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journalism

If I don’t talk, or swallow, I feel fine

Much like Phil Collins, I can feel it coming in the air, particularly through the mouth and down into the throat where it is manifesting itself as a persistent, burning little itch. I’m getting sick.

In matters of personal health I blame everyone until I find the right person to blame. This is of course an overreaction, but the pretend-angst is a sort of self-soothing, self-medicating technique I’ve been working on these last several years. Besides, it is more proactive than saying “Sinuses” or “Allergies.” Which is hopefully all this amounts too.

But I’m just saying now that this week is going to be Coughy, Achy, Watery, Fatiguey and a few more of the dwarfs that were never cool enough to hang out with Snow White. Fire Marshall ordinance or not, she could have spent some time with those other characters. There were parks they could have visited together!

Anyway, class today, where we heard fine presentations on public relations and advertising. We’ll go visit our friends over at Intermark Group on Wednesday. The rest of today was spent making recruiting phone calls and doing various other things which will no doubt yield small results in big matters.

So I’ll just pass the time with various links I’ve been hoarding with some of the lesser dwarves and sinus symptoms these last few days.

One of my students shared this one, and it is awesome. 8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need. These include the sinceroid and sarcastises, which I would use every day.

Incidentally, punctuation or grammar humor is always welcome from a student. Makes us think our passion for this stuff is contagious.

Here’s a piece designed to make every journalist with arithmophobia feel better: Danger! Numbers in the newsroom — tips from Sarah Cohen on taming digits in stories. Find an anchor, she says:

A standard or goal – Ask yourself, “What would good look like?” For example, what would good GDP growth look like?

Historical numbers – Is there a golden period to which current numbers can be compared? Perhaps in the economy that might be the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Portion of whole – For example, at the time of the Million Man March in 1995, a turnout of 1 million black men would have represented 1/12th of all the black men in the country at the time.

Other places – How do other similar towns or companies compare?

A lot more at the link.

Here’s a great presentation on the functional art of Infographics:

Just a wealth of knowledge here; and here are the slides:

The Functional Art: Design and Infographics | Journalism Interactive Conference 2013 | journalisminteractive.com/2013/ from Journalism Interactive

From Poynter: How reporters can become better self editors, a topic we talk about a lot. No doubt I’ll make some hay out of this post in a class somewhere soon.

Hiding in public: How the National Archives wants to open up its data to Americans is a story from the Nieman Lab that generates a lot of responses. Interest! Intrigue! Fear! A challenge!

The National Archives is sitting on massive amounts of information — from specs for NASA projects to geological surveys to letters from presidents. But there’s a problem: “These records are held hostage,” said Bill Mayer, executive for research services for the National Archives and Records Administration.

“Hostage” might be a strong word for a organization responsible for 4.5 million cubic feet of physical documents and more than 500 terabytes of data, most which can be accessed online or by walking into one of their facilities around the country. But the challenge, Mayer explains, is making NARA’s vast stockpile more open and more discoverable. “They’re held hostage in a number of centers around the country — they’re held hostage by format,” Mayer said.

Fascinating stuff, but I’m glad that’s someone else’s challenge.

The Iwo Jima photo and the man who helped save it:

Soon after the photo’s publication, a story began to percolate that Rosenthal had staged the famous scene, that he had posed the men just so. The story followed Rosenthal to his death in 2006. It is whispered in various forms to this day.

Hatch can set you straight on this, just as he has been setting people straight for nearly 70 years.

Hatch enlisted in the Marines in 1939 and worked his way into its photographic unit. In late 1943, some 15 months before Iwo Jima, Hatch had waded ashore with the American invaders at Tarawa, carrying a hand-cranked 16mm camera.

[…]

Hatch came in with the first wave at Iwo Jima, a battle that killed nearly 6,000 Marines.

From that day to this one, he insists there was nothing posed about the flag photo. Though the events occurred a lifetime ago, Hatch speaks about them as if they were fresh in his memory. Hatch can swear like, well, a Marine, and he brooks no argument about what happened that day and thereafter.

What a man.

Finally, an interactive piece from Smithsonian: The Civil War, now in living color.

The photographs taken by masters such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner have done much for the public’s perception of the Civil War. But all of their work is in black and white. The battlefield of Gettysburg is remembered as a shade of grey and the soldiers as ghostly daguerreotype images. Photography was in its infancy during the time and colorizing photographs was rare and often lacked the detail of modern imagery.

John C. Guntzelman is changing that.

