journalism

cycling / football / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo footbaw
29
Aug 13

Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo footbaw

One of the first emails I received this morning was the first I’ve received on the Affordable Health Care Act. It included this line: “Unfortunately, we do not have details on the exchange coverage or the rates to share with you at this time.”

And this starts in October.

Though, right off the top, there are $65 in fees, and “we do not yet know what the rate increase will be.”

Thanks, Congress.

So I wrote our hard working and now long suffering HR director and asked a few specific questions. You can imagine the stress that gentleman is under.

In the evening I received this tweet:

I tell my students “One of the perks of being in the front of the class is having your pet issues. Here’s mine. Be careful of cyclists. Move over three feet,” and so on. Be careful when you pass them, I say, because you never know when it will be me and I get to grade you.

This joke always does pretty well. And she laughed at it, too.

Someone asked me on Facebook one day how to pass a cyclist. I got it down to five hints:

First: Wait. Just a second. Let a little road get out in front of him or her. She has the same rights the car does, etc.

Second: Know that waiting for 15 seconds until oncoming traffic doesn’t exist isn’t going to make you late.

Third: Just ease over to your left and pass, when clear. Some cities have a three-foot law. Think of that: that’s an arm length, but do err on the side of wider berths when you can. (Not everyone is a champion bike handler.)

Fourth: You don’t have to honk your horn. Unless you are driving an electric, I can hear you.

Fifth: Go on and have a nice day.

A former student sent along this story:

Police say a man suspected in a Chase Bank robbery was found in a nearby building after they believe he fell 21 floors down a garbage chute.

This is the dumbest story of the day: Radio station officials apologize for stir created by promotional:

The programming director at Shoals Radio Group said he is puzzled how a promotional for a local radio station managed to excite many students and parents into believing bombs would be exploding today at area schools.

Rumors of school safety being in jeopardy have steadily increased since promotionals began Monday to bring attention to a format change at Star 94.9. The rumors prompted some parents to keep their children at home today instead of having them attend class as usual. Police and school officials also increased patrols in some schools in an effort to ease fears.

[…]

The promotional, which will continue until Friday when the format change is officially announced, is built around the thought that aliens have taken over the radio station and are trying to figure out what type music appeals to humans.

You can hear the promos here. How people got worked up about them remains a mystery. “Aliens with perfect diction!”

Every now and then Spencer Hall feels the need to prove he’s a better writer than the rest of us. Give the guy a good story and watch him work. Read this (too long) excerpt and you’ll need to know the rest:

Kurt Vonnegut said that his chief objection to life in general was that it was “too easy, when alive, to make horrible mistakes.” This is what offensive line coaches live with: the notion that for every five simple circles drawn on a board, there are a nearly infinite number of possible threats looming out in the theoretical white space. Offensive plays give skill players arrows. Those arrows point down the field toward an endzone, a stopping point, a celebration. Those five simple circles stay on the board in the same place, and are on duty forever.

They are rough men in the business of protection.

Herb Hand is an offensive line coach at Vanderbilt University, where he might not even be were it not for a long line of random events. Hand got a job at Glenville State under Rich Rodriguez in 1994, a team whose base offense–the spread option that redefined modern football–depended on a play that in itself was the result of an accident, the zone read. A quarterback simply pulled the handoff from the running back, read the defensive end, and turned a mistake into deliberate and deadly strategy. Other coaches might have dismissed it entirely. Rodriguez did not, and now it is run at every level of the game from Pop Warner to the NFL.

Hand would work under Rodriguez at Clemson, and then followed him to West Virginia when Rodriguez was hired to replace Don Nehlen. Hand would recruit, coach tight ends, and recruit, and do all of that in exactly that order, because recruiting is an important activity that sometimes is interrupted by bouts of college football. One of the places Hand recruited was the talent-glutted state of Florida, including Orlando, where on April 27th, 2006 something would hit him in the back of the head with an axe.

The axe blow to the back of the head was a different kind of pain than normal.

