wait.

I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / memories / photo / running / Samford / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off on Out goes the best neon in east Alabama
2
Oct 13

Out goes the best neon in east Alabama

This is a sad little story:

Lamar Phillips, the owner of Goal Post Bar-B-Q in Anniston, on Friday closed the doors to his restaurant for the final time.

He said he will sell the business, a fixture of Quintard Avenue since the 1960s, but declined to provide the potential buyer’s name or that person’s intentions for the building.

That Anniston restaurant has some of the best neon around:

Goal Post

I took that picture on Valentine’s Day in 2007. We had dinner that night at a catfish joint. Had I been thinking we would have gone to Goal Post. Catfish was not the best Valentine’s dinner. (Because barbecue is the ideal, of course. And it would have run me $12, apparently.) But we sat right down at the catfish joint, if I recall. Anyway, it was being in the same place that mattered. That year The Yankee was in Atlanta and we spent a lot of time on I-20 going back and forth.

Certain stretches of that road bring it all back.

Anyway, Goal Post was great. The neon is the best in that part of the state. The kicker actually puts the ball through the uprights. You can just see the other parts of the neon fading into the darkness. It looks great in motion. And that kicker has never missed.

Hope they are doing business there again soon.

I hope those American tourists can figure out a way around this barricade at the World War I memorial. I’m more troubled by the presumption that someone would tell you where you may practice your rights.

But the doings at the World War II memorial, just down the mall, are of course getting a lot of attention:

Some of it is disproportionate:

All of this is needless, of course.

The first time I visited the World War II memorial, it was about midnight on a cold December Saturday. It was open, as it was designed to stay open.

The memorial has 4,048 gold stars, each representing 100 Americans who died in the war. “Closing” open memorials with the simple intention of inconveniencing people is, well, simple. But you’ve learned to not expect a lot of nuance out of Washington D.C. these days.

In front of the wall of stars there is the message “Here we mark the price of freedom.”

Here’s a story with a great pull quote: “(W)hen he called the parks service, he was told they would face arrest. ‘I said, are you kidding me? You’re going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn’t for them it wouldn’t be there. She said, ‘That’s correct sir.””

But a bit of sanity finally prevailed.

It is shameful to make sacred places props, both the closing it and the photo opportunity it turned into for some congress members, but there’s not a great supply of shame in Washington.

And, think, we’re just getting started. We’re going about all of this all wrong, on both sides.

Things to read that I found interesting today …

Speaking of the shutdown, please meet The Most Unessential Man in America, in what is surely a bitterly humorous and demoralizing tale.

Here’s The Onion on the shutdown.

Local reads:

Study: Alabama residents pay 14 percent more for homeowner’s insurance after making 1 claim

4 found shot to death inside vehicle in remote area of Winston Co.

This one is interesting. How Big The Internet Of Things Could Become:

By the end of the decade, a nearly nine-fold increase in the volume of devices on the Internet of Things will mean a lot of infrastructure investment and market opportunities will available in this sector.

[…]

Who wins if any of these scenarios takes place? Semiconductor, network, remote sensor and big data vendors will be the lottery winners of such Internet of Things growth, to name a very few. Big data especially: 75 billion devices all generating signals of data to be analyzed and measured, many of which in real- or near-realtime? That’s got big data written all over it.

Designers and engineers look for opportunities in problems. In something that massively big maybe the idea is to look for the problem. My bet is on networking the data — which is challenging in volume — and predictive algorithms.

Now, what would you do with that, if you knew what to do with that?

Sticking to the newsroom, then, there was an afternoon of grading things. And then, in the early evening, we critiqued the Crimson. High story count, but it needs better art, not their best design. As always there were a few critical copy editing points. A solid effort, but, perhaps, not the one of which we are capable.

That’s what the next issue is for, of course. Check out the what the hardworking students at the Crimson are doing, here.

On the drive home I spent a lot of time thinking about the run I was going to do. What? This is supposed to be a rest day, anyway, and I’m thinking about running? As in, I found myself looking forward to it.

I do not know what is happening.

