Samford « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Samford

Alabama / photo / Samford / site / Thursday — Comments Off
23
Sep 10

Just try to relax

We have new test labs at Alabama. Today we were demonstrating how to use the equipment. Somehow, by virtue of sitting in the wrong chair I think, I became the guinea pig. One of my classmates snapped the picture as they attached my fingers and arms to sensor pads.

We have instrumentation to measure heart rate, skin conductance and other fancy things. There’s a big screen television where participants can see images and movies and commercials or whatever and the researcher can gather data on how they impact you. It is pretty cool stuff. When the labs are completed, the associate dean (seen vaguely in the background here) believes this will be a top-of-the-line research center.

And I will have graduated.

She’s wearing gloves because it “makes you look more official.”

And I used to think a clipboard and a confident wave were all you needed for credibility. Turns out it is just non-latex gloves.

Anyway, lots of studying and research today. Lots of reading. Lots of Emailing too.

I sent out scholarship letters to the last high school journalism teachers in America who had not already received them. The boss wanted saturation, so I found some 70 state and local high school press associations and then wrote to every individual teacher I know in the state. If you can carpet bomb any better your name might be Arthur Bomber Harris.

Now I’m working on another series of Emails for the next big push.

I have updated the photo gallery this evening. There are now 143 pictures online for September. And there’s still a week to go. If you’d like to look back at previous Septembers, or other months in amusing personal history, just go here.

And, in a few minutes, I’ll be along with the newest addition to the site as well. It will be simple and beautiful and I’m very excited to finally get around to it. So you simply must indulge me.

journalism / links / memories / photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
22
Sep 10

Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium

This reminds me of the Bessemer City Councilwoman who foolishly thought she could claim an endorsement from the local football coach — as if no one would follow up on that. Except that lady, in her brilliant moment of mayoral campaigning, managed to Photoshop a picture of herself with the coach at a golf tournament. Of course the coach had made no such endorsement. And, also, the councilwoman’s campaign made a poor Photoshop effort. You can still see the coach’s wife’s hair in the image.

But this is completely real, of course. This young man traveled north and secured the endorsement of our most famous Founding Father. There’s no Photoshopping here. He has another poster standing beside the famous Rocky statue in Philadelphia. With endorsements like those he has to be a campaign favorite.

I love SGA posters. There’s another guy who is using a Forrest Gump theme. The young ladies all have cute designs and slogans, most that rhyme. There’s another campaign who has pressed Ron Burgundy into service. These are amusing popularity contests.

We critiqued the Crimson for about two hours today. They didn’t want me looking over their shoulder last night, and I was happy to oblige them, so we went over it line by line today. For only being three issues into their run the finished product was encouraging.

I picked a lot of minor details and a few obvious things that shouldn’t have escaped their attention. There’s no such thing as a perfect newspaper, but I’m pleased with this issue and still think they hold a great deal of potential. They had coverage of the gubernatorial debate and a Pulitzer winner. There’s also a story on record student enrollment and on Eleanor Clift’s visit.

Clift has covered a lot of great stories, but her own tale is a good one. She was a 1970s newsroom hire when you didn’t see a lot of female reporters. Someone assigned her to cover a darkhorse presidential candidate, some peanut farmer from Georgia no one had ever heard of. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election, and the tradition is that the reporter that covered the campaign follows the president-elect. Clift joined the White House press corps and the rest is history.

That story is a good one. They agonized over it for a long time, they said, because they knew Clift would read it. I’m going to threaten to send every story they write for the rest of the year to the Newsweek veteran.

You can see the full issue here.

Busy day. Started at the gym early this morning, where the biggest problem I had was in almost pinching my pinkie off on the Smiths machine. You’d think, since they named it after me, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but the left hand re-rack is a tricky maneuver. So I nicked the skin off the top of my knuckle, pinching it between the bar and rack. This flies into my fundamental goal of going through life with all of my appendages intact, so I’ll just move a little more to the right next time.

Visited al.com today. I think this was my third visit since I left there in 2008. My desk is still empty. Prime cubicle space like that simply can’t go empty, though, so they call it the “Kenny Smith Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium.”