Not quite right, but gripping, spooky stuff. There are four pictures there for you to see.

And that’s all for today, but there will be more for you to see here tomorrow. Do come back.

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23
Feb 13

Travel day

It was off the main road, and off the road that became the main road when your sense adjusted. It was down off that, vertically down. Under a bridge, beneath an overpass. It was by the railroad. Not too far away from the Church of the Deliverance, if I recall, that I pulled into a dusty, unkempt yard and walked on to an ancient porch filled with the wrecked memories and peeling dreams of some long ago time. I knocked on the screen of this house and a small, frail old woman answered, still mostly in her curlers and wrapped up in her robe.

At first I was sure I’d disturbed her, but I came to realize over time that this was her general appearance these days. On this day, the first day, however, I was there to ask her about the worst thing in her world. Here was this skinny white kid standing on her porch and in the back room was her even skinnier son, and would she mind if I sat with him.

I was there, mostly, to watch him die.

Which is terribly dramatic, but that was the story I was writing for a terrific features class I took in undergrad. The professor wanted descriptive narrative, and I’ve thought a lot about that story today and yesterday. I’ve been at the SEJC conference in Tennessee with some of the Samford students, where the theme this year was “the power of narrative in a digital age.” We heard incredible speakers talk about the words that reshape everything, the images that set the story and they’d walked the students through exercises on how to build a narrative in a really easy, straightforward way. No need to be intimidated, take these four things — characters, moving through time, encountering an obstacle and acting until resolution — and you’re halfway to writing the story.

It is a great list. It works. You can tell masterful stories that way. For my personal narrative formula I would add two tangential things: smells and textures. Smells are so common and so active in our memory. Even if you aren’t at the scene of that school we learned about yesterday, the suggestion of mildew or cheap spaghetti sauce or sweaty students has a way of transporting you into the scene.

Textures can be that way too, and that was one of those things I learned by sitting with the guy who was struggling in the last days of his life. I spent time with him over the course of several weeks that term. He wasn’t much older than me, in his mid-late 20s, but he had the kind of cancer you can’t fight without a presidential insurance plan. To see where he was raised, where his mother brought him home to, it was obvious what would happen here. It was only a question of when and how badly.

But I’d found this family through Hospice. I met the local director and convinced her of my project and she found this old woman who was really not prepared to endure the process of burying her son, but had a great, weary strength about her, and a sad cheer that offset your earliest need to empathize with her. She had spirit and she had the Lord and she had her son. And, for some reason, she agreed when the Hospice director asked if I could come meet her son. He still had his smile, and Hospice was helping to make him comfortable and his entire world didn’t involve much beyond this crappy hospital bed and the four walls of the front room of his mother’s home. He was happy to have some different company for a while, I think.

I was so proud to know that guy. He was facing it head on by then, but that suggests a lot about what he’d probably already endured. He’d be perfectly still, talking with you, eyes open, smile on his face, eyes closed, still talking, and then asleep. He’d snore softly and wake up 15 minutes later and keep answering the same question, usually without a reminder.

I always thought it was very brave of his mother to leave her son alone with a stranger like that. I can’t imagine how the protective instinct, already so frazzled, must have felt about this kid, a student, asking to spend so much of her precious time with her boy. But then she used that time to nap, or get some things done around the house. She came to trust that at least he had someone to sit with him for a while. I was proud of that.

And I wrote this story, which was probably not nearly as good as I thought, and twice as bad as I remember. But I remember that I was very happy with it. I’d gone to talk to the guy a time or two without writing anything, just being friendly. I’d rush out and jot notes afterward. And one day I visited and did the real serious interview part, notebook, pen, cramping hands and all of that. And I went back another time to hang out with him, just intent on getting every detail about the place committed to memory. I paid the most fastidious attention to every crack in the ceiling and creak his bed made. I wrote in the story about the color of the walls and the softness of the guy’s hands and tried to describe his gentle, whistling snore. I didn’t know anything about writing about smells yet, but I described his mother and the way she looked around the room when we talked. I wrote about the guy’s hopes and his life and what he still wanted to do. I probably got some of his music into the story. I wrote about the angel sculptures that were hanging on the wall above him.

My professor asked me “What were they made of?”

Texture. That’s part of the narrative too.

On Google Maps, today, that house looks a lot different than it did almost 15 years ago. I should stop by sometime and see if they know what happened to that nice lady after her son passed away. I sent her a card, a note of sympathy and thanks. Never did ask her about those angels though.

Some things, I felt at the time, you should just be able to keep for yourself.

