Took part in a panel this morning. It was titled The Future of Campus Journalism. The description:
What are we teaching our journalism students? What should we be teaching our journalism students? Given the prolonged state of flux of the journalism industry, it is more important than ever for educators to be conscious of the ever-changing nature of the skills that our students will need to be able to adapt in today’s job market. Panelists will share their experiences with and suggestions for journalism education, both in the classroom and in the newsroom.
I talked about entrepreneurship, partnering with other entities on campus — Samford’s JMC teams with the business school and the law school for combined degrees — and initiative.
Other conference things took place. We attended sessions and other sessions. We visited the welcome mixer and then had dinner across the street at the Palace Cafe:
It was one of those places that was widely suggested to us by friends. (Tell people you are going to New Orleans and everyone has a restaurant list.) I had the braised pork shank:
It only needed to be bigger. And there was banana’s foster, which was prepared and fired in front of us. All the people infatuated by fire recorded the moment. The maitre d made a note of it and called the fire marshal, I’m sure. There was also cheesecake:
Tomorrow I’ll get to take part in two panels at the conference. Also, Wrestlemania is being held in New Orleans. The fans are starting to filter in. And some of the wrestlers. I think Mark Henry is staying in our hotel. That guy is massive.
Everyone seemed OK. The troopers were there. We had just a slight slowdown and I met no ambulances coming the other direction for the rest of my drive. Even still, you see these small accidents and know that these people just had their week ruined. And on a Monday morning, too. But at least everyone is OK.
And now, to change the subject, here’s another hit from Kid President:
It is probably selfish to say, but I hope that guy never changes.
In class today we talked about mobile marketing. This is the part of the conversation where students always find the line dividing acceptable and creepy. Say you’re walking down the street and your phone buzzes, “Hey! We noticed you’re just a block away from Starbucks. Couldn’t you go for a nice coffee and muffin? Here’s a coupon!”
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
In November, the Macy’s department store chain began testing a product called ShopBeacon at stores in San Francisco’s Union Square and New York’s Herald Square.
The app, created by Shopkick Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., enables a merchant to offer discounts on specific products that a customer has expressed interest in or, perhaps, has lingered near, prodding him or her to buy.
“We can find out where you are standing and how long you’ve been standing in front of the Michael Kors handbag and if you haven’t purchased,” Macy’s Chief Executive Terry Lundgren said at an analysts conference in November. “And if you haven’t, I’ll send you a little note to give you encouragement to do so.”
And that’s the new world in which we shop. Or does something like this just push you further away from brick and mortar stores?
I didn’t mention it but I did have a nice, brief bike ride yesterday evening. I got in a quick 14 miles, wherein I managed to have two thoughts. The first was that I haven’t been riding my bike enough. I knew this because I hit too small little uphill segments and pushed my feet down and accelerated and that was a wonderful feeling. The ride was really meant to be the first half of a brick workout, where I would take on a long run. Just as I went back outside, though, it started to rain. And while I enjoy riding in the rain, I don’t much see the need to run in it. But the other thought I was continually having on the bike was “I wanna run.”
I do not know what is happening.
I did not run, however, because of the rain. This evening I swam a mile, 1,750 yards. It even felt pretty good, which doesn’t happen often. Didn’t want to run, though!
Things to read … because I still don’t want to run.
“It actually started with me reading an article by Steven Levy in Wired about algorithms and news content — ‘Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” Christer Clerwall tells Wired.co.uk. “My first thought was ‘maybe it doesn’t have to be better — how about ‘a good enough story’?” Sadly, Wired may turn out to be the architect of its own destruction. Because Clerwall, an assistant professor of media and communications at Sweden’s Karlstad University, has found the answer to this question. And it’s yes.
This is the second small study I’ve seen like this. Both have to do with sports copy, which probably means something. What may be promising, however, is that as the algorithms improve this could free up writers from the more basic stories and allow for better storytelling.
Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was jolted awake at 6:25 a.m. on Monday by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and went straight to his computer, where he found a brief story about the quake already written and waiting in the system. He glanced over the text and hit “publish.” And that’s how the LAT became the first media outlet to report on this morning’s temblor. “I think we had it up within three minutes,” Schwencke told me.
If that sounds faster than humanly possible, it probably is. While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.
The copy, which you can read in that story, was basic, to the point, and not perfect regarding style, but it shared the pertinent information, apparently within three minutes. What happened afterward was telling. ” Quakebot’s post had been updated 71 times by human writers and editors, turning it from the squib above into this in-depth, front-page story.”
This first story, the early morning Quakebot copy, is a first step. It didn’t save the day, or save even a big part of a reporter’s day, but it is the sign of a utility to come, or, rather, a tool that is already here.
Daily time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the U.S. for the first time, according a newly-released 2014 AdReaction study from Millward Brown.
