Kidnappers are dumb. Seems to be a universal thing, as Japanese reporter Kosuke Tsuneoka can attest:
A Japanese journalist held hostage in Afghanistan for five months managed to send out a message via Twitter that he was alive when his captors asked him how to use a cell phone.
Just days before he was freed, Kosuke Tsuneoka said one of the militants brought him his new cell phone and asked the prisoner to set it up.
The younger militants were more interested in accessing Al-Jazeera on the phone, but Tsuneoka managed to shift their attention to Twitter, successfully getting them to ask him to demonstrate how it worked.
“That’s how I got the message out,” Tsuneoka told a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, a day after he arrived safely back in Japan. “I’m sure they never thought they were tricked.”
Then you must also question the sanity of some reporters, as well. Tsuneoka was also kidnapped in Georgia (the country) in 2001.
Oh we all want to be war reporters, but you don’t think about the possibility of being kidnapped or the even more attractive things like dysentery and getting shot at. War reporting sounds like so much fun.
Taught 90 minutes on grammar today. I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing the lecture yesterday. It isn’t the most fun class the students have, but it is necessary. They were patient, though, and laughed at all the right places. Next week I’ll change things up and we’ll discuss … punctuation!
Meanwhile, the editorial staff was spending the night putting together their first newspaper of the new school year. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow. I looked over their shoulders a bit. It should be a nice start for an almost entirely new staff.
If they can ever get finished. This is usually a late-night-early-morning process. The beginning of the year even more so since there are the inevitable software struggles and design difficulties.
It’s a long day, but a rewarding.
I wrote something on Auburn’s season opener for al.com today. (They didn’t link to me, unfortunately, so I’m not going to waste a lot of time on it.)
My inbox has been full of the comments that came in under that contribution, though. Most of it from Alabama fans. Using the prevailing logic they must be very concerned about Cameron Newton. I don’t blame them. The guy is terrifying.
Tomorrow, newspaper, meetings, studying, the 1939 World’s Fair and probably more.
The last few days have been … mildish. Given the recent weather the upper 80s were delightful. Over the weekend we actually enjoyed a day of weather that, in comparison, seemed almost cool. And, yes, Deep South, September. I understand. We have this conversation often, The Yankee and I. These are perfectly natural temperatures here, I remind her.
Doesn’t make you sweat less.
But, today, we returned to a heat index of 97 degrees at one point. I like summer, but there comes a point in September when it just begins to feel cruel. We’ll reach that point in a week or two, the point of Rubbing It In. The point of Oh, Really? The point of biology where the body says “You know, there’s no more sweat to be had.”
And suddenly a subarctic lifestyle doesn’t seem like a bad idea. That’s when you walk into a restaurant’s cooler and realize “A little more summer might not be so bad.”
Spent the morning researching media effects. Had a meeting with one of my committee members to start discussing my comprehensive exams. He’s such a cool guy. Very kind and energetic and incredibly intelligent.
So naturally we talked about NASCAR and iPhone applications.
At Samford I had a meeting with the new editor. She’s getting ready to run her first issue of the newspaper next week. The online editor joined us to hammer out a few policies for the new year.
We turned it into a teleconference, which turned into a site re-design project in the next few weeks. And from that conversation a lot of exciting things will happen. It was an enthusiastic afternoon full of a great deal of promise. We’re looking forward to new partnerships, bringing in more news outlets to the site, breaking more news on the web, adding more sports and more.
It’ll be a good year.
Traffic? Not so great. Eight miles of construction to get through, all of it behind this guy:
Soon after I passed the buses carrying the Florida Atlantic football team. (Later: FAU blocked a UAB field goal attempt on the final play to win, 32-31.)
I also saw this guy:
Temperatures or not, that’s the first sign of fall. Football is here!
In fact, there are five games on my television tonight, so if you’ll excuse me …
Poor soundbites from the president and indistinct ends aside, we’re now in the new post-modern when it comes to the United States in Iraq. There is a bit of dissembling and, of course, best-foot-possible posturing going into the spin, but the fighting isn’t over. There will still be combat and sacrifice and families separated from loved ones in this, the fourth chapter of the Iraq War.
