Rowan

friends / journalism / links / Rowan / site / Tuesday — Comments Off on New look to the front page, btw
2
Dec 25

New look to the front page, btw

For fun, I made some certificates for colleagues. They’re all inside jokes for conference friends. Polite, smart, funny, kind-hearted people. One of them was about one guy picking on another guy. That second guy got one for being up for anything. Another certificate for was for someone running the circus. A third was for another guy, “and he knows why.”

He does not know why. But, you know, I don’t know why either. He’s just about the sweetest, most decent guy you could meet. If he’s ever done anything out of line no one knows about it and he’s buried it deeply in his subconscious. I could go on and on, but, really, we’re just lucky he’s a good friend.

Anyway, we all attend this one conference. And we’ve all held various leadership positions there over the years. We’re trying really hard to become the cool club within the club. Or just to amuse ourselves. One year, my lovely bride won the junior scholar award and at the conference and got a nice plaque. The next year, she won a top paper award and got a plaque. The year after that, I got a top paper award there. (I got nothing.) She also has some certificates from when she ran different divisions of that conference. I’ve run the same ones. (I got nothing.) In our text chat, the rest of the group realized they have been similarly shortchanged. So I made certificates.

Her certificate recognized her many conference achievements. So meta.

And so as to inoculate myself from a return joke, I made one for me.

That’s one of the two or three semi-notorious things I’ve said at that conference over the years. We were participating on a panel on the social constructs of this or that and I held up my phone and said something like, “We are all roaming little balls of hate with hate rectangles in our hands.”

Actually, I said exactly that. The quote was immortalized by someone who got a certificate today.

I get to see them in April, and I’m excited for it.

This evening I updated the images on the front page of the site. They look similar to the most recent version, but different. They look like this.

They are photos from a particular tree-covered road that I shot in October. And here I am, finally getting around to uploading them. This being one of my core hobbies, and being about five weeks behind on getting them here says a lot about my time management lately.

Maybe I’ll get better at it later this month, when the term is over, and the grades have been submitted.

At which time I’ll take three, maybe four deep breaths, and start planning for the spring term.

The good news is I only have one new class prep in the spring! (Three this semester was … a lot.) One class I have will be unchanged. The one will be new. And I’ll make some small adjustments to the criticism class. I’ll refine the details for that in a few days.

Yes, I have carved out two 15-minutes blocks of time, Thursday and next Tuesday, to figure that all out.

In today’s installment of the criticism class, we discussed this story. I chose it because it is a different sort of piece than anything we’ve read all fall. And I wanted the class to see the mechanics of how the writer wrote about the mechanics of deaf soccer. I played when I was a kid, and when I first saw this story last summer I thought, “How do they do that?” Soccer is basically played, and communicated, from behind you. But if no one can hear …


Soccer — and life — through the eyes of the U.S. deaf women’s national team

The first thing to know about deaf soccer is that it is soccer, and a match looks the same as at any level of the sport.

Instead of a loud, profanity-laced pregame speech from the most extroverted leader on the team, players gather in a circle and execute a synchronized movement of quick fist bumps and back-of-hand slaps. During the game, the center official raises a flag in addition to blowing their whistle for fouls and stoppages of play, and games are typically quieter than the average match that features more verbal communication.

From a technical standpoint, players must have hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in their “better ear” to qualify to play deaf soccer and, crucially, hearing aids are not allowed in games, ensuring all players are on a level playing field.

On a hearing team, communication often comes from the back. The goalkeeper and defenders see everything in front of them and can direct their teammates accordingly — and verbally.

“For us, that’s not possible, that’s not realistic,” Andrews says.

The process is more about inherent understanding and movement as a team. If a forward pushes high to chase a ball, everyone behind her must follow. Halftime or injury breaks become more important, Andrews says, because they represent rare opportunities to look at each other as a group.

