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Avoid the shade

Bright. Clear. Cold. Not so bad in the sun, but it was a different story in the shade.

So I tried to run in the sun, but of course all of our preferred routes have nice tree cover, which is a great idea for most of the year. Only tonight did I think of visiting the actual track.

Ah, well, freeze and learn.

The high was 45. We are diving toward 27. Like I said, cold. But I got views like this:

I ran 3.64 miles, and the cold made it hurt. It has been a long time since I’ve ran in a serious chill. It doesn’t feel any better now than when it did back then. But I ran. Someone who runs in cold weather needs to tell me how to dress appropriately.

Things to read …

Chart of the Week: A minute on the Internet:

Keeping up with what people do online is no easy task — just ask the researchers in our Internet Project. Nor is it much easier for those seeking ways to make money off online activities — they’re changing almost too fast to keep up with.

But the folks at Quartz, the business-news site from Atlantic Media, have given it a good shot. They pulled together data from Intel, investment bank GP Bullhound, and a Facebook-led consortium called Internet.org to create this neat summation of what happens in a minute on six of the Web’s biggest services

The numbers are staggering. And speaking of which, This Map Of Planes In The Air Right Now For Thanksgiving Will Blow Your Mind.

Gov. Robert Bentley says report that Medicaid expansion would create 30,000 jobs is ‘bogus’:

“Because the studies are all bogus,” Bentley said. “The jobs are already there. You’re not creating new jobs. You’re not creating new people by bringing this money in. You have the doctors are already there. The nurses are already there. You don’t produce a new doctor in a year. I went to school 24 years to become a doctor. You don’t produce these type people immediately.”

The governor said he did not dispute that expanding Medicaid, which states have the option of doing under the Affordable Care Act, would create some ancillary jobs.

“I’m not saying it couldn’t create some jobs,” Bentley said. “That’s not the reason we’re doing this though. That’s not the reason we’re making this decision. We’re making this decision philosophically.

“And we’re just going to have to see how this plays out. I personally think the entire Affordable Care Act is falling apart. The people of this country do not like it. The majority of the people of this country do not like it. And I’m not going to be a part of it.”

There’s a lot to unpack there.

Love stories like this one. Secret to a long marriage revealed; Birmingham couple in nursing home renews vows:

He was walking into the JC Penney in Jasper more than 72 years ago. She was walking out.

Wednesday at a nursing home in Birmingham where they both reside, Hercule, 95, and Kathleen Henslee, 89, renewed their wedding vows in a ceremony that brought tears to the eyes of family, friends and nursing home staff alike.

“Do you promise to love, honor and cherish, in sickness and in health, to be faithful, forsaking all others, for as long as you both may live?” asked the Rev. Herman Pair, pastor of Sandusky First Baptist Church, where the couple have been members since the 1950s.

I saw this young man in the background of a football game the other night. He has a remarkable story. Alexander in wheelchair, but UAB lets him work toward football dream:

Practice is for players and Timothy Alexander was not a player, not in his condition. But before he could dream to be upright again, he had a proposition for McGee: You let me live that dream and try to become that player.

“I just fell in love with the person,” McGee remembers. “Then he started talking to me about, ‘Man, the Lord is going to bless me. I’m going to be back on the field.’ I started saying, ‘You know, I believe that, too. I think you’re right.’ ”

So Alexander, seven years removed from his car wreck that paralyzed him, practices football. Each afternoon. It’s not the kind of practice any of them is used to. Alexander does push-ups during practice periods, does leg lifts in the weight room. He once benched 315 pounds.

McGee has given him a locker, his own jersey. This bio even says he’s playing football. All this because when the Lord decides to bring Timothy Alexander all the way to the field, he wants to be in shape.

That’s a great personification of the human spirit.

Auburn fans may be able to see this on Facebook, though for some reason they are having takedown orders on YouTube. Despite the left-hand, right-hand confusion this is a fairly intense video for the Iron Bowl this Saturday. We have reached saturation point. We don’t care. There is a video to see.

Auburn / football / journalism / links / running / Samford / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
26
Nov 13

I’d like my blue skies back, please

Cold. Rainy. Miserable outdoor experience. The high was 46. The low was only 41, but even thermometers can be fooled. Just gray and yucky all day. Yucky is the preferred meteorological term.

I went out for a run, but it was drizzling and I realized I didn’t need to run that bad.

So I didn’t run, except back inside to put on warmer clothes.

More phone calls and other assorted things, all of which make for riveting site reads, I’m sure. Instead, we’ll move on.

