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Samford

The day the sirens went off

My friend the great Ike Pigott came to speak to my class today.

Ike works at Alabama Power and he is a great idea man. His time at Red Cross and, before, that, ABC 33/40 make him a terrific pitch man. He talked to the class about public relations and social media and crisis communications.

He talked about the last series of tornadoes that passed through the state. It occurred to me that every pro we’ve talked to in that class this semester has told tornado war stories. I’m sure every student who is from some other place is wondering why they live here now.

With about a half-hour left in the class the fire alarm went off. Everyone in the room looked at me.

I’m supposed to know this answer.

Fortunately I remembered what we are supposed to do in a fire alarm. (It isn’t like this happens all the time.) So we got our things, felt the door to make sure it wasn’t hot, walked down the hall and exited the building to our exterior gathering space. Class continued as the fire truck pulled up:

It was cold and damp and we couldn’t see any smoke anywhere. Firefighters walked inside and, a few minutes later, walked back out. I walked over to them and said “I have a class full of journalism students wondering what is going on.”

Turns out someone in the kitchen in the cafeteria, which is in another wing of the same building, started cooking something without exhaust fans and that built up smoke for the sensors and so there we were, talking about crisis communication with a firetruck in the background.

That’s a Wednesday.

We went back inside and, at the end of the class, the fire alarm went off again. Turns out that we had gone long on our class, but the students were so caught up in what Ike was talking about that they didn’t mind. He’s just that good.

Also today was the first meeting with the incoming editor of the Crimson. I was up late last night putting together information for him. Want the job? Here are 27 pages of easy reading. Mark, set, go.

He’s been around the paper for the last two years as a section editor and is a smart guy, so I’m sure he’ll do well.

This year’s staff has done a fine job and I’m proud of a lot of things they’ve done. I always like that first new meeting though. It is one of my favorite parts of the year.

Usually it is warmer, mid-April and all. Tonight parts of the state are enjoying temperatures 30 degrees below their seasonal averages. Spring will arrive on a more permanent basis, eventually. Right?

Or maybe we’ll just go directly into summer.

Things to read: The War Eagle Reader was kind enough to reprint the thing I wrote the other day. It let me give it another edit and convinced me I still didn’t adequately make my point. There’s always next time.

Philip Lutzenkirchen wrote an open letter that’s worth reading:

Most importantly I need to thank the entire Auburn Family. You all are truly the best fans in the country. You’ve been on our side through thick and thin and that is appreciated way more than you think. I’ll never truly understand why you all love that goofy, embarrassing, silly, little dance that I did against ‘Bama but I appreciate the love that you have always showed me.

State senators have to be separated:

Alabama state senators and a Senate official stepped in between two of their colleagues during a shouting match between the two men that occurred after a controversial ruling by Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday night.

And this, the sweetest thing you’ll read all day:

Plastic wrappers and other pieces of litter rustled like tumbleweed across the empty space under the bridge yesterday afternoon.

Two hours later, enough chairs were set up to seat several hundred of Nashville’s homeless, enough chicken and baked beans cooked to feed them all.

And a few minutes later, while some were still finishing up their rainbow cake dessert, a cloth was rolled down the aisle and my friend Amanda walked through a crowd of her homeless friends to meet her fiancé at the altar under the overpass.

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19
Apr 13

Neva betta

We held a big committee meeting today and held interviews and selected next year’s student media leaders. This is always a great day because our most motivated students come forward and share their ideas and answer a few questions and we try to make sure we pick the right people, and there are so many fine choices for most of those jobs.

I haven’t been to this meeting on a day when the sun wasn’t shining and the people in the room weren’t pleased to be there. Some of the elements of what happens in that meeting are among my favorite things about being at Samford. I get to watch highly-placed people in the university thinking about the best possible thing for a particular student. To be a part of that is to realize you are in a great place, surrounded by people there for the right reasons. That’s a fine thing to know.

Made it home in time to enjoy dinner with our friends Barry and Melissa, who were in town for meetings and things. We’d just spent the weekend with them and others in Louisville, but now they had their sun, who is a huge ball of 5-year-old energy. We saw Dr. Magical, who made Matthew, who is awesome, a balloon. He likes Angry Birds so …

I mention the Boston scanner and listening to that last night. I stayed up until 3 or 4 a.m., late enough to not be sure. I fought my eyelids for a good long time and then when the officers decided to tighten their perimeter and wait until daylight it seemed a good time to get some rest. So I had about three hours last night. And when I woke up they’d turned off the streams to their scanner chatter for security reasons.

