Each fall we host several hundred students from across the region for a day on the Samford campus. We bring in industry leaders, mix them with our faculty and try to give the high school students a day of fun and a little learning.
Here are a few pictures.
Dr. Dennis Jones talks about newspaper design:
Samford alumnae, and CBS 42 reporter, Kaitlin McCulley leads a large session on broadcast reporting:
Kyle Whitmire, who recently joined The Birmingham News and al.com, talks about online journalism to this group:
Samford’s senior photographer, Caroline Summers talks about digital photojournalism. (Naturally I take a shaky picture of this.)
Birmingham News business reporter Marty Swant discusses intermediate reporting.
Finally, and joined in progress, here is Dr. Julie Williams, who leads a session on beginning writing. She illustrates her first point by making peanut butter sandwiches. The people in the session have to help her.
What you don’t see is their order to open the bread. She grabs the back and rips it apart, flinging the bread everywhere. They tell her to tear off a paper towel, and she pinches off a corner of one sheet.
I edited that on my phone, while walking from one building to the next. This technology still amazes me.
There were other sessions, but they were all opposite mine, so I could not visit them. I talked about building an organization, staffing the newsroom and the various challenges and successes you have in school newsrooms. It was so gripped my room stayed three extra minutes.
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.
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.
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.
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:
