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journalism

journalism / links / Monday / Samford — Comments Off
26
Nov 12

No ostriches were harmed in this post

Have to love a deadline journalist. One of my jobs is to coordinate the coordination that is involved in coordinating nominations for student journalism awards. It leans a bit toward tedium sometimes, but our department likes to brag on award-winning students. We have quite a few worth such young men and women and so we do the contests because we want our share. Journalists like awards.

One of the better contests we enter has an odd holiday deadline this year. The nominations were due today. This could have somewhat put a crimp in the implementation phase considering how everyone had several days off last week and that goes against the very last minute nature of every journalist you’ve ever met.

So for weeks I’ve been sending my colleagues emails. Remember the rules, here’s what we have to do. Please have these things to me by this time. The deadline is 5 p.m. Monday.

I spent much of the day finalizing my portion of the contest. It is all online now, a big improvement. Once upon a time this took folders, a stenographer, two notary publics a series of semaphore motions, stamps, labels and ink obtained from the inner lining of an ostrich egg. That was a two day process.

I mean just curing the ink from the ostrich eggs.

This was of course all done after the bird had hatched.

So yes, selecting nominees still takes a bit of time, but I have a marvelous committee that makes that happen. And now, this year, it is simply a matter of finding, selecting, renaming and uploading the correct PDFs in the many categories. This only takes a few hours. (There are many categories.)

I received a phone call around noon or so from one of my colleagues with his nominees. I received an email from another at 3 p.m. with his nominees. At 4:46 I sent off the final document.

At 5:03 I received another email from the last colleague. He had no nominees this year. Well then.

We nominated student-journalists in 18 of 30 categories. We should have at least a few wins in there, hopefully.

You can see all of their work at the Crimson and SNN and various other corners of the Samford net.

Something new on Tumblr, there’s always something on Twitter and maybe on Google+ if we’re lucky.

journalism / links / overwriting / Samford / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Nov 12

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.