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history / links / Samford / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on The little things
28
Apr 15

The little things

You wonder what things people take from their young adult years, what stories they carry into their hopefully long and prosperous lives. Someone will tell a few of these stories for a good long while, for sure. These celebrations are in the cafeteria:

Pretty cool, huh? One of the tennis players has been in two of my classes. One of the track athletes has been in my class and he’ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he’s getting his first ring, as a freshman. All of that is nice, but I just thought it was a nice touch how the folks in the athletic department took steps to point out their team’s success.

Paper tonight, and a run today and a lot of time in the office working on class things. Sometimes it feels as if the grading will never stop.

You might have heard of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. Sad story:

“I’ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I’ve never seen a situation come up so fast,” he said.

And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.

“He’s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,” Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.

Creekmore described Beall as “very passionate about sailing.”

I was downtown tonight, for pizza, and so this was a good night to also see this story, which has probably never happened here before:

As cities around the country look for ways to go green, a recent report shows Birmingham to be leading the way in terms of air quality.

Ozone and fine particulate concentrations in the Birmingham area are at their lowest-ever recorded levels, according to the Jefferson County Department of Public Health.

You don’t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.

The air has been getting progressively better over the years. You can even see the skyline for miles. I remember days as a kid when you couldn’t say that.

This gentleman is believed to be the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders in Alabama:

“My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was — we were surrounded there — can they keep us with enough ammunition?” the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.

“We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,” he said.

Kinney, who had suffered two hits from shrapnel and a bullet across his helmet during the fighting, recalled the Nhpum Ga battle came to a halt on Easter Sunday morning in 1944 with a victory over Japanese soldiers. It was the latest of several hard-fought battles for the Marauders, named after their commander, Gen. Frank D. Merrill, but it wasn’t their last.

“When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,” said Kinney.

Nothing little about that.

I tell students that obituaries aren’t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here’s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, who then lived for a century:

Ione’s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, “She wanted perfection.”

Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, “If you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.”

Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.

She drove a Buick. Whoever writes mine, a long, long time from now, I hope they remember to get in a lot of small details like that. In any kind of stories, I think, those small details are the one that make the imagery sing.

The little details make the big picture.

journalism / links / Monday / things to read — Comments Off on Things to read
27
Apr 15

Things to read

Before we get to long running lists and passages of recent journalism and media links, there’s this video to consider:

I’ve covered exactly two protests, neither of them with as much as stake as we’ve seen in recent months in several places around the country. What I’ve learned, by watching from afar, is that the juxtaposition of thoughtful interviews playing in a two-box opposite things on fire in any city is sad and unfortunate. Here are things that people use and depend on and enjoy. And here are people destroying them. Society has a difficult time abiding by that. I suspect that, eventually, it will stop doing so. The reason is pretty simple. There are protests, and then there are those who would use protests as cover for their own unscrupulous goals. Guys like the one in the video above never get noticed, and they probably do as much as anything else to keep the balance tipped to the more peaceful side of the spectrum.

First Hurricane Katrina evacuee enrolled in Opelika schools to graduate this spring:

With relatives already living in Opelika, the family fled to Alabama to stay at Emily’s grandmother’s house. Just days after they arrived, Emily’s parents enrolled her in third grade at Opelika’s Northside Intermediate School.

Emily was one of approximately 20 Katrina evacuees who enrolled in Opelika City Schools between Sept. 1, 2005, and Sept. 5, 2005, when the Opelika-Auburn News published an article titled “Opelika schools open to evacuees.” The article featured Emily as the first of those 20 evacuees to register in the school system in that five-day time span.

Days after Emily became a student, and still 10 years later, Emily’s mother and grandmother talked about how welcoming the school system was to their tragedy-stricken family.

“I was very proud of the way the school system and everybody opened to her,” said Emily’s grandmother, Barbara Strickland, sitting on her couch in Opelika last week. “I mean the schools, the kids in the school that were in the classrooms with her, the teachers, the kids’ parents — they were totally awesome to her.” Barbara Strickland shared similar thoughts in the Opelika-Auburn News’ September 2005 article.

Cool little story, there. She’s going off to Huntingdon College in the fall.

A small handful of carefully cultivated online stories:

Google’s ‘mobilegeddon’: ways you can respond to the algorithm shake-up
Google to websites: Be mobile-friendly or get buried in search results
13 Instagram tools brands should be using
Before and After Pictures of the Earthquake in Nepal
Scenes from the Nepal earthquake zone
Digital Commerce Is the Norm as Germany’s Internet Culture Matures

Such widespread adoption and penetration in Germany’s private culture is very telling.

