The big cultural event of the spring at Samford is Step Sing, the choreographed, team-based, song and dance revue put on by the Greeks, independent groups and who knows whom else. I learned today that there was once a professors’ group. I suspect there’s probably enough interest in creating a local alumni group. I say local because this is a seriously orchestrated event. They put in about 40 hours of rehearsals for the three days of shows. It eats into everything.
One of the ancillary aspects of Step Sing is the banner drop. There are 14 groups performing this year. I know this because there are 14 banners now on display in the Caf. Everything is supposed to be kept strictly confidential until the banners are unveiled, and then the real anticipation for the shows begins. Here are two of the banners:
More later this week.
I say Step Sing eats into everything. The only thing big enough to eat Step Sing is winter weather. And so it was, that on the sixth day of February, and for the fifth time in just the second week of the term, we’ve had campus closed.
So I went home. Which was good, because we had to be in Atlanta tonight. There was a play:
Here is the curtain call:
That show isn’t for everyone, but if you like your satire acerbic and irreverent, well you might find a place in that show.
But here’s the kicker: It never even occurred to the company or its agencies that people would accuse them of staging a hack — or, for that matter, being drunk. In reality, the tweets were part of JCPenney’s ongoing campaign for the Olympics, which involves promoting its special Go Team USA mittens. The original plan for the Super Bowl was to tweet a stream of these misspelled, clumsy tweets through the big game and then reveal the #tweetingwithmittens hashtag at the end.
If you believe this telling — which has some depth to it — then you have to acknowledge that what really happened here was J.C. Penney was more or less very lucky with an incredible unsound strategy.
You’re going to run a series of bad tweets for a few hours and then tell the joke? There were 25 million tweets during the game, which is to say the firehose was turned on full bore. And you’re going to run a joke for three hours in an environment that is guaranteed to have an audience with an attention span of Dory the Pacific regal blue tang? At best you get ignored and forgotten. At worst people assume, well, what they assumed.
J.C. Penney will take all of the publicity they can get, but the point is this was a deeply flawed plan.
I took a class on a field trip today. This is the class that takes three or four each term, which is one of my favorite classes, mostly, I think, because of the field trips.
So here we are in the conference room at Intermark Group in downtown Birmingham, where the students learned a bit about the day in a life of PR practitioners, advertising reps and creatives.
They give us a quick walking tour, offices, cubicles, a server room, some of their edit bays — they have a full service production studio in their building — and the famous camper:
They bought it online, restored it, had it installed and now all of their clients try to have their meetings in there. One of the dozens of neat touches you’ll find in a shop full of out-of-the-box thinkers.
Things to read … because sometimes you have to stay in your box.
So why doesn’t audio go viral? It’s not because shareable audio doesn’t exist — it does. If you’re an audio listener, you’ve probably heard something amazing, surprising, or funny that you really wanted to share. But in many cases, there are boundaries that prevent shareable audio clips from spreading.
When we started experimenting around audio and social, we identified three hurdles.
It is a shame, really, because audio can work as such a focusing agent, or an atmospheric agent, or a telling agent. There’s something inherently compelling about really good audio — recognizing and capturing it is an art unto itself — but if you’re discussing the nebulous “go viral” as a goal then you are talking about online. And, usually, if you can record audio you can record video. And, of course, in video sometimes the audio is lowered, or removed, or just overwhelmed by what the eyeballs see.
Amazon is shedding a little more light on where it hopes to take its ad business. It is announcing that it has inked a deal with video ad company FreeWheel to provide the technology for Amazon to build out its video advertising business.
FreeWheel is essentially responsible for putting the right video ads in front of the right Amazon customers.
In short: Get ready for a lot more video ads on Amazon video content.
Get ready to buy in pre-roll, buying from more directions in Kindle and buying, buying, buying everywhere.
Still don’t think your packages are being delivered by drones, despite 60 Minutes’ breathless efforts.
The Obama administration is pushing ahead with its vow to mitigate the effects of climate change. Today, the US government announced plans to create seven “climate hubs” that will offer information and resources to communities in rural regions across the country.