That made sense, but it was unfortunate in a way. All last night, when they were chasing people they didn’t know, when they were taking automatic fire and explosions in a suburban neighborhood, when they were searching door to door in the darkness and didn’t know what they’d find, they exhibited the best of their professionalism.

The good people of the great city of Boston have a lot to be thankful for. Their police, and the feds and other municipalities who were involved in all of that performed admirably. Today, too, we found a link to a still-active scanner feed for about a half hour before dinner and it was the same thing, even as they were drawing close, and even as they realized they had their suspect contained.

And so when they announced, when we were at dinner, that they’d caught their man, and started pulling out of town, the road lined on either side with neighbors who looked like the Celtics had just won a championship, when the SWAT team took to their loudspeaker and told the people of that neighborhood that it was their pleasure to be there, that was a beautiful site.

Here is the scanner chatter as they caught their man. “Neva betta” indeed.

There are, already, at least two sites taking donations to collect money to buy the Boston police officers a beer. That seems fitting.

YouTube Cover Theater: Where we irregularly celebrate the talent of the undiscovered, who take their guitars and their computers and show off their song stylings to the entire world, by showing off people covering popular performers. It is a testament to all of the talent that is out there that ought to be acknowledged, and only gets mild notice. We do this by picking one musician and finding people who are covering them. This week’s featured artist is Colin Hay.

This version of I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You is by the U.K.’s Kieran Smith, who is a music teacher, it turns out:

Australian Jace Leckie’s cover of Beautiful World has only been watched 62 times, which is a shame. It is a chill cover of a terrific song:

Here’s a guy sitting at his desk, just strumming out Maggie. No big deal:

Guess it wouldn’t be Colin Hay without some Overkill. Monica Brentnall is handling it. It really needs some more views:

And, finally, a bit of Colin Hay himself. Another great song, Waiting for My Real Life to Begin:

Hope you have a great weekend. Let’s all celebrate it like we’re in Boston.

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13
Apr 13

SSCA, Day Four

I presented a paper this morning titled “Hail to the Chief: Comparative Presidential Face-ism on Online News Sites.” The abstract reads:

Past research demonstrated that visual displays demonstrated varying facial prominence, known as face-ism, among varying subjects with respect to race, gender and prominence. This paper compares the face-ism score of President Barack Obama on prominent news web sites in the early days of both of his terms. The analysis is timely and relevant as the nation’s first African-American president comes to power and constitutes one of the few studies on face-ism online. Results indicated that facial prominence of the president yielded a moderately low score on the face-ism scale which suggests that the editorial choices are reflective of stereotypical scores with respect to race rather than his powerful and prominent position.

Or words to that effect, anyway.

There are numbers in that paper, which is a great way to start a Saturday morning.

In the very next session The Yankee and I presented a paper we creatively titled “Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Virtual Watercooler? An Analysis of Election Night Conversations on Twitter.” We looked at hashtags and what was going on under #Election. She discussed the theory, I talked about more numbers and then read some of the interesting examples from our case study.

These things happened over the course of the evening’s election coverage. In more than 11,000 tweets with #election in that period between the polls closing and the end of the immediate coverage we found:

52 #GOP
47 #Republican
80 #Democrats
45 #Dems

512 #Romney
1,095 #Obama
30 #Mitt
32 #Barack

147 #CNN
47 #NBC
47 #Fox
30 #ABC
2 #CBS

2,992 @ symbols (Conversations.)
205 RTs (Sharing others’ tweets.)
2,487 links (Sharing media.)
21,447 any # (Indexing attempt or punchline.)

120 #Florida or traditional abbreviations
157 #Ohio, or OH
67 #Pennsylvania or traditional abbreviations

All of which is to say that, with the framework of social identity theory — your self-conception realized through your perceived membership in a relevant social group — we can see how formerly passive television viewers and newspaper readers are now not only taking active roles in conversation, but they are using primary identifiers to organize themes, which suggests a fair amount of implications for audience fragmentation, political activation and raises questions about “unofficial” hashtags, harnessing those results and forced versus voluntary interactivity.