Americans now spend 151 minutes per day on smartphones, next to 147 in front of TVs. But the numbers are even greater elsewhere.
“2013 was the first year for multi-channel video industry losses, but the modest losses represent only about 0.1% of all subscribers,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “While the overall market remains fairly flat, further share-shifting has taken place. Cable providers now have a 52% share of the top multi-channel video subscribers in the US, compared to a 58% share three years ago.”
We are at something of a hinge point in entertainment history.
The three news reports followed the same format: Television reporters walked into schools with hidden cameras, under the premise of testing the security measures. Each time, the anchors provided a sobering assessment of the findings.
[…]
Critics say these kinds of undercover efforts do not provide an accurate portrait of school safety, and question whether they serve any public good. Some journalists question whether the news organizations become too much a part of the story, and whether it is dangerous for reporters to wander into schools now that students and staff are often on heightened alert.
I got caught in the rain a few times today, so there’s that.
I dried out sitting on a waiting room sofa, talking with a colleague about Texas and grandchildren and holidays. That was nice, since yesterday I’d sat in someone else’s office and talked about communication plans and how you’d restructure your entire workflow if you were given the opportunity. These are little insights into other worlds that I don’t normally see, in my office or with my students or in my car or wheezing through a workout. We talked about internships in one of those meetings yesterday and externships today. Sometimes the circles complete themselves.
Sometimes the umbrella leaves drip marks as you walk up two flights of stairs.
I don’t know what that means. I only know you can never shake enough drips out of the things, and then I feel responsible to patrol halls warning people of the wet floor I made.
Things to read … because nothing of great interest is coming to mind.
What if front pages were selected by newspapers’ readers instead of their editors? At NewsWhip, we’re always interested in the news stories people are choosing to share – and how those stories differ from the normal news stories editors put on the front pages of big newspapers. So we ran a little experiment.
On Wednesday morning, we gathered the front pages of leading newspapers in several countries. Then we used Spike to check the most shared stories from each one.
A little work at our end, and we used those most shared stories to make new “people powered” front pages for each newspaper – giving the most shared story the most prominence, the second most shared the second most prominence, etc.
I was going through the most read and most commented on stories at al.com to do a mock up of the local outlets. But I decided against it when, even in March, most of the lead stories would be about Alabama football.
This move requires uptake, but the right kind of uptake. Ideally, it would generate new value among the web scofflaws while not harming Getty’s business with pro publishers. I’m not sure these embeds hit that balance. The workflows are too ungainly for the people who currently have contracts with Getty, true, but they’re also not quite easy enough to be a good substitute for people who don’t mind stealing. My wager is that, as transformational as this announcement might seem to be, Getty’s embeds won’t be pockmarking the web.
But no matter how it turns out, give Getty a lot of credit for being willing to take a highly unorthodox stance. It’s an effort very much worth watching.
So more illustrations for blog posts everywhere, I guess.
Newsweek returns to newsstands Friday with a small press run (70,000), but it’s hoping to make a big impact with its cover story, which claims to have actually tracked down the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, the man credited with inventing Bitcoin.
As the story goes, Nakamoto doesn’t open up much except to say that he’s not involved in Bitcoin anymore, but senior staff writer Leah McGrath Goodman manages to wring out a nearly 3,400-word profile of the California man, who’s described as rumpled and unkept and living in a modest home, despite having a fortune estimated at $400 million.
Doctors announced that they may have possibly cured a second baby born with AIDS by administering antiretroviral treatment within hours after birth.
Doctors revealed on Wednesday that the baby was in remission from the virus at an AIDS conference in Boston. The girl was born in suburban Los Angeles last April, a month after researchers announced the first case of a possible cure, a baby from Mississippi. The Mississippi case was a medical first that led doctors worldwide to rethink how fast and hard to treat infants born with HIV, and the California doctors followed that example.
Two of the 10 best barbecue chains in America are right here in Alabama, according to the food website The Daily Meal.
Birmingham-based Jim ‘Nick’s Bar-B-Q, which was founded by father and son Jim and Nick Pihakis in 1985, is No. 1 on The Daily Meal’s 10 best list.
That is a list of chains, mind you. And while I enjoy both of those chains, if you were talking singular barbecue experience there are about five other places you might choose first. In a related story: There is such a thing as eating too much delicious barbecue, but no one has found that amount yet.
That post is a bit self-serving, particularly given the gravity of the situation. Also, it seems that another, equally important question is: “Why is this taking so long to address?” This story is from a year ago:
There are other television examples from 2012. The systemic problem in the state’s prisons didn’t just creep up on anyone. And while there’s no finger-snap fix, it reads as if change is slow to come. But AMG is on the case now. Every little bit of attention helps in a progression story.
Rutgers University is not backing down in the face of a faculty eruption over the New Jersey state school’s invitation of Condoleezza Rice to deliver this year’s commencement address.