So I ran through the neighborhood in the darkness. Only two stretches of which don’t have good light. One of those, of course, being the short bridge over the creek at the bottom of the neighborhood. There’s a light at the far end and a light down a way from the other side. And, right in the middle of the two sits the bridge. Between having no oxygen in your brain and no light for your eyes it looked like there were goblins and monsters on the bridge.

Greeeeat.

May there be no trolls on your footpaths!

Catember / journalism / links / Monday / Samford / things to read — 1 Comment
30
Sep 13

Good for 63.73 percent of the people in the poll below; they said ‘Who cares?’

Didn’t you love Catember? We love Catember. That’s the fourth year I’ve put that on the site, and it is probably one of the more popular things going. You can follow this link to the Catember category and see all of them. Allie is wacky as ever.

This morning she got locked in a linen closet. Because if you go to that part of the house then you must be going into that room. And if you are going into that room it must be because you are going to open the door for her.

It is a neat trick, really. She jumps up to a second shelf, while ducking down to avoid hitting the third shelf and fitting in a narrow space on top of beach towels. She likes to be on clean things. Very fussy.

Talked about news leads in class today. Riveting stuff. Here are some of the slides:

My favorite part is finding examples of bad leads. New York Times, student media, the local pros. None of us are immune. I read a dreadful one out of the old gray lady today. It violated almost every rule of thumb you would ordinarily use.

Otherwise, the day passed as it should.

Things to read that I thought you might find interesting:

Auburn-Opelika named as top place to retire

More than 2,000 NASA workers in Huntsville look to Washington today as government shutdown looms

Shutdown would lead to 2,000 civilian furloughs, no pay for military at Maxwell

Here’s an interesting profile on author and “performer” Malcolm Gladwell who has a new book out. He addresses critics. And his hair is still artistically unkempt:

“When you write about sports, you’re allowed to engage in mischief,” he says. “Nothing is at stake. It’s a bicycle race!” As a serious amateur runner himself (just the other day, he finished the Fifth Avenue Mile race, in Manhattan, in five minutes and three seconds) he’s “totally anti-doping … But what I’m trying to say is, look, we have to come up with better reasons. Our reasons suck! And when the majority has taken a position that’s ill thought-through, it’s appropriate to make trouble.” His expression settles into a characteristic half-smile that makes clear he’d relish it if you disagreed.

Here’s an insightful New Yorker piece on the Guardian taking on the British government:

At 5:23 p.m., roughly eight hours after the encounter in his office, Rusbridger ordered the Guardian to post the G.C.H.Q. story on its Web site and then in its print edition. Although the British government had taken no further action, the mood in the Guardian’s offices was anxious. As the stories based on Snowden’s revelations were taking shape, Rusbridger had hired additional security for the building and established a secure office two floors above the newsroom, just down the corridor from the advertising department, to house the documents. When he flew to New York to work with his team there on the stories, “he couldn’t talk on the phone,” his wife, Lindsay Mackie, said. “He couldn’t say what was going on.”

It has been the Guardian’s biggest story so far. With eighty-four million monthly visitors, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Guardian Web site is now the third most popular English-language newspaper Web site in the world, behind London’s Daily Mail, with its celebrity gossip and abundant cleavage, and the New York Times. But its print circulation, of a hundred and ninety thousand, is half what it was in 2002. The Guardian, which is supported by the Scott Trust, established nearly eighty years ago to subsidize an “independent” and “liberal” newspaper, has lost money for nine straight years. In the most recent fiscal year, the paper lost thirty-one million pounds (about fifty million dollars), an improvement over the forty-four million pounds it lost the year before.

Last year, Andrew Miller, the director of the trust and the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group, warned that the trust’s money would be exhausted in three to five years if the losses were not dramatically reduced. To save the Guardian, Rusbridger has pushed to transform it into a global digital newspaper, aimed at engaged, anti-establishment readers and available entirely for free. In 2011, Guardian U.S., a digital-only edition, was expanded, followed this year by the launch of an Australian online edition. It’s a grand experiment, he concedes: just how free can a free press be?

For reasons big and small beyond this story I really, really hope they make it.