Specific details on the hubs are slim for now, but each one will be tailored to a specific region’s climate-related challenges — such as water shortages, forest fires, pests, or floods. The hubs, which will be overseen by the US Department of Agriculture, are largely zeroing in on farming and ranching. In a statement, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack noted that the hubs will help ensure that “agricultural leaders have the modern technologies and tools they need to adapt and succeed in the face of a changing climate.”
The first question I have: Why not just use the existing Extension infrastructure? They are in place. They have a wide array of experts. They are already networked into the local farming and ranching communities and so on. The answer to that question would be telling.
One of the most frightening Muppets, to me, was Grouch. Doesn’t ask me why. I think it was his appearance, home and his voice, which vaguely reminded me of one of my uncles. That’s what I’m going with. I bring this up because the other one that disturbed me is at the bottom of the post.
At lunch today I dropped a plate, basically right in the lap of a young lady who’d made the unfortunate decision to sit between my Point A and Point B. The plate was, thankfully, empty. And it did not break. But this is mortifying. There are eight young women sitting there talking about their studies or their sorority or boys or who knows, and then I happen.
Some distance away I could hear the slow clap starting. That hasn’t happened since high school. My innocent victim noted, as she picked up my plate and I apologized profusely, that at least her table didn’t chime in, an observation I’d already made, and a decision for which I was grateful. But no one else did, either, and the slow clap quickly died. It was probably only three people.
“Frat boys,” one of the students said.
I’m pretty sure they started clapping reflexively, but then stopped when they realized this was an old guy. Maybe one of them was a student of mine. Maybe it just isn’t funny if it isn’t your peers.
For example, the state troopers now say there were more than 700 snow and ice-related car crashes last week, not counting whatever the locals worked. That’s unfortunate for those people, to be sure. Nine people died in crashes. And in this vein some people are making their wacky “Haha, Southerners can’t drive in snow” jokes.
But, hey, we opened our windows and sat around in shorts last weekend.
Here’s another video, a short film featuring Ms. Alice Herz-Sommer. She is believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor, and, perhaps, the world’s oldest piano player:
Things to read … because your parents warned you about watching all of those videos.
A historically high number of people will be locked out of the workforce by 2021, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday.
President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law will contribute to this phenomenon, the CBO said, citing new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger-than-expected reduction in working hours—eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021.
The answers were not long, and bad enough that they should have taken a few more minutes to think up something not so insulting.
With the expansion of insurance coverage, the budget office predicted, more people will choose not to work, and others will choose to work fewer hours than they might have otherwise to obtain employer-provided insurance. The cumulative reduction of hours is large: the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time positions by 2024, the budget office said.
The report “rightfully says that people shouldn’t have job lock,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. “We live in a country where we should be free agents. People can do what they want.”
“Now you won’t have to work!” doesn’t sound like an especially compelling argument, really, Senator. But have at it.
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
[…]
The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.
[…]
To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. “The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented” in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, “appears to be preparation for an act of war.”
The past two decades have seen a revolution in every aspect of the media industry – technological change has enabled consumers to develop sophisticated and subtle patterns of behaviour, constantly being updated from a variety of sources. Cable news established the 24-hour news habit, but today social media and mobile phones fulfill the instant news needs of consumers better than any TV channel can.
Yet around the world hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be invested each year in news networks. Is this money well spent? Or has the time come to rethink the TV news business? Were live channels simply the product of the satellite age which is now all but over?
[…]
News channels prize being first – a race that they can’t win, and nobody else cares about. “Did we beat CNN?” is a phrase often heard in a newsroom. But in the digital age social media will always win the race to be first (if not always the race to be right). And who, other than the inhabitants of newsrooms, is watching enough news channels simultaneously to know who was first anyway? Those 30 seconds might be important for commodity traders – but for news audiences?
In today’s media environment any broadcaster is first for minutes at most – by which time Twitter or the competition will have caught up. Being first – the primary criterion for 24-hour news channels – is increasingly the least interesting and effective value they offer.
What wasn’t included, but should be: The Weather Channel.
