journalism « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

journalism

“You are pretty strong … for a professor”

I spent a few moments loading up a queue with posts for my Samford blog. Here are two I wrote today, a morning tweet, which I think might become a new feature. There’s also a little post about reverse publishing.

Here are a few more things I wrote, last week, that I neglected to cross-post here:

The business of the business

Digital first, the only way?

On the big switch in local media

Also, I noticed that the particular them I’m using there allows for rotating banners. (Apparently I like them, no?) So I’m loading up on campus shots, which is probably the best part of that blog.

Spent some time in the library today. Spent some time writing letters.

I visited city hall. I learned that while there is the old saying “You can’t fight city hall” you can write a check there.

I had to visit the City Revenue Office, which looks more like a hospital’s information desk. There was a nice lady there who took my check. I needed little tags that would signal the garbage crew to pick up my dead appliances. Stick them on, roll the old washer and dryer out to the curb and, come morning, they’ll all be gone.

That doesn’t even give you time to be sentimental about it. “I had you, washer and dryer, for about 10 years, four homes and countless loads of laundry. Just think of all the dates you helped me get! I’m going to … I promised myself I wouldn’t … sniff … ” So it is good that the system moves so fast; that would just be silly.

So while I’m working on a small project for a guy this evening The Yankee says “Someone is taking our stuff.”

I walk outside and meet Mr. Lauderdale, one of our elderly neighbors who talks fast and thinks big. He’s a retired engineer, worked for AT&T for more than three decades and about half as many corporate names. One of his friendly spies in the neighborhood saw the old appliances and gave him a call. He drove his pickup down the road and there he was, trying to get this stuff in the bed by himself.

So I helped him. Turns out his son is an attorney, his daughter-in-law is a professor of some sort. I told him I was a professor too. And he said “You are pretty strong … for a professor.”

I was moving things one-handed, bad shoulder and all that.

Nice guy. He gave me tips for how to fix some things. Told me precisely what it would cost. Told me how much a telephone pole costs. Gave me a brief history of a river in northwest Alabama. Let me go back inside just in time for dinner.

And now I’ll copyedit a journal article into the early morning hours. Living the dream.

iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
11
Oct 12

I mentioned three desserts below

Happy 10/11/12 day. Do you know where you were at 7:08:09? How about 1314:15?

This is Homecoming Weekend at Samford. Because of this and the fall break landing in the same week the student-journalists at The Crimson are publishing a paper tomorrow. So they’re putting it to bed tonight.

See? Here’s proof.

So I watched them put a bit of that together. I saw the lady that works at the local deli. She hadn’t been there the last two times I’d visited.

I thought you’d moved on, I said.

“No, I’ll never get away. Unless it is to start my own place, Liz’s. We’d have banana pudding and red velvet cake. That’s what the people here always make me bring to the potlucks.”

I promised I’d show up twice a week if she did that.

Watched part of the vice-presidential debate, but on mute because, as the rest of the world just learned, Vice President Biden says a lot more with his body than his mouth.

Had a very nice talk with the editor of the paper. She is a smart, driven young woman. Quiet at first, but vividly funny. She aspires to be a photographer, and is very talented. She’s worked for me for three years now, and our department is fortunate to have her.

We have a lot of students like that. Seems like we’re always saying that of someone. “We’re fortunate to have a lady like that in the program” or “We’re going to flunk him so he has to stay another year.”

She runs the paper much like an executive, setting the course and letting the staff do their work. And they’ve come along nicely in a short time. So now I’m going to challenge them to work even harder, make something even better. They are conscientious and diligent and I believe they will soon be making something they are really proud of.

Tonight she asked me what I thought they could do. Now she has a list. And probably regrets asking that question.

But we also discuss things like coning.

People have too much pocket change, apparently.

friends / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
1
Oct 12

We know these things because of the Internet

Allie would like to thank you for taking part in another successful Catember. The categories are archived in a reverse chronological order, but you might be interested in seeing three entire years of Catember joy. You would start right here.

