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journalism

Don’t forget your hat

It isn’t that there’s a statue in the back of the truck — it must be contemporary, you can’t imagine any classic piece from the Vatican’s collection would be carried around in the back of a Nissan.

It can’t be that the rope is looped around the neck, though at first blush that does make you stop and wonder about the driver’s mood when they put it there.

it is the way she just stares through you.

I have a rope around my neck. I’m in a … Nissan.

Check out the latest on The Samford Crimson. It is a nicely colorful front page this week, post-Step Sing.

The copy is pretty good, except for the typos that slipped through the cracks at 2:30 this morning. The editorial staff is always chagrined when I point them out at 10 a.m.

Things to read: This is severe weather awareness week in Alabama. Were you aware the person in charge of maintaining the tornado sirens has been placed on leave? (Public service note: Do not rely on outdoor sirens. Watch the weather. Buy a weather radio or download the weather apps.)

Alabama’s exports? So glad you asked. Just happened to stumble across a story about that today, hence this entire paragraph, and the subsequent BBJ blockquote:

Alabama exports rose to a record high in 2011, according to a press release from Gov. Robert Bentley’s office.

Exports from the state increased 15.4 percent in 2011 to $17.9 billion, which was up from $15.5 billion last year.

Two prominent non-profit news outlets are shutting down. Alan Mutter has a terrific analysis:

Evidently beguiled by seeing their stories in the pages of the New York Times, two high-profile journalism start-ups failed at building sufficient audience for their own brands.

[…]

Yet, each of them seems to have stumbled in a different way.

The Chicago Cooperative concentrated all but one of its hires on journalists, including several prominent and well-compensated individuals who devoted most of their efforts to putting the best possible work into the NYT. While readers may have appreciated the articles in the newspaper, scant attention appears to have been paid to converting them into individual or corporate supporters of the venture itself.

The Bay Citizen, on the other hand, invested heavily on development …

He goes on to run through the numbers, and his commenters comment on the quality and the competition. The earlier portion of his analysis is cutting, but he has sources who suggest that both Cooperative and the Citizen were working in a bad model.

The only thing worse than a bad model is bad model security. What happens if that rope slips? Where does that garden decoration go from there? Gnomes are so much cheaper. And only slightly more creepy. The Travelocity gnome has helped a lot in that respect.

iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Feb 12

A random assortment of small things

The BIC, Gillette, Shick razor marketing war reaches its logical conclusion:

This, the restaurant manager, pictured here, tells me, is not an escalation in the face trimming arms race. It is instead a sign for the ski slopes. You need to know the condition of the terrain you’re about to fall down, he said. You need to know where this a good route or a bumpy one. He had to explain this to me because he’s hanging Colorado skiing paraphernalia in a barbecue house in central Alabama.

But it makes sense. The Zamboni of the skiing world, as I called it, except it is in no way like a Zamboni. But otherwise, exactly like one.

This is at Moe’s, in Lakeview, where I met Brian for lunch today. It is a central location between our offices the barbecue is pretty good. It is a Colorado-based riff on Alabama and Memphis style meat.

The manager says he’s still trying to find the ideal place to hang this inside.

They don’t understand seven-blade razor jokes there, but that’s OK, because I had no idea about this impressive piece of machinery either. The chicken was delicious. They’ve made a mockery out of black eyed peas. All things in life are a tradeoff.

Things to read: Why organizing beats is just as important as large investigations, ” good reporting happens more regularly and more quickly when information is organized from the start and a beat is built around a clear organizing principle.”

The value of Quora, I think, is jumping in toward the end of a good conversation. There is a great curation of links on this page.

Up in the air! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a zipline!

What is believed to be the nation’s first universal-access zip line and canopy tour is scheduled to open in April at Red Mountain Park in Birmingham.

Consisting of 10 platforms and seven zip runs ranging from 100 to nearly 350 feet long, the course will allow visitors to fly between elevated platforms built in the trees while descending a portion of the slope, tacking back and forth over a draw in the mountain.

At points in the course, a rider will be 50 feet off the ground and moving 25 to 30 mph.

The first comment, before things turned to that delightful level of vitriol and anonymous recrimination that makes most general comment streams, was wonderful: “I have a 17 year old in a wheel chair, I love that he will be able to do this!”