One guy, at the bginning of class, wondered the same question. How does that work? I said, “You should read the story. It gets explained about 20 percent the way through the story, and it’s a good one, and you’d like it if you read it.”

He just smiled an embarrassed smile and put his head down for a while. We carried on.

We also read and discussed this story, How the Texans and a spa enabled Deshaun Watson’s troubling behavior, mostly for the troubling headline, so I could make some important points about headlines. But the copy is worth reading, too, if you can stomach it.

The accusations have been frequent and startling: more than two dozen women have said the football star Deshaun Watson harassed or assaulted them during massage appointments that Watson and his lawyers insist were innocuous.

Two grand juries in Texas this year declined to charge him criminally and, while the N.F.L. considers whether to discipline him, he has gotten another job, signing a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns this coming season.

It is time, Watson and his representatives say, for everyone to move on.

Yet a New York Times examination of records, including depositions and evidence for the civil lawsuits as well as interviews of some of the women, showed that Watson engaged in more questionable behavior than previously known.

The Times’s review also showed that Watson’s conduct was enabled, knowingly or not, by the team he played for at the time, the Houston Texans, which provided the venue Watson used for some of the appointments. A team representative also furnished him with a nondisclosure agreement after a woman who is now suing him threatened online to expose his behavior.

In org comm we talked about crisis and conflict. Specifically, what are the differences between crises and scandals. This is one of those classes where you get to use popular instances of players the class knows and try to understand why things transpired as they did. For us, it is all building to next week’s work. And toward the final, but they don’t know that yet.

Instagram / photo / Rowan / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Ready for turkey?
25
Nov 25

Ready for turkey?

Guess who has been giving me the business for not talking about them here. You guessed it. They get a whole month of highlights, and then I overlook their contractually obligated weekly appearances for a few weeks and the howling, yowling protests I receive … these cats should have been agents. They’d be devastating in negotiations.

Anyway, here’s Phoebe, in between lodging her protestations. She’s surveying her queendom.

On a recent cold night, Poseidon cuddled up next to me, on top of me, and under the covers.

That’s the boy that wants to go outside all of the time. Always needs to be under the covers, but wants to try on the cold of all outdoors.

Here’s Phoebe considering a bit of dust on the steps. I like how the tail curls around the paws.

And here’s Poseidon doing his best noir cat act.

He would have been great in an old noir movie. He’s got real charisma on camera. But he also has versatility. If he couldn’t get top billing, somehow, he could play a good mid-level henchman.

So the kitties are fine. They’re ready for Thanksgiving, and an extra day of cuddles.

And while Thanksgiving is Thursday we did have class today. The university is only closed Thursday and Friday. So we had class today, those of us that showed up. In my criticism class we discussed Mo’ne Davis is finally ready to play baseball again

Back in 2014, when she was on top of the planet, when she was the first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series, when she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and getting recognized everywhere she went and fielding requests from what felt like every corner of the country, Davis heard something that she never forgot.

In the immediate aftermath of that wild run in Williamsport, Pa., her coach told her, “Mo, I don’t want this to be the greatest thing you do in your life. I don’t want you to be 35 years old stuffing yourself in your old Little League jersey and signing at a card show.” She took that message to heart.

That was not his plan when he delivered it to her. “When they’re 13, you feel like they’re not even listening to whatever you say,” Steve Bandura says now. He was stunned when Davis, now 24, recently used that quote in a newspaper interview to describe what had shaped her life after that famous shutout. You remember that? Of course she did. Bandura met Davis back when she was in elementary school and had coached her in multiple sports, and he’d always recognized how smart she was, how good a listener, how thoughtful. Of course she would hold on to something like that.

She was invited to the White House. She published a memoir. She struck out Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, she was the subject of a documentary by Spike Lee, and she had not yet turned 15. She kept thinking about those words from her coach all the while.

It’s a good story, and it’s about her, but it’s also about this new baseball league, and the modern star, and the commissioner, and the draft, and Davis’ coach is our real tie to the younger star of years gone by.

