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A standard rambling Saturday of fun and memories

Every so often we have to make Allie, The Black Cat, famous on the Internet. This morning she was posing so patiently in the sun. She doesn’t mind the actual camera, but today I had the phone and she does not care for the phone in her face. Who can explain cats? She didn’t mind so much today, though, I guess because of the warm sun, but who can explain cats?

We watched the Army-Navy game. We attended one a few years ago, it was a great, chilly day and it is a game that everyone should go to at least once. (We want to go back.) You get a fair amount out of the experience watching the game on TV, CBS has done a nice job with it over the years.

To see the track athletes run the game ball onto the field and to watch the flyovers in person is a different thing. You’ve probably never seen the “prisoner exchange” of returning cadets and middies to their own sides after a student exchange program at home. Television doesn’t often show you the young men and women sworn into the service at the game and it doesn’t allow you to talk to graduates of both academies. For all the care that CBS gives that game, you just can’t absorb it all from the screen.

To watch the cadets march on, or to watch the teams sing their schools’ alma maters — my favorite college tradition of all — that’s an in-person experience you need. Here’s my video from 2011, shot on my first iPhone. It looks fuzzy after a few downloads and uploads from service to service, but it offers a nice little stadium view:

Here are some of the photos I took from our 2011 trip.

Of course, the hype videos always play better at home. You can hear them better. These were my favorites today:

More were collected for you here.

I’ve always cheered for Navy — the Department of the Navy was important in my childhood world — but two years ago, watching that late Army turnover, I softened up. The Black Knights were about to score late and break what was then a 10-game losing streak to the Middies. But they fumbled inside the 20 and I decided, about 40 seconds into the video here, that no rivalry should ever have more than a three-game losing streak. Everyone should know what it feels like to beat the other guys once in their career.

But it was not to be then, or today, of course. Navy has won 13 in a row, but Army is getting better.

I do enjoy the Army-Navy game.

Things to read … because there are other sports to enjoy.

The headline ruins this great high school basketball story:

Your team has not suffered like the Climax-Fisher Knights.

No matter how Raider-y or 76ers-esque your program is, it has not endured their unique brand of pain. Even Prairie View, the Division I-AA football team that lost 80 straight games during the 1990s, has technically suffered a shorter string of defeats than the Climax-Fisher girls basketball team, which finally broke its four-year losing streak Tuesday despite incredibly unfavorable odds.

That’s a happy finish.

I remember covering the accident that started this story years ago. It was probably one of the last stories I did before I moved to KARN in Little Rock. It was a terrible accident, to be sure. Dangling power lines killed a 7-year-old and changed a 4-year-old boy’s life forever. But this story is thrilling to read today. Good for him. Ward Webb lost his feet at age 4, but the Mountain Brook linebacker never says ‘I can’t’:

Mountain Brook football coach Chris Yeager remembers the early days of watching Ward Webb train with other players.

As teens sprinted up and down stadium steps for conditioning, Yeager remembers, they told Webb to go to the side and use the handrails.

Webb, who lost his feet at age 4 and uses prosthetic legs, refused.

“He wants to be like everybody else,” the coach said. “He’s falling down those steps and that’s just typical Ward. He absolutely believes he can do anything anybody else can do. I’ve been coaching him for 3½ years, and I have never heard Ward Webb say, ‘I can’t.’”

This is a neat concept. Not sure if I’d want to work there, but I’d read the product: A newspaper and a hotel, all in one. If you’re interested, here it is now.

St. Patrick’s is beautiful. Immediately below are a few of the pictures I’ve taken on visits to Manhattan over the years. The cleaning, though, has done wonders. St. Patrick’s unveils its immaculate facelift

This is an interesting visual mashup, and it leads to some spooky results. Battle of Nashville Then & Now is worth seeing, and the bigger your screen, the better.