After that a meeting here, lunch there, sales talk, the paper itself, and then studying.

I had to renew my IRB certification tonight. Required every two years for people doing research with human participants, mine was winding down. So I read the things you have to read and took the quizzes you have to take and now I have the nifty little certification to put in a filing cabinet and forget.

Meanwhile my lifeguard certification is woefully out of date. I can’t pull you from a pool, but I can give you surveys and run psychophysiology experiments with you.

If, that is, my IRB proposals are accepted. I have one of those due tomorrow. The Yankee helped (a great deal). And then there’s the reading. Another 100 pages to stumble through tonight. It looks like another after-midnight bedtime.

books / history / journalism / memories / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Sep 10

Teeming Tuesday

I’d like to try putting a few more things into a Tuesday, just to see if it is possible. Tuesdays are the fullest of days. Met with the boss. Tried, and failed, to install a new printer on my new iMac.

Called the tech guy who, happily, could not install it the first time. If it takes him two attempts I don’t feel so bad.

Had lunch. Met with the WVSU news director. We talked about Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, who is on campus this week. She’s been in classes and student meetings and will deliver a big lecture tomorrow night. She’s got such a great story, really. But more on that tomorrow.

Tried to meet with a student, but missed. Made copies of everything for my class. Held class, delivering a spelling test, talking about news leads and doing wholesale news rewrites.

We made fun of typos. There were two on the most recent cover of Soap Opera Digest. I can’t find a link and can’t bring myself to upload it here, but the designer has forgotten their rules on apostrophes.

And then there was the paper. The students have worked on it all night. I get a question here, make a joke there and listen and tell stories. Now, around midnight, they’ve announced they’re going it alone. I offer to copy edit the first few editions with them, but they rightly want to remove me from that process. This is the moment where they pedal away, around the block and you’re just so proud to see them go.

Tomorrow they make it back from their circuit around the block. We’ll critique the whole paper. We’ll talk about how to improve their technique, steady lines, standing, brakes and falling. Hey, I might keep this bike metaphor. You’re just so proud.

I decorated a wall in my office.

Those are Stars and Stripes announcing the end of World War II. The one on the right is the Paris Edition announcing the Germany surrender. I found that paper purely by accident at a place called The Deal in an artsy Louisville, Ky. That was the same day, incidentally, when I decided to build the half-hearted black and white section of the site.

It was a nice day. I’d spent a long weekend visiting the folks. They took me to a local funky, artisan restaurant and just down the road we found that store. It doesn’t deal in antiques. Or in things that feel like antiques. Everything is from that frozen moment when your grandparents stopped trying to be contemporary. Much of it was familiar, but vague. You could understand the function of all the merchandise, but if you weren’t from the period the why could be lost on you.

We ate at that restaurant and used bookstores and a record store and that shop. It was a great day.

They were stored in a desk pretty close together, the pictures and the newspaper, and they might have once belonged to the same family. There was also a Red Cross map of Paris. The woman sold it all to me for next to nothing, just glad to get it out of her way. She’d much rather sell mid-century modern furniture and clothes.

My step-father bought me a little bookholder there, too. It is sitting on top of one of my bookshelves and holds Winston Churchill’s history of the war. A friend sold me all six volumes for $20. He bought them from a library and realized he’d never read them. I Hope to one day. Maybe I’ll bring that newspaper home next summer and read the books underneath the authentic newsprint.

The paper announcing the Japanese surrender is also from Stars and Stripes, the Mediterranean edition of the military paper. It is a bracing headline, but that too will be a teaching moment. What is contemporary and acceptable today might not be a name that people approve of years from now.

I don’t have a great story for that paper, though. I bought it from e-bay. I wish I’d asked the seller to try and explain that particular issue’s history. Someone thought enough to bring it home from Italy, or thereabouts, but now we’ll never know the details.

journalism / Monday / Samford / video — Comments Off
20
Sep 10

The joys of AP Style

AP Style, we all love it. We loved to learn it. And now I love to teach it.