She would never let on, but I think Allie likes being famous on the Internet. She pretends to be annoyed by some of the cameras — the iPhone in particular, though she is very patient with DSLRs — but she is very proud of the attention. So when I told her this weekend that Catember was almost over — she’s a cat, she doesn’t read calendars — she was a bit sad:

Cats are tough, though. She’ll bounce back soon.

Something new is the Alabama Media Group, which is launching this week. There is a lot of criticism in the fall air, but some people have to do that so they can later point out they’ve been screaming the loudest. This is largely untrodden ground that the people at AMG are walking, but I know those folks at al.com and many of the people at the three papers that are used to producing the old daily miracle. Give them a bit of time and they’ll do some impressive work.

So it is a big week in local news. First, on college campuses everywhere, the Clery Act reports are due.

Can The Boston Globe and MIT hack the future of news together? Maybe for them. But I have this growing suspicion that these answers will all be locally customized:

“In the long term, maybe we’ll come up with something that will matter to the organization, to the bottom line,” he said. “In the short term, it’s just really cool to have these cool ideas floating around.”

Marstall said his goal is to have experimental modules that readers can play with on Boston.com and provide feedback to the Globe Lab. The lab was created for the purpose of exploring ideas that could be transformed into products for the Globe, or tools that could be helpful in reporting, Marstall said. The additional manpower, and brainpower, provided by MIT, will accelerate that, he said.

The reason a handful of news organizations have created their own research and development labs is to have people working on new ideas outside of the day-to-day business concerns of journalism, Moriarty said.

Seems like Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products at the Globe, agrees, doesn’t it?

Pew: After email, getting news is the most popular activity on smartphones, tablets Why are tablets good? These findings:

Another key finding: Almost one-third of people who acquire tablets find themselves reading more news from more sources than before.

What they’re reading is also interesting. Almost three-fourths of tablet news readers consumed in-depth news articles at least sometimes, with 19 percent saying they do so daily.

Here are the revenue notes, from that same Pew study.

I tell students you don’t write question leads or question headlines. Only very, very occasionally, I say, are they appropriate. Here might be an example: Are we already in a recession?

Most of the time and for most people, the difference between no growth and contraction probably doesn’t mean that much. However, we are in a much different situation now than we were in 2007. The Federal Reserve has more or less gone all in with its open-ended quantitative easing. The government’s fiscal mechanism is paralyzed and a large portion of the electorate has no appetite for further fiscal stimulus. If the American economy were to go into a so-called “double-dip” recession the government would be especially hard-pressed to drag us out. It would be a huge blow to the nation’s confidence and would lead to shrinking government revenues and further net job loss in both the public and private sectors.

For those reasons, it’s more than a little frightening that we’re seeing a spate of depressing numbers that could signal a recession on the horizon — or that one is already here.

Read the whole thing.

I mentioned the other day how an old online friend popped up on Twitter out of the blue last week.

The Internet is a lovely thing, really. Tonight I’ve been chatting with a guy I used to play soccer with. He was a defender, probably the fastest guy I played with, who had the natural ability that comes with working really hard at something. We played with a few very gifted guys, but he made himself as good or better than all of them. He was never afraid of work that was hard or to put in the time to make something good.

Good guy. We grew up together. We avoided trouble together. We probably caused some, too. Here’s a grainy and bad picture of an OK picture. This is some birthday of mine, probably 12, I’d guess.

We were at a restaurant called China Doll. For my birthday, and by then I’d gotten to that awkward feeling of people giving me presents, he gave me a knife he found in a scabbard he’d made. It was a very nice and thoughtful gift.

We lost touch somewhere just after high school, which is one of those small things that shouldn’t happen, but now he’s popped up on Facebook.

He’s got a beautiful wife and a handsome son. He’s in Afghanistan and, for him, that seems just about perfect. (Told him I was teaching journalism. He said he’d always thought I would have made a great comedian.)

I see his pictures and he looks exactly the same, just a little more intense. There’s a picture of him and his mother on there that I could write full essays about.