Mostly, I enjoyed reading the tweets that we captured for the study. Here are a few I shared with the audience. These are direct quotes:

Dear Todd Akin, I do believe you suffered a legitimate defeat #inyoface #Election #legitimaterape

I feel like you should have to be 21 to vote. Some people just vote for the coolest name #YouDontKnowAnything #Election

The tone of PBS’s election coverage is basically Suck it Romney — Big Bird wins! Hilarious! #Election

Who at #NBC decided to put an #Election results map on the ice rink? Was Jack Donaghy involved in this?

This whole #Election tracker business turned our civil governance process into the highest stakes Fantasy Football game ever played.

I don’t tweet much.. But I hope @JohnKingCNN shuts up… You are so annoying.

Damn this girl on ABC is too fine! #Election

i used to have faith in my countrymen. now that i know my countrymen can be bought w/ phones and biRTh control, not so sure…#Election

Interesting dichotomy: Obama strong in swing states, Romney strong in states that snap their fingers out of time. #Election #Dems #GOP

Romney of Massachusetts might have won this. Romney of Tea Party, 47%, Ayn Rand, Benghazi blather, false Jeep ads… Not so much. #Election

Tuned into Fox News and was surprised to see that they harnessed the power of time travel and brought in Ben Franklin to cover the #Election

But #Romney holds firm in Cayman Islands and Switzerland. #Election

Obama 2012 campaign just announced it will unleash drones over Pakistan to celebrate re-election. #Election

i want to create a burlesque number called “the exit pole.” #Election

Another panelist talked about the making of this ad for Dale Peterson, former candidate for agriculture commissioner of Alabama.

That’s a real commercial. It was produced for the web because Peterson didn’t have TV money, but it was an instant hit online and the money started rolling in. Before long he went from five percent in the polls to pushing 30 percent. But he did not win in the Republican primary, despite his huge online following. The entire case study is an interesting exercise in aggressive, low budget politics.

So we go through all of the presentations and then the respondent, our old friend Dr. Larry Powell stands to discuss each of the presentations. He talks about how each of these studies are important and offered his suggestions for where the research should go.

For each paper he also offered his fake gift. One rhetorician received a copy of Ronald Reagan’s RNC acceptance speech, so that he might give it to Mitt Romney, for example. The author of the Dale Peterson work received a can of cashews.

Everyone in the room from Alabama is now all but rolling on the floor for, you see, Peterson has recently been arrested for shoplifting, twice. The second time he was dining on cashews.

For our paper Dr. Powell pointed out that The Yankee and I met in his class. That he served as advisor on both of our comps committees and now we are married.

“I think I’ve done enough.”

In the afternoon The Yankee was a member of a panel titled “Political Entertainment Television and the Framing of Choices and Consequences in the 2012 Presidential Campaign.”

Here she is now:

She talked about The Daily Show’s Indecision 2012 which was, I feel, the presentation that really brought the panel together.

So after that it was time for another very late lunch. We learned that three of the four sandwich shops within walking distance were closed. You’re in the middle of the downtown entertainment district on a Saturday and all the small places lock up at 3 p.m. Some business model. Back to Potbelly Sandwiches, then, and then back to the conference so that I might run the political communication division meeting. It is my penultimate responsibility as the division chair.

All went according to plan. Things moved along, I printed too many agendas, made a joke no one thought was funny and we conducted the business of the division. The Yankee was elected as the vice chair-elect of the division. That means she’ll program two divisions of presentations in a row, mass comm next year and political communication the year after that. That’s service to academia, for you.

Dinner was just about the strangest, most surrealistic, hysterical thing possible. Also we sang along to Carly Rae Jepsen. And I played the drums. There were drums at dinner and that was the part that made the most sense of all.

So how was your Saturday?

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12
Apr 13

SSCA, Day Three

On a break from the conference we bumped into Colonel Sanders:

And that was just about the only break of the bitterly cold day.

The morning started with a “Roundtable Discussion of the 2012 Presidential Election” where the program promised “Panelists will discuss campaign tactics, strategies and outcomes in the general election process of the 2012 U.S. presidential election season.”

