I taught a class on Associated Press style and on visual journalism this afternoon. I showed the students this video:
I use it a lot. It is very touching and incredibly moving. It is relatable. It has a lot of great production elements, video and photographs. Color and black and white. It tells a story from beginning to end. There is music, which I see as a mileage may vary kind of thing. I don’t think it is really necessary, but it is clear where they are going with it.
The best parts are where the producers interject in the story and where they are smart enough to stay out of the way. There’s an art to that.
We watched this unembeddable slideshow from NPR, too. In it we meet Steve Campbell and his Iraqi bride as they negotiate the day to day struggle to make a life for themselves in Missouri. Natural sound, coordination of the audio and the visual, and the everydayness just make an interesting story.
We tend to overlook those sometimes.
Therapy this evening, pushing small weights up and down, or left and right as the circumstance required. Rode a bit on a bike. Cleaned up, had dinner, went back into the office.
Tonight the student-journalists at the Crimson are putting their first paper of the year to bed. We start the school year a bit later than most, and we’re a weekly, so it feels like a late beginning, but we’ve used most of the time well.
There is a lot to learn, we have a young staff this year, but they are all eager to do good work, and that’s the key. Also, having fun. They introduced me to mershed perderders which, approaching midnight, was funnier than it should have been. I did not know turtles have such poor diction.
Tomorrow the students get to see the fruits of their labors. Just as exciting as the first night of layout is the unheralded first critique of the year.
Any day that starts with fruit and grading can’t be bad, right? I think so. Also, apple slices are delicious.
I’m a phase eater. Sometimes I eat a lot. And then, for a brief while, I’ll eat very little. There’s nothing consistent about it, except when I’m in the habit of eating the same things over and over. Lately I’ve been on a fruit kick, which is not particularly interesting to anyone but me, and only then given how many bad-for-me things I typically ingest.
There is a boy in my family who apparently reminds me of me — how he talks and walks and laughs — and I think, “Poor kid.” And then I text his mother and say “If he is like me tell him to study harder and eat fewer candy bars.”
“Enjoy more grapes.”
So I had a small fruit tray for breakfast and graded quizzes this morning. I had lunch with one of our recent grads. We had barbecue, my first ever trip to Saw’s. It is a small little place in a roadside strip mall. There are maybe eight tables inside, we had the corner window. The lady at the register is managing chaos, but thanks everyone who writes out a tip. It doesn’t feel particularly clean, but you can’t make respectable barbecue in a place that aces the health code rules.
A young man brings out your lunch on paper plates. They leave you alone otherwise, despite the lunch crowd and the few tables. There are framed newspaper articles and magazine covers on every inch of the walls. There are license plates above the doors. It is all a thin and perfectly random homage to a sub-genre of food.
Longtime readers know barbecue would be the center of all of my food streaks if it were actually healthy. All things in moderation though, even slow cooked, pulled pork.
Back on campus I had a brief meeting with the editor to discuss distribution patterns and then a visit with my chair, who’s the nicest guy around, and some students about various student things. I wrote plenty of emails.
The guy that can fix my office phone called my cell. He stopped by near the end of the day. This is what he did: glanced at my phone, followed the path of the two cords coming out of it with his eyes, picked one up and plugged it into the wall.
The phone paused, lit up and turned on.
Naturally, I feel like a dope. Turns out he’d had to do some electrical work in a panel in a Jeffries tube somewhere in the building. He did that after I called to complain that my phone wouldn’t work. I didn’t know that, and hadn’t thought to test the highly technical technique of plugging the phone back in to see if it was working this week where it did not last week.
So I spent a few minutes playing with the settings. Turns out you can run your computer off this phone. You can both phone home and phone the Internet from this Cisco IP device. It does not have the ringtone from 24, however. I’m sure there’s a way to do — yes there is.
The engineer that fixed the phone left his notebook in my office. It looked important, so I called his office and someone was still there. He answered his phone, on this same server networked phone. Sounded like he was standing in my doorway.
Pin drop nothing, I could hear the creases in his slacks settling.
So I walked the book over, because this is one thing the phone won’t do. The phone guy will thank me in the morning.
He’ll send an email, no doubt.
Hot day today, even into the evening. I believe she had the right idea:
She does it, her owner said, more than he would like. But the fountains at Samford are just so tempting.
Burr and Forman, by the way, are not buried beneath that fountain. That is a large regional law firm. Some 55 of their lawyers graduated from Samford with their undergrad or with their JD from Cumberland.
