Oh, sure, it is spring. But we are going to have one of those years, it seems, where two seasons are battling it out. Spring will win eventually. Winter isn’t giving up easily this year. Winter is the guest that doesn’t know how to leave. Maybe it is a season that can’t pick up on the social cues. Or maybe it is looking for the graceful exit, the last joke, a tender poignant moment or an uneven silence. But it won’t show up, and so winter continues to linger inside our door. There are still a few unnecessarily chilly days and too many clouds ruining sunny afternoons. But spring will win out. The clues are all here.
Spring will win out. Unless summer rides in at a full gallop.
Put in 2,000 more yards at the pool this afternoon, a mystifying exercise of good and bad experiences. I’m getting better in some aspects of my swim and seem fairly static in others. It all comes down to breathing and technique, two things which I don’t do very well.
But at one point, around 1,100 yards or so, my shoulder and collarbone hurt so bad that I was nauseated. That didn’t happen when I broke it or had surgery or anytime since. I was at the wall and wondering what the pool deck protocol was for violent sickness. It was a weird moment. But it passed with a few more laps. And then I went upstairs to the locker room and then out and upstairs again to an indoor track and ran three miles.
They were playing volleyball on the gym court below the track. Someone launched a ball into the rafters, where it got stuck. I was able to free the ball, but I was not invited to play. Just as well. I haven’t played volleyball in years and years. I bet I could still serve, though.
Things to read … because serving up links is one of the things we do around here.
I mentioned this in a class yesterday and it received a nice reaction. StoryCorps Using $1 Million TED Prize to Become an App and Go Global:
For the past decade, StoryCorps has amassed more than 65,000 recordings of ordinary individuals interviewing one another and telling extraordinary stories.
In doing so, StoryCorps has amassed the largest collection of human voices ever recorded, but is still limited by the time and expense of its approach, which relies on professional radio recording equipment and dedicated volunteers to act as facilitators.
Thanks to a $1 million prize from the TED conference, the organization is turning its process into a smartphone app in an effort to ensure even more stories get recorded, especially outside the U.S. The free app will allow anyone with an Android or iOS device to record an interview and have it uploaded for distribution and archiving into the Library of Congress.
But everyone is talking about Facebook today. Here are some important links:
What brands and publishers need to know about Facebook’s developer conference
Facebook Takes Aim at Google’s Ad Tech Clout With LiveRail
The beginning of the end of Facebook’s traffic engine
It’s the relationship, stupid
“Now is the time to get access to the data that will build more than today’s cash flow but will instead build tomorrow’s strategy,” Jeff Jarvis writes in that last link. Data is important. I hope the point gets across. We seem to be at the event horizon for all of the things Jarvis has been discussing for a decade or more.
You’ve heard about this for a while now, too. Coming, a major shift to mobile ads:
Mobile advertising is increasing at a shockingly fast pace.
This year, it will make up nearly half of all digital spending, up from just under 25 percent two years ago. And by 2019, it will account for 72 percent of online dollars.
It will also make up more than 28 percent of overall ad spending.
And yet so many aren’t ready.
This is both unfortunate and terrific. As professional news outlets vacate state capitols because of budget constraints, student journalists move in to fill the gap:
When Jessica Boehm interviewed a state senator for Arizona State University’s Cronkite News for the first time, she worried about saying the wrong thing or asking a question she shouldn’t ask.
Researching bills and interviewing lawmakers weren’t tough tasks, she said, but “knowing you were talking to someone that wielded a lot of power and probably didn’t want to talk to you, that was really intimidating.”
Boehm reported on the state’s spending transparency, bills on a texting-and-driving ban and off-highway vehicle enforcement during Arizona’s 2013 legislative session for Cronkite News, a student-produced news organization with a wire service that serves about 30 print, broadcast and web outlets and a 30-minute nightly news broadcast for the local PBS station.
Boehm spent eight months co-writing a story for News21, a special projects arm of the Cronkite School of Journalism, that compared Arizona and Connecticut’s gun legislation after shootings in both states — the 2011 Tucson, Az., shooting that killed six people and injured Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the 2012 Newtown, Conn., shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 20 students and six teachers.
The Washington Post published the story in August 2014. She said it took most of the semester at the statehouse to get comfortable interviewing lawmakers, but after the experience she is now able to “ask what I need to ask and not need to sugarcoat anything.”
That’s a long excerpt on an important story about watchdog journalism. And my good and bad reaction to the idea — pros leaving the capitol and students stepping in — which has been around since pros started abandoning capitol coverage a decade or more ago is simple. There’s nothing better than experience and there’s nothing better than experience.
I covered a state capitol for the better part of a year. I was a professional journalist by then, but still very young. The bureau offices had been turned into storage spaces because there were only two of us still visiting the capitol on a regular basis: one newspaper guy and one broadcaster. Others would show up when big stuff was about to happen. They got a tip or a release or they found out through us. But the two people were the only ones covering an entire state’s lawmakers and one of them was very young. But I was a much different reporter after that year there. There’s nothing better than experience.
Under command of that small spot on Jan’s cortex, the machine hums into action, picking up an object in its robot hand and moving it to a shelf or table.
At first the researchers kept the arm across the room, worried that Jan might inadvertently punch herself. As Jan gained skill, the University of Pittsburgh researchers brought the arm near Jan’s side to let the paralyzed woman fulfill her greatest wish.
In the video shown at the Bevill symposium, Jan grabs a bar of chocolate with her robot arm. She haltingly brings it to her mouth and, then, takes a big bite.
“One small nibble for a woman,” she proudly says. “One giant bite for BCI (the brain-computer interface).”
There’s video, and you just know that was the most delicious chocolate she’s had in a long, long time.
We find ourselves railing against the insertion of writers into the stories they write.
If the bulk of your story on an interesting topic is about you, rip it down and start over. You are not special #AdviceForYoungJournalists
— Matthew Zimmerman (@Zimmsy) February 11, 2015
I call it Grantlandization, since the folks at Bill Simmons’ project do it with almost perfect consistency. But I have a new, easy to grasp standard. It goes like this. You can’t Grantland, you can’t insert yourself into a story, until you can do it like this. It is an almost-maudlin P.J. O’Rourke piece remembering John Hughes, so good luck.