And now a big handful of journalism links, starting with a few useful reads. As you may know, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced last week. Here’s a judge’s thought process, The winner for the best Pulitzer Prize lead is…:

There may be more than 300 candidates in a category, and your job is to find three finalists. Your default position is to reject, reject, reject (in Pulitzer parlance to throw it under the table). To have a chance, your prose has to grab a juror by the throat. Leads matter. And your first lead in a series or a collection matters most of all.

With that theory in mind, I have sifted through the Pulitzer Prize winners of 2015. I am about to award an ancillary prize for best lead. In addition to the winner, I will honor two finalists and three honorable mentions. The prize is lunch with me – their treat.

My rules:

I will only consider the lead of the first story in any entry.
Categories compete against each other. Leads are leads.
Long leads are not punished, but shorter ones get extra points.
If I don’t get the point of the story in three paragraphs, you’re under the table.
Unusual elements get extra points, as long as they don’t distract from the focus of the story.

Great analysis follows, and if you’re a writer, thats worth reading.

Journalist-turned academic John L. Robinson on one of his darkest newsroom days, Laying off journalists:

When I left, I went straight to a reception for one of my daughters’ soccer teams. I could have skipped it, but I wanted to be around people and I knew there was beer there. I told the host how I’d spent the day. He briefly commiserated, then put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “I’ve been on the other side. Your people had it much tougher today than you.”

He was right, of course. I still had a job.

I wept when I got home. Wept from guilt, from regret, from stress. Wept because I knew this was the beginning of the end for me and the paper.

In the ensuing days, it was clear that a bond between the company and the employee was broken. The deal had been this:

They would work hard, do good work, miss family dinners, have coworkers critique their work, hear from readers that they were stupid and biased and worse.

We would give them a place to do what they loved, a paycheck and job security. We could no longer provide the security.

After that day, that covenant wasn’t ever fully restored.

Last month, I told a student who interviewed me for a school project that that day had traumatized me.

Which one of these do you think is more interesting?:

Virginia Cop Detains Television News Videographer, Fearing Camera Vest Could be Tactical Gear
Police body cams: The new FOIA fight
Politico plans to double its reporting staff to about 500
Peter Hamby leaving CNN for Snapchat
‘Traditional TV viewing for teens and tweens is dead. Not dying. Dead.’

The correct answer is they are all interesting. The officer involved in the first link is clearly at odds with the law. The FOIA issues around police cameras are going to be reoccurring stories for the next several years. Politico growth is an interesting note, but how and where they will grow is the most telling. That political reporting vet Peter Hamby, meanwhile, is jumping from CNN to be the director of news at Snapchat is an incredibly telling move. This one came up in class today. We left it with the observation that this are, indeed, interesting, transitory times. That’s the second time I’ve made that point in class this semester. The first one is about the last link in that group, that young people don’t watch television as you and I did. The numbers are so stark that I’ve all but stopped making live television references in class.

A few more strictly journalism-related links:

WH Press Corps Developing Demands For More Access To The President
The president and the press
Why The New York Times apps look different
Getting it Right: Fact-Checking in the Digital Age
The unstoppable rise of social media as a source for news

News about Facebook and news:

Andy Mitchell and Facebook’s weird state of denial about news
Facebook is making 3 big changes to its NewsFeed algorithm, and publishers should be worried
Facebook Tweaks Cause Concern, but Not Necessarily Panic

We’re not even reading tea leaves here. This stuff is pretty obvious, and Mitchell’s speech should be off-putting to everyone who values the role news place in local society.

Facebook is about 15 minutes away from dominating online video, however. Will Facebook Pass YouTube for Video Ads?:

It’s go time for Facebook autoplay video ads, and according to December 2014 research by Mixpo, the social network is set to pass YouTube in video ad usage this year.

Nearly nine in 10 US advertising executives polled said they planned to run a video ad campaign on Facebook in the coming year—the highest response rate out of all networks studied and up from fewer than two-thirds who had done so in the past year. Despite usage intent rising 3.7 percentage points, YouTube fell to second place, trailing Facebook by 5.5 points.

The Wall Street Journal rolled out a new version of their site today. Check it out. And then follow up with a few on-topic links:

After the launch of its long-awaited web redesign, The Wall Street Journal hopes to spur innovation
The Wall Street Journal is playing a game of digital catchup
Wall Street Journal’s digital revamp: Q&A with Emily Banks, news editor for mobile

Every newsroom should probably start seeking out a person to fill the mobile editor role. Why wouldn’t you have someone in that position, when so much of your audience is mobile, anyway?