And then you finish that story and you think: Great, that’s how we start football season. With teary eyes.

Which is fine, I guess, because we have football. You know, I’ve waited almost my entire life to enjoy picture-in-picture. The technology was rolled out in 1983. I’ve had two televisions that had the tech, but never had the necessary cable setup. Now, on this second television to feature PIP we finally have the opportunity to use it — and during football season! — and I can only manage to watch the same game twice.

But Gatorade ads look great when you see them in double vision!

So picture in picture is, so far, disappointing. And the New Directv setup lasted seven quarters of football, watching and switching between channels, before quitting. So there was a call to tech support. They flipped the magic switch and unkinked the hose on their end. A reset and a reboot later and it works again. Hope we’re not doing that all fall.

Even if we are they’re already proving more competent than Charter ever was.

Three things from the Multimedia Links site:

From the ‘Picking on Millennials’ beat

How a small paper went big time online

‘Password’ is not a password

Auburn / football / journalism / links / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Links to things
28
Aug 13

Links to things

We’ve been watching the last quarter of the 2010 football season on DVD as a way of preparing for the college football season, which opens tomorrow night. Last night we saw the SEC championship game, which I think I only saw the one time, live. It was an emotional thing, that day. Still fairly stirring.

Tonight we watch the national championship against Oregon. It has its drama, but it isn’t terribly exciting in some respects. Knowing the outcome is, of course, anticlimactic in a small way. The win was the thing, but that SEC championship game was the most complete effort of that amazing season. And knowing what it meant, and knowing it came at Darth Spurrier’s expense made it all the better.

All of which is to say nothing new, except this. It was this video that really made me look forward to this season.

Ronnie Brown is a bad man. (Hard to believe it has been nine years since some of that footage was shot.) The New York Restoration Choir sounds great. Bring on the football.

Would you like a bit of history? NPR has a great piece on what was one of the rhetorical inspirations for Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. You can hear it! I knew the provenance of the imagery, but I’d never heard the original speech before. It is fascinating in every way, though that’s not really the voice I imagined Pastor Archibald Carey Jr. having. Give it a listen.

Here’s a longer read on the future of NASA:

NASA is looking for a rock. It’s got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can’t be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can’t be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can’t be a speed demon. And it shouldn’t be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile.

The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA’s human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people.

It just doesn’t sound like the same agency in some ways, but there is some boldness in the plan, if you read on.

Here’s a conversation that delves into the origins of online scholastic journalism. Before WordPress, before a lot of tools, you had to hand-code everything. Now, not so much:

Yet there persists an odd notion that a newspaper staff is more deserving of awards for its online journalism and that its online work is more authentic if they built their website or even their WordPress theme themselves. There’s a confusion in this logic –– a failure to distinguish the tool from the content; we only tend to see this confusion when working with newer tools. No one would question the value of using a word processing tool and writing on a computer over using a typewriter. No one would question the value of using desktop publishing software and new printing technology over hand-set type. No one would question the value of a photo taken with a digital camera over one taken with a film camera and printed in a darkroom. That’s because we’ve recognized that Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs, InDesign, PhotoShop, and digital SLR cameras are tools that allow our students to do better work.

We now need to make that same recognition with our understanding of WordPress and its templates. Buying a good WordPress template is the same as buying Adobe CS7 or buying a new digital SLR camera. CS7 won’t create your design for you, a camera won’t take its own pictures, and a WordPress template won’t write and publish stories, photos, and videos in a timely and relevant manner. New tools create new efficiencies and new opportunities –– they allow us to report better, write better, design better, and connect with our audiences better, and our national contest and critique standards need to evolve to reflect the new realities of the tools used for web publishing.

I bolded my favorite part. This debate isn’t restricted to online tools designed for efficiency versus the most laborious method possible. Value the journalism over the tool, or the medium for that matter.

One more PBS thing, a series of serious and concerted thoughts on a digital curriculum from Dr. Cindy Royal:

what I am proposing is curriculum in which digital is the foundation, and the basic skills of writing, reporting and editing are injected into digitally focused courses, as opposed to inserting a digital lesson or two into traditional classes.

