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I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / photo / running / swimming / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off on I’m slower at a lot of things
12
Mar 15

I’m slower at a lot of things

Slipped into a pool lane today just as my sports editor was leaving the pool. He’s coming back from a little injury and is racing in his first track meet in some time this weekend. He’s naturally very excited. So today, of course, he was just knocking out 2,250 yards in the pool.

“Hey,” I said, knowing I was going to run later and that he’s run at the same place before and that he’s a lot faster than me, “I’m going to do a few laps after this if you want to wait around.”

He was planning to run too. Because he’s young and he can do that.

“Where are you going to eat later? I’ll stop by and eat slower than you, too.”

He laughed and disappeared. I swam my 2,000 yards, feeling nauseous for the second half, thinking so that’s what that feels like.

Then I went and ran three miles, feeling better and sprinting through about 15 percent of the thing, pretending I knew about intervals. After I got cleaned up I looked up the sports editor’s best times 5K. He’s very fast. Good thing he turned me down.

Here’s the view from the track. Three black cinder walls and then one side with three of these:

window

I saw a great pick on the basketball court below, and then I ran my last three laps as the lacrosse team warmed up running laps below. They must have not been trying too hard, I stayed with them. But, hey, that’s two bricks in a week, and that feels great.

Things to read … because reading is always great.

I think this is the first Twitter video I’ve embedded here. This is a great video:

Here’s a newsroom with some spunk. Turns out someone set fire to the building, but the publisher is unimpressed. Fiery journalism:

We know there is a portion of the population that doesn’t like what we do here. A nice quiet chamber of commerce cheerleader that runs press releases, without asking questions, is more to their liking. Those readers don’t want to know how badly the schools are doing, lack of city services, problems in police departments and county job bids that are illegal and padded.

That would be so easy to do. We could operate on half the reporters and they’d require no news writing education, training or experience.

But that’s not what we do. We do what journalists everywhere used to do, before bowing to advertisers, money, pressure and threats and the easy road. When a newspaper informs readers in such a manner, whether they wish to be informed or not, certain risks come with that, including bullet holes in windows, occasional paint-balling and the ever-so-popular rocks.

But to start a fire? Understanding the anger or the arsonist’s lack of ability to cope with a problem is just beyond all of us here at the Rio Grande SUN. Richard Beaudoin states it very well in his letter on page A7: write a letter, come talk to us or start your own cheerleader and print what you want.

Better yet, don’t do the stupid, immature, irresponsible things that lead to your actions or words being reported in your local newspaper. The community would be better for it.

I wonder what they write when the arsonist is caught.

I like most everything about this:

Climb Mt. Everest? Nah. I saw it on Google Maps:

Monasteries, lodges and schools have all been captured and Apa says you might even see some yaks along the way.

“My hope is that when people see this imagery online, they’ll have a deeper understanding of the region and the Sherpa people that live there,” says Apa.

Previously Google has mapped other renowned locations, including the Amazon forest, Greenland’s ice fjords and wedding chapels in Las Vegas.

Don’t you wish they hadn’t grouped Las Vegas with those other places?

The kids are alright: Basketball players stop game to stand up for cheerleader.

Anyone know what this is? It is an old three-ring binder. This was a high school book that belonged to my grandfather.

book

Seventy-some years ago he was writing in that book. I’ve been looking through it. Some of it is worth seeing, and I’ll share it soon.

journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off on The flexibility of now
11
Mar 15

The flexibility of now

I walked into a classroom today with one idea about a later thing and when I walked out of the room an hour later I knew other things. A meeting had changed. One student had a story and another had a joke. A third had big news. A lot can happen in a calm hour. Some days the idea of now is an obviously thin construct and some days now is a solid and statuesque thing.

There are at least four full statues and a bust on campus, and this fact amuses and bewilders me.