I covered the launch of the war while in Washington D.C. Like many others I know friends or family who served there. Fortunately they’ve all come safely home. Here’s hoping the rest get back safe, too.
Random journalism observations of the day: Nice to see Chris Fowler can keep his journalistic distance and not shill for Nike. That sort of thing stopped mattering a long time ago, but still.
Check this out, I’m still working my way through the high school workshop circuit and I just found a school where every teacher has, and uses, a blog for classroom purposes. So every student is required to visit it, which means we now have the four R’s: reading, riting, ‘rithmetic and RSS.
Journalist, entrepreneur, philosopher, pundit Alan Mutter muses about a return to the Tampa Model, tying a newspaper and a television station into one newsroom to share coverage, merge manpower and effect cost savings. For a while the idea was thought of as the future of the news industry, but as Mutter notes, the joint Tampa Tribune and WFLA enterprise has not been without it’s difficulties. Others in the comments note a few other aborted examples.
At the macro level the problems are abundantly cultural. What newspapers are after and what television needs are different. The language the two newsrooms use are different. The skill sets, obviously have more than a little variation. Television staffers write differently than newspaper folk. Print reporters don’t always function in the visual medium as well as they might like. The presently natural place to put together a combined print and video product is on the web, but most traditional print and TV organizations aren’t exactly comfortable with that.
So, in a merger, the problems that Tampa model has exhibited for the last 10 years become apparent. Perhaps the problem is in the merger. Maybe the way to proceed would be with a creation of an entirely new news operation.
We’re working to converge our newsrooms at Samford and I’m hoping we can make great strides to do even more of that this year. In many ways these transitions have to happen slowly and, I think, culturally. The people doing the work have to see the need and the value, and that can only happen over time.
A new generation of students who are using the Internet as a matter of course in every classroom are already learning the values of accessibility, utility and multimedia.
On the site I’ve started a new September feature. I shot lot of pictures of Allie the other day, so I figure I’ll add a new cat picture every day. Because if the Internet isn’t powered by cat photographs yet some IT guy somewhere is working on making that happen.
Also I’ve split up some recent posts, pulling out the regular features from the daily entries. I’d been on the fence about it for some time, but figured if I was going to do it now was the time. Better to pull out a handful now than a few more handfuls in the future. This presumes I’ll decide to separate them in the future, of course. I separated them in the present because … let’s say a phone booth landed in the front yard with a future version of me and told me I came to that decision.
A phone booth? I hate to pick on Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure for the film’s otherwise excellent authenticity, but they really whiffed on the phone booth, didn’t they? The goofs on IMDB, they are priceless:
There is a heinous number of most egregious factual errors in the depiction of the famous historical dudes, their lives, their works, their time periods and the state of their hearing.
Someone, upon having that idea, was very happy to find that no one had written any notes for the movie on IMDB.
I forgot to mention that I made the front page of al.com yesterday. I could say that in some way or another every day once upon a time. The sports producer wrote me a few weeks ago to ask if I’d participate in a roundtable discussion throughout the football season. Here’s a segment of my first installment, the topic Auburn’s chief worry:
Break them down: QBs, wideouts (to a smaller extent) and every individual grouping on defense. These are the ones you have to look at. All of those guys have different numbers on the jersey, but the name on the back may as well be John Q. Potential. There’s loads of it, but it now simply has to develop. Stars no longer matter. Recruiting class rankings are now ancient window dressing. The feel good quotes from teammates and coaches must now be tested — and not against the Arkansas States of the world. At this point we must all just see who pans out and how.
[…]
Even if one of the other elements can’t reach it’s potential, though, the regression to the mean seems an improvement over last year’s baseline. And you can worry less because there is no way humanly possible that each unit finds itself in that situation. Overall, Auburn finds everything looking shinier than this time last year.