The first day of class, take two. After Tuesday’s snow and ice event turned into a systemic and region-wide calamity, our campus was closed for a while. They sent down the CANCELED notices at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Things returned to normal on Saturday. Which is overstating things. Campus was passable by Wednesday. The roads were finally usable by Thursday, when the cold weather broke. But Friday, it just felt like people needed a rest. At least that was part of the reasoning.
Folks had been working for three days straight – and straight is used in the literal sense. You could tell that people just needed a break. I’m sure there were some other logistical reasons and probably even larger, perfectly fine rationale, but at the end of it all, the administrators decided that campus would be closed on Friday. Most on campus activities started again over the weekend. Classes resumed today. (And if you had a Tuesday afternoon class, or later, you hadn’t even met yet.)
Walking in today, then, we started all over again. It seemed liked it had been three weeks since we met last, anyway.
Various things in the class, as they were put into place, proved that missing last Wednesday because of the weather was actually a big deal. Many things had to be re-juggled. How this happened since we lost only one day, I’m not sure, but it took a while to put the moveable parts around the immovable parts in a way that made sense for the larger aims of the class.
So I rebuilt and rearranged parts of the syllabus.
This is the class where we ask students to start thinking about news products in critical terms. So I have them critique the news that they see and hear and read. I have them do this online, so they can learn at least one content management system this term and have place to start putting their news clips, too. We used to have students build faux-websites in Dreamweaver, but that presented unique problems on two or three fronts, so I’ve just streamlined the effort and now we use WordPress. Which means that, today, we spent all day talking about Dashboard.
It isn’t the most exciting day of the term, but it is useful. And I get to show off a cool site or two (like this one) and demonstrate how easy it is to be a modern publisher. I did not make, however, my international author joke. So I have to make sure to get that one in class next Monday.
Also, I need to remember, here, to cross link to things I publish on my multimedia blog. Here are the most recent items now:
Six decades after Hartley wrote his famous line, the past is no longer a foreign land. Instead we’ve brought a weirdly literal truth to William Faulkner’s famously sphinxlike aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Take the Kennedy assassination, for instance. In honor of the event’s 50th anniversary last November, CBS streamed four straight days of its news broadcast from the period surrounding the killing so you could experience what it had been like in real time. Or consider this: World War II buffs can download radio broadcasts and listen to the rise of Hitler or the news from D-Day as you would have heard them back then.
More often, though, we don’t immerse ourselves in history; it’s just there whenever we want it, living right alongside the present. We can trace ideas backward in time, either by searching Google Books or (for a sum) through thousands of academic journals, using a few keywords to find sources that once were the sole domain of historians. Pick any historical subject and the Internet will bring it to life before your eyes. If you’re interested in vaudeville, you’ll find videos galore, while college football scholars can browse Penn State’s 1924 yearbook, complete with all the players’ names and positions. And every day, more history keeps washing up. Not long ago the news went out that a Philadelphia woman named Marion Stokes had recorded 140,000 VHS tapes of local and national news from 1977 to her death in 2012. Her collection has been acquired by the Internet Archive, and soon it will trickle onto the web.
This omnipresence of the past has weird effects on contemporary culture. Take any genre of music, from death metal to R&B to chillwave, and the cloud directs you not just to similar artists in the present but to deep wells of influence from the past. Yes, people still like new things. But the past gets as much preference as the present—Mozart, for example, has more than 100,000 followers on Spotify. In a history glut, the idea of fashionability in music erodes, because new songs sit on the same shelf as songs recorded five, 25, and 55 years ago, all of them waiting to be discovered. In this eternal present, everything can be made contemporary.
Just wait until the next time you see a favorite actor that you see regularly from some production from the 1980s or 1990s. And then, when you see them now, think of reading that again.
Why does digital news media seem so vibrant on the national level and so anemic on the local level?
First, venture capitalists and other professional investors have little interest in businesses focused on one community. News is tough enough to make money on but at least if you’re national you can generate massive numbers of ad impressions and the possibility of Amazonian reach. Venture capital investors can only get 5x return or more for businesses that promise national or global scale.