One of them is an abstraction, three of them are representations of real people, including an ancient president of the institution, a statue which once stood at the U.S. Capitol. Another is a football coach, which, OK. And then there’s Ralph Beeson, who was a big donor and has the family name on quite a few nice things around campus. His statue is centrally located and figures into a lot of pictures and general merriment around the place. Also, it has the great honor of being the voice behind one of the best Twitter accounts on campus, even if some of it is school-specific.

Anyway, I recently stumbled upon this 1988 clip which explains a bit about the man and the then-new statue. The Twitter account asked us to republish it. Great idea, alas, it was from The Birmingham News, and not ours.

BhamNews

We were discussing our publication tonight when someone poked their head into the newsroom and offered us free food. There was a focus group down the hall and journalists are always hungry for leftovers. I grabbed a few things:

underneath

I’m going swimming tomorrow, and I won’t eat them all at one time, so it works out, right?

Things to read … because reading always works out right.

There’s one truly incredible story worth reading, it is a bit long, but absolutely worth it. And I mention it here so you’ll keep looking below. First, though, a few journalism links:

24 takeaways from the ONA London conference on mobile
Los Angeles Times reorients for digital
CNN Pushes More Original Web Video
How to capture fly-by digital visitors
Boston Herald, Franklin Pierce combine for exclusive coverage

And now the story worth spending a few minutes to read. It defies excerpting, really, so here are just a few of the first paragraphs. A Bulldog’s battle:

It was morning in Lithuania and Andrew Smith was getting dressed. As he put a shirt on, he caught an oddity in the mirror, a weird bump at the base of his neck just above the collarbone. The former Butler center was a newly married man playing foreign hoops in a faraway land, just three months into his first professional contract and living with his wife, Sam, and dog, Charlie.

Thinking little of it then — Smith had battled mono and enlarged lymph nodes during his freshman year at Butler — he brushed aside any serious concerns. Over the next two weeks, the bump got bigger and more uncomfortable. The scare increased when pressure crept on his insides, near his chest, and soon enough breathing became a conscious task. Lithuanian health care is not optimal, and the team physician spoke broken English, which did not translate at all to nuanced medical terminology.

[…]

In a foreign country with doctors they did not trust, the Smiths weren’t getting clear answers. Tests were not immediately coming back with conclusive results. An initial biopsy came back negative for cancer, but still, Andrew reluctantly agreed to minor surgery because his neck’s discomfort was preventing him from being able to play.

Smith was — get this — awake for the procedure and could faintly feel doctors tugging with metal tools at his numbed neck as they attempted to remove the blockage in his throat. What at first blatantly felt like the wrong decision turned into a mistake he was lucky to make. Without successful surgery, more evaluation was needed. Andrew’s neck was coral-red as he and Sam spent their first Christmas together as man and wife. They Skyped home, telling their parents Andrew was cancer-free. But a few days later, Smith’s growth got grotesque. He was living with a rock attached to his throat and a perma-red neck. He underwent a full body scan, and as they awaited the results, Andrew rung in 2014 feeling like his chest was shrinking by the day. He was unable to sleep.

Maybe it was his heart? No. For now, Andrew’s heart was fine.

That part, that “for now” part, that becomes important. But “for now” is always important.

history / iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / music / photo / things to read / triathlon / video — Comments Off on The only thing wrong with this post is the headline
9
Mar 15

The only thing wrong with this post is the headline

You can tell people all of the reasons they shouldn’t take pictures of signs, and there are plenty of good reasons, but still, when the classics come back to life, you can’t help yourself:

Saco

The story:

After nearly a decade of its pumps sitting idle, fuel is again flowing at the former Saco gas station at the corner of Dean Road and Opelika Road in Auburn.

Auburn resident Mike Woodham turned the station’s original lights back on at the Saco gas station Monday as he reopened it as Woodham’s Full Service—a gas station offering full or self serve fuel service, a full-service tire shop, oil changes and more.

