journalism


29
Oct 12

Hurricane Sandy

A high school football team takes in a bullied girl as one of their own. Make sure you stay for her money quote. Kids these days.

Some Hurricane Sandy things? Sure, I ran across plenty of those today.

The real picture today from the Tomb of the Unknown. That was the first of many photos that tricked readers. There’s a local boy on this duty assignment, by the way. Makes us all proud.

Livestream offers a crowdsourced approach to Sandy. Lots of great videos and photographs there.

Google’s crisis map is just hinting at things to come. Via Digital Journal:

Its crisis map is pooling Hurricane Sandy data to inform visitors about the hurricane’s path, emergency shelters and crowdsourced YouTube videos.

If you want to track where Sandy is heading in the next 48 hours, Google’s new layered map is a good place to start. It collects info from the National Hurricane Center, the American Red Cross and its own YouTube videos to let us know the latest details on this powerful storm.

Want to hack a hurricane? Huffington Post has details on who’s doing what.

Insurers estimate $10 billion in damages. Here’s to hoping premature estimates are … premature.

Check out Andrew Kaczynski’s
Sandy Tumblr, where you’ll find plenty of valuable information.

The Wind Map is especially popular on breezy days, as you might imagine.

Big storm or not, there is always the media. And the hype didn’t start with cable television. E.B. White, whom I studied and still reference in classes, was complaining about radio weather hype in 1954. (Here’s a modern equivalent, by the way.)

New York has had big storms before. Here’s the 11-foot surge in 1960.

And now to a night of watching cable news and learning more from Twitter.

Update: All of our folks made it through with little trouble. The in-laws lost their cable and Internet connection. The Yankee’s godparents lost their power. All very fortunate, really.


25
Oct 12

APA journlism panel

We held a panel at Samford today for the journalism students. Publishers and editors from papers across the state came in to visit as part of a visit with the Alabama Press Association. Pictured here are Dee Ann Campbell from the Choctaw Sun-Advocate, a weekly in southwest Alabama, and Leada Gore, who just left the editor’s desk in Hartselle to join Alabama Media Group as the statewide military reporter:

panelists

Hopefully it was very insightful for the students. If nothing else they heard the industry leaders telling them the same sort of things we in the faculty tell them. Stuff like:

The secret to getting an internship: keep bugging the person in charge without being a pest.

Learn the skills that you’re taught in school. Then expect to learn many more different skills on the job.

There is a story everywhere. You just have to listen and watch for it.

Bring ideas. Don’t wait for your editor to give you leads.

Get ready to work hard and do a bit of everything.

Don’t think you’ll get to go home at 5.

Writing is writing, but design, photography and videography are important. No one just writes.

Don’t limit yourself (to a style or beat).

Write wherever you have the opportunity to write.

If you don’t read, read, read, you can’t write at all.

Look at the way things are designed. It is having an eye that you can only develop over time if you pay attention.

There is a degree of flexibility that you won’t find in other jobs. This is different every day.

For a young reporter to have a sense of news judgement, you’ve got to develop that, and you do that by reading, meeting people, talking and listening.

Start looking for a job now. Don’t wait until April.

Read their (newspaper’s) copy. Get familiar with the publication, style and coverage.

You can’t have enough internships.

Student newspapers are great, but you need to treat that like a job.

It was a fine panel. We hope to put another one together for the public relations students in the spring.


23
Oct 12

Pictures, lots of pictures

Did a photojournalism presentation for my class today. I showed the Taylor Morris photo essay I mentioned yesterday. I handed out some notes. I showed off some audio/visual slide presentations, silly stuff really.

I talked about all of these photos for an awfully long time:

If you’ve been visiting the site — or lurking in the photo gallery section — over the years you’ve probably seen many of those.

Just remember, some of the shots in that slideshow are meant to be bad. Most of them are average, at best. I told the students today that I had one photojournalism class with a brilliant professor and another photography class with another talented teacher, but I’ve had photos sprinkled in newspapers and magazines and on websites and in books here and there over the years. Not because I’m a great photographer. Click through there, you’ll see.