Most programs have courses at their core that introduce basic skills, things like Media Writing, Media Law and Introduction to Mass Communication. Other programs also require courses in Media History or Mass Media and Society. I propose we flip and reconfigure these courses with a digital emphasis.

That’s worth a read if you’re interested in journalism or pedagogy.

Did I mention I renamed my work blog? I renamed my work blog. Made it a little more inclusive, avoids any university branding concerns and just sounds more vaguely fun. So check out the creatively titled Multimedia Links. Several new posts this week as we’ve gotten back to the classroom:

Must have apps

The FOIA Machine

Sleuthing public records

Crowdsourcing history

Things that, perhaps, should be reconsidered

Still not sold on mobile

Evernote tips

I try to get as many students as possible to read that site, so there will be more to write this year.

More, more, more!

We want more.

cycling / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off on My back, journalism, the weather, my bike
20
Aug 13

My back, journalism, the weather, my bike

Ever have one of those days where the floor was the most comfortable thing you had? No? Just me then? OK.

So I spent a little time stretched out today because my back got all cinched up and my shoulder wasn’t helping. For some reason I decided the floor was a good place to be, and it turns out, I was right.

I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and I’m not especially excited about that.

I have a new idea about the criticism of journalism. It goes like this, it is as shallow or meaningful as you want it to be, and the format doesn’t have anything to do with that.

Here’s the latest example in the all but exhausted “Real Journalists” versus “Just a Blogger” debate. The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer is struggling with the thorny issues: Is rapper Big Boi taking classes at Auburn University?

The answer? No. But his daughter is enrolling as a freshman. That doesn’t keep a lot of rhetorical questions at bay, though. They just fly out into the ether and are never answered, because who needs answers when you can embed a YouTube video?

I’ve had arguments with people that have worked at that paper about the various values of citizen journalism compared to professionals, and this is a perfectly good counter-argument to anything anyone says in that debate. To be fair, the writer of that sad little post is called an “audience engagement coordinator.” And therein, I think, lies the problem. It is as shallow or meaningful as you want it to be, and the format doesn’t have anything to do with that.

Meanwhile, a writer at al.com stepped in it today. He offended women when assuming they didn’t understand football. Here’s the freshly edited version. It even made Romenesko.

In bigger news of things to read: Jeff Jarvis on how media in different countries are covering the recent governmental moves against journalism. Hint: shamefully poor.

Jay Rosen on the conspiracy to commit journalism, one of the better things he’s written in my view:

This battle is global. Just as the surveillance state is an international actor — not one government, but many working together — and just as the surveillance net stretches worldwide because the communications network does too, the struggle to report on the secret system’s overreach is global, as well. It’s the collect-it-all coalition against an expanded Fourth Estate, worldwide.

[…]

This tells us something. The battle I referred to is not a simple matter of the state vs. civilians. It’s not government vs. the press, either. It’s the surveillance-over-everything forces within governments (plus the politicians and journalists who identify with them) vs. everyone who opposes their overreach: investigative journalists and sources, especially, but also couriers (like David Miranda), cryptographers and technologists, free speech lawyers, funders, brave advertisers, online activists, sympathetic actors inside a given government, civil society groups like Amnesty International, bloggers to amplify the signal and, of course, readers. Lots of readers, the noisy kind, who share and help distribute the work.

This type of sunlight coalition — large and small pieces, loosely joined — is a countervailing power to the security forces, the people who are utterly serious when they say: ”You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more,” the same people who, as Bruce Schneier has written, “commandeered the internet” for their use because, viewed from a certain angle, it’s the best machine ever made for spying on the population.

If sunlight coalitions are to succeed, it won’t be by outwitting surveillance. Not better technology, but greater legitimacy is their edge. This attitude was perfectly captured by Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, who shut down his email service when the surveillance state demanded his submission. “I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore,” he said.

Sadly, the wrong side has already won this argument.