Love might be a strong word.

I do like to use it. I do enjoy a good editing session. Teaching AP Style is of course valuable. Designing the lecture isn’t the most fun you’ve ever had with the venerable old reference book — and yes, I still have my original Stylebook.

And, no, I will not start the ebay search for the original Stylebook.

I’ve been condensing a bunch of style tips, however, and passed those around to my editing class. The trick is to not repeat word-for-word the paper you’ve given to students.

So I have some editing exercises for tomorrow. Each of these stories, a fatal arson, a domestic dispute, bad city government and more, take place in one fake city. It sounds like a terrible place to live. If I ever teach a public relations class I’ll have to use the same fake city when I write press releases about the new park for special needs children and green initiatives downtown, just to balance things out.

Because one does not wish to offend the fictional residents of a fictional city, that’s why.

Had lunch at Pannie-George’s, a meat-and-three that quotes Nehemiah on their business cards and website. Can’t go wrong there. Or here:

We are not just a restaurant for people to come and eat, but it is a place where people are welcomed and treated like a respected member of the Pannie-George’s family … The main ingredient in our food is LOVE.

I’m told the pork chops are delicious, but I only eat those at home. I had the chicken and rice, but the sweet potatoes were the biggest hit. And the people there. Everyone was “Love” or “Sugar” or “Hon” in that extended Southern family of nurture kind of way.

It is knowing that someone else’s family has wrapped their arms around you, making their family bigger and role more important. That’s a tireless feeling.

But we’re eating lunch with a friend who’s about to take a trip to northern Europe. He’s seeking my advice because I just came back from Europe. It feels stupid to give this advice because I’ve been to southern Europe and you know there are differences. Why else have the distinctions?

So, never mind, dear friend that you are going to different countries let alone different cities than I visited, I get to play the expert. Because my advice on Rome will be so helpful to him in Prague. But I spent two weeks in Europe; I’m an expert on generalities.

Here’s the book, here’s the money wallet. Watch your backpack, find the embassy. Don’t worry, you will look like an American. I’m guessing all of this was different a century ago, or people just didn’t write about their banal worries and fears in their travelogues. Of course fellow travelers then couldn’t download region specific podcasts to their iPads, and they didn’t have in-seat movies on their steamships, so the trade offs probably balance out.

Haven’t watched Monday Night Football in several years. My interest in the professional game has more than waned, I suppose. I blame the broadcasting. This isn’t helping:

Ouch. I turned on the television this evening out of want for background noise and that was the second thing on the screen. I think there’s a comma splice in the scripted copy.

Tomorrow: class! The paper! Black and whites! More!

Alabama / Auburn / friends / journalism / links / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Sep 10

Workshop day

We had a record crowd on hand at the Samford High School Journalism Workshop. That’s our department chair, Bernie Ankney, delivering his opening remarks. Shaun Chavis, associate editor from Health magazine, provided the keynote address.

In the morning sessions we had rooms with professors and journalists discussing news writing, layout, sports writing, broadcasting and magazine journalism. One session discussed the best ledes ever written, one nominee: Bob Considine’s story on the 1938 Lewis-Schmeling bout:

Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling.

Carla Jean Whitney talked about the gratification of magazine publication and exciting industry changes. Meanwhile sportswriter Doug Segrest of The Birmingham News does a great session on sports reporting.

I had a lot of nice conversations with teachers before lunch and then in the afternoon got to spend time with the famous Ike Pigott.

Joining him were Tatiana Richards and one of our professors, Dr. Sheree Martin, on a panel about journalism online.

We had a Pulitzer winner, Sonia Nazario, presenting in our afternoon sessions. And I presented too!

Here’s the picture of the day, though:

That’s the newest McAlister. The Yankee spent the day with him today and I got to visit for a few hours this evening. Good kid. Sleeps all the time.

They won’t put him in one of those costumes I found last night, thankfully. He’s already got an Auburn blanket. To update last night’s horror of child rearing:

That landed on The War Eagle Reader this morning. They also used the capital THE in writing the credit.