Maybe I’ll get to see him out there. Yes, I’ll be in the ziplines.

iPhone / journalism / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
20
Feb 12

Monday Monday

Ike Pigott, former television reporter and Red Cross strategist, is now a spokesman at Alabama Power. He is famous for his ability to deliver an entire half of a presentation with his eyes closed, as he is simulating here. Pigott spoke in my class today, we filled one room with two classes worth of students and I believe we all learned something. I know I did.

He did not deliver his presentation with his eyes closed. Every other picture I have, however, suggests he has an awkward posture. And since everyone blinks …

Pigott was kind enough to discuss crisis communication and did so through the prism of strategy and social media. It was a great presentation, which you’d come to expect from a pro like him. As I said on Twitter, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking an Ike Pigott up.

Recruiting phone calls into the evening hours. “Have you heard about all the cool things this department does? And the interships our students routinely land? Did you know about our scholarship opportunities? What questions do you have that I can help you with?”

I like doing the recruiting phone calls. Most of the kids are interested in what you have to say, and they’re excited to get the phone call. You have to be careful about how many you make at one time. Somewhere around 25 phone calls in one evening you start to feel incredibly repetitious.

But the program at Samford does a nice job of selling itself. The are great opportunities behind the Samford gates. And then there are plenty of places in the city and across the region that have a high reputation, built of years of experience, with the quality of interns the program produces. Then they go out in the world and get really cool jobs, from coast to coast, in the NFL and national magazines and the Washington Post and big PR firms, or they start their own companies or work in huge churches and find incredible opportunities to take what they learned on campus and turn it into something they are passionate about.

And then there are the scholarships. So, really, it sells itself.

Still, you have to reach out and contact potential students. There will be a lot of that this week.

Alabama / errands / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / Storify / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off
14
Feb 12

Valentinus, the unknown, celebrate him!

The view in the Caf:

Step Sing, “Samford University’s most time-honored tradition. Since 1951, students” have been preoccupied from their classes while producing this song and dance revue show. It takes place this weekend. There are 14 teams competing for top honors. Thousands of people (tickets sell out in about an hour) will come onto campus to see the shows, which donate large sums to their annual philanthropy benefactor — this year it is Cornerstone Schools of Alabama.

The shows are great fun, very clever, inventive and entertaining. But the banners may be my favorite part.

And, yes, I went to lunch early, which is why the tables are empty in the photograph. There were things to do. There was a trip to take. I had to travel to Tuscaloosa to get a piece of paper filled out. One piece of paper, five signatures, or, more precisely, initials. This can’t be done electronically or by fax, because it has always been done the old fashioned way, I guess. I figured I wouldn’t get all five people, and I did not.

That was a three hour round trip for two sets of initials.

At least I got to see this:

Classic.

Late night for the student-journalists at the Crimson. Step Sing has an effect on everything. When I left sometime after 10 p.m. most of the staffers were still working on their dance steps. So they won’t sleep much. The things you can do when you’re young, right?

Things to read: Who advertises on news sites and how much those ads are targeted:

A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.

Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.

[…]

Overall, the analysis finds that while news organizations have tried to persuade their advertisers to buy space across multiple platforms, there was little evidence that they had succeeded. The kinds of products and services being advertised online were quite different than in legacy platforms, and often were seen across multiple websites.

Interesting findings, but they were only looking at the front page of sites. A lot of traffic comes from search engines, directly into interior pages. Indeed, many front pages aren’t built for the human aesthetic, but rather for the search engine spiders.

Sites selling specific ad space, or clients buying ads exclusively on sports pages or on automotive stories, don’t seem to figure into this. That’s worth studying (or practicing) but it would be incredibly labor intensive.

Seven ways the New York Times is using social media for ‘deeper’ engagement has two really interesting ideas. The rest aren’t bad, they’re just obvious or common. But check out numbers three and four:

3. By “revamping the liveblog template” and turning it into a “second screen”

Heron recognises she is “lucky to count on about a dozen interactive developers as colleagues” on her team, “which is kind of a dream come true for a journalism nerd like me”.

She told the news:rewired conference that the “team of developer-journalists has rebuilt our traditional liveblog and transformed it into more of a second screen, social media-heavy experience – a one-stop-shop for reporting, analysis, newsworthy tweets, reader engagement, and interactive election results”.

4. By creating a “liveblog about liveblogs”

The New York Times team decided it should provide its “own coverage and analysis” for the “aforementioned media cacophony”.

Media reporters Brian Stelter and David Carr have been using Storify to collect the “news media’s tweets, videos and Facebook posts on primary nights”. They have been adding their own analysis as narrative within the Storify.