Anyway. We are all back home today. There was a big two hour faculty meeting I attended this morning, so I missed most of the day’s sessions at the conference, one on videography and another on snake handling. Hate that I missed it, as it was a long talk by the reporter of this magazine-style piece. I would have liked to been able to hear the entire presentation because Julia Duin, is on the faculty at Union and a three-time Pulitzer nominee. But I can rest easy knowing I have read perhaps both her story and the best book ever written about the topic, Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain.

The conference gave the students another awards luncheon, this one for the on-site competition. The Crimson’s sports editor won the top spot for sports writing. He was so excited he knocked over his chair standing to go get his certificate.

After that we made a quick stop at the bookstore and then spent far, far too long in the van. Party animals that these students are, they were all asleep before we’d gotten out of Tennessee. I don’t think I heard a word out of any of them until we got back into Jefferson County.

I made it home just after dark. It was nice to sit on the couch again, pet the cat and stare at nothing. Think I did that for most of the night.

Finally decided that I think they were plain white plaster angels. They’d been given a bit of discoloration by a little too much dust and a yellowing light bulb overhead. But they were with him all the same.

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22
Feb 13

At the Southeast Journalism Conference

We spent the day on the campus of Union University, home of the 2013 Southeast Journalism Conference. This is a two-day conference for undergraduates, and we’re fortunate enough to have four students here for instructional and inspirational presentations and various competitions.

The morning started with a presentation from Union’s Gene Fant, an English professor and dean, tell student-journalists about the 2008 tornado that devastated their campus. Fifty-one students were hospitalized, nine seriously hurt, but they all lived, even as firefighters told the students and staff to stop digging.

This is all appropriate for the conference because events like that can mark a place for years, even if the generations rotate out every fix or six autumns. But the theme of our conference is “The Power of Narrative: Journalism in the Digital Era” and Fant seques into lines like this one “Truth is among the most powerful elements … We cannot speak truth to power unless we speak truth in the first place.”

And then he winds up by saying “Treat truth as if truth were a person … Defend truth. Encourage truth … It always is a worthwhile pursuit.”

Fant was a nice start, but the start of the day, a day full of wonderful speakers, might have been the man that came after him. The Oregonian’s Steve Duin, a nationally renowned columnist, walked to the lectern after a video about the Un|Divided Project taking place at a failing Portland, Ore. school.

Duin starts out with “You never know when you will stumble upon the words that will change or reframe everything.” He tells us about the Roosevelt High girls basketball team. He’d read about a game where Roosevelt was beaten something like 70-10. One girl on the Roosevelt team had scored eight of their 10 points. This, he thought, would make a great story.

So he finally went to visit, to try to talk to the player, but found a school in a spiral, young women forgotten and their community in disarray. This was a story.

So he wrote about that. And those turned into the words that changed everything:

That, sports fans, is as inspirational a night as I’ve known for a long, long time.

Before a capacity crowd — 1,600 strong — the Roosevelt girls played their best basketball game of the season before losing 31-29 to Madison.

No one who was there, I suspect, will ever doubt again what an outpouring of love and support means for high-school kids. For one night, every move these girls made — every rebound, every shot, every hustling steal at mid-court — was celebrated.

For one night, the playing field was leveled, and the Roosevelt girls — yes, and the Madison girls, too — were cheered on by enthusiastic, caring adults who had no agenda, no unkind words, no investment in the final score.

Is it any surprise that Roosevelt — now 0-18 — played their hearts out? When I asked Monique Carlson, Roosevelt’s lone senior, to explain why they played so well on that dramatic stage, she said, “The support. Everyone was watching us. This is the most support we’ve ever had.”

But the sports story was only the beginning of a real story. Members of the community banded together, conspiring to take back the children in this school, which is where the Un|Divided Project comes in. Now they are making meals for the kids every week. And Duin’s details are the thing. Not just that these people feed hungry students, but that they did it under a ceiling held up by duct tape.

And then, sometimes the quote is the thing, like the student that comes up to the woman organizing this spaghetti dinner and says that this meal, this one simple dinner, is what he thinks about all week.

Duin quotes the woman who brought all of the volunteers together, by the hundreds, to try to turn this school around. He reads what he wrote in his column and you could see most everyone in a room of 400 college students sit up a bit straighter, “(W)e are called to love the world and the older I get, the more love looks like work.”

