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journalism

Downright magical

Here’s an almost-interesting piece about the future of how you watch sports. You work through the need for cable for your sports fix, baseball’s success with streaming, how other leagues follow what MLB does and the need for cable. Cable is always important:

ESPN might be the pied piper for a different kind of strategy, though. Rather than cutting cable and paying only for what you want (the “a la carte” model), you’d pay one price and get everything, everywhere. Yes, you need cable to get WatchESPN, but once you’ve logged in you’re effectively untethered from your TV. Your cable bill buys you access to all the things you want to watch, wherever you want to watch them, on whatever device you choose. And because it’s the company setting the restrictions for the leagues, ESPN’s platform doesn’t have weird local blackouts, or odd weekend restrictions — you just watch ESPN as you always have.

The Verge is also running a War for your TV series. Stock Gumshoe is using Television 2.0 and the new golden age, and really the The $2.2 trillion war for your living room. There are also the game consoles and emerging gadgets.

And it all sort of leads to this piece, which is worth reading in full and defies excerpting, really. But:

Because the percentage of households with a cable or satellite subscription is now declining for the first time in the history of television.

3 million Americans have already cut the cord, including 425,000 in the past 3 months alone.

And according to Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger, those “cord-cutters” are joined by a new group: the “cord-nevers.” A full 83.1% of new households are choosing to live without pay-TV.

[…]

Robert Johnson said about the shaky state of the cable industry last month at a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“In the next two or three years, something’s got to give. At some point, the consumer is going to say enough is enough.”

He’s one of the most powerful men in the pay-TV business, warning his fellow fat cats that their bloated, inefficient industry may collapse by 2014…

TV isn’t just the next great transformation of the Internet Age… it’s the BIGGEST one of all.

Since no one likes their cable service, let us say bring it on.

And, of course, it will change things for us in the classroom. Not everything, but quite a bit.

Newspaper critiques. Budget meetings. Award nominations. Well that’s different for a Wednesday. We submit news clippings from the Crimson to a couple of different contests every year.

The deadline for one of those contests is coming up. We’ve gotten about two dozen awards from this organization in the last three years, so we sat around late into the evening finding the best examples today. Next week I’ll have to send them to the judges.

OK, we sat around for part of the afternoon. The rest of it I think I just rambled on for a while, too. It happens.

If I ever ran for office I might be a micromanager. I visit rest stops in my travels — I have to take breaks to stretch my shoulder and back — and the photography is … dated. Not the best image to share with people visiting our fine state. It is probably 14 pages down on the list of priorities, but still, this could be easily fixed.

The one nearest our home has photographs of the football stadium without upper decks. That’s a 32 year old photograph, at least.

Here’s a photo from a rest area in almost the perfect center of the state. It is encouraging you to visit Orange Beach, a lovely place to be most any day, but on this day in 1981 … well, downright magical:

People see that picture and think “Now there’s a group of somebodies. What a great life.” But they don’t realize they haven’t talked in a lifetime.

She’s a new grandmother. He’s now a guy who is coming to question all these years in sales, but he’s been pretty good at it. They gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work out. They sent cards to each other on all the big days for the first few years after, she always loved the memories of that trip to the coast, he’s silently been kicking himself for drinking too much and remembering too little … but they somehow lost track in that way people do.

Sad, really. She stopped at that rest stop one day, her kids had to go potty. She walked right by that photo.

“I need to go to the beach,” she thought. But she didn’t make the connection.

Or they could be happily married. The new grandkid could be theirs. He might have been a terrible salesman, but really found his stride in retail.

We’ll never know what became of them. But that photograph might live on forever.

Visit me on Twitter. And a new picture on the Tumblr today, too.

Friday / journalism / links / music / Twitter / video — Comments Off
9
Nov 12

A brief collection of things

You’ve seen some version of this commercial, perhaps:

That Lebron James spot uses “Keep On Pushing” a 1964 hit from Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions. Wonderful stuff.

But that’s like a 1964 spot where NBA megastar Bill Russell moves around town as the 1916 Al Jolson hit “You’re a Dangerous Girl” plays:

Hard to imagine in the 1960s, eh?

Have you seen this Washington Post analysis of how the election was won? Excellent work they produced this week.

Have you seen the post-Sandy cover of New York Magazine? It is an incredible helicopter-at-night shot. Poynter has a great description:

Baan made the image Wednesday night after the storm, using the new Canon 1D X with the new 24-70mm lens on full open aperture. The camera was set at 25,000 ISO, with a 1/40th of a second shutter speed.

“[It was] the kind of shot which was impossible to take before this camera was there,” Baan said.

Unreal.

Battlestar Blood and Chrome, now airing as webisodes. Better than a Friday night slot.

My shoulders and neck are a mess. I’m going to go sit very still.

journalism / links / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
Nov 12

The election paper

They finally finished their paper somewhere in the 3 a.m. hour. Got two election stories on the inside. Got a tidbit on the lone Supreme Court race and the congressional district that is home to the campus. Proud of them:

Left a big typo in the cutline, though. And a little more planning would have meant they’d finished this before 3 a.m., but they did a fine job. Proud of them.