In elementary school, during the third grade, let’s say, we buried a time capsule. It seemed a very big deal at the time, of course. I think it was a garbage bag-lined ice chest or something like that. And possibly they dug it up sometime later that night after we all left school. But we took it seriously, because it was very serious. It would be important when they dug it up in 50 years. All of this has come to mind a few times since, and now I wonder if anyone knows about it, if anyone remembers where it is or even cares. Were there 10 or 15 such time capsules buried on that playground? And did they dig it all up when that school built the big gym next to it? All of that is boring. This is amazing: Time capsule found at Massachusetts Statehouse:

Crews removed a time capsule dating back to 1795 on Thursday from the granite cornerstone of the Massachusetts Statehouse, where historians believe it was originally placed by Revolutionary War luminaries Samuel Adams and Paul Revere among others.

The time capsule is believed to contain items such as old coins and newspapers, but the condition of the contents is not known and Secretary of State William Galvin speculated that some could have deteriorated over time.

Officials won’t open the capsule until after it is X-rayed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to determine its contents. The X-ray is scheduled for Sunday.

Time capsules are fascinating things. Who came up with this idea? And why can’t I open them for people?

We went for ice cream last night. One of those places where you drive over, park, walk up to the window and order under the humming neon lights. There’s a list of the ice cream flavors of the day, and the flavors are always changing. This is a challenge for me. Occasionally I find something I really like, but it is never there twice.

Tonight we pulled up about a half hour before the place closed and the guy at the window, Matt, knew it. He was older than the usual high schooler working there and he knew that too. The Yankee ordered her usual. I hemmed and hawed and agonized.

What is the Oreo cheesecake like? I asked.

“It tastes like cheesecake … with Oreos,” Matt said.

He gave me a sample. He was correct. I ordered it.

It was good. I’ll probably never see it offered there again.

errands / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
11
Dec 14

Why I’m still wearing broken glasses

Before Thanksgiving I broke my glasses. There was a wire bookshelf thing in the newsroom, it fell and a bundle of newspapers landed on my nose. Somehow the arm of the wire frame snapped off right at the lens.

Life, being so busy, meant that I could finally this week get an appointment to go get new glasses or contacts — which I was due for anyway. So I booked that appointment on Monday. That appointment was today.

I drove over, parked, walked in, announced I was there for my 1:15 and was directed to sit down. I sat down.

For the next 65 minutes I watched people come in, sit down, get called back and take their appointment. For 65 minutes I did this. And then I left. That was better than trying to express how off putting the entire situation felt. There are, after all, other eye doctors in town.

Smith’s Rule of Business: Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.

And so I now have an appointment on New Year’s Eve, at a different eye doctor.

Things to read … because I can see up close just fine, thank you.

How newspapers lost the Millennials:

The inability of newspapers to resonate with digital natives has left them with a daunting demographic challenge. Two-thirds of the audience at the typical newspaper is composed of people over the age of 55, according to Greg Harmon of Borrell Associates. “The newspaper audience ages another year every year,” he adds. “Everyone’s hair ought to be on fire.”

As the newspaper audience grays, the readers that newspapers – and most of their advertisers – would like to have are, instead, busily racking up page views at places like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox.

(I)t is easy to see that publishers and editors have a higher regard for their products than the next-gen consumers they need to attract. Now, the only question remaining is whether newspaper folk have the gumption – and time – to turn things around.

‘Experiential Journalism:’ How Virtual Reality Could Depict News in 3D:

The news industry is currently grappling with a challenging problem: How can it make news interesting to the younger generation?

Virtual reality offers one solution: Strap them in vision-encompassing helmets and let them experience the news like a video game.

This is about three kinds of silly. Google axes News in Spain in response to royalty law

We’ll let our old friend and colleague Jeff Jarvis take it from here. Spain’s link tax forces Google News to shut there:

Thus a link tax intended to protect Spain’s publishers will only end up harming them — depriving them of untold audience — and could even end up killing the weakest among them. Spain will also bring damage to the web itself and to the country’s reputation, establishing itself as a hostile environment for investment in technology.

Be careful what you wish for, you old, threatened institutions of media and government, huddling together against the cold wind of the new.

A lesser thing is that it helps diminish the spread of information, but that’s most likely a tertiary concern here.

3 Steps to Leveraging Storytelling in Your Presentations:

We no longer want to be lulled to sleep by complicated graphs and bullet points. We expect to be excited, challenged and to reflect on our own experiences. And you can do that many times with the use of stories.