Things to read … The Guardian’s Gabriel Dance on new tools for story and cultivating interactive journalism:

I can go to someone on my team, give them a topic, and ask them to report on that topic and the process is very similar to how that might work with a more traditional print reporter. They go out, they explore it, they see what information is available. They schedule some interviews, they gather data, and they come back and we work on what form it might take.

Are we producing articles with strictly text? No. But I think what we are producing is much closer to what you saw in Decoded, which is what I guess I’d call web-first journalism.

When people talk about this as new and different, it only really is if you’re looking at the old things as the status quo.

This would work for branded journalism, too. That’s a great Q&A, worth your time if you’re interested in the topic. Also, I have other topics.

Gene Policinski, whom I’ve had the good fortune to meet and spend a day with, writes: Inside the First Amendment | Privacy the impetus for conflict

(I)n our lifetimes — and more since just last June — privacy and its implications for First Amendment areas ranging from free speech to the freedom to assemble have taken on a new urgency prompted by government surveillance of the World Wide Web, phone calls and high-tech gadgetry.

Beyond questions of how much does the government know about our individual lives through captured emails, online search logs and records of whom we telephoned, where and for how long, there’s the looming impact on whether we will feel free to speak our minds even in “private” moments, and whom will we be willing to be seen with?

US B-52 bombers challenge disputed China air zone:

The US has flown two B-52 bombers over disputed islands in the East China Sea in defiance of new Chinese air defence rules, officials say.

China set up its “air defence identification zone” on Saturday insisting that aircraft obey its rules or face “emergency defensive measures”.

A Pentagon spokesman said the planes had followed “normal procedures”.

The islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are a source of rising tension between the two nations.

Turn an eye to the east. That is getting interesting in a hurry.

Sports fan? TV buff? This is a great read. Inside the chaos and spectacle of the NFL on Fox:

To watch a football broadcast is to see much more than a football game. There are only about 11 minutes of actual action during a three-hour game, which means 95 percent of the time there’s something else going on. The graphics, replays, highlights, and analysis that make a football game into the at-home experience millions of people know and love — it’s all from Fox, and it’s all done on the fly. Nearly everyone on the crew says that while they broadcast the game, what they really do is make television.

It starts at 6AM on Saturday, in the cold, dark Foxboro morning, as the Fox team shows up to unload three 53-foot trucks. Stadiums don’t have much in the way of built-in A / V equipment, so Fox (and every other network) carries everything the crew will need for the weekend inside those trucks — the show has to be built and broken down every weekend. This Saturday, it has to be even faster: there’s a college football game at 4PM.

That those things never occur to you is a testament to the quality of their work, really.

We’d like you to meet a paralympic sprinter Blake Leeper. He was a guest on Arsenio Hall’s show. Hall brought on a surprise special guest. Leeper’s reaction is priceless.

This is a candid and refreshing read. If you followed Auburn last season, it is a nice way to, maybe, finally, close the door on all that. The former head coach, forever gracious, gave a wide-ranging interview to USA Today. Coach Gene Chizik on Auburn ouster, team’s current success:

I think you’d have to start with the players. What people don’t understand is from a coaching perspective when you struggle like we struggled last year, you hurt so much for the players. The players, you brought them there and told them that this is the way it’s going to be and give them this vision of championships and things of that nature. And when it doesn’t unfold exactly like that and go through the struggle we went through last year you hurt for the players. So I’m ecstatic for the players.

I couldn’t be happier to sit there and watch them win these games, particularly these close ones, however they pull it out and we all know how that’s gone this year. It’s an absolute joy for me to watch them celebrate and be happy and win. I think without question, that’s what I get the biggest joy out of.

Gus has done a fantastic job, and he and I worked together for three years and he’s done a fantastic job of regrouping the troops and them buying into him and the staff he brought in and it’s really nice to see those guys rebound and do what we recruited them to do and that’s win. They’re definitely a talented group of young men, and they’re great kids and they deserve this.

A nice Samford sports story, too: Summerlin And Shade Named Players Of The Year:

Samford senior quarterback Andy Summerlin and senior linebacker Justin Shade were named Southern Conference Offensive and Defensive Players of the Year, respectively, by the SoCon Sports Media Association, when the league released its postseason awards Tuesday morning.

They’ll start a playoff run this weekend.

Leaf update:

It is gone. Fell this morning or overnight. A new picture would just be of branches and twigs. I wouldn’t want to embarrass the tree that way.

Tomorrow it will be sunny again. And warmer. Has to be, right?

cycling / journalism / links / Samford / things to read — Comments Off
25
Nov 13

A lovely, cold Monday

Had the opportunity to work from home today. Lots of emails. Lots of texts.

It was also cold. The high was 48. Naturally I chose this afternoon to work from home, because that meant I could get in an afternoon ride. And that meant riding at 48 degrees.