Here I was fortunate enough to be invited to sit at a table with immensely talented scholars and talk about the presidential campaign. Even better was that Dr. Larry Powell, my adviser in my master’s program, and a highly influential political pollster, was on the panel. At one point I was looking for a spot to wade in with what I felt was a particularly important point. He said it first, almost word-for-word. That alone would have made my day. But, somewhere around 3 p.m. I entered “What a great day” territory.

I presented awards for the top papers in the political communication division. The Yankee (who was the respondent on this panel) and I won this award last year.

Then I listened in another panel as The Yankee presented our paper “Identity in Twitter’s Hashtag Culture: A Sports Media Consumption Case Study.” Since it got accepted to this conference it was accepted and quickly published in the International Journal of Sport Communication, 5(4). The abstract reads:

This case study, using social identity theory as a framework, examines how sport consumers and producers used different identifiers to engage in conversation during the final games of the 2012 College World Series of baseball. Five major hashtags were noted for each baseball team as primary identifiers; users fit in three main groups and sub-groups. The analysis of tweets revealed five major themes around which the conversations primarily revolved. The study has implications for social identity theory, team identification, as well as broader implications for audience fragmentation and notions of the community of sport.

In the afternoon I was the respondent on a panel full of papers about message framing. The panelists had four interesting papers, one about salience in the New York Times and the Apple Daily in Taiwan in coverage of the Tohoku tsunami, another was about college newspapers framing the H1N1 scare a few years back, another discussed the use of Twitter in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death and the last one compared how CNN and Al-Jazeera English covered Occupy Oakland.

Respondents wait until the scholar has finished their 12- or 15-minute distillation of their work and then discuss the matters at hand. Different people take different approaches to this. Some try to find a common thread in the collective works and riff on that. Others just ask a question or make a point here or there. I’ve watched people just lecture on about whatever crossed their mind. But when I am presenting a paper I want the respondent to be useful. So I find hard things to critique. I try to ask interesting questions that will help them think of new things they can expand their research. I try to be obnoxiously detailed about it. Be useful.

An interesting thing happened after this panel. All of the researchers lined up to thank me and shake my hand ask me more questions. That’s never happened before. Maybe I did something right.

After that I had a very late lunch, which came all too close to dinner, really. Ordered a burrito at Chipotle, realized how hungry I was and then returned to the conference for the mass communication division’s business meeting, where business was conducted. The Yankee is the secretary of that division and I’m a mostly quiet member. I did second a motion, however.

We had dinner at this place:

Spinelli’s is in a basement. It is long and stone and drywall and linoleum. There are columns keeping the ceiling off your head, and loud speakers keeping the music in your ears. The guy working the counter was an archetype of counterculture straight out of central casting, he said knowing how bizarre that sounds.

This is a pizza place, and so we order Stromboli, which is like a calzone. The menu offered a regular and a large size. I asked about the size and he did the hand gesture: regular, large. The regular looked about like what you’d expect out of a slightly ambitious calzone. When it arrived it looked like a large pizza rolled over onto itself. Just massive. But the brocoli and the spinach and all of the other things inside were delicious. And we sat there for forever laughing about, oh, most everything. About half of the jokes were directed at me, which makes them funnier somehow.

You’d have to be there, I guess. You’d need video and we’ve made a pact that all of that will stay in the private collection.

And since there was no possible way we could still be hungry, but we were all having such a nice time, we found more ice cream.

Here’s one more shot with the Colonel:

Tomorrow: We have three more presentations to take part in. Told you it was a busy conference.

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11
Apr 13

SSCA, Day Two

It rained today. That was fun, walking from my hotel a half-mile in a cold rain, dark as night rain, using a tiny little umbrella. Down there was the Seelbach Hotel, where the Southern States Communication Association’s annual conference will take place. I had to cross a street that allowed for two left lanes to turn, which meant I almost never made it across. I had to time an intersection where, somehow, passing cars had managed to drag the manhole cover out of its home. That seemed dangerous for drivers.

Somehow the side of my suit coat that I kept facing the buildings I walked past was the sleeve that got wet.

I was asked “Is it raining?”

No. I danced under a sprinkler on my way here. Gene Kelly has nothing on me.