Here’s how you can harness your own personal stories and use them to touch your audience the next time you present.

That’s a fine essay from SlideShare. Click on over.

For a different kind of thing, Storytelling on the Radio Builds Community, On-Air and Off:

What separates radio documentary from any documentary? And what separates public radio journalism from any journalism?

Radio gets inside us. Lacking earlids, we are defenseless, vulnerable to ambush. Sounds and voices surprise us from within. As radio documentary makers, we have this tactical advantage over our colleagues in print, film, television, photography. Our tool is aural story, the most primitive and powerful. Invisibility is our friend. Prejudice is suspended while the listener is blind, only listening.

This is a great read. Just after her retirement from ABC, Ann Compton offers a great look back from her ringside seat for some of our most important recent history. I Spent 40 Years Covering the White House:

I retired from ABC News on September 10, 41 years to the day after I arrived as a network correspondent in 1973. Back then, the Cold War was hot, the Middle East was in flames and Watergate was coming to a boil. When Richard M. Nixon finally resigned to avoid impeachment the following year, the president of ABC News in New York deployed me, his youngest recruit, to the White House beat. No network had ever assigned a woman there, and coverage would demand near constant travel. Being the first woman assigned was not the challenge. It was age. I was 27 years old, inexperienced and untested.

These go together, in order:

Police officer buys eggs for woman caught shoplifting to feed her family in Tarrant:

A woman caught shoplifting eggs in Tarrant Saturday didn’t leave with handcuffs and a court date. Thanks to a Tarrant police officer, she left with food for her family.

Grandmother caught stealing eggs to feed hungry children ‘overwhelmed’ by kindness of police:

By Saturday, the family had gone two days without food. Johnson went to Dollar General on Pinson Valley Parkway with $1.25 and thought that would be enough to buy a carton of eggs. When she realized she was 50 cents plus tax short, she stuffed five eggs in her pocket out of desperation.

Tarrant police officer delivers groceries to woman caught stealing eggs at Dollar General:

Helen Johnson stared in amazement at the piles of food accumulating in her small Tarrant apartment on Wednesday.

“The last time I saw my house this full, I was 12-years-old and staying with my grandmother,” said the 47-year-old mother and grandmother. “I’ve been crying all day.”

Score one for the good guys.

journalism / links / photo / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Dec 14

A flea mall trip

I mentioned on Monday that I was withholding the most fun part of my afternoon’s adventures. I wanted to share some of the pictures with you today. Here are a few of them now.

For $20, you can pick up a five-album set of the Boss.

They looked good, too.

There’s this collage of paintings you see in one or two places. One of the pictures is a color version of this old hand-drawn shot of Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum and Cliff Hare Stadium. I’m assuming this is an original draft from the artist, then. That it is labeled as Cliff Hare means this board, if it was drawn contemporaneously, is from at least 1973. It can be yours for $9.

They used to do these in the textile buildings, as part of the students’ work, I guess. I used to see them on ebay and the like, but I haven’t run across them in a while. Who knows how old they are:

When was the last time you saw a postage stamp vending machine?

I saw other things in my quick stroll. Also I picked up three Gloms for my collection. I also met Mr. Brewer, the owner of Angel’s Antiques. We talked about my collection — I now have 101 books, 86 percent of the entire series — and he promised to keep an eye out for me.

Also, I just realized how many of those things I need to scan. We’ll have weeks of covers to look at soon.

Things to read … because you can check this stuff out right now.

This is a long excerpt, but you need it. And it isn’t every day you read about high school journalism. This one you should read, because it is awesome: Student journalists learn to cover scandal from Stamford High School halls:

After the newspaper staff returned to school in the fall, the story ratcheted up. In October, Stamford police charged the principal, Donna Valentine, and an assistant principal, Roth Nordin, with failing to report what they knew about Watkins and the student to state authorities.

Rebecca Rakowitz, features editor of The Round Table, said Ringel asked the staff whether they wanted to report the news by summarizing the work of outside organizations or “whether we wanted to go to the courthouse and the police station and take it on ourselves. We wanted to take it on ourselves.”

They ran into barriers. They learned nothing more from police than what was said during a news conference that followed the arrests of Valentine and Nordin, for example.