Check out the paper at samfordcrimson.com

iPhone / journalism / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
6
Nov 12

Election day

Autumn is here:

You can’t put that in a picture: the smells, the smiling sun, the sometimes crisp air, the crunch of leaves, the smell of that first wood fire in someone’s yard competing with the smell of a fresh lawn. You can’t capture that in a photograph and you can’t share it in a video. But we surely do try.

It was also election day today. I visited my polling place after breakfast. We vote in a hotel. The parking lot was full and so was the overflow lot next to them.

They have the sign-in stations organized by the alphabet, of course. I visit the Q-S line, which had three people in it. I was through the line quickly. Here’s my ID, there I am in your roster. Sign here and take your ballot.

She said they’d been busy since they opened at 7 a.m.

I sat down at a folding table. I was soon joined by a young lady who was making her first vote. She was pretty excited by this prospect, and busy asking her mother what all the amendments on the ballot meant. Her mother didn’t much know either. We had quite a few, and they aren’t written for a low reading level.

I ran my ballot through the machine, watched with pleasure as the tally ticked up one line. I politely turned down the “I voted” sticker, which seemed to throw the nice lady for a loop.

Someone lost their Voter ID registration card. I returned it to the help desk — there was a help desk — feeling it was part of my civic duty. Hopefully they can mail it to the lady.

I received emails from some of my students who were telling me they may be late to class. They were going to vote. One of those extra perks about teaching college students: they’re all getting their first vote this year.

They all made it to class on time, too.

We had a guest speaker in class today. At the end of his presentation there were still two more hours before the polls closed. I encouraged all of the local students, if they had not voted yet, to consider going to do so. “It will mean more to you as you get older.”

Our guest speaker agreed.

Went upstairs to the Crimson office. The news editor was designing a front page for a Romney win and another for an Obama win. I convinced her of the wisdom of designing a third one, a question mark. She started working on that.

Of course the race was all but over by the time I returned from dinner. They’re working long into the night on the paper.

I remember my first election coverage in 1996. I was writing for my college paper. I attended a county watch party. It was held in the same hotel where I voted today. A very inebriated lady of considerable local influence spent most of the party hitting on me. I left there to go to the other party’s headquarters and spoke with a newly elected congressman on the phone. From my place I called a new senator. His staff told me I would be a terrible reporter. I asked too many questions. It was a badge of honor.

I worked on that story late into the night, typing until morning time. I think I had two front page stories that issue.

Elections are like Christmas. And that’s one of the nights the recovering journalist misses being in a working newsroom.

I remember sleeping in my car for two hours on the night of the 2000 election. That was after watching the deadest watch party ever. The candidate hadn’t talked to the media or much of anyone, felt the whole ordeal was basically hers because she deigned run and was stunned when she lost badly. I feel asleep in my car that night, though, after working probably 20 hours, listening to the radio in the early morning. When I nodded off we didn’t know anything about what was really going on in Florida. I woke up before the sunrise to find we still didn’t know anything about what was happening in Florida. I worked all that Wednesday, but don’t remember much about it on zero sleep.

Like Christmas.

Maybe I’ll get a little more rest tonight.

journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
30
Oct 12

Journalism in the clouds

Journalism, journalism, journalism. My day was just eaten up with the stuff.

All of the Sandy material in the world, it must be read, if not looked at. I find it harder and harder to look at hurricane damage. Tornado damage isn’t easy, but hurricanes, I’d rather just look away, if only I was allowed. Sometimes the work supersedes the want. Tornado damage, though, has a different scope. Devastating, sure, but to fewer people. The volume of a hurricane’s destruction is hard to comprehend and that can be a lot to bear.

Tornadoes? Not quite as bad. Or at least that’s what I thought until the giant tornado carved a path between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham last year. I’ve watched a lot of tornadoes. Chased a few, even. Seeing that monster on television was hard to watch, though. This one, from the ground during the same storm, I’ll never forget. The rotation is just behind the mall and you can tell from the shot how hard they were fighting against the wind. Those are just tornadoes, though, right?

The humanistic response outweighs the journalistic impulse and I think I’d be happy never to cover a hurricane, thanks. Just look at the scale:

Showed that in class today. And then we did Associated Press style for the rest of the afternoon. Then I had to give an interview to a student who is working on a project about the phone hacking scandal in London. She was a freshman, but she’s clearly done a lot of research and put a lot of thought into the project. It was a pleasant surprise. I figured we’d talk about ethics and process. Behave better, this is how this is supposed to work. She wanted to talk about organization. OK then, there were many corrupted people acting unscrupulously, and it seems to go all the way to the top.

From time to time someone wants to come and interview me about how some aspect of the working media operates. That’s wonderful and we should have more of that. This young lady pulled out her digital recorder and her pages of notes and I knew I was going to be talking for a while. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully I gave her something useful. And so we did.

Then, of course, tonight is the night the student-journalists put out their paper, too. So I stuck around for that so I could answer important stylistic questions like “Do you like this? Or that?”

There’s also reading things like:

Lance Armstrong shows why the disruption in journalism matters

Journalism ethics in a digital age

And my favorite, Drone journalism set for takeoff – once they’re permitted to use our airspace

I want one:

And here’s an entry-level, legal in the U.S. model, the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 It has limited range and altitude, of course, but it also has two cameras on it.

Here’s a video from a slightly more expensive make, shooting footage over Detroit:

Clearly you could get some great storm damage footage this way.