The future of location-based marketing is cool. . . or scary. Yes it is. You knew that, but read that piece and see if your position changes.

Did the AP just declare war on news aggregators?

(T)his disruption has been even worse for AP and its ilk because they are primarily distributors, and the web has fundamentally democratized content distribution. Instead of trying to find ways to adapt to this new reality, however, the AP seems determined to fight it with everything it has, including lawsuits: On Tuesday, the service launched a lawsuit in New York against a digital news-aggregation service called Meltwater, accusing the service of copyright infringement and “free riding” on its content. The AP says it isn’t going after news aggregators as a whole, but this is clearly meant as a show of force.

The AP may try to charge me for linking to their release. (If they do, let’s all laugh at them together.)

Finally, one of the best Valentine’s tales you’ll read today. It is told through Twitter, making it unique in a way, but it has great pictures and a lovely story, making it traditional. The best work always stems from great stories.

football / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / site / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
7
Feb 12

The magic of lights and trees and things

My view in the Caf today:

Those aren’t new leaves. That’s a species of oak which stays green. Everything is still sticks and and twigs — everything except the Bradfords, at least. Some of the maples are starting to get those crisp red buds of future promises, and all of that seems a bit early, perhaps. But we’re still looking at too much brown and not enough green.

I love what is to come, that week or 10 day period where you are overwhelmed by just how verdant everything has suddenly become.

Still, the dreary sticks and twigs of winter have an appeal. You can see things that would be hidden the rest of the year. Leaving campus this evening I had a great view of the steeple on Reid Chapel. It seemed to be lit in such a way that dramatically lit the side closest to you, with the rest in shadow for effect. It was an optical illusion of course, but what a neat trick it would be. When the leaves return you won’t be able to see it from there.

At the mall:

They’ve closed this parking deck. If you walk around inside it you see they’re painting. First the columns. Perhaps they’re re-doing the ceiling as well. It is colder in the parking deck than normal, no exhaust. But it also smells a bit better. More importantly you have to park somewhere else.

Which I did, about 50 feet away. A parking deck closed and still plenty of spaces. That has to trouble the mall managers, right?

But economists say things are due to improve locally:

The center forecasts gross domestic product growth of 2.5 percent in 2012, compared to 2.2 percent in 2011. They also expect employment to increase 1.1 percent in 2012, compared to 0.8 percent last year.

Every little bit.

A guy named AUltered Ego made me this:

That’s one of the two new crosswalk warnings — because nothing says pedestrian safety like a “LOOK AT ME!” sign high above the road — on Magnolia in Auburn. AUltered was kind enough to hack the sign with his magical Photoshop skills. I will only turn the sign on when there are no cars coming. Wouldn’t want to cause any traffic problems.

Two tech stories that fell neatly side-by-side: E&P says some newspapers still unsure how to use the iPad for publishing. Alan Mutter writes:

Two years after the debut of the iPad, most newspaper publishers still are fretting and fumbling over what to do about it.

Even though the iPad 2 was one of the most popular items last Christmas and the third-generation version of the product is likely to turn up well before Santa returns this year, many newspapers have yet to develop their very first app. Of the publishers who took the plunge, most were so unclear on their concept that they shouldn’t have bothered.

Mutter says it is all a big flub at this point.

Meanwhile, the app that keeps you from contacting your ex. ” It allows users to block text messages, emails, and phone calls to thier (sic) ex. It even tracks the number of days you go without contacting your ex.”

If you download that, you are co-dependent on technology. And, also, we’re going to laugh at you. (Though we will remain sad about your broken heart. Truly.)

Finally, this: Auburn great Ben Tamburello’s, Ben Jr., was all set to attend school and play football at Samford. And then the Naval Academy called. at Samford. Now he’s going to be a Middie. (Go Navy! Beat Army!) Samford’s coach, Pat Sullivan:

“I’ve known that family forever,” Sullivan said. “I helped recruit his dad, I sold insurance to his grandfather. But whether it’s Ben or (Shelby County signee) Denzel Williams, I really want what’s best for these kids.

“Am I disappointed I won’t coach Ben? Yes. But, in the end, this is what’s best for the young man, and that’s what we’re all about.”

Can’t say enough good things about Sullivan. Though I used 2,000 words to try last year.

What else? Two brief things on the journalism blog. One on FOI help. The other has a checklist for breaking online news.