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journalism

Volume 98 begins

It was a late night. About 2:30 or 3 this morning, I think, when they finished their newspaper. Much faster than the first night last year. Not as fast as they’ll be later in the year, of course. And of course time doesn’t matter so much. Work on it until the sun rises if it means the quality is good.

And the first paper is pretty good. This is a young staff, with only one returning section editor from last year. They’re learning as they go, and we’ll make sure they learn a lot. But for a first edition, this is promising. You can see it online here.

We had our first critique meeting just after lunch today. Four members of the editorial staff were there, and we laughed and told jokes and asked questions about this or that in the paper. There are errors to correct, but there are many things to brag on. Later in the day they received compliments from two big titles in the university’s administration. That’s a nice pat on the back, too.

Spent part of the afternoon unpacking a few new cameras for the department.

We have added a large handful of new high definition equipment this year. When they handed me this part of my job a few years ago it was a mess. As of today we are an all-HD shop.

A great plan from the faculty, great support from the university’s administration and attention to detail have made it happen. The digital video center is a part of the program we are proud of.

Hard working students, smart planning among the faculty and an administration that is taking part. No wonder Samford is a great place to work.

Pretty, too. This is one of our lovely buildings, as the afternoon is winding down:

And this is west campus, from Talbird Circle, looking back toward Seibert Hall:

This came up on Twitter. Someone we know from Alabama, and from Auburn, is back at Alabama for law school. But before she returned to Tuscaloosa she came to visit the Cumberland School of Law at Samford. She’s jealous, but, you know, they are all beautiful campuses.

Chick-fil-A now wants your name, for when your order is ready. The guy at the cash register asked. Threw me for a loop. Why does everyone need my name? This is probably a good idea at lunchtime. For now I hope I can hear them over the din of the … three people in here at dinner.

Also that manager is working. That guy. You know the one; he moonlights as security at concerts so he can get his authority on. One night I saw him almost work his way into a fistfight over what time he closed his store. He’s a bit aggressive with his employees, too. Just a bit intense for a chicken place.

Remember, during the week of Chick-fil-A Week of Free Publicity, that after the I Eat Mor Chickun campaign, there was to be a kiss-in after that. Some wondered if that would devolve into a nasty scene. If there were going to be fisticuffs it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn it involved him.

Here’s why you love Chick-fil-A, though: the guy who took my order gave me a coupon for a free sandwich for the delay. I’d waited an eternity, three minutes.

More rehab tonight. I’m sore, but that’s more muscle sore than injury sore. Seems I can easily overdo it, that’s progress. So, yes, let’s do that again.

And then I did an hour of intervals on a bike, clocking 19.5 miles and showing watts and METs I don’t understand. I’m just waiting for the muscle spasms to go away. A few days after that — I have to make sure they aren’t trying to trick me — then I’ll try to really ride again. It has been a while, but my shoulder says no rush. So far I’ve been inclined to agree, which seems odd. I try not to think about it.

Arms are too sore, you see.

journalism / links / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
11
Sep 12

How turtles talk

I taught a class on Associated Press style and on visual journalism this afternoon. I showed the students this video:

I use it a lot. It is very touching and incredibly moving. It is relatable. It has a lot of great production elements, video and photographs. Color and black and white. It tells a story from beginning to end. There is music, which I see as a mileage may vary kind of thing. I don’t think it is really necessary, but it is clear where they are going with it.

The best parts are where the producers interject in the story and where they are smart enough to stay out of the way. There’s an art to that.

We watched this unembeddable slideshow from NPR, too. In it we meet Steve Campbell and his Iraqi bride as they negotiate the day to day struggle to make a life for themselves in Missouri. Natural sound, coordination of the audio and the visual, and the everydayness just make an interesting story.

We tend to overlook those sometimes.

Therapy this evening, pushing small weights up and down, or left and right as the circumstance required. Rode a bit on a bike. Cleaned up, had dinner, went back into the office.

Tonight the student-journalists at the Crimson are putting their first paper of the year to bed. We start the school year a bit later than most, and we’re a weekly, so it feels like a late beginning, but we’ve used most of the time well.

There is a lot to learn, we have a young staff this year, but they are all eager to do good work, and that’s the key. Also, having fun. They introduced me to mershed perderders which, approaching midnight, was funnier than it should have been. I did not know turtles have such poor diction.

Tomorrow the students get to see the fruits of their labors. Just as exciting as the first night of layout is the unheralded first critique of the year.

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5
Sep 12

A cute dog is found below

Any day that starts with fruit and grading can’t be bad, right? I think so. Also, apple slices are delicious.

I’m a phase eater. Sometimes I eat a lot. And then, for a brief while, I’ll eat very little. There’s nothing consistent about it, except when I’m in the habit of eating the same things over and over. Lately I’ve been on a fruit kick, which is not particularly interesting to anyone but me, and only then given how many bad-for-me things I typically ingest.

There is a boy in my family who apparently reminds me of me — how he talks and walks and laughs — and I think, “Poor kid.” And then I text his mother and say “If he is like me tell him to study harder and eat fewer candy bars.”

“Enjoy more grapes.”

So I had a small fruit tray for breakfast and graded quizzes this morning. I had lunch with one of our recent grads. We had barbecue, my first ever trip to Saw’s. It is a small little place in a roadside strip mall. There are maybe eight tables inside, we had the corner window. The lady at the register is managing chaos, but thanks everyone who writes out a tip. It doesn’t feel particularly clean, but you can’t make respectable barbecue in a place that aces the health code rules.

A young man brings out your lunch on paper plates. They leave you alone otherwise, despite the lunch crowd and the few tables. There are framed newspaper articles and magazine covers on every inch of the walls. There are license plates above the doors. It is all a thin and perfectly random homage to a sub-genre of food.

Longtime readers know barbecue would be the center of all of my food streaks if it were actually healthy. All things in moderation though, even slow cooked, pulled pork.

Back on campus I had a brief meeting with the editor to discuss distribution patterns and then a visit with my chair, who’s the nicest guy around, and some students about various student things. I wrote plenty of emails.

The guy that can fix my office phone called my cell. He stopped by near the end of the day. This is what he did: glanced at my phone, followed the path of the two cords coming out of it with his eyes, picked one up and plugged it into the wall.

The phone paused, lit up and turned on.

Naturally, I feel like a dope. Turns out he’d had to do some electrical work in a panel in a Jeffries tube somewhere in the building. He did that after I called to complain that my phone wouldn’t work. I didn’t know that, and hadn’t thought to test the highly technical technique of plugging the phone back in to see if it was working this week where it did not last week.

So I spent a few minutes playing with the settings. Turns out you can run your computer off this phone. You can both phone home and phone the Internet from this Cisco IP device. It does not have the ringtone from 24, however. I’m sure there’s a way to do — yes there is.

The engineer that fixed the phone left his notebook in my office. It looked important, so I called his office and someone was still there. He answered his phone, on this same server networked phone. Sounded like he was standing in my doorway.

Pin drop nothing, I could hear the creases in his slacks settling.

So I walked the book over, because this is one thing the phone won’t do. The phone guy will thank me in the morning.

He’ll send an email, no doubt.

Hot day today, even into the evening. I believe she had the right idea:

She does it, her owner said, more than he would like. But the fountains at Samford are just so tempting.

Burr and Forman, by the way, are not buried beneath that fountain. That is a large regional law firm. Some 55 of their lawyers graduated from Samford with their undergrad or with their JD from Cumberland.

Two things to read on the student blog. Steve Yelvington dives into what drives local media traffic and Alan Mutter discusses how Apple and Google are threatening local mobile providers.

Do follow that Crimson blog if you like journalism and think pieces. Also Twitter and Tumblr

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4
Sep 12

The videos are worth reading the text

Class, I taught it. Twenty more topics on Associated Press Style and things we think your English brainwashed you into thinking.

They take it very well. Every time I teach this class I expect someone to stand up and hurl a book across the room. “I am PRO Oxford comma!”

But it never happens. They are good little note takers. I point out the different styles is all, and I’ll leave it to you to decide what you really feel about the great comma debate. And then I tell the story of an English major friend of mine who I managed to get so worked up he was willing to fight. Over a comma. (But not sentence fragments, as it turned out.)

One of my students seized on the question about three slides before I was ready today. “What about that comma?” I was so proud.

I gave a quiz, which everyone took with that second week of class spirit. Let’s see how they feel about that in November!