He’s got plans to open a paradise resort, hopefully some time next year after he rotates out. Told him I’d swing by and help him hammer things.

Hey, I can bend nails in paradise, too.

Auburn / football / friends / history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / site / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
29
Sep 12

A Saturday mishmash

Something I wrote, and photographs I took, last spring made it on to the Smithsonian Magazine’s website.

It has some formatting problems that weren’t there in my submission or the version they returned to double check. No matter. There’s a better, longer version, published here, but, still, Smithsonian.

This is hardly the biggest thing in the world or even the best publication news I’ve had in the last month. But I get to say I’m published on the Smithsonian’s site.

Again.

Back in the old days — and I mean about 1996, which is in no way old, or far enough removed to suggest they are the old days — I perfected my dry sarcasm and speed typing on a chatroom site that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. As we have learned is the norm, a bigger company bought the little company. They made changes, ruined the aesthetic and people left. Some of those people stuck together on ICQ. My ICQ number, which I can’t grab at just this moment, was shockingly low. But the friends stuck together, from Maryland and out west and the Deep South and somewhere in London and in Australia.

One by one they all sort of fell away. Life demanded them. They grew bored. They lost their password or their Internet connection. And finally that group was down to just two people. So there was me and this Australian lady. We’d talked for a couple of years by then. Carol was friendly, and liked folk music and all manner of interesting decorative styles. She worked in the government in Canberra and had a big burly husband who sounded hysterical.

We even talked on the phone a few times. We discussed the virtues of the Australian accent in the United States and my accent, which she found charming, in Australia. I was well underway in my broadcast career by then and thinking a lot about sound. Carol figured I could do very well in Australia. I hatched the sort of plan that you never even try to implement — summer in Australia wooing girls with my southern accent and then running from the winter there to have summer at home in the States, wooing girls with a blended Aussie, Southern accent.

She was my mother’s age, almost. So I jokingly called her my Internet mom. Or, mum, being Australian and all. Her parents were English, but she was raised in Australia, so she had a terrific mixture of both sense of humor. She was a sweet lady.

And yesterday she found me on Twitter.

“You remember me!” she said.

It was the biggest, dumbest smile of the day, lasting into the afternoon.

Saw that this is closing.

Sent the picture to The War Eagle Reader. They made a few calls and turned it into a story.

I have claimed DIBS! on the neon sign out front. You. Can’t. Have. It.

Legendary Auburn quarterback Pat Sullivan told me his Heart of Auburn story last year:

Sullivan looks at his career through those relationships he’s cultivated along the way. His Heisman Trophy experience was no different.

Back in those days the announcement came as a halftime feature during the Georgia-Georgia Tech game. Instead of being on the front row in New York, Sullivan was in Auburn.

“We were actually at practice that day because we had Alabama on Saturday. My parents had come down to hear the announcement … Our TV went on the blink so we had to go rent a room at the Heart of Auburn. We watched it on TV just like everybody else,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan, perhaps the last Heisman Trophy winner to stay at the Heart of Auburn, says his room number has been lost to history. There are plenty of clear memories from the night, though.

“After the announcement we went back over to (Beard-Eaves-Memorial) Coliseum and all my teammates, coaches and their families, (Auburn President Dr. Harry) Philpot and Coach Jeff Beard (then the Auburn athletic director) were all there and I was able to share that with them. That was something that I’ll never forget because I know I didn’t win it by myself, they were a part of it.”

Remember, I’m claiming the neon sign out front.

Links: Iranian news agency uses The Onion. And that says pretty much everything about the gulf between two cultures.

Hints that water once flowed on Mars. In every previous instance of water in human history scientists have found life. Does that project out to Mars?

Sadly, Birmingham News staffers depart as paper ceases daily publication. On Monday the new company, Alabama Media Group opens for business. I have friends and colleagues at both. There are plenty of talented and caring people involved. I project, after a slow start, big things.

Presidential ad spending soars past $700 million means I’m glad I don’t live in a battleground state.

Journalism, Avengers, something for everyone

Did you know that the history of video has recently been re-written?