And teachers weren’t talking.

[…]

Sports editor Bailey Bitetto said the newspaper has a role.

“Teachers are supposed to be the voice but now we are the voice, because the teachers are too scared,” Bitetto said. “It’s a lot of responsibility but we understand that their jobs could be at stake.”

Four news stories:

‘I don’t feel like he’s dead’: Son vindicated as father rescued after 12 days at sea

Police look for clues in case of Mississippi teen burned to death

Credit unions: Retailers “should be held accountable” for data breaches

Instagram Hits 300 Million Monthly Users To Surpass Twitter, Keeps It Real With Verified Badges

I kinda hope this goes to court. I don’t have any strong feelings about it in any of the possible directions, I simply think this would be an interesting First Amendment case — assuming the issue of “tag as state property” was mitigated. Is ‘No Homo’ license plate free speech? Alabama Revenue Department says no, recalling tag:

Amanda Collier, spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Revenue, confirmed the tag saying “NOHOMO” does exist and was approved by mistake.

“By law, the issuance of motor vehicle registrations is not centralized and must be processed at the county level. However, the Motor Vehicle Division of the Alabama Department of Revenue does hold the authority to approve personalized messages on license plates,” she said.

[…]

When a person buys a tag, the county employee enters the desired message into its system. Those on the banned list are supposed to be automatically rejected, but that didn’t happen here.

And a thought exercise, what if the plate had said “YESHOMO”?

How would you like to be on the plate approval committee? Well, a 1982 DMV rule, by the way, says they’ll turn down any plate “which contains objectionable language or symbols which are considered by the Department of Revenue to be offensive to the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama.”

They are typically very proactive in their refusals. And you better like the E-Street Band. You couldn’t get H8BOSS, for example. But you can get those records at Angel’s …

journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
9
Dec 14

Things to read

I haven’t ran through a day’s worth of links on the site in about two weeks. You’re welcome and/or I’m sorry. I’ve been saving them up for a rainy day. And while it is cold and sunny outside, today is that day.

For this mega-installment I’ve broken it up into segments. If you’re here for the journalism or the tech links, they’re down below. Beyond that you’ll also find a social media section and something I just named “deep reads.” That section holds a few pieces that defy excerpting and are important.

First, some nice or important stories of late.

Rankings: Auburn-Opelika fourth smartest metro area in America:

Not only is Auburn-Opelika the smartest metropolitan area in the state of Alabama, according to NewGeography.com, but it’s also the fourth-smartest metropolitan area in America — only behind St. George, Utah; Bloomington, Ind. and Ocean City, N.J.

“For the most part, the top 10 on our list of the 51 largest metro areas is dominated by places with large concentrations of colleges, and those that long ago made the transition from industrial to information-based economies,” survey authors Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill stated on NewGeography.com. (Other college towns in the top 10 include Bloomington, Ind., Hattiesburg, Miss. and Lawrence, Kan.)

Grew up watching this guy play. This is a hard story to read. Broke and broken:

Those closest to Darryl Talley are terrified. His wife, daughters and former teammates openly cry for him. They lament what has befallen him. They dread what his future might hold.

Talley’s life is in tatters. Loved ones say his mind is deteriorating. He’s begrudgingly starting to agree.

He’s 54, but his body is a wreck and continues to crumble. He suspects collisions from playing linebacker for 14 NFL seasons, a dozen with the Buffalo Bills, have damaged his brain. He’s often depressed beyond the point of tears.

He’s bitter at the National Football League for discarding him and denying that he’s too disabled to work anymore. He says the Bills have jilted him, too.

He learned after he retired that he’d played with a broken neck.

Shared this in class last week. We all agreed the video added a little something extra to the story. Family hears son’s heartbeat in another man’s chest:

Doctors say Matthew Heisler’s heart stopped beating twice. And soon after, there was no brain activity.

Turns out, Matthew Heisler signed up to be organ donor when he was 16 years old. After renewing his driver’s license, Matthew Heisler asked his father, Jared, what he had done by “checking the organ donor box.”

“He made the decision that if life ever slipped away from him, he would give life to someone else,” Jared Heisler said.