“The City of Auburn has been very gracious to my kids and very good to me, and we wanted to give something back,” said Woodham, who owned Woodham’s Tire in Montgomery and has been in the auto business for 30 years. “We wanted to serve back. And the best way that we know of is what we bring to market with our tire knowledge.”

Known for its iconic Saco sign, the previous gas station closed more than nine years ago after then-owner Dick Salmon was shot and killed at the business in July 2005. According to an Associated Press article as reported by The Decatur Daily on July 24, 2005, Salmon had worked at the family-run business for 43 years.

And the store:

Saco

Not a lot has changed, and that seems to be the plan, and that’s great.

Breakfast at Barbecue House this morning, which meant I could skip lunch. Read students’ news stories all morning and afternoon, and that is always fun, right up until I imagine then trying to read my marginalia. And then there was class, where we talked about profiles and obits and got ready to point to exciting digital methods of story telling, which will last us through the rest of the week.

There were other office things, a late dinner and here we are.

Things to read … because here we are.

I’m keeping it to three, but these are three incredible Selma pieces to read. Because they are better than the headlines, I will link you with a good quote for each:

I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die. — Rep. John Lewis

The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it … it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Not even the National Guard wanted to go through Selma — Dr. Bernard LaFayette

And now for another kind of fortitude, this is a strong testament of health, strength, and mind over chemo, Finding strength in triathlons:

It was debilitating. “I was 10 days away from doing my eighth Ironman,” Hackett says. “I was still training 100 percent and I had this huge, stage four tumour going.” His youngest daughter was just two weeks old. His oldest was five years old.

[…]

Hackett is on an aggressive form of chemotherapy, a regimen called FOLIRI, whose name represents three different drugs. His oncologist, Dr. Michael Sawyer, combines the regimen with a relatively new drug called bevacizumab that attacks the growth of new blood vessels. Hackett tolerates it well. “He told me he biked 20 or 30 kilometres the day before I saw him,” Sawyer says. He also ran a five-kilometre race just four hours after he finished his first round of chemotherapy.
The exercise might have something to do with it. “There are many studies, both in curative chemotherapy (to remove cancer completely) and chemotherapy to prolong people’s lives, where it appears that people who exercise do better than people who do not,” says Sawyer.

So we’ll all be at the gym a bit longer tomorrow, no?

Here are a few media links:

How four top publishers use Facebook for video

Testing out Meerkat: the app that brings live streaming to Twitter

What does the Twitter live streaming app Meerkat actually do?

You Won’t Understand The Potential of Snapchat Until You See This

And, finally, we’ll end with some music today. If you’re still looking for something to hate Tom Hanks in, keep looking because this probably isn’t that thing either:

Have a great and purposeful week. See ya tomorrow!

Friday / history / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Twitter — Comments Off on The Friday blanks
6
Mar 15

The Friday blanks

A few weather things, from yesterday.

As always, it is dangerous when you amuse yourself. (Usually that means you aren’t being funny to anyone else just at that moment.)

Just two Selma things today, because while the activities are getting underway over there, we know there will be plenty more tomorrow.

So I had to narrow down about four interesting Selma stories I found today to share just this one. It is a fine read. ‘No matter what it takes’: Selma remembers:

They paid for black Americans’ right to vote with their blood and bruises. Now they remember.

As President Barack Obama said on the eve of his visit to Selma, Alabama: the battle for civil rights is not ancient history.

“The people who were there are still around, you can talk to them,” America’s first black president said Friday.

He meant people like 70-year-old retired firefighter Henry Allen, who five decades ago took part in history.

“It was was the final stage. We had been beaten. We had been pushed to the limits,” Allen told AFP.

“No matter what it took, we wanted to get the right to vote.”

I mentioned this in class today and, later, I was thinking about what I said and the reaction it got and I realized that, next time, I’m going to make a big hinge point in the conversation about that day’s historical topic. The 50th anniversary marches are this weekend. This isn’t even ancient history by collegiate standards, as the above story points out.