A photo (or two) a day meant to express everything that needs to be said. Don’t over extrapolate or strain yourself making too many inferences. They are just pictures.
Soon. I should be riding my bike in the trainer more. I want to ride it on the road. I got a new helmet this week, a surprise gift from my lovely mother. And now I just need to buy a new tire, wait another week or so to get back out onto the road.
It is strange. I’m in a rush to get back to normal, but the lingering pain says “Ease back into it.”
I’m siding with discretion on this.
We had a nice discussion online about the New York Times use of graphic user-submitted art after the shooting near the Empire State Building. Someone asked my thoughts on Facebook and took a screen capture for wider posterity:
Dr. John Carvalho, a journalism professor at Auburn, was kind enough to share it as well.
(Incidentally, I wrote that will spinning down on the bike trainer.)
No change in my physical therapy this morning. I did the same small exercises as in my first session on Monday.
I think there are two guys running the place with lots of younger colleagues guiding people through their paces. During the massage portion I had the other main therapist. Today was the man moving gracefully into middle age. The therapist looked like the man that sits down a few rows on the other side of your church.
His fingers were a little more narrow than his partner’s, this process takes plenty long to consider good metaphors for the therapist’s digits, but no less painful. His fingers are more the size of a screwdriver handle. He works the shoulder. There are two muscles in the damaged and surgically repaired area that go to the scapula and that, he said, explains the almost-muscle spasms.
He spends a lot of time over the incision itself, a cruel mixture of mild sensation and extreme sensation owing to the vagaries of the damaged nerves and “Hey watch it, there’s a huge surgical cut there!”
The point is to break up the scar tissue, a little now is better than a lot later. Holy moly they can work you over. He raised up my arm, impressed with my range of motion — with a little effort I can put my hurt wing completely over my head, like a touchdown call.
“There’s a big difference” he said, between 180 and 135 degrees of rotation. “Be happy with that. It takes a lot to get there.”
Things to read: Army SPC Josh Wetzel, a Glencoe, Ala. native, was wounded in Afghanistan. I wrote about him this summer for TWER.) The most recent piece of his storyinvolves a now famous picture of the Auburn fan from Walter Reed Medical Center that hangs in the White House:
The president was so moved by us praying with him on his visit that he chose this picture from the film his photographer took, had it blown up, and it now hangs in the West Wing of the White House. We said a prayer around the picture today that it would touch the lives of those who saw it and would be a catalyst for positive decision making in the Obama administration.
Seeing the picture for the first time was amazing but I think the coolest thing about it was the tour guide behind us was showing the next group the picture and said “The family in front of us is the family in this picture and the gentleman in the wheelchair is a one of our country’s wounded warriors.”
We in news and media should bring those strands together to knit a mobile strategy around learning about people and serving them better as a result — not just serving content on smaller screens. Mobile=local=me now. We should build a strategy on people over content, on relationships.
That’s what mobile means to me: a path to get us to the real value in our business.
If you view business as grounded in a relationship (some refer to it as the loyalty of, their customer) then you find that businesses need to create and then restrengthen those relationships. Media outlets, Jarvis says, need to return to that approach. The audience has to be a part of that, which may sometimes be a tricky sell. The next thing, though, would be to also monetize it.
Speaking of money, how much did USA TODAY and the Suffolk University Political Research Center spend on this survey?
Call them the unlikely voters.
A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t likely to do so finds that these stay-at-home Americans back Obama’s re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of them say they are registered to vote. Eight in 10 say the government plays an important role in their lives.
Even so, they cite a range of reasons for declaring they won’t vote or saying the odds are no better than 50-50 that they will: They’re too busy. They aren’t excited about either candidate. Their vote doesn’t really matter. And nothing ever gets done, anyway.
Fine story to find out their motivations — or de-motivation. There are some great statistical points of interest:
Many of the nation’s unlikely voters report hard times over the past four years. Only a third call their household finances good or excellent. Close to half say their annual household income is less than $60,000 a year. They tend to have lower levels of education than likely voters; nearly six in 10 have no more than a high school diploma.
I love the subhead. “They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a landslide for President Obama— but by definition they probably won’t.”
Maybe “They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a Reaganesque landslide for Romney — but by definition they probably won’t” didn’t sound as good around the newsroom. Or perhaps the assumption is that staying home will, in fact, do just that. The piece estimates that more than 90 million won’t vote. The subhead, then, could just as easily say “They could bolster a growing movement for the resurgent Green Part — but by definition they probably won’t.”