And that decision was no small feat. Tom, who waited nearly three years for a lifeline now lives with Matthew’s heart.

Eight month’s after Matthew’s death, his parents and younger sister, Casey, listened to Matt’s heart beat inside of Tom’s chest.

Rare cancer can’t keep Oxford teen out of 10K race:

Oxford High School ninth-grader Keyshon “K.J.” Lynch woke up at 6 a.m. Thanksgiving Day. He was nauseous, but didn’t tell his mother, Christeena.

He was afraid that if he told his mom he felt sick, she’d try to keep him from running in the annual Plucked Turkey 10K in Golden Springs. It would be his fourth time participating in the 6.2 mile, bragging-rights-only race, the proceeds of which go to the YMCA of Calhoun County.

Lynch is no stranger to an upset stomach. He finished his fourth round of chemotherapy Wednesday.

Yes, the VA story can get more shameful. Bad things happen to whistleblowers when watchdogs become attack dogs:

“It was a disappointment,” said Peterson, a Navy veteran who served with a Marine unit in the Persian Gulf in the late 1980s. “One of the core things you are taught in the military is to take care of your brother. That stays with you. How can I wear a uniform and then cower to the VA mentality?”

What happened to Peterson is not unusual, according to outside watchdogs, members of Congress and a review of recent media reports involving whistleblower retaliation at numerous federal agencies.

I don’t care if it is true. Nichelle Nichols deserves to have people loudly stand up for her. So I want the punchline here to be true:

Unfortunately, as is the case for many people her age, she has some mobility problems and was seated in a wheelchair as we approached the metal detector. With some difficulty, she got out of the chair to go through the machine, and the TSA Officer waiting on the other side ordered her to take off her shoes.

Wartime spy finally accepts she is a French heroine:

“It wasn’t until after my first round of training that they told me they wanted me to become a member of the SOE,” she said in a rare interview five years ago, “They said I could have three days to think about it. I told them I didn’t need three days to make a decision; I’d take the job now.”

A close family friend – her godmother’s father – had been shot by the Germans and her godmother had committed suicide after being taken prisoner by the Nazis. “I did it for revenge,” Mrs Doyle told the New Zealand Army News magazine in 2009.

In Britain, the SOE operatives were trained by a cat burglar, released from jail especially. “We learnt how to get in a high window, and down drain pipes, how to climb over roofs without being caught,” she recalled.

Couple marries at Harvest Thrift Super Center:

Takeia and Nelson Alvarez Lopez came with their daughter Royalle to Alabama from New York without realizing how their lives were going to be changed.

A wedding was held for the couple Thursday evening during Harvest Evangelism’s annual Christmas party at the Harvest Thrift Super Center. Pastor Rick Hagans officiated the wedding. The wedding dress came from the Harvest Thrift Super Center, and the bride’s ring was donated.

That’s an adorable story, though it is a bit disorganized. I hope those crazy kids make it, they’ve surely got a lot of people cheering them on now.

The journalism links:

Why Serial is important for journalism

How to handle fast-paced multimedia reporting

Note the word “former.” Former Sun deputy news editor: Inventing quotes to ’embellish’ stories is ‘standard journalistic practice’

Corrupt politicians suffer only when there’s local media to report on it

Miami Herald continues to treat some South Florida neighborhoods as though they don’t exist

Five steps for shooting the perfect sit-down interview

A new study looks at the interplay of journalism and PR in the digital age

Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media bias

Rolling Stone’s Rape Story: A bigger journalistic train wreck than we thought

Uh huh. This never works the way you want it to, senator. Defining ‘journalist’ may become necessary

Senate leader Del Marsh taking heat for advocating an official state definition of ‘journalist’

Google News: The biggest missed opportunity in media right now

How much of your news site’s search traffic comes from Google News? Probably 5 to 25 percent

How 5 media outlets are using Tumblr

The newsonomics of the newly quantified, gamified news reader

The social media links:

Tumblr Overtakes Instagram As Fastest-Growing Social Platform, Snapchat Is The Fastest-Growing App

Five companies doing social media right

Anheuser-Busch Is Plotting to Win the Super Bowl With Four Social Media Command Rooms

The tech links:

How the iPhone 6 Plus Impacts Where We Read & Watch

A new dawn for the podcast

Netflix CEO: Broadcast TV Will Be Dead By 2030

NAB Labs: FM Capability in Smartphones Rises

56% of Digital Ads Served Are Never Seen, Says Google

Discarded Laptop Batteries Keep the Lights On

Older viewers also abandoning TV in favor of phone, computer

New cord cutting data spells trouble for traditional TV

Research Confirms the Crowd: Netflix and Others Are Upending the TV Business

Six Drivers Of The $700B Mobile Internet

What’s next for the smart home?

