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30
Oct 12

Journalism in the clouds

Journalism, journalism, journalism. My day was just eaten up with the stuff.

All of the Sandy material in the world, it must be read, if not looked at. I find it harder and harder to look at hurricane damage. Tornado damage isn’t easy, but hurricanes, I’d rather just look away, if only I was allowed. Sometimes the work supersedes the want. Tornado damage, though, has a different scope. Devastating, sure, but to fewer people. The volume of a hurricane’s destruction is hard to comprehend and that can be a lot to bear.

Tornadoes? Not quite as bad. Or at least that’s what I thought until the giant tornado carved a path between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham last year. I’ve watched a lot of tornadoes. Chased a few, even. Seeing that monster on television was hard to watch, though. This one, from the ground during the same storm, I’ll never forget. The rotation is just behind the mall and you can tell from the shot how hard they were fighting against the wind. Those are just tornadoes, though, right?

The humanistic response outweighs the journalistic impulse and I think I’d be happy never to cover a hurricane, thanks. Just look at the scale:

Showed that in class today. And then we did Associated Press style for the rest of the afternoon. Then I had to give an interview to a student who is working on a project about the phone hacking scandal in London. She was a freshman, but she’s clearly done a lot of research and put a lot of thought into the project. It was a pleasant surprise. I figured we’d talk about ethics and process. Behave better, this is how this is supposed to work. She wanted to talk about organization. OK then, there were many corrupted people acting unscrupulously, and it seems to go all the way to the top.

From time to time someone wants to come and interview me about how some aspect of the working media operates. That’s wonderful and we should have more of that. This young lady pulled out her digital recorder and her pages of notes and I knew I was going to be talking for a while. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully I gave her something useful. And so we did.

Then, of course, tonight is the night the student-journalists put out their paper, too. So I stuck around for that so I could answer important stylistic questions like “Do you like this? Or that?”

There’s also reading things like:

Lance Armstrong shows why the disruption in journalism matters

Journalism ethics in a digital age

And my favorite, Drone journalism set for takeoff – once they’re permitted to use our airspace

I want one:

And here’s an entry-level, legal in the U.S. model, the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 It has limited range and altitude, of course, but it also has two cameras on it.

Here’s a video from a slightly more expensive make, shooting footage over Detroit:

Clearly you could get some great storm damage footage this way.


29
Oct 12

Hurricane Sandy

A high school football team takes in a bullied girl as one of their own. Make sure you stay for her money quote. Kids these days.

Some Hurricane Sandy things? Sure, I ran across plenty of those today.

The real picture today from the Tomb of the Unknown. That was the first of many photos that tricked readers. There’s a local boy on this duty assignment, by the way. Makes us all proud.

Livestream offers a crowdsourced approach to Sandy. Lots of great videos and photographs there.

Google’s crisis map is just hinting at things to come. Via Digital Journal:

Its crisis map is pooling Hurricane Sandy data to inform visitors about the hurricane’s path, emergency shelters and crowdsourced YouTube videos.

If you want to track where Sandy is heading in the next 48 hours, Google’s new layered map is a good place to start. It collects info from the National Hurricane Center, the American Red Cross and its own YouTube videos to let us know the latest details on this powerful storm.

Want to hack a hurricane? Huffington Post has details on who’s doing what.

Insurers estimate $10 billion in damages. Here’s to hoping premature estimates are … premature.

Check out Andrew Kaczynski’s
Sandy Tumblr, where you’ll find plenty of valuable information.

The Wind Map is especially popular on breezy days, as you might imagine.

Big storm or not, there is always the media. And the hype didn’t start with cable television. E.B. White, whom I studied and still reference in classes, was complaining about radio weather hype in 1954. (Here’s a modern equivalent, by the way.)

New York has had big storms before. Here’s the 11-foot surge in 1960.

And now to a night of watching cable news and learning more from Twitter.

Update: All of our folks made it through with little trouble. The in-laws lost their cable and Internet connection. The Yankee’s godparents lost their power. All very fortunate, really.


22
Oct 12

Padding with pictures

Nothing but pictures and slideshows and more photos and then some camera things. I’ve stared at so many photographs today I’m not sure what is in focus any more. This one is going in tomorrow’s presentation as the thrill of victory:

SpringGarden

That was in 2008. Time flies. She’s gone on to college, made the dean’s list several times and probably graduated by now.

Twitter! For grades! It isn’t just for your breakfast anymore.

It hasn’t been about breakfast since roughly ever, but people that don’t understand it tend to default to such things. A television producer asked me once if I could learn as much about news on Twitter as I could on television. I told him of all of the tidbits I’d learned that day — there happened to be a plane crash and I knew as much or more as you’d get in a television recap of any story — and apologized for not knowing more; I hadn’t been online as much as I normally was.

I think I sold him. But I digress. There is a study that suggests “>Twitter is good for learning:

(C)ollege students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades.

“Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice,” said Greenhow, who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers. “It’s changing the way we experience what we read and what we write.”