Somebody had to say it. I say it to my freshmen (your job is learning as much as you can and selecting and sharing the most critical parts) and I’ve told it to old reporters (do what you do best and link to the rest) and pretty much anyone in between (solicit and cultivate your community) who’d care to disagree. But the truth is the truth. Journalism *is* curation: tips on curation tools and techniques:

Curation is a relatively new term in journalism, but the practice is as old as journalism itself. Every act of journalism is an act of curation: think of how a news report or feature selects and combines elements from a range of sources (first hand sources, background facts, first or second hand colour). Not only that: every act of publishing is, too: selecting and combining different types of content to ensure a news or content ‘mix’.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in his talk to employees at the Washington Post said: “People will buy a package … they will not pay for a story.” Previously that package was limited to what your staff produced, and wire copy. But as more content becomes digitised, it is possible to combine more content from a wider variety of sources in a range of media – and on any one of a number of platforms.

Curation is nothing new – but it is becoming harder.

It is becoming faster, with stronger feedback, and with more and more places to monitor and share. So, in that sense, yes, it is harder. Really it is more intensive, and more thorough.

And then there’s this embarrassment: AJ and Katherine: A kiss is just a kiss, or is it? (poll)

We can’t let people live their personal lives. And by people I mean a young woman who’s caught a minor bit of celebrity in the most 21st century way possible and a college student. We must speculate. Are they on or off? Here’s a photo gallery! And take this poll! Now let’s bring in our kiss expert (“lukewarm at best”) who is really, and I’m not making this up, the public safety reporter.

A commenter wrote “AL.com, please use the poll results to help refine the amount of time you spend covering Katherine Webb stories. Thanks.”

Others:

Carol’s reply:

It is a good thing bandwidth is cheap. So is the content.

cycling / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off on A fast Thursday post
26
Sep 13

A fast Thursday post

Wrote a long email today, in keeping with my email style. I went through it to edit and did manage to eliminate 42 words. I also used the word “countervailing,” which I felt like was a good reason to go for a bike ride.

So I managed to wrap up the day on my bike, catching the last few rays of sun from the saddle. It was late enough in the day that I didn’t even wear sunglasses, because that just made it look dark. As it was I found myself way over in the lane as I worked my way along shaded roads. No need to blend in, as Richard La China taught me:

I’d just started out and noticed my front derailleur wouldn’t shift. I could feel it in the shifter, and I could see it bolted onto the frame. I was in the big gear and it was staying there.

Everything was spinning, but I only had about six gears at my disposal. So I did a short, easy ride and stayed away from any hills. That’ll be something I get to look at tomorrow.

Things to read, which I found interesting today …

Speaking of riding the bike, here’s a local story from earlier today about the local bike scene. Hint: it ain’t bad.

The Garths scrimped and saved for two years before starting their tour in 2011 in Maine. After pedaling through 41 countries, the couple has experienced some of the best, and worst, areas for cycling.

“Our favorite place, as far as scenery goes, and natural beauty…was Patagonia,” Dave Garth said “For cycling, it’s terrible.”

He added Auburn is somewhere in the middle.

“Auburn is definitely getting better,” Garth said. “At this point, having been to some places that are really modeling this well…there is definitely room for improvement.”

Alabama currently holds the second-to-last spot in a nationwide ranking of bike friendliness by the League of American Bicyclists, coming in just above last-place finisher North Dakota. But with the implementation of Auburn University’s more pedestrian and bike friendly campus, the city as a whole is working to improve its biking infrastructure.

“Auburn is currently the only bicycle friendly community in Alabama,” said Brandy Ezelle, traffic engineer and bicycle coordinator for the city of Auburn. She added the city has received a bronze ranking in bike friendliness by the League of American Bicyclists.

Thomas McCrary, thought to be Alabama’s oldest farmer, dies 4 days before 102nd birthday:

Up until a year ago, when he was 101, Thomas McCrary drove a tractor around his 200-year-old farm, ensuring operations were running smoothly.

The humble man from New Market said in December he cherished the land that was settled by his namesake and great-grandfather, the first Thomas McCrary.

“It means a great bit to me,” McCrary said of the farm, which since its founding 203 years ago had been divided among family members.

Mr. McCrary died Monday.

There’s a book about that family, and that farm, perhaps the oldest one in the state, a decade older than the state itself. It was written by an old newsman, Joe Jones. About Thomas it says “he loves all and is loved by all.” He stayed on the farm his entire life, except when he was in Burma and China during the war. Here’s his obit, which is full of old-fashioned charm.