Deep reads:

‘The most expensive regulation ever’

Cartelists’ conundrum: OPEC meets

Chief justice questions whether rights might be curtailed in Internet speech case.

Cost Still a Barrier Between Americans and Medical Care

Cycling over the Pyrenees with one leg

Love the A-10. America’s Toughest, Ugliest Warplane Is Going Back Into Battle

Pearl Harbor survivors reunite in Hawaii to mark 73rd anniversary of attack

Survivors Gather to Remember Pearl Harbor Attack

There’s something for everyone in this post. Thanks for making it this far. Please bookmark it and come back for more of these links. If they are here, they are worth a quick look.

And come back tomorrow. There will be more pictures and, perhaps, things to read.

Alabama / Auburn / football / history / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
25
Nov 14

Students were doing what with email?

There is this giant filing cabinet drawer sitting in one corner of my office. I rescued it some time back from a nearby room. That office space was once the home of Entre Nous, the Samford yearbook. When they moved elsewhere it seemed to become a storage space, mostly forgotten. Finally someone came along and made plans to use it for another department and we were kindly asked to move all of our old stuff out of that room.

So I moved all of our old journalism department things and all of our old newspaper things out of there. It was a multi-day process and helped proved where my time goes.

Anyway, one of the things I discovered in there was this giant drawer of newspaper clippings. Instead of moving it to another storage space I just put it in my space because the clips would be fun and because this joker was heavy.

And now I am going through some of the clips. This was in a folder titled “Computers.” I’ll just leave this here for you to note the dates yourself.

From November of 1979:

From September of 1987:

From December of 1987:

Also from December 1987:

And you could apparently check your email in March of 1988:

I love two tidbits in that last story:

“Students often find creative ways to send messages to friends. Charles Dunlap, a pharmacy major from Tullahoma, Tenn., sometimes sends graphics and computer art through the system.

[…]

Although most students feel positive about the use of E-mail, some have expressed complaints that communicating electronically causes some people to avoid one-on-one communication.

So some things are the same, no matter your connection speeds, eh?

The people writing those stories, or pictured in the photographs, are ministers, educators and work in the software industry. Our alumni turn up in all manner of interesting places.

Things to read … because reading takes you to interesting places.

There is this football game this weekend, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Here are three stories looking back on last year’s game. Each has their own merit. One of them is mine. I present them to you in order of importance:

Jon Solomon’s Remembering “Kick Six”

My piece, The Iron Bowl

Thomas Lake’s Looking back at historic Iron Bowl a year later

Solomon’s piece is the one I’d excerpt, but it defies excerpting. If you read one sports piece today, that should be it. It is simply one of the best non-sports-masquerading-as-sports stories you’re likely to read this year. Superb copy. High marks, Jon Solomon, high marks.

Here are a few quick journalism and PR links:

Will be sharing this in class next week, 7 ways to ensure your press release won’t get covered

I wish I had more places to share this, Visual journalism: Virtual reality graphics technology

A one-page photo essay from 2013, still worth seeing, if only for shots 23 and 36, On the Border

One to make you mad, Social worker charged with smoking crack while driving on I-65 with child in car

And three really nice stories to end on. The first one has an aww, an oops and a neighbors-helping-neighbors theme. The second one is a superbly touching kindness of strangers tale and the last one is part of the great Gabby Giffords comeback.

Sheriff’s dive team recovers engagement ring dropped in Noccalula Falls

Former newspaper vendor Charles Graham receives the birthday surprise of a lifetime

Gabby Giffords completes 11-mile bike ride

That sounds like a great ride to me.

Have a nice one today and come back for more tomorrow.