The story notes “Two-thirds of the unlikely voters say they voted four years ago, backing Obama by more than 2-1 over Republican John McCain.”
I wrote this on Twitter early Monday morning. “21st century living: I just watched an explorer LAND ON MARS on my phone. Top THAT, every century that’s come before us.”
“And almost immediate pictures from Curiosity via Odyssey orbiting above. Pictures. From Mars. Immediately. From MARS.”
Here’s the first color panorama:
I wrote: “People that think space is no longer interesting or exciting aren’t paying attention to space.”
Meanwhile, back on earth, we’re trying to overcome the other front page news. And Will Ferrell isn’t taking it well:
Check out this feature from the New York Times on how all of history’s great sprinters stack up to Usain Bolt. This might be my favorite time piece in a very long time.
The politicians want your Pandora play lists. But mostly just your email. My Pandora thinks I should really contact an electrician in Kalamazoo, such errors in the algorithms might throw off the campaigns. That would make for an interesting fall.
Speaking of journalism: I have a great respect for the people that craft effective longform journalism pieces, particularly the good profiles. They frequently carry the reader through a story in such a way that the unfamiliar, or opposed, often becomes familiar or even likable. That’s what you expect to happen there. “He is the coach of the team I hate, but I tell ya, he’s got a story. And despite wearing different colors — and that just boils my bottom — he almost seems like a human being.” That sort of reaction.
Not this Urban Meyer fluff piece. It just seems … sad … in ways you don’t really want to worry about. Wright Thompson did a fine job, so it isn’t the reporter, but the subject of the profile. Thompson gives Meyer the black-and-white treatment. There’s 1986, enjoying football, and 2006, where you can’t find glory in the glory of winning games gloriously on the fields of glorious battlefield which was, in many respects, viewed by the masses as rapidly approaching glorious. Thompson plays Meyer as a guy trying to find himself, the dad, husband, pal, as opposed to being overrun by That Guy. He leaves it so that you think, maybe, Meyer can get back there, and keep the signed contract he had to make with his kids. Maybe he will; there’s hope for all of us! But you get this suspicion that when Thompson reflects on this piece in a few years, he’s going to be disappointed. That isn’t the journalism, that’s the subject matter.
The best essay I’ve read this week, is a slightly older one, on prison and tattoos. It defies excerpting, but here:
Another popular pattern—though it makes one shudder to think of the process by which it is inscribed upon the skin, or the consequences if a mistake is made—is the spider’s web on the side of the neck. Occasionally, this is spread over the whole of the face, even over the scalp. At first I assumed this design must have a symbolic meaning, but having inquired of many bearers of it, and having been assured by them that there is no such meaning, I am now satisfied that it is its intrinsic beauty, and a certain vaguely sinister connotation attached to spiders’ webs, that attracts people to the design and induces them to adorn themselves with it. Moreover, I vividly recall the scene at a murder trial in which I testified. The judge and counsel were embroiled in a learned discussion of the finer points of mens rea, watched by the prisoner in the dock and his family in the public gallery—all of whom, down to the nth generation, had spiders’ webs prominently tattooed on their necks. Never was the class basis (as the Marxists used to call it) of British justice more clearly visible: two classes separated by, among other things, a propensity on the part of one of them to self-disfigurement.
Mark Worsfold, 54, a former soldier and martial arts instructor, was arrested on 28 July for a breach of the peace shortly before the cyclists arrived in Redhouse Park, Leatherhead, where he had sat down on a wall to watch the race. Officers from Surrey police restrained and handcuffed him and took him to Reigate police station, saying his behaviour had “caused concern”.
[…]
Worsfold, whose experience was first reported by Private Eye, claims police questioned him about his demeanour and why he had not been seen to be visibly enjoying the event. Worsfold, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2010, suffers from muscle rigidity that affects his face. He was released after two hours without charge or caution.
“It could have been done better. I was arrested for not smiling. I have Parkinson’s,” he said, adding that he realised the officers were working long hours and trying to control the event properly, but they had not, in his case, acted correctly. He said he did not want to make further comment until he received a response from Surrey police.
There is not here, of course, but that is increasingly becoming a less desirable sounding place. This regrettable overreaction doesn’t help. But, hey, they kept this guy from worrying anyone. I know people who deal with Parkinson’s and I struggle to imagine having to see them in a position like this.
Tomorrow: a doctor’s appointment, and something really fun!