The draft for this new league has since taken place. Davis was picked 10th overall. The Women’s Pro Baseball League is scheduled to begin play next May.

We also discussed Cowboys DE Marshawn Kneeland dies in apparent suicide at 24:

DPS troopers found Kneeland’s vehicle crashed on southbound Dallas Parkway near Warren Parkway. According to the report, Kneeland fled the scene on foot and officers searched the area with help from K-9 and drone units.

As authorities were looking for Kneeland, a dispatcher told officers that people who knew him had received a group text from Kneeland “saying goodbye. They’re concerned for his welfare,” according to recordings from Broadcastify, which archives public safety radio feeds.

Approximately three hours later, Kneeland was found with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Happy Thanksgiving, boys and girls.

That’s a morning-of story, and one of the few breaking news style pieces of copy we’ve looked at this semester, so there were plenty of new things to talk about. And, as a palate cleanser, I ended the day with three quick videos, each with something we could discuss in a useful kind of way.

In org comm, we talked about stereotypes, prejudice and diversity. We discussed the organizational aspects of diversity and inclusion, and we talked the substance of organizational success. You could see them staring at the screen, with my extremely exciting slide deck. You could see them dreaming of turkey.

The blog is taking a few days off. See you next week. When I make my quiet little list of things I’m thankful for, I’ll be including the readers of the site in that list. And, of course, the kitties.

Friday / history / journalism / photo / Rowan — Comments Off on There are many questions
21
Nov 25

There are many questions

We had a faculty meeting today. Many speeches and introductions. It is part of moving into, and creating, a new college. There are many questions, we don’t yet have all of the answers, but good and talented people are working on it. Answers will be found. These things don’t happen overnight.

Here’s how overnight they don’t happen. We’re in a one-year status quo pattern. As that happens many new procedures are implemented. It’s the first year of a three-year fact-finding and solution-creating process. Sometimes it seems like three years might not be a long enough for that. Sometimes you’re made aware of all that goes into it. And then you’re made aware of all of these other things too. And then there are concerns you aren’t familiar with. There’s a lot that goes into it. You can see that even if, like me, you’re only familiar with just the trees in your section of the giant forest. And people get highly specialized, of course. Also, this is not a thing that happens all of the time, these big department-college merger things. No one specializes in that. But campus communities do love making committees, and sometimes you get some great work out of them. I’m sure that’ll be the case in this instance.

This meeting was held in a building with a big auditorium, because this new college is a huge college and it needs the space for meetings such as these. Down the hall from this auditorium are the offices of the RTF department, and parts of the journalism department, which is moving in there. And on the walls are a lot of old newspaper front pages. These are always such great displays. Maybe I’m one of the only people that stops to look at them, but that’s why they’re there.

Those walls have framed prints of local and campus papers, as all journalism departments seemingly have. The farther you get from this January 1991 issue, above, the less frequently new pages appear. It occurs to me that one of the less important, but nonetheless sad, side effects of ending newsprint is that one day we’ll have no more displays such as these. The last yellowing page on the wall there is a 2018 installment of a local paper (then in the process of being assimilated by a larger entity) running their Super Bowl edition. I wonder who was in charge of deciding which ones to keep. Some are obvious, some may take a little more contextual appreciation.

You could study the look of this paper, and I have considered it. For its day, that’s a strong small paper design. The layout only feels long in the tooth to my 2025 eyes. You’re nine years into the influence of USA Today and all of the influences that emanate from there. I can’t speak to the history of that particular publication, but a quick glance at their digitized archives on newspapers.com suggests they were pretty responsive to industry and consumption trends in that era. Most importantly, it is sharing the information you need, and you know there’s more inside.

Also, there are no ridiculous SEO headlines. It was also all done locally. In 1991, the layout was made with some relatively basic software. If they were using QuarkXPress, this paper was very much an innovator. It would be five more years before a version worth talking about was released. It’s also possible that they did a lot of that with razors and glue. Old school.