So I put on my stretchy clothes and a layer with sleeves. I put on my fingerless gloves and pedaled very hard, right from the outset. Maybe, I thought, this would warm me up. At the light closest to home, where I haven’t even started riding yet, I’m already cold. That’s a good sign. I don’t really know how to ride in that weather. The chill, the wind you create, the sweat staying with you … These are rare problems for us, fortunately, but I should figure it out.

What I did figure out, my hands were only cold when I stopped. My torso was only cold when I was moving. So I got in a quick 15 mile ride around the perimeter of town. Then I came home, wrapped myself in a towel and made a hot tea.

And then made quite a few phone calls, working on recruiting the next class of students into our department. I like talking to the students, some of them ask great questions. I also like talking to peoples’ answering machines, too. Sixty seconds, done!

Leaf update: Still going strong.

I took that picture last week of the last leaf on my indoor tree. I’ll keep you posted on how long it sticks around.

Things to read … Drones Offer Journalists a Wider View:

The best way to film the destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban, the Philippines, said Lewis Whyld, a British photographer, was from the air.

But Mr. Whyld did not want to beg for a ride on a military helicopter, taking the space of much-needed aid. So he launched a drone into the skies above the city. In addition to shots that showed the scale of the damage, broadcast by CNN recently, his drone discovered two bodies that were later recovered by the authorities, he said in an interview.

“The newspaper was for still images,” said Mr. Whyld, who builds his own drones, “but the Internet is for this.”

Yep.

4 examples of innovative online newsgathering:

You may be accustomed to using RSS feeds, Twitter, Google Alerts and other tools for newsgathering. Here are four reporting techniques you may not have thought of.

[…]

These four examples were flagged up in a presentation Journalism.co.uk gave to journalists at Swedish Public Radio.

Photographer Wins $1.2 Million Lawsuit Over Images Taken From Twitter:

With an endless amount of photos floating around on Twitter, it’s easy to find images of almost anything. But this large social-media bank of seemingly free-to-share photos can also lead to issues regarding ownership and copyright infringement.

A New York jury delivered a landmark decision on Friday when it sided with freelance photographer Daniel Morel after he sued Getty Images and Agence France-Presse for using photos that he posted on Twitter without his permission. Morel won $1.2 million for the unauthorized use of his images.

So be careful out there.

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute wants to digitize, preserve its Oral History Collection, and it wants your help:

If the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is one of Birmingham’s greatest assets, the institute’s Oral History Collection is one of its greatest assets. It is comprised of 500 video interviews, many lasting an hour or more, with the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement. The subjects of the interviews include many of the names you know, like hours with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and dozens and dozens of names you may not know, but who played a role in the struggle nonetheless.

[…]

BCRI hopes to preserve that material, and to that end they’ve launched a fundraiser on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo seeking financial support for the digitization and archiving of all the material in the library.

That’s a worthy project.

Here’s my favorite, which you’ve seen here and on Twitter and Facebook among other places: Help Molly Walk Again. She’s more than three-quarters of the way to her fundraising goal. Great story, a young Auburn woman who had a bad car crash and a traumatic brain injury. She rehabbed enough, learning to walk and talk and feed herself again, to return to school and finish her degree. A remarkable young woman. Now she’s trying to continue her rehab. Her fund raiser continues through the next several few days. If you have the means, please consider helping her out and passing along the link.

Friday / iPhone / journalism / links / movies / things to read / video — Comments Off
22
Nov 13

The last leaf

And, now, the last leaf on my indoor tree:

This tree sheds them all at once. This morning there were only two leaves left. I watched one of them fall away, like Leonardo DiCaprio in so many nautical films.

Last year this tree dropped leaves almost overnight. I thought I’d killed it somehow. But, you never know and it doesn’t take up that much space. So I watered the soil and stared at the branches and then, this spring, the leaves came back even larger than they were the year before. At this rate we’ll have to buy a new house just to support this tree within six years.

So I thought I better document the strongest of them all. I’ll keep you updated.

Caught a late showing of the new Hunger Games movie this evening:

The movie is pretty good. The Yankee says it was a consistent adaption from the book. I’m sure fans will love it. I have a problem getting past a nation willing to allow themselves to digress to a situation like that. I’m told that is never really explained, which is a great way to escape a difficult theme for the author, who can then launch into a social commentary on whatever she likes. And then I read about it:

Collins says the idea for the brutal nation of Panem came one evening when she was channel-surfing between a reality show competition and war coverage. “I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way.”

Uh huh.

By the way, ever heard of Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale?

Things to read …

World Bank raises Philippine typhoon aid package to almost $1 bln:

On Saturday, the national disaster agency said the death toll from Haiyan had risen to 5,235 from 5,209, with more than 1,600 still missing and over 4 million displaced people.