[…]
Another challenge faced by local news startups relates to the nature of digital advertising. Because national digital properties – Google, Yahoo, AOL – can target ads to particular zip codes, local advertisers can reach their customers through them, without having to advertise with a local company. In effect, a local media company is now competing for ad dollars not only with the other media in town but with massive, national institutions with better technology and larger sales forces.
Also, infrastructure. The local shops need to be well-staffed with talented people. If you don’t have that, you won’t have much. Sadly, there have been a lot of cuts across the industry of old hands. Meanwhile, the younger staff that were hired to replace them, typically in a digital capacity or one-man band scenarios, are still learning their craft. Audiences pick up on that sort of thing.
MUNICH — In an unusual joint appearance overseas, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told European allies Saturday that Washington would depend more heavily on them to tackle a litany of political and security crises, even as the two pushed back against concerns that the Obama administration was abdicating leadership on the same issues.
And, finally, about that Super Bowl Coke ad:
So let me get this straight. A nation of immigrants is supposed to be offended that a happy song about it is sung in many languages?
Yesterday was something of a trying day. We were holding vigil with friends all over the country as their little girl fought for her life. This adorable little 3-year-old suddenly got ill. It seems the first hospital missed something big and by the time the next morning rolled around bad had gone to worse and now tragic.
It has shown the best of us, though. People who are hurting for their friends now suddenly dealing with this huge hole in their world. And strangers who are generous because they read a good appeal and they saw a few beautiful photographs. Folks who empathized, maybe, because it could have been their child. In two days the Internet has helped raise almost $50,000 for that family’s hospital bills. You people are quite remarkable.
We’d ordered some things on Amazon to have shipped to them at the hospital. And then suddenly the facts on the ground made the shipment seem inappropriate, so we tried to cancel them. Four items were in the pipeline. I called Amazon, and Rachel told me that they have a half-hour cancellation policy. However, she was able to cancel three of the orders while we were on the phone. This, I thought, was great. The fourth item, though, had already passed Go. She contacted the merchant and the shippers this morning and got that item stopped. Amazon and Rachel didn’t have to do that, but they did. And she called to tell me about it this afternoon.
(Also, we spend so much time complaining about customer service, we should compliment the good examples, too.)
We ran today. I got in 4.25 miles, chasing The Yankee around the local running trail and down an adjoining road. I outran two horses. Of course they were being walked, slowly, but let’s not concentrate on that.
Also, at the pool yesterday, I swam 1.29 miles. Swimming is supposed to be mentioned in yards. I count it in laps. My online tracker uses miles. It was 2,250 yards if you’re interested.
Most important was that I did half of that freestyle. That’s 1,125 yards. My shoulder isn’t limiting me. Muscle fatigue, that’s a different story. Also, there was an Olympic swimmer on the pool deck. And I was told that my stroke looked good.
The Olympian didn’t say that, but it is pretty awesome when it reads that way, right?
Farming and forestry are big business in Alabama. Combined, they account for nearly 12 percent of all of the state’s economic activity.
But after generations of change, the state’s bell cow industries may need some nurturing.
Over the past half century, the number of Alabama farms has dwindled from about 250,000 to around 60,000. Large farming operations have thrived but many medium-sized, family farms died away, said Alabama Cooperative Extension System Director Gary Lemme.
The U.S. Department of Justice said today that conditions at Julia Tutwiler Prison violate the Constitution, citing what it called “a history of unabated staff-on-prisoner sexual abuses and harassment.”
DOJ sent investigators to Tutwiler last April and reported their findings in a 36-page letter to Gov. Robert Bentley.
“The women at Tutwiler universally fear for their safety,” the report stated.
Think about that. A news app, a piece of software about the news made by in-house developers, generated more clicks than any article. And it did this in a tiny amount of time: The app only came out on December 21, 2013. That means that in the 11 days it was online in 2013, it generated more visits than any other piece.
I’ll repeat: It took a news app only 11 days to “beat” every other story the Times published in 2013. It’s staggering.
You don’t know them, but do a little dance — or a few burpees, she liked burpees — for ZB and her parents. Pink and purple were her favorite colors. Wearing those might be a nice touch.