Elmore Leonard died. I love some of his work, though, since I don’t read hardly any fiction, I’ve never read any of his books. But I quote him in one of my syllabi. Here are his invaluable rules to writing:

Never open a book with weather.
Avoid prologues.
Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

Go check out the rest, too.

And, now just to change the subject, all of this rain has hurt the cotton crop:

The fiber-producing plant is not getting the hot, dry and sunny weather it needs to turn the bolls into blooms. If the bolls don’t bloom before the first fall frost or freeze, the cotton won’t be harvestable, farmers and agricultural specialists said.

By and large the rainy season has helped the corn. I thought about that today while I was getting hammered by rain and pedaling around corn fields:

cornfield

This was about the only time it wasn’t raining, for 34 miles mind you, and it was clearly coming on. And then came the lightning. I’m starting to add miles back in to my rides and this was my reward. Roads I’ve seldom, if ever, been on and one of the stronger storms I’ve ever enjoyed.

Two hours in the gloomy, escaping light and thunder and rain. How was your day?

cycling / football / friends / journalism / links / Monday / things to read — Comments Off on Mondays need better titles, I know
19
Aug 13

Mondays need better titles, I know

Almost football time. People here are counting the days. I won’t go on and on about it. I’m tired of that to be perfectly honest. I do enjoy it, the drama and the emotion and the collegial cheering. I’ve come to be more interested in the business and the personal. Especially the personal.

Like these stories. I really want to see Shon just blast someone into the dirt, stand over them and say “CANCER!” He deserves that. With playing time in sights, cancer survivor Shon Coleman trying to ‘get better every day’:

The cancer went into remission just weeks after starting chemotherapy treatments in April 2010, and he continued to receive weekly injections following that diagnosis to ensure it wouldn’t return. It never did.

His return to the field came much later, though, as Coleman was finally cleared to practice with the Tigers in April 2012, working back into form ever since.

It’s the versatility and natural ability he showed during his high school career that has him on the verge of breaking into Auburn’s two-deep depth chart, likely the first in line to play whenever starting left tackle Greg Robinson needs a breather this fall.

“I feel comfortable on both sides, really,” he said. “I pretty much got so used to both sides that I can switch up and have everything down pat.”

Another young man, a similar story. Samford long snapper Perry Beasley living college football dream again after beating cancer 3 years ago:

On Aug. 30, he’ll get the chance to run on the field as a college football player when Samford travels to Georgia State. The Georgia Dome is minutes from his home, so family, friends, even nurses who helped treat him, will be in attendance.

And while Samford’s goals are high, Beasley’s shining moment will be realized when he takes the field with his teammates.

“For me, it’s already set — that I’m doing what I love again,” Beasley said. “I definitely think that whenever we run out on the tunnel on Aug. 30, something will come over me that will be really powerful.”

You want guys like that to have that big triumphal moment, check that off the list and move on to big things, knowing they can and they will.

A feel good story of another sort. A WWII POW traded his prized gold ring for some food. Now, 70 years later, the ring has come home:

Last week, about a dozen family members and friends gathered in the living room of David C. Cox Jr.’s Raleigh home and watched as he slit open a small yellow parcel from Germany. The 67-year-old son dug through the crinkly packing material and carefully removed a little plastic box.

“And here it is,” he said with a long sigh as he pulled out the ring. “Oh, my goodness. … I never thought it would ever happen. I thought it was gone. We all thought it was gone.

“He thought it was gone,” he said of his late father.

The story of how the ring made it back to the Cox family is a testament to a former enemy’s generosity, the reach of the Internet and the healing power of time.

Mowed the lawn this evening. Then changed sweaty clothes for workout clothes and got in a little ride. I deemed it a take-it-easy ride, so I only touched 39.1 on the big hill. I did, though, set a new 10-minute distance best for Red Route 2. This is a segment that has a determined starting point where you just go for as hard as you can, for as long as you can, for 10 minutes. It is one of the many nonsensical challenges I’ve created for myself on my bike. This is the first time I’ve broken the first distance mark on this challenge, too. The speed wouldn’t be impressive to you, because I am slow, but I am apparently getting a tiny bit faster. In my first ride after a race, taking it easy on a home 20-mile course.