The Faculty Council at Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus is trying to oust Rice, a former secretary of state, national security advisor, and provost of Stanford University, as the university’s commencement speaker because she does not “embody moral authority and exemplary citizenship.”
Taking issue with Rice’s politics and career, professors passed a resolution Friday imploring the university’s Board of Governors “to rescind its misguided decision” to invite Rice and give her an honorary degree. Faculty councils on Rutgers’ Camden and Newark campuses are expected to do the same in the coming weeks.
If only the secretary was of a serious caliber of whom the Rutgers community deserves:
Apparently no one has uploaded a video of that 2011 Snooki speech. You do see a lot of “Rutgers angered by” links, though.
I bet they all went up and down the halls at dear ol’ Rutgers, warning of the drip that was coming.
photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off on There were no meetings about meetings 5 Mar 14
One of those days where the morning meeting melts into the midday meeting (which came with lunch) which transitioned into a conversation which filled up the time nicely before the next meeting.
Actually not true. I did have just enough time to miss my turn, come back around, try again and then sit in my car and tap at the keyboard for 15 minutes. In my car.
It is even more glamorous than I’d hoped it would be ever since I first saw it casually dropped in a minivan commercial all those years ago. There’s a stream, and a van with sliding doors on both sides. And in between them is the van owner, pecking away at the never ending TPS reports.
He wrote a memo about it once, but the memo was ignored because, in his passive aggressive way, he did not put the cover sheet on the TPS memo. And previous office literature had clearly stated, no cover sheet, no memo.
That was before the minivan. And he’s much better now, thanks. He can exit out of both sides! Stream? Turn left! Field of wildflowers? Exit right? How could you be bothered about problems at the office? Or even TPS reports. You’ve got a laptop in your van. Down by the river!
Yes, I just mixed imagery from three different sources. That’s been the sort of fun, delightful, not tiring, but full, not tangible, but productive day it has been. I’ve not made anything with my hands today. I haven’t anything on which to put a cover sheet. But it was a good day.
This afternoon my class took a field trip to see the nice people at WIAT CBS 42. The news director introduced them to the director, who’s been in broadcasting, it turns out, longer than I’ve been alive. We walked them through the interim studios — they are rebuilding. We visited the old set up. We sat in the newsroom and talked with one of the evening anchors and had passing conversations with other employees.
The news director, Scott MacDowell then asked his trick questions. He says he asks these in every interview. I’ll share one of them: What three things does every story need?
A beginning, a middle and an end.
He showed us the new backpacks some of the reporters are using. Think cell signals and air cards. He said they can run for two hours continuously, generate different shots than you’ve ever seen on a regular newscast (changing the way they approach storytelling, no doubt) and cost a fraction of what those suddenly unnecessary microwave trucks cost. In a time when you see iPad and iPhone videos on the newscasts, here’s equipment that ways about 20 pounds, that requires one cord and lets you go deep into buildings or weaving anywhere else a person can walk. Game changer.
I think I was the one the most interested in that.
We had the opportunity to watch the first block of the newscast. Here are a few of the students checking out the 5 p.m. newscast at WIAT:
One of our graduates, Kaitlin McCulley, had the lead story in the newscast.
And then that led into the day’s next meeting, the weekly critique of the Crimson. They’re doing such a nice job with the print product at this point. I’m proud of them. We found only three obvious errors and one more judgment call in the entire paper this week. Their hard work is paying off, too. I arrive to emails and walk into meetings and receive compliments on their behalf. That’s great to watch happen for the students, because I know how much hard work they put into the product.
Anyway, that meeting skipped right into dinner … and now I’m looking for some TPS cover sheets. I probably left them in the car.
There was beans and rice and gumbo — sans the okra, so it wasn’t actually gumbo, but good nevertheless — and there were beads and king cake and some weird jello dessert on hand today.
People dressed up. Or at least put on masks.
I declined the king cake. I don’t like king cake. Came as a surprise to me, too. And I don’t think I’ve had jello as an adult. I’m saving up for a rainy day. I did have some fried okra on the side, however.
And then this evening I ran a 10K. I sprinted some. I can’t feel the lower half of my legs just now.
I built a training regimen that will surely be difficult to stick with in one way or another, but if I want to do triathlons this year I have to get in something approaching a reasonable condition. The good news is that I have the base stuff covered. The bad news is that, eventually, the Saturday “run nine miles” day will at some point become something closer to routine rather than a big deal.
I do not know what is happening.
Maybe I should wear a mask, so no one will see me in pain.
Things to read … the all-link edition! There is something for everyone, I’m sure. Enjoy!
And, finally, this newly released video from my friend Nathan Troost, whom I wrote about here last week. Terrific story, sharp storytelling. It is worth six minutes of your time.