Photographer and videographer Larry McCormack of The Tennessean also delivered a lecture to the students, and he got right down to it, telling the students that if they think of themselves as just a reporter or photographer or copyeditor “You’re not going to last long.” So he launches into how his job has changed, saying his iPhone allows him to shoot a bit of video. “That buys me time” for traditional, high-quality photos.

He shows off some of his photographs and we all remind ourselves he’s been doing this for a good long while.

“Your perspectives,” he said, “aren’t obstacles. They are opportunities.”

Right about then our sports editor, Clayton Hurdle, grabbed this shot of Crimson editor Katie Willis teaching me all about photography.

We had lunch at Panera, and we discovered the Panera in Jackson, Tenn. is the best Panera in the world. Also, we were all hungry.

After that Clayton went off to his sports writing competition, Katie departed for a photography contest and then two other students, Megan and Catherine, set out for public relations and news writing contests.

I talked with faculty members about personal descriptives. I quoted Ferrol Sams and felt pretty good about it. If you don’t know why, add some of Sams’ work to your reading list. And you’re welcome.

David Simpson talked with the students about on-campus narrative in the afternoon session. He boils it down to four points: First, characters are (2.) moving through time while (3.) encountering an obstacle and (4.) acting until resolution.

I’d add textures and smells, which is something I learned in the best feature class I ever took. I’ll have to tell you about that tomorrow. But today Simpson gave the students an assignment and they all joined up with students from two other schools with one school’s characters, another’s issues and the third school’s obstacles. So the three groups I watched wrote a narrative of a ninja nun on an anti-STD and pornography crusade beginning at move-in day. It was entertaining.

Anthony Siracusa of Memphis was the last speaker of the afternoon, talking about the growing bicycling culture in his town.

Made me want to go ride my bike.

Siracusa said “No venue is too small if you want to advance your idea.”

He had a cycling column in the Commercial-Appeal for a time, while he worked on bikes in the tiniest of basement shops. He said that column had a lot to do with the change the cycling community has created in Memphis.

“Every time you advance your idea,” he said, “you make connections in people’s brains and sometimes their hearts.”

And then, “Once the truth gets the shoes on, you better watch out.”

I enjoyed it, but I like bikes.

At the Best of the South banquet this evening they fed us in a buffet line and handed out awards based on more than 400 students from more than 30 schools.

Samford won four awards, including best magazine:

The students picked on me for taking the safe photograph there, something Larry McCormack cautioned against. So, good, they were paying attention.

We celebrated with milkshakes.

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21
Feb 13

Road trip

I got a rental van. It arrived a bit later than it should, so we left precisely 14 minutes after I wanted to. But, still, getting on the road at 3:46 when you were hoping for 3:32 isn’t bad when you consider you’re pulling in six people’s schedules and the general We’ll be there at 2:30 or 3:15-ness of the rental car guy.

We live in an amazing time if you think of it. I looked at glowing words on this flat screen, picked up a hunk of plastic and called a hotel, booked four rooms, found more words on the screen and made arrangements for a rental van. (Of course they called me in return three times, but that’s trivial.) I arranged all of the paperwork, procured the department’s blessing, recruited four students and a colleague, made them all sign the inevitable waivers and now we are bouncing all over western Alabama, Mississippi and western Tennessee.

Here we’d stopped for gas in Tupelo:

Brother, if your tank is low you better stop in Tupelo. It is a long walk in either direction if it purrs, conks and dies.

Our rental performed admirably, even with a distinct twang in Tennessee as we drove on the Rockabilly Highway, a 55-mile stretch of Highway 45, from Mississippi to Interstate 40. Look, I’m the guy who always wonders about the stories behind the names we put on roads, who regularly rides the actual Lost Highway and still does it with wonderment. So believe me, being on something called the Rockabilly Highway was pretty great.

Apparently there are Rockabilly murals here and there along the Rockabilly Highway, but it was dark and raining — which sounds like a song in of itself — so we didn’t see any. Shame that highway doesn’t stretch into Mississippi, though. Jumpin’ Gene Simmons was from Tupelo:

That video is understated and terrific, except our disc jockey didn’t walk it all the way up to the post. Everything else is perfect.

Anyway, we made it to beautiful and cosmopolitan Jackson, Tenn. around 8 p.m., just in time to register for the Southeast Journalism Conference. It runs tomorrow and Saturday and is a good trip for the undergraduates. They hear inspirational messages from talented professionals, met peers, eat free food, win awards and so on.