Met with the online editor. Met with the editor-in-chief. Did a little extra work on class stuff and on a paper. I finished all of the early-semester administrative stuff that I can think of.

I called again about getting my new phone. Did I mention this? We received new phones over a period of the summer when I wasn’t here. So they installed it in a copy room that belongs to another department. Someone passed this information along. I retrieved my phone. The old 1973 model in my office no longer worked. It was as if a storm had cut the line, or perhaps a bad person.

So I plugged the new one in sometime last week. Nothing. A different bad person had come along and severed this connection to the outside world. Dramatic music plays.

Finally got in touch with someone that had an answer. Turns out you can’t just plug these in and go. This phone, dig this, needs the Internet. And it seems the outlet in my office wall was installed in some bygone pre-Internet era. A guy will come by.

I never saw this person — but to be fair, I move around on campus a lot. So I called today, to hear that someone had been assigned the chore of plugging in my phone and souping up the phone jack. The person I talked to today said that guy had left me a message.

On my phone.

Which does not work.

Other technology news: I discovered a missing keyboard. But that’s getting ahead of the story. I discovered our newsroom had a missing keyboard. Naturally I asked around. Someone had stuffed it into a desk drawer. Let’s not even ask why.

Meanwhile, I managed to discover that a second keyboard was possessed. Remember the scene in Ghost — of course you do — where Sam types his name on the bad person’s keyboard and Jerry Zucker wants to evoke Shakespeare and Poe, but not have you realize how those guys did it so much better? Just the word Sam, over and over in that green monochrome?

I have an Apple keyboard doing that. Only my ghost thinks his name is either 9999999 or ———. Perhaps there are two of them.

The other keyboard, the one that was in a desk drawer, is just dead. Maybe that is why it was stored away. I plug both of these keyboards into other machines and I get the same response. 9999999 or nothing at all. So, tomorrow, I get to visit with the nice Tech Services people again.

In a shocking bit of news I visited Walmart. And it was not an unpleasant experience at all. I do not know what to make of this. They have a little fruit package, red apples, green apples, grapes and cheddar cheese, that I enjoy. Pre-cut, cheaper than anything else and a nice snack.

How should I interpret this? Walmart as a quick and painless shopping destination?

A cashier was wearing feathers as earrings, like the synthetics of the 1980s, so someone was making a statement. But you don’t disqualify for that. These are the reasons you go the big box stores, right?

Finally, videos: Cee lo Green played with Prince. One of them still brags about that to everyone they know:

And this is a strong contender for the title of Why I Love the Internet This Week. I believe it might be the video the Internet created itself for:

On and on and on.

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28
Aug 12

Back to class

My first class of the semester was this afternoon. This was the sky over the Samford campus later in the evening. We did the syllabus thing, and the let’s-all-get-to-know-one-another thing. This time I just asked them what was the most interesting things they did this some. Some stayed home and worked. A few took road trips. Others did work with their churches. One did a mission in Kenya.

Our students are always doing cool things like that.

Like a mean teacher, I lectured for a while. No time like the present to start in on AP Style, I always say. So we worked through a bit of that. I let them go a few minutes early, first day of classes and all that. It won’t happen often.

They had such bright eyes and took good notes today. They laughed at my jokes.

I promised them a quiz next week. They might laugh a bit less then.

Saw some faculty I haven’t seen in a while. Got to tell my collarbone story one more time. Usually these tales get better with each telling, but this one is good enough. Besides, my shoulder needs all the karma it can get just now.

Missed a meeting with a student because of my class. There will be plenty of meetings with students this week.

Football season is upon us and I’m posting photographs we found last week while sifting through archives in Auburn University’s collection in honor of this most festive time of the year. This is from some undated game. There are tons of photographs in the archives without names and dates. A shame, really. But I love this boater hat.

We were just having a conversation about the Tigers/War Eagles thing. No one wants to admit it, but War Eagles was used as a noun as recently as the 70s around here. I’m pretty sure that is what the rest of this guy’s hat says.

The guy on the left, he’s clearly seen something he didn’t care for on the field. I wonder if he’d remember this game today. That guy’s got some good hair, too. I wonder what he’s coating it in.

Everyone in the stands seemed to well dressed. These were clearly different times.