Thomas McCrary would have remembered his grandmother, who lived until his 18th year. She remembered the Civil War. A link just two generations removed is now gone. The first plane was flown in the state in March of 1910 by Orville Wright. McCrary was born 18 months later. Think of all he saw in his life.

And that’s what you lose when you lose a centenarian.

Sounds like a longform story, really. Here are some chat tips on one could do that:

It turns out that long and short writing are not necessarily in conflict. Think for a moment about your favorite magazines. Compared to newspapers, the long stories in magazines are longer, and the shorter pieces are shorter. It’s the combination of short and long that make a publication versatile for readers.

Although I’ve met some writers who tell me “I want to write shorter,” that is the exception. Most writers I know — including me — want to go longer. The daily beat reporter wants to do a Sunday feature. The Sunday feature writer wants to do a series. A series writer wants to do a book. The book author wants to do a trilogy.

And Twitter goes to emergency mode: Twitter Alerts: Critical information when you need it most:

We know from our users how important it is to be able to receive reliable information during these times. With that in mind, last year we announced Lifeline (a feature that helps Japanese users find emergency accounts during crises), and since then, we’ve been working on a related feature for people around the world.

If you sign up to receive an account’s Twitter Alerts, you will receive a notification directly to your phone whenever that account marks a Tweet as an alert. Notifications are delivered via SMS, and if you use Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android, you’ll also receive a push notification*. Alerts also appear differently on your home timeline from regular Tweets; they will be indicated with an orange bell.

You can see a list of participating organizations here.

More on the multimedia blog, Tumblr and Twitter.

journalism / links / photo / Samford / Tumblr / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on There was no gold. I looked.
25
Sep 13

There was no gold. I looked.

The newspaper industry, they gave it away online for a decade or more, suddenly decided to charge for it online and now, I’m sure, are stupefied by this news:

Now that roughly a third of the nation’s newspapers are charging for access to their web and mobile content, the early evidence suggests that digital audiences aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about paying for news as publishers are about charging for it.

Although digital-only subscribers make up 37.6% of the total circulation of the Wall Street Journal and 34.4% of the total readership of the New York Times, the number of digital-only subscribers at Gannett, the largest publisher of general-interest newspapers in the land, is 2.2% of its average aggregate weekday circulation of 3 million subscribers.

Notwithstanding the relative productivity of their paywalls, the paid penetration at the Journal and the Times pales in comparison to the success that Netflix, Spotify, Major League Baseball and other ventures have had in selling entertainment-oriented digital content.

Some of those entertainment and news comparisons stretch the bonds of credulity, but they do say one thing: People will pay for a service online, just not the news.

It is simple economic theory, really. You can easily charge for a scarcity. There is a great volume of news, analysis and information around us. Some of it isn’t worth the download to be sure, but a great deal of it is readily available.

You might say it isn’t the news they need. You might be right, to an extent. You might also be called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that.

At the end of the day your news seeker is a resourceful individual. He or she has plenty of options to find what they want, or at the very least, enough to make them feel they’ve gotten what they need.

So the search for a compelling and profitable news model will continue. Even as I remind you that news has always been a (civically minded) loss leader.

Speaking of losses … now you can find out how much the Affordable Care Act is going to cost you. Finally.

Also, my insurance is increasing, so that’s nice.

Our state doesn’t get the opportunity to brag about education frequently enough, but here’s one where we are on the top of the list: Alabama high school students lead nation in increase in passing advanced placement tests.

Reviewed the newspaper this afternoon. They are designing a sharp looking product — and they were only in the newsroom until 2:30 this morning, so that is an improvement. Today we talked about story selection and word use.

Pretty soon I’ll run out of things to find wrong and will simply be down to the very subjective things.

Here is the rainbow I saw on the way home this evening:

rainbow

One of the meteorologists said there was a storm in some little town, a wide spot on the road really, to my east. I was on the interstate about 20 miles away. I glanced up and saw the clouds. I looked back to the road. I glanced up again and saw the rainbow.

Here’s a post on the multimedia blog.

Here’s something from Tumblr.

There’s more on Twitter.

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