Finally, this is a thoughtful and attractive effort from Esquire. They’re taking some of their great pieces from over time and sharing them in a modern style — and they could do this in almost every presentation evolution that comes down the line. It looks really handsome and demonstrates some of the great, timeless storytelling that Esquire has had over the years. There are eight great pieces there so far. They call it Esquire Classics.

links / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Move fast, move slow, so long as you move
22
Apr 15

Move fast, move slow, so long as you move

When we did the half Ironman in Augusta last year I realized one place where those races do a disservice to the athletes. They shut down the relief area too early. That’s not a knock on the support staff there, some person has stretched or massaged 100s of sweaty people in an endurance sport of their own and probably wants to go home. But those people that come in slow, and late, they’ve been on the course for a long time, and they deserve that support too.

That’s about the third thing I thought of when I learned of Maickel Melamed, who knocked down the Boston Marathon over the course of 20 hours. Also, he has muscular dystrophy, and he was out to prove something about Boston, and also about his spirit:

So the rest of us really are running out of excuses, aren’t we?

If, like me, you’ve been feeling a bit older than normal later, let’s take one more item away. 76-year-old man running 8 marathons in 8 days across Alabama:

“You meet a bunch of interesting people and you see a bunch of interesting things,” he said. “That’s what keeps me doing it.”

I should really stop looking up excuse antidotes.

I’m going to spend the next little while thinking about creating a job like this:

What does your role as lead news editor for mobile entail? Are you in charge of news about mobile developments? Or are you responsible for news content delivered on mobile?

Banks: I was hired to help reporters and editors think about how they could create unique content for mobile and content that’s optimized for mobile. So no news about mobile, but rather creating and optimizing news delivered on mobile platforms. That includes everything from working with designers and developers to building new templates for content on mobile, then teaching editors how to use those templates, to working toward making sure, for example, graphics that we publish work on mobile. I also will jump in and pitch ideas aimed at mobile — like an interactive about smartphone ergonomics that readers access on their phone, and by playing a little game and performing tests in this interactive could determine whether their phone is too big or too small for their hand.

I could see that being a fun position for the right journalist. One of the really neat things about it would be that, in many newsrooms, the person in that position would be blazing their own trail.

More and more content is going that way, no matter how fast or slow the rest of us move.

journalism / links / Monday / things to read — Comments Off on Things to read
20
Apr 15

Things to read

The Monday post with a ton of interesting media and journalism links. Since we have so many, let is jump right to it.

‘No-hands’ ad sales challenge legacy media:

Ever since legacy publishers and broadcasters got serious about selling interactive advertising, they have struggled with how to do it.

Should veteran ad representatives be cross-trained to sell portfolios of traditional and digital advertising? This came to be known as the two-leg sales call.

Should specially trained digital ad specialists accompany legacy reps on four-leg sales calls?

Should digital marketing strategists accompany digital ad specialists and legacy reps on six-leg sales calls?

Now, some of the biggest names in digital publishing are going in a decidedly different direction than flooding the zone with sales power: They are moving to zero-leg sales calls that eliminate human beings altogether.

Under this plan that media access to networking data becomes even more important.

Here’s more on that now, The most concerning element of Facebook’s potential new power:

Much has been made of Facebook’s potential new partnership with the Times, Buzzfeed, and a handful of other news organizations, who may soon start posting stories directly on Facebook instead of having Facebook readers reach their content through a link. This move has the potential to make a lot of money for cash-strapped news organizations and produce another anchor into the news world for the cash-flush social network.

It also has the potential to rob news organizations of their soul. Felix Salmon believes this could kill the news brand (it could). Others, like Mathew Ingram, argue that it could give Facebook too much control over which news organizations thrive and which will die when the social media company decides to tweak its algorithm (it does). But the problem is much broader than that.

What this discussion has missed is perhaps the most crucial element of Facebook’s new power: the right to choose between the free expression of ideas or to instead impose censorship when it deems content unworthy. That should worry the public, because when given that power in the past, Facebook has ruled with an iron fist.

Interesting video and social media reads:

HBO gets prickly at Periscope over Game of Thrones live streams
Is Periscope a new frontier for TV piracy?
Snapchat Is No Longer Selling Its Original Ad Unit, Brand Stories
Fusion to Turn Its Snapchat Channel Into a Network With Five New Shows
Dashcam video shows Arizona officer intentionally running over suspect

That last one isn’t about social media, but look at how CNN is integrating tweets into the story. That’s a nice step in a good direction. It augments copy, demonstrates different perspectives and isn’t just reporting about stuff a “reporter” found on Twitter.