This is our story, I said. American society, the South, Alabama, Selma, people we know. Please, I said, take a few minutes this weekend to read or watch some of the goings on at Selma.

I got back blank stares. Maybe it was because it was Friday afternoon. Maybe they somehow don’t know what this is about. (I’m not teaching history here, but perhaps I should?) Maybe they don’t care. Perhaps they knew all about it and had heard all about it from other classes and they’d already decided they were going to spend every waking weekend moment absorbing stuff from Selma. The reasons could any of those or anywhere in between, of course. I’m just curious about. I’d understand that reaction if I somehow brought up that Magna Carta found in Sandwich recently.

Magnum Carter? When’s his new track drop?

(I don’t think it is that bad, for what it is worth.)

But Selma, for a lot of us, the people there were grandparents or people down the street or who have been in our stores or churches or or schools or lives in some way or another for all the time since. Seems like half my professors covered the Civil Rights movement. It came up a lot. I hope we didn’t stare back blankly. Anyway, this is another big moment, perhaps one of the last contemporary ones as the original participants age. Festivities will continue there, of course, but they’ll eventually become memorials, history, not living reminiscences.

A decade ago the Crimson had the opportunity to localize the story:

Crimson05

Professor Davis is no longer on campus, or we could do that story again. I haven’t heard of anyone else still here that was there. But I’d like to. The author of that story, by the way, now works for International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief organization operating in 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities.

Things to read … which span cities near and far.

These are all journalism/storytelling bits today and they will be bullets, because the weekend is upon us. On we go:

The next stage in the battle for our attention: Our wrists

How a 40-year-old radio DJ from Florida became a Snapchat star

Who should see what when? Three principles for personalized news

9 ways the most innovative media organizations are growing

19 free social media analytics tools

An open letter to the community

That last one needs some setup, but it is from a high school publication, so that’s OK. It is worth reading, though, because the editors, two high school seniors, goes point-by-point through the various concerns that emerged after they wrote about teen sex. The letter is thoughtful, detailed, clear and leaves little room for debate about why they did or their stories’ value to their community. (The one that comes to mind is the age range. Their school is a 9th-12th grade institution. Not all topics are the same across that spread, I’d suppose.) Anyway, it is a wonderful argument, a fine letter. The kids are alright.

journalism / links / things to read / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on Seriously, it is supposed to be winter here again tomorrow
4
Mar 15

Seriously, it is supposed to be winter here again tomorrow

It has come to this. For the second week in a row we are under the specter of winter weather. For the second week in a row there could be snow or ice or both or neither. For the second week in a row schools and businesses are making the early or late decisions about whether they will be open tomorrow as meteorologists study their models and refine and predict mild to moderate to severe weather.

For the second week in a row I stopped at Walmart to study the crowds. For entertainment.

walmart

Clearly this is the sign of something wrong. And I don’t mean that last week this same Walmart had four cash registers open and each had lines of people midway back through the store. I don’t mean that tonight there are four lines open and no one is in this place. That this has become a mild manner of amusement is troubling.

Also troubling is the lack of shoppers. This is consumer forecasting at its worst. Last week it was packed and, thankfully, nothing of seriousness happened for the surrounding community. Tonight, with no one here, it is easy to reach the conclusion that we’re sure to get ensconced in ice tomorrow.

But back to why I find this amusing.

It is a strange night. To be outside at any point today you’d wonder how we could have temperatures in the 60s and low 70s and winter weather tomorrow. But, it does have an “anything is possible” feel outdoors as the evening turns into night.

Normally that’s a springtime feeling: This could become anything.

I think, then, that we are in a great seasonal change, even now. Winter is beginning to give up the fight. One last little lashing out, and then we can talk about the glories of springtime.

Things to read … because this stuff is great in all seasons.