Not that you came here for a lot of thoughts on old software. Not that you knew what you were getting here to end the week. I didn’t know either, to be honest. I also don’t know what we’ll have here next week. There will be something, though. We’ll need to check in on the kitties, for instance. There will be some other stuff, too. What will it be? It’s a good question. There are many questions. We’ll find out together.

Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off on This long day featured shooty hoops and a diversity lecture
20
Nov 25

This long day featured shooty hoops and a diversity lecture

In my criticism class we talked about this documentary, which begins with a basketball tournament hit by a dangerous storm. In fact, a desperation three-point shot at the end of one game sent it to overtime, which kept everyone in the Georgia Dome, while a tornado hit downtown Atlanta. Hence the title, Miracle 3. But in the second act, the tournament officials have to figure out how to continue their event because the Georgia Dome is now unusable. So they moved across town to Georgia Tech’s gym, which seems like an impressive feat of logistics.

And in the third act, Georgia, who had a thin and bad team that year, went on the most improbably run, winning three games to win the SEC tournament, another miracle 3, of a sort. But not more so that the jump shot that may well have legitimately saved lives.

It’s a pretty good documentary. The class was into it. We talked about media aesthetics and a few of the tangential points included in the documentary. Someone looked up something about the film as we talked. If nothing else, we’re fostering some good curiosity. But, hopefully, we’re doing more, as well.

In org comm we discussed diversity. We started with the SPLC’s Frame acrostic. We talked about diversity, and stereotypes, and explicit and implicit prejudice, and different sorts of discrimination, your standard greatest hits collection.

Then we tried to tease out some of the things that weren’t included in the basic overview, which allowed us to discuss sports and people with special needs. Turns out that 47 percent of kids with special needs are playing a sport, and some 30 percent of adults with a disability are physically active.

And then we talked about this story I ran across recently. A small town high school had a local elementary school student take part in some pregame football ceremonies. The kid is autistic, so they had to figure out how to accommodate her needs. They talked to some experts, and local businesses, and they set up a place where she could enjoy the game. Then this amazing thing starts happening, other people in the community start coming to the games, people who had never gone to games before. We also talked about the Philadelphia Eagles, who have a hugely robust Autism Foundation. The franchise has hired 35 employees who are on the spectrum, in a demographic that experiences 85 percent unemployment. They’ve also trained 700 stadium works to work appropriately with fans with autism, and they have sensory facilities. Some Eagles execs have personal connections to autism, and that’s how it began six or seven years ago. And, since then, the Eagles Autism Foundation has raised more than $10 million autism research and programs.

Which was a great way to end the day, teasing Tuesday’s discussion about inclusion.

I drove us home in near silence. The day had just wiped me out, somehow. And the drive seemed to take longer than usual. This evening, one set of things has been taken off my plate, annoyingly so. But there’s still much to do. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to that.

baseball / cycling / football / links / Rowan / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Just class stuff today
18
Nov 25

Just class stuff today

In my criticism class today we discussed this story. College sports’ racial, gender hiring practices getting worse instead of improving:

College sports received a C for racial hiring practices when it decreased slightly from 75.1% in 2021 to 73.3% in 2022. College sports also received a C for gender hiring, with 74.1%, which was a slight increase from 2021 when it was 72.8%. The combined grade was a C with 73.7%. That was down from 74.0% in 2021. In other words, overall, equal opportunity hiring practices are getting worse instead of improving.

As we look at the sidelines in the tournament, we see the best record for hiring of people of color and women as head coaches. But the coaches of color represent a fraction of the student-athletes on their teams. In 2021-22, Division I men’s basketball Black student-athletes made up 52.4% of the total, compared to the 24.8% of Black head coaches. We have a smaller percentage of Black head basketball coaches now than we had 17 years ago, when 25.2% of the Division I head basketball coaches were Black.