Apart from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank also pledged a $523 million loan and grant package to the Philippines, as foreign governments and international aid agencies committed about $344 million in cash and relief goods.

The government initially estimated the reconstruction cost to reach as much as $5.8 billion, with more than 1 million houses totally or partly destroyed.

Southeastern Raptor Center to auction off eagle’s Iron Bowl equipment:

Auburn University’s Southeastern Raptor Center is offering Tiger fans a piece of Iron Bowl history. On Friday, the center opened a live auction for the handcrafted lures and jesses that will be worn during the eagle’s pre-game flight before Auburn and Alabama face off Nov. 30.

Mobile-only Internet users face a harsh new digital divide:

‟There’s a misconception that just because someone has Internet access, the digital divide,” the gap between those with Internet access and those without, “has been eliminated,” charges Ortega, who heads a chapter of the digital literacy group One Million New Internet Users.

The problem, Ortega argues, is that large swaths of the population, groups that are predominantly poor and non-white, are largely relying solely on smartphones for Internet access. It’s created a two-tiered system where the rich have access to expensive, high-speed broadband Internet at home and everyone else is relegated to slower connections on mobile devices that seriously limit users’ ability to contribute to the digital conversation.

Ortega views this emerging digital divide as one between “digital consumers” on one hand and “digital contributors” on the other.

This is, in this story, a socioeconomic issue. That’s an interesting, and perhaps overlooked, perspective.

One of those stories every reporter should keep close, because there’s always going to be another one you can write just like it, and it might be as good as this one, What Became of JFK’s Gravedigger?

In 1980, Pollard suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He retired and sat at home in his home on one of Washington’s more modest streets with a box of mementos that included a clipping of the famed gravedigger column. He had hanging on the wall by the television a commendation from the Army for his service to the president on that November day in 1963.

Pollard also had on display the text of Kennedy’s inaugural address and its call to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your county.” Pollard had gone straight from serving in the Army in World War II to spending more than three decades digging graves in Arlington with quiet care and unwavering dignity. He had demonstrated that person can give full measure to America’s greatness by imparting nobility to a humble task.

And he had already made sure that he and his wife would be buried in Section 31, just a short ways from the Kennedy memorial.

That line in the second paragraph there, that’s magic.

Hope you have a great weekend ahead of you!

Auburn / football / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
21
Nov 13

I did not write about meetings

Coca-Cola is getting set to dump press releases. They’ve found something better. Brand journalism, of which I approve, as it can be a powerful tool when used correctly. As this Ragan piece demonstrates, there is a paradigm shift coming:

Perhaps you caught the story in Mashable, The Daily Mail, Adweek, or The Huffington Post.

Coca-Cola’s Singapore team designed a novel double can that
splits into two, so customers can share the fizzy beverage with a friend.

Fantastic PR. But one major reason it got so much play was “because we covered it,” says Ashley Brown, who leads digital communications and social media for The Coca-Cola Company.

The rest of the piece is worth reading, do check it out if you are interested in journalism, public relations or marketing.

Here’s something of an example at Auburn:

Nosa Eguae just graduated with his first degree and his pursuing a second while finishing up his playing days terrorizing quarterbacks. The guy is 22, telling you the children are our future. Here you see him away from the field, the roaring crowd and the mixed life of a student/celebrity, like he is pretty much everywhere in town.

Auburn’s athletic department is putting considerable resources toward telling stories like this, humanizing the young man behind the face mask:

I shot that of him at an equestrian meet last year.

Every team has at least a handful or more of hardworking, successful on-and-off-the field people like Eguae. We should see more of the great stories our institutions are producing in the young men and women that attend there. This is one of the great victories a university can demonstrate to the world, after all.

(Samford does a good job of this, too. They have an incredibly strong social media presence and interaction with all of the university’s various stakeholders. Freshmen are published on the university’s home page. The athletes are widely accessible. There’s even a reality show being shot on campus by the students in our department. There are plans in place to expand on those efforts, too.)

Here is the other side of the “branded” coin. One must find the right balance of telling stories to your multiple audiences and working alongside the traditional (and nontraditional) media. No one has arrived at a formula for this, but you have to develop a deft touch. Otherwise, you might hear about it, as you’ll see in the first of these two quick links:

Photojournalists want better access to the White House

Obama’s Image Machine: Monopolistic Propaganda Funded by You

Cyborg Journalists: How Google Glass Can Change Journalism

And, finally, this: When an artist allowed her 4-year-old daughter to finish her drawings, something awesome happened. Great art there.

And that’s enough for one night. I’m tuckered.