I will never understand how I get chain grease on the outside of my left calf when the chain is on the right side of my bike.

I’ll probably never understand nutrition the correct way either. We decided that I’m at a negative calorie amount for the day so I was able to eat three dinners. We went out for pizza with a friend. He’s a runner, so it was all miles per minute this, and playlists and marathons that. We’ve become these people. I had two slices of pizza.

Meanwhile, in London, the government stormed The Guardian’s offices to destroy data. Think about that:

I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents… Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.

England is lost. Hope they’re not the canary in the coal mine.

cycling / Friday / journalism / links / maps / movies / music / things to read / video — Comments Off on The Unofficial Unified Swampers Theory
16
Aug 13

The Unofficial Unified Swampers Theory

Greasy, if Aretha Franklin says it, is a good thing.

That’s not far from one of the places where I grew up. Aretha, in the Apple promo says “You just didn’t expect them to be as funky or as greasy as they were. This documentary looks great, if only to answer the question ‘Why Muscle Shoals?’

Which is the same as asking ‘Why not anywhere else?’

I have a theory, he said to the surprise of no one. Look at this map:

Think of all of the music that has come from the rough diamond of Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta and Nashville. All of these places are where the Mississippi basin, the Delta, the Smoky Mountains, countless churches and a wide rural storytelling tradition meet. Inside the diamond is much of Mississippi, Birmingham and, right there, Muscle Shoals. There’s a lot of lyrical fertility in there.

Music comes from all over, but there’s a timeless quality — as pop culture goes — to a lot of the things produced in and around that little diagram.

Rode a bit this afternoon, just spinning little circles with my feet over to the bike shop. Bought new tubes and some drink supplements.

The nice thing is you can go over there in spandex and they don’t even blink. They get you in and out real quick. Can’t have you scaring everyone off.

I hit the last hill, the one we live on, and topped it in one gear. Usually it takes a third of the cassette. And I did it at a speed I can’t even average and that’s going uphill.

So, naturally, I’m going to choose to believe that means I’m improving. But we all know better.

I visited a physical therapist today. He wanted to test out my shoulder. The first thing he did was jab his massive, muscular finger right down onto the tops of the screws in my shoulder.

I do not like him very much.

But he says there are problems I shouldn’t have a year-plus later, so he’s sending me to a nationally renowned orthopedic guy. If I see that person next week as planned that’ll make my third ortho.

I’m starting to wish I’d noticed that chunk of wood that I hit last summer.

Things to read: Counting the Change:

In 2008 Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBCUniversal, a big entertainment group, lamented the trend of “trading analogue dollars for digital pennies”. But those pennies are starting to add up. And even Mr Zucker, now boss of CNN Worldwide, a TV news channel, has changed his tune. Old media is “well, well beyond digital pennies,” he says.

What has changed his mind? The surge in smartphones, tablet computers and broadband speeds has encouraged more people to pay for content they can carry around with them. According to eMarketer, a research firm, this year Americans will spend more time online or using computerised media than watching television.

And a Samford student wrote this one:

According to McCay, until recently, Alabama was seen as a “pass-through” state. Traffickers from other states take their “workers” and travel through Alabama to get to another state.

“Now that you see a Memphis girl being brought to Huntsville or Madison, you begin to think, ‘Ok, maybe we’re not just a pass-through state anymore,’ and we’re seeing more and more reports over the last several years that trafficking is in Alabama,” McCay said.

“It is happening,” McCay said, “and the thing that our task force is really trying to do is just raise the awareness primarily, just let people know that it is happening, get it on their radar. If you don’t know something is happening, how do you fix it?”

And I have to go to bed early tonight because I have to get up early tomorrow. Naturally I’ll be awake most of the evening. But I must try … Tomorrow, we race.

Hope you have a lovely weekend ahead of you.

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