We had our early morning Executive Council Meeting, Part II — This Time It’s Personal. Worked through the agenda in about 90 minutes or so, just long enough to dry out.

In the late morning I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel session titled “Tips, Tricks and Techniques: Teaching Media Writing to Today’s Students.” The program describes the panel:

Media writing is no longer a one-size-fits-all endeavor, as we are now training students to work in a variety of platforms, including online and social media. Panelists will share their experiences and adventures in teaching, complete with some tips for those just starting out.

I talked about media critiques and literacy and spelling tests and writing strengths and our upcoming curriculum offerings and all manner of things like that. I don’t think we got very deep into social media, which is a shame, there is a lot to talk about there.

We had lunch at a place called Potbelly Sandwiches. Here’s the stove they have in the middle of the store:

Philo D. Beckwith, by the way, was a stove maker, a philosopher and a mayor. His company, Round Oak, became the Estate of P.D. Beckwith Incorporated sometime after his death, but the company would thrive until just before World War I. The Depression hit them bad, and the company sold out after World War II. They tried to make a comeback in the ’50s, but it was short lived. And while I can’t confirm it because almost every site Wikipedia suggests is no longer live, this stove might be a century old, circa 1915. These days it is just waiting in line for a sandwich.

“Is it raining?”

No. This is just the style back home. We’re counterculture.

I listened in on a panel on the 2012 presidential debates. There were some impressive scholars sitting at that table. The thing that struck me the most was how similar the general ideas were to what we said in this same panel last year during the primaries. Also, there were a lot of references to thing said in the popular media.

Other panels came and went. This was the first day and they were a rush of a blur or, more appropriately, a hectic, moving kaleidoscope of rushing, blurred movement. Our really big blur of paper and panel sessions starts tomorrow, though.

Followed a small group of friends and fellow compatriot scholars to a place called Bluegrass Brewing Company for dinner. I think a concierge suggested it. I had the chicken milanese, mostly for the tomatoes and capers. This worked out well since the tomatoes and capers were the best part of the dish.

We sat in the hotel lobby and told stories for far too long, and so it was another late night, but it was a late night with charming, smart, talented and funny people. There was must hard laughter. We were fortunate to fall into this group three conferences ago now and are fast friends because they talk about the same kind of research, but we also have common schools in our backgrounds. Most importantly they are all just lovely people. There are four Smiths and three or four other people who come in and out of the group and they’re all getting Smith names, too. We plan on taking over things when the conference least expects it.

We imagined this over ice cream, so you can imagine how diabolical our plans are.

And, in addition to last night’s invisible Kenny jokes we also have the “Is it raining” commentary, because everyone else is seemingly staying in the Seelbach. It rained all day. (We’d hoped to sneak in a little bike ride, but no.) Three people asked me about the evidence of precipitation they’d noted on my suit.

My favorite one was the third version: “Is it raining outside?”

No. But in the basement there are cloud bursts and rainbows and thundershowers everywhere.

Things to read: Mobile journalism: It’s not “the web only smaller”:

Mobile media are an increasingly important tool for journalists. They can deliver a new audience if you learn to adapt your content for that audience. If you’re not sold, yet, on why journalists need unique mobile skills consider a few tidbits:

62% of U.S. respondents get news from their phone weekly (Pew Research Center’s, State of the Media 2013)

36% get news from their phone daily (Pew Research Center, State of the Media 2013)

88% of U.S. adults owned a cell phone of some kind as of April 2012, and 55% of these used their phone to go online (Pew Internet and American Life Survey, “Cell Internet Use 2012”)

People with less education and income (some college or less and household incomes less than $30,000) use their cell phones as their primary means of accessing the Internet (Pew Internet and American Life Survey, “Cell Internet Use 2012”)

17% of cell phone owners do most of their online browsing on their phone, rather than a computer or other device. For some, their phone is their only option for online access. (Pew Internet and American Life Survey, “Cell Internet Use 2012”)

No one be surprised this time.

J-Schools, Invest in CAR:

There is an economic argument for this. While journalism jobs are in a general decline, it was made abundantly clear at NICAR’s recent Computer Assisted Reporting conference that the demand for data and interactive journalists outweighs supply; it is essentially “raining jobs.”

Tomorrow: The conference really picks up.