British photographer Edward Raymond Turner patented color motion picture film in 1899, but the credit for the first fully functional system went to George Albert Smith’s Kinemacolor in 1906. Researchers at the National Media Museum recently discovered that Turner had in fact shot a few rolls of color film that were languishing in the museum’s archives and set out to see if they worked.

Edward Raymond Turner had no idea in 1899 that you would see this:

From the first parrot, the first people shot in color, to the biggest blockbuster of 2012, re-imagined by the people at Honest Trailers:

A friend had this to say about that trailer:

OK, as a Marvel pseudo-expert, allow me to punch some holes in this “honest” trailer. First, Bruce Banner has ALWAYS been able to turn into the Hulk, just not the other way around. He spends most of his life trying NOT to turn into the Hulk. If you want misunderstood character, see Edward Norton’s Hulk. Anger is what sets off the Hulk, not heart rate. However, in the very first Hulk comic, he changed whenever it turned night. Back stories change. But this one got it right.

Second, every true comic fan knows who Thanos is. If you don’t know who Thanos is, then you aren’t a fan, you are someone who went to see a movie. And that’s fine. But don’t hate because you like superheroes with S’s and bats on their chest so you know who to root for.

Third, Loki didn’t die at the end of Thor, he just let go. He’s a god. He’s immortal. He also has inter-dimensional teleportation capability, see character back story.

And that’s what happens when the comic book set chimes in.

Story about news of the day: Alex Green is the editor of the student newspaper at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn. One of his professors, he learned, was leaving school. Green started looking into into the public records and learned the professor was facing of “having attempted to meet with a minor child” at a gas station. He wrote a story. School president Dr. Stephen Livesay ordered it killed.

So he publised it himself, out of his own money. He also emailed a PDF version. As you might expect, all of this earned a big reaction.

All of that to get you to the latest, from Jim Romenesko:

This morning I talked to Bryan College Triangle adviser John Carpenter and asked: Are you aware that Alex Green called and asked me to remove the post?

The adviser said he was.

Did you or someone else at the college tell him to make that call? I asked.

“I can’t comment on that,” Carpenter said.

OK, that answers that question, I thought. (Someone else I talked to this morning believes the editor “has been guilted” by the college president to believe he did something wrong by publishing a story about a professor charged with trying to hook up with a minor. Green hasn’t returned a message that I left this morning.)

And that, friends, is a president big timing a student. (For even more, here are notes from a meeting the president had in the aftermath. He would not allow that meeting to be recorded because he can flex that particular puny muscle.)

Update: Now President Livesay says “In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.”

Yes sir. For all sorts of reasons. First, while The Triangle is a class project, and thus under the purview of the administration, Green published this of his own accord after you shut him down. Second, you overreached in your reaction with regard to the intrepid young report. Third, from the university’s PR perspective you’ve now made this much bigger for you than it had to be.

Sure, this is a private school, and we can talk all about the case law. But there should be more to the ethical and moral leadership of students than the case law. The good folks at Bryan, as Dr. Livesay said tried “doing the right thing to protect the privacy of a man charged, but not convicted, of a crime” briefly forgot about their other obligation. Seems that everything is being righted now.

By the way, the Student Press Law Center has a great guide for private school media.

Quick links: When the Tuscaloosa News won their Pulitzer last year for tornado coverage, an important part of that was how they used Twitter. But don’t tell the Associated Press, which is vowing to not break news on social media.

Moving away from their paywall, The Times and the Sunday Times will allow their stories to be indexed by Google, or at least the headlines and the lead. They’ll come around.

Facebook discovers re-targeting, which ad-sellers have been using for years.

From Neiman, something we’ve been saying for a while, too, students really need to know digital research. In some respects, this is a “Can you find it?” era.

On my Samford blog I wrote about perception and elisions as they pertain to quote accuracy.

A picture! On my Tumblr! And more things, of course, on Twitter.

And, now, for no reason whatsoever, a shot of the fountain in Ben Brown Plaza on the Samford University campus this afternoon:

I work in a beautiful place.