When the news imitates satire, and vice versa. Hillary Clinton Hints At Presidential Ambitions By Concealing Information From American People:

Fueling further speculation this week that she has her sights set on the Oval Office, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is said to have hinted at her presidential ambitions by concealing a vast trove of information from the American people. “By using a personal email account to keep records out of the hands of investigators and the U.S. populace, Clinton is making it resoundingly clear that she has presidential aspirations,” said political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, adding that Clinton’s efforts to obfuscate basic facts and hide thousands of documents from taxpayers for years on end demonstrate her capacity to successfully perform the duties of the commander-in-chief.

The Onion is genius at blurring the lines.

Hard men and women right here, ‘We aren’t disabled, we’re inconvenienced,’ veteran says as Ride 2 Recovery group cycles 470 miles:

Wednesday afternoon about 200 injured veterans made a rest stop at Battleship Memorial Park as they embarked on a 470 mile cycling trip which started in Atlanta and is set to end in New Orleans.

The 2015 Ride 2 Recovery Gulf Coast Challenge, sponsored by United Healthcare, supports physical and psychological rehabilitation programs for injured veterans, featuring cycling as a core activity. There are six Ride 2 Recovery cycling challenges this year across the United State and in Germany.

Participants rode hand cycles, recumbents, tandems and traditional road bikes, depending on their needs, as they made their way into Battleship Memorial Park, stopping in front of the USS Alabama battleship. This was one of the many stops the group makes on their six-day endeavor.

Well OK then. Actually this makes senses, and someone had to do it. But I like that there’s a marketing approach ere. There’s a reason why at The Economist we don’t chase the millennial generation:

he starting point for publishers to carve out space in this hyper-competitive environment has to be uniqueness of voice. Without a real sense of mission and purpose, the risk is that your voice will be lost in the noise. Critical as this is in itself, it’s just not enough; media companies must possess a real and deep understanding of just who is interested in hearing that voice.

A prevailing notion in marketing (across many sectors, not just media) is that millennials are the most valuable demographic to reach. They are perceived to be at the forefront of changing media patterns, so the concern is that if you fail to win them now, you lose them forever. But a focus on millennials at the expense of truly understanding a target audience is a dangerous thing.

A sound marketing strategy for a news organization would be a very nice thing to have in place. The other thing to consider here is that if we all go off chasing after the Millennial set, we have a clearly defined group of underserved, known as Everyone Else — and the Millennials who don’t care about what you’re selling.

Which brings us into the journalism section:

How a veteran reporter joined the digital age

The value of digital data

Instagram Will Top 100 Million US Users by 2018

Copyediting for reporters: How to get the basics right

This one just serves to shock by how long ago it was, and how young these guys were: Federal traffic safety board considering fresh look at Buddy Holly crash.

Here at home, 16 percent of Alabama households – double the amount of 2000 – now rely on food stamps:

In 2000, 145,368 Alabama households – or about 8.4 percent – relied on government assistance for food. By 2014, that number had increased to 283,047 households, or almost 16 percent.

The percentage of Alabama households receiving food stamps is higher than the national average of almost 14 percent but noticeably lower than the states with the highest averages. In Oregon, 19.8 percent of all households are on food stamps, with Mississippi (19.4 percent) and Maine (18 percent) following.

Nationally, the explosive growth among those receiving aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has grown from 6.2 percent in 2000 to 13.5 percent in 2013.

Now let’s talk about how effective we are at lowering those numbers.

Officials reveal smart home for wounded Jacksonville veteran:

The custom built 2,800 square-foot house will allow Tomlinson, who lost the use of his legs from a combat injury, to live on his own for the first time since he received a paralyzing gunshot to the neck in 2010.

Holding an iPad on Monday, Tomlinson touched the screen and the front door on the rock-faced porch swung open to applause.

Tomlinson can also raise and lower the stove and countertops to the home by tapping on the tablet computer.

The home comes to Tomlinson free of charge from the Tunnel to Towers and Gary Sinise foundations, which build custom homes for wounded veterans.

And we’ll close with this note, from here on the frontier:

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