We had dinner at a place called Redbone’s right across from our hotel. They made a nice Casear Salad, and one of the students complimented their ribs. The band was good, if loud. And then they did a Beatles’ song that might have been a bit ambitious for two guys running their percussion through a keyboard. But they did enjoy themselves, and seemed to know they did Sweet Baby James just right.

Checked into the hotel mostly uneventfully. Everyone crashed into their rooms. I ironed in mine. Very exciting night, really. But tomorrow will be a busy day.

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20
Feb 13

Took a field trip today

More trip planning, thing doing, list checking, check making.

As in the writing of checkmarks next to things on the list. If you’re looking for money, this is not your site. So sorry about that, too.

Received a visit from a former editor of the Crimson today. Nice to see Drew drop by, giving me grief about the state of the Auburn-Florida sporting rivalry and inspiring me about his plans. He’s a sharp guy ready to go out and conquer his corner of the world. (If you need a sports writer, this is the right blog. You should look up Drew.)

We do have the good fortune to enjoy a fine caliber of students in our program, to be sure. They keep us young.

My class today visited the Alabama Media Group, as I might have mentioned elsewhere. It was a chance to seeold friends in a new place, the first time I’ve visited with my former coworkers at al.com since they made the AMG shift last fall. This was the first time I’ve seen them anywhere besides the Martin Biscuit Building in Lakeview.

They are on the north side now, in the Birmingham News building — which is now for sale.

If you’re on the market for a lot of open floorspace in that is less than 10 years old, I know of a deal for you!

Anyway, lovely and talented folks. I always enjoy visiting them. I didn’t get to see everyone today, but I’ll be back for lunch tomorrow. Of course we heard from AMG’s director of community news, Bob Sims:

At one point a student asked him a question and Bob used, almost word-for-word, the same answer I’d offered to this class on Monday about where they should be focusing right now. I love it when a plan comes together.

Anyway the sun was coming in through that light, over the church across the street and stretching out across this open work area and the AMG folks talked about their numbers and marketing and coverage and where they are planning to go in the future. Students asked good questions. It all came off famously. I was happy to see old friends and to see them looking well.

I did get to visit with Brian and Justin — guys I’ve known for almost a decade now — and some of my newer online friends today. We sat in a corner, the three of us, for a time and we made random references to pranks we once pulled one another and talked almost exclusively about how old we are. So it begins.

Things to read: Jeremy Gray, a local crime writer whom I admire, is doing a little bit of historist work. Journalism-history, that’s not a bad way to spend a slow night on the beat. This story reaches all the way back to the 1920s, involves ax murders, assaults on immigrants and interracial couples, truth serums, three death sentences, reprieves, new trials and several enduring mysteries, all nearly vanished from the modern collective memory. The story is a great read, which defies a brief and cogent excerpt, but do give it a look. I’ll just leave you with this from The trials of ‘The Axemen of Birmingham’: Drug-induced confessions lead to winding courtroom drama:

Descendants of some victims still live in the Birmingham area and at least one, Butch Baldone, a downtown tailor for 53 years, said black people were unfairly targeted in the investigation.

Baldone’s grandparents, Charles and Mary Baldone and their daughter, Virginia, then 14, were assaulted in their 10th Avenue North shop on July 13, 1921. All three survived, but refused to identify their attackers.

While the five black people injected with scopolamine reportedly confessed to the crime, Baldone said he believes the attack and “at least 90 percent” of the others were the work of an Italian mafia that was trying to plant roots in Birmingham.

“Black people got along with Italians because they were the only ones who would give them credit. The white man didn’t want their business,” Baldone said.

[…]

“The Baldones found the people who really did it and, to put it simply, they don’t exist anymore,” Butch Baldone said. “That was the closest the mafia ever came to Birmingham.”

Just so pat and perfect.

From Reuters, “Keep your so-called workers,” U.S. boss tells France:

The CEO of a U.S. tire company has delivered a crushing summary of how some outsiders view France’s work ethic in a letter saying he would have to be stupid to take over a factory whose staff only put in three hours work a day.

Titan International’s Maurice “Morry” Taylor, who goes by “The Grizz” for his bear-like no-nonsense style, told France’s left-wing industry minister in a letter published by Paris media that he had no interest in buying a doomed plant.

“The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three,” Taylor wrote on February 8 in the letter in English addressed to the minister, Arnaud Montebourg.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S- … what’s that?

“Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour wage and ship all the tires France needs,” he said. “You can keep the so-called workers.”

Oh, right, the American way.

Finally, some people in higher education have been writing about social media, lately, if you’re interested.

Tomorrow: Road trip.