The evolving nature of things … Hey, Google! Check Out This Column on Headlines:

THE headline was perfect: “China’s Tensions with the Dalai Lama Spill Into the Afterlife.” Engaging, informative and clever, it sat atop a story about reincarnation and the succession plan for the Tibetan Buddhist leader, accompanied by a photo of the golden-robed monk.

Then there was this headline, which also did its job, but made my head spin: “Apple Unveils iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite at Developer Conference.” Cluttered and notably lacking in grace, it was designed to be found by those searching the Internet for specific terms.

If New York Times headlines are supposed to be lyrical — or even just elegantly spare — the Apple one would seem to flunk the test. But these days, the test has changed, and so have many aspects of headline writing at The Times.

A few forward-looking think pieces:

The Boston Globe’s David Skok on pushing digital change
You Don’t Need A Digital Strategy, You Need A Digitally Transformed Company
How to Get Your Game On in the Newsroom

Sad and inevitable news from Delta State over in Mississippi:

College Board votes to cut Delta State journalism program
State press association denounces Delta State for eliminating journalism major, shuttering newspaper print product

The story goes that the president is cutting back for budget purposes. The other version of the story goes that he didn’t like some of the coverage the award-winning Delta Statement produced. Here’s the news editor of the Statement, Connor Bell: Long live print newspapers. Also, here’s the editor-in-chief, Elizabeth Zengaro: The power of the press.

The week before all they did was win three first place awards, second place in general excellence, and a dozen more honors in other categories at the 2014-15 Mississippi Press Association competition. And now they’re covering the forced shutdown of their publication. Various people fought the good fight, but, in the end, you’re reduced to watching a program shut down, students transferring, a campus go under-covered and simply quoting Don Quixote.

Finally, two great references to bookmark:

Verification Handbook, v2
2015 Pulitzer Prize winners

journalism / links / Monday / photo / Samford / things to read — Comments Off on Things to read
13
Apr 15

Things to read

Copeland Cookie Day in my Storytelling class:

cookies

There’s a great vintage photo at the bottom of the post. First, here are a bunch of great links for you to check out, some of them neatly arranged by category.

Social media platform pieces:

Snapchat is building a research team to do deep learning on images, videos
How college students use Snapchat
Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015
What USA Today learned covering the Final Four on Periscope and Snapchat
The most concerning element of Facebook’s potential new power

Next is the section for those here for journalism matters. But first, this, from our editor-in-chief:

I had her in a freshman class and you could tell, even then, how sharp and squared away she was. In the years since, she’s just begun to realize her great potential. It has been great fun to watch. (And, to her mother, I offer my joking apology and sincere congratulations.)

Some great pieces of a journalism nature:

Tips to make you a better storyteller
Washington Post Exec. Editor on journalism’s transition from print to digital
USA Today’s David Callaway on gaming the news
How smartphone video changes coverage of police abuse
Editor column: A reminder of journalism’s power to do the right thing
News media’s sloppy week: Column
Free Tools To Exploit Free Data
2014 IRE Award winners

And a few sign-of-the-time links:

LinkedIn, Lynda.com and the Skills You’ll Need for Your Next Job
In-Store Mobile Shopping: 61% Compare Prices, 52% Use Shopping Lists, 49% Take Product Photos

You might have seen her on ESPN, or if you’ve been in any of my classes or just like a great story, but the women’s college basketball player that captured our imagination last year has died. The local CBS affiliate produced a beautiful obit, which, really, was about how she lived: Lauren Hill (1995-2015). A beautiful young woman, a young life, well-lived, but far too briefly.

If you’re looking for something charming, Moxie is a therapy dog with a GoPro.

I’m just going to leave this headline right here and let it do the rest: Reduced sentence for 3-year-old girl’s rapist sparks outrage.

Changes coming to state policies on industrial recruitment … Old incentives brought big wins, but also big losses to Alabama.

We’d like to thank the state of New York for creating an environment that prompted Remington to move south … Huntsville led state in 2014 job creation

A strange twist to the tale of that $800,000 painting ‘Antiques Roadshow’ discovered in Birmingham:

The story behind a Mountain Brook businessman’s prized Frederic Remington painting that has been appraised for $600,000 to $800,000 just got even more intriguing.

The director of the Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y, said Tuesday that she has discovered the nearly 120-year-old painting of Mountain Brook real-estate executive Ty Dodge’s great-grandfather was obtained by Dodge’s family in a 1938 exchange that left the museum with two forged Remington pieces in return.

You have to pay close attention to that story to follow it — or I did, at least — but it is a great story for those that like museums, family heirlooms, art or misidentified forgeries.

And finally, go Dogs:

basketball

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