[…]

Greenhow analyzed existing research and found that Twitter’s real-time design allowed students and instructors to engage in sharing, collaboration, brainstorming and creation of a project. Other student benefits included learning to write concisely, conducting up-to-date research and even communicating directly with authors and researchers.

I have a Twitter paper that will be published later this year. It will be more about the communal nature of the tool. I look forward to telling you all about it.

I’ll be using this photo essay in class tomorrow. This is the story of a naval EOD who became only the 5th quadruple amputee survivor at Walter Reed, but also his long road back and the love he’s walking with once again. Amazing story, all right there in pictures.

That Buzzfeed piece has turned his friend and photographer, Tim Dodd, into a star. “The site went from boasting 220 views per day at its peak, to 36,000 views per day literally overnight.”

And then The Chive got hold of it. They say they’ve raised $250,000 for Morris in a matter of days.

Media law: SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte on the creep of Hazelwood:

When Hazelwood was decided, First Amendment advocates comforted themselves that the ruling affected only minors enrolled in K-12 schools – and then only in the limited “curricular” setting, such as a class-produced newspaper. That was a logical reading of the case and, as time has proven, an overly optimistic one.

[…]

The creep of Hazelwood onto college campuses is troubling because, in practice, courts regard Hazelwood as a “rational-basis-minus” level of review, under which censorship decisions need only reside in the deferentially viewed vicinity of reasonableness.

[…]

That level of control would be unthinkable in college, where principles of academic freedom are widely accepted to give instructors the latitude to air provocative and even offensive topics. But the inescapable conclusion – that a student could be disciplined for speech that would be constitutionally protected if uttered by a nonstudent – is equally unsustainable. If words are inappropriate for a college audience and might be confused for the government’s speech when uttered by a student, then they are doubly so when said by an adult authority figure.

Quick, fun read: Superman quits the paper.

Tomorrow I’ll use this picture as an argument for taking your camera everywhere:

truckfire

Took that picture five years ago and remember it like it was yesterday. Not for the picture. I just happened upon that as I drove to a visitation.


16
Oct 12

Tuesdays go so fast

An overcast, almost cool day. No wonder I saw cider at the store. We’re not there yet, but soon, I’m sure.

Saw this guy on the road this morning. Always nice to see them moving sedately down the interstate:

firetruck

Saw this guy on a support column this evening. Always nice to see them wait for me to get the best shot I can, which is to say a blurry, fuzzy, nighttime snapshot off my iPhone:

insect

In between I taught a class, arranged a big meeting with several publishers for next week, helped a student with a story, talked cutlines and all of the other rewarding things that go into a Tuesday. Life is pretty good, indeed.

Some things from the other blog:

A tweet to start your day

Preventing plagiarism

Looking for a new venue? Tumblr on over

What’s wrong with this video?

Clery Act data

More on Twitter, and something new on Tumblr tomorrow.


15
Oct 12

“You are pretty strong … for a professor”

I spent a few moments loading up a queue with posts for my Samford blog. Here are two I wrote today, a morning tweet, which I think might become a new feature. There’s also a little post about reverse publishing.

Here are a few more things I wrote, last week, that I neglected to cross-post here:

The business of the business

Digital first, the only way?

On the big switch in local media

Also, I noticed that the particular them I’m using there allows for rotating banners. (Apparently I like them, no?) So I’m loading up on campus shots, which is probably the best part of that blog.

Spent some time in the library today. Spent some time writing letters.

I visited city hall. I learned that while there is the old saying “You can’t fight city hall” you can write a check there.

I had to visit the City Revenue Office, which looks more like a hospital’s information desk. There was a nice lady there who took my check. I needed little tags that would signal the garbage crew to pick up my dead appliances. Stick them on, roll the old washer and dryer out to the curb and, come morning, they’ll all be gone.

That doesn’t even give you time to be sentimental about it. “I had you, washer and dryer, for about 10 years, four homes and countless loads of laundry. Just think of all the dates you helped me get! I’m going to … I promised myself I wouldn’t … sniff … ” So it is good that the system moves so fast; that would just be silly.

So while I’m working on a small project for a guy this evening The Yankee says “Someone is taking our stuff.”

I walk outside and meet Mr. Lauderdale, one of our elderly neighbors who talks fast and thinks big. He’s a retired engineer, worked for AT&T for more than three decades and about half as many corporate names. One of his friendly spies in the neighborhood saw the old appliances and gave him a call. He drove his pickup down the road and there he was, trying to get this stuff in the bed by himself.

So I helped him. Turns out his son is an attorney, his daughter-in-law is a professor of some sort. I told him I was a professor too. And he said “You are pretty strong … for a professor.”

I was moving things one-handed, bad shoulder and all that.

Nice guy. He gave me tips for how to fix some things. Told me precisely what it would cost. Told me how much a telephone pole costs. Gave me a brief history of a river in northwest Alabama. Let me go back inside just in time for dinner.

And now I’ll copyedit a journal article into the early morning hours. Living the dream.