This is a project Professor Lapchick and his team at UCF undertake every year. They grade out the big professional sports leagues in the U.S., and also collegiate sports. The students picked this little story to read, and so we talked about the grading system a bit, Lapchick’s work, and also some of the math involved here, which was hilarious. A few of those students are in my organizational communication class, and they don’t know it yet, but we’ll be discussing Lapchick on Thursday, too.

We also considered this CNN piece. This injury has plagued MLB for most of the last century, but a new phenomenon is emerging:

It is an injury which has plagued Major League Baseball for the best part of the last century. The ligament in your elbow which connects the bone in your upper arm to the one in your forearm – and is only about as strong as “a piece of celery” – tears, leaving you unable to throw and facing a very lengthy spell on the sidelines.

This season, the likes of Gerrit Cole, Corbin Burnes and Shane Bieber have all had Tommy John surgery – the most popular procedure to repair a torn UCL – while Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani made his long-awaited return to the mound after almost 22 months away following the second elbow surgery of his career.

Dr. Christopher Ahmad, Tommy John expert and head team physician for the New York Yankees, has performed the surgery on some of the biggest names in baseball. But he has also been privy to the other side of the story.

“The alarms are going off on how devastating this problem is to the youngest players,” he says in an interview with CNN Sports.

One of the series of questions I try to get the students to answer is who is a story for, and who is the disadvantaged person, or group, in the story. Sometimes that’s subtle. Sometimes obvious. Wouldn’t you know it, at least two people in the room say they knew someone that had already damaged or ruined their UCL by high school.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the “piece of celery” imagery out of my mind when watching people throw a baseball.

We also discussed the Slaying the Badger documentary, which we watched last Thursday. I showed it because we watched a football-center documentary just before, and we’ll watch a basketball-themed documentary just after. There’s something to be said about watching something you nothing about. Plus, it’s a dramatic story.

I was impressed, they seemed to like it more than I would have expected. It is a trick and a challenge to try to explain a sport to an audience who may have no understanding of the sport, while also reaching an audience that knows a great deal about it, while also telling a riveting story. For the most part, the filmmakers here did that. (The book is better. Yes, the documentary was inspired by a book.)

I was proud of myself. I did not get too far into the weeds on the cycling minutiae while trying to answer their questions. That would have been easy to do.

Why was he wearing this jersey and now wearing that jersey? What’s the deal with stages?

You don’t need to know the sport to follow the story, but knowing the sport heightens your awareness of a film.

In org comm we had a great negotiation activity today. I was nervous about it, but it worked out well. I had one student play a quarterback who is about to become a free agent. I specifically chose a student who can be loud and opinionated and, often, correct, to be the player. That kept him out of the back-and-forth. I had two others play his agents. One of them a super smooth charmer, and another who is quite the thoughtful analytic type. They did their work with their client in the hall, and then they would come in and meet the team leadership for the negotiations.

The rest of the class I broke into groups representing his team. I wanted one person to be the GM, a student who also seems worldly and practical. The rest of the class broke up into various VP offices and so on. There was some designed conflict between those franchise groups, and every group had a certain series of motivations and criteria I gave them.

It took exactly one round for them all to get into the exercise. It took them five rounds of offers and counter-offers for them to reach a deal.

The most fascinating thing happened. though. Two of the team groups were supposed to be resistant to making a deal for budget and other considerations. So they had conflict with the boss group, my three-headed GM hydra. The GM(s), though, wanted to make the deal. So they had to go back and forth, which became incredibly animated. One group convinced themselves they were absolutely opposed to the signing. But when they finally reached a deal, franchise GM(s) and player-agents, everyone was so happy, and the various groups, even the ones that had been opposition just moments before, were “Welcome home!” and “Welcome to the team!”

The actual player will be a free agent soon. I’m curious to see how close, or how far off, our mock negotiation was.

I’m also wondering how we can take this org comm class and do more things like this, which are marginally practically and a lot of fun.

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