I’m a serviceable photographer, I told the students. Being there, researching the subject matter, knowing how to tell a story visually, anticipating the action, knowing your equipment, understanding a handful of basic photographic techniques and having extra batteries … that counts.

Link bait from the school blog: What will the iPad mini mean for journalism? I wrote that on my phone. Technology is amazing.


22
Oct 12

Padding with pictures

Nothing but pictures and slideshows and more photos and then some camera things. I’ve stared at so many photographs today I’m not sure what is in focus any more. This one is going in tomorrow’s presentation as the thrill of victory:

SpringGarden

That was in 2008. Time flies. She’s gone on to college, made the dean’s list several times and probably graduated by now.

Twitter! For grades! It isn’t just for your breakfast anymore.

It hasn’t been about breakfast since roughly ever, but people that don’t understand it tend to default to such things. A television producer asked me once if I could learn as much about news on Twitter as I could on television. I told him of all of the tidbits I’d learned that day — there happened to be a plane crash and I knew as much or more as you’d get in a television recap of any story — and apologized for not knowing more; I hadn’t been online as much as I normally was.

I think I sold him. But I digress. There is a study that suggests “>Twitter is good for learning:

(C)ollege students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades.

“Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice,” said Greenhow, who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers. “It’s changing the way we experience what we read and what we write.”

[…]

Greenhow analyzed existing research and found that Twitter’s real-time design allowed students and instructors to engage in sharing, collaboration, brainstorming and creation of a project. Other student benefits included learning to write concisely, conducting up-to-date research and even communicating directly with authors and researchers.

I have a Twitter paper that will be published later this year. It will be more about the communal nature of the tool. I look forward to telling you all about it.

I’ll be using this photo essay in class tomorrow. This is the story of a naval EOD who became only the 5th quadruple amputee survivor at Walter Reed, but also his long road back and the love he’s walking with once again. Amazing story, all right there in pictures.

That Buzzfeed piece has turned his friend and photographer, Tim Dodd, into a star. “The site went from boasting 220 views per day at its peak, to 36,000 views per day literally overnight.”

And then The Chive got hold of it. They say they’ve raised $250,000 for Morris in a matter of days.

Media law: SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte on the creep of Hazelwood:

When Hazelwood was decided, First Amendment advocates comforted themselves that the ruling affected only minors enrolled in K-12 schools – and then only in the limited “curricular” setting, such as a class-produced newspaper. That was a logical reading of the case and, as time has proven, an overly optimistic one.

[…]

The creep of Hazelwood onto college campuses is troubling because, in practice, courts regard Hazelwood as a “rational-basis-minus” level of review, under which censorship decisions need only reside in the deferentially viewed vicinity of reasonableness.

[…]

That level of control would be unthinkable in college, where principles of academic freedom are widely accepted to give instructors the latitude to air provocative and even offensive topics. But the inescapable conclusion – that a student could be disciplined for speech that would be constitutionally protected if uttered by a nonstudent – is equally unsustainable. If words are inappropriate for a college audience and might be confused for the government’s speech when uttered by a student, then they are doubly so when said by an adult authority figure.

Quick, fun read: Superman quits the paper.

Tomorrow I’ll use this picture as an argument for taking your camera everywhere:

truckfire

Took that picture five years ago and remember it like it was yesterday. Not for the picture. I just happened upon that as I drove to a visitation.


16
Oct 12

Tuesdays go so fast

An overcast, almost cool day. No wonder I saw cider at the store. We’re not there yet, but soon, I’m sure.

Saw this guy on the road this morning. Always nice to see them moving sedately down the interstate:

firetruck

Saw this guy on a support column this evening. Always nice to see them wait for me to get the best shot I can, which is to say a blurry, fuzzy, nighttime snapshot off my iPhone:

insect

In between I taught a class, arranged a big meeting with several publishers for next week, helped a student with a story, talked cutlines and all of the other rewarding things that go into a Tuesday. Life is pretty good, indeed.

Some things from the other blog:

A tweet to start your day

Preventing plagiarism

Looking for a new venue? Tumblr on over

What’s wrong with this video?

Clery Act data

More on Twitter, and something new on Tumblr tomorrow.