Special teams, I concluded, is on the clock.
We’re grilling hamburgers tonight. I’m getting my act together for class tomorrow and, soon, uploading the newest additions to the 1939 World’s Fair section. Come back to see those, and more, soon.
First class of the semester. For the professor in me, at least. Samford gets the benefit of a later start. Classes began yesterday, mine kicked off this afternoon. I’m teaching editing to a class full of eager young student journalists. I’ve had some of these students in previous classes.
We did the standard fare introductory stuff and then I gave a quiz. Now I’m that professor.
I showed them this video:
The point of the video being to speak and write with conviction and purpose. Seemed appropriate for an editing class. Took them a while, but they got into it by the end.
Should be a good class, if the professor does a good job with his part.
Had a meeting with the boss. Had a meeting with our new sales manager. We brain stormed ideas and then a few more and then one or two more besides. Now she just has to go out and spread the good word. Had a third meeting.
And then I read a lot.
That’s for class on Thursday.
The black and whites will be up shortly, but that’s it for the day. Tomorrow will be more workshop stuff, more studying, more work. More more more. (And another new, September long feature.)
I’m going to wonder this for years — perhaps long after the chore is no longer mine, perhaps long after I’m in a different place in life entirely — but how does the organizing of a one day workshop take up so much time? My task these last few days, and for the next several days, will be to call teachers.
Do you know when the best time to catch teachers at work is? During the day.
Do you happen to also know what they typical spend their day doing?
Aren’t you surprised some office assistant somewhere in America hasn’t gone crazy and hacked up phone lines? After all, this is only the 6,428th time it has been said this school year, “She’s in class!”
So that was the morning. Emails and phone calls and searching for Email addresses and the proper person for whom to leave a message.
The afternoon I spent putting the final polish on the syllabus I’ll hand out tomorrow. I’m teaching an editing class this term. I’m giving spelling tests, among other things.
I don’t remember how this was received when I was in a similar class way back then, but I’m sure we thought the idea of a spelling test was a novel idea. And then we took those tests, carefully calculated to find the most challenging words in English or other languages that might one day be used by an American journalist. Having come full circle I’ve included some of those words on my list.
Tomorrow, on the first day of the class, I might also give a quiz. Set the tone. Or, as the hip kids say “Be THAT professor.”
I’m going to show a video, though, so I can also be THAT professor. And I’ll talk about typos in banners and semi-permanent paintings and … well, there is always this example if you really need one:
It was supposed to say “hopefuls,” but “when we’re typing and the computers freeze, sometimes it takes so long to unfreeze that we completely forget what we were trying to do when it froze,” explains the editor.
I’ve no doubt that was simply a horrible mistake. The Alligator is a fine paper. And the explanation strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The excuse could use a little more punching up. “We forget” might not satisfy the aggrieved parties.
We grilled out tonight and I reminded myself of a painful less. When lighting fire to the grill, be careful you don’t catch an ember in your eye.
I’d never forgotten that one, actually, it is always good to say out loud, however.
What I did forget was the exact inventory of what was going on the grill. Two pork chops, I thought, I can be economical with the briquettes. But I’d forgotten the corn until The Yankee came home and reminded me that I’d requested roasted corn. So there was an attempt to cook everything over the small mass of charcoal. That proved unsatisfactory. So I spread a few more of the magical black rocks that give fire on the other side of the grill. And now I have a flame discrepancy. So I let it burn and then covered the grill thinking I’d starve the fire. Which I did, right out.
So now nothing was grilling at the proper pace and, really, this is the worst part of my day. Life is so good.
The pork chops were good. The Yankee has this nice seasoning that we must now order online. Stores stopped stocking it, so messengers from Jakarta now deliver it to our door. It goes great with pork and is the sort of thing that makes you think it should stand well on any dish. But, then, if you put it on fish the salmon would stand up and say “Keep it on the swine, friend.”
The corn was a little under-done, but 45 extra seconds on a grill for a fresh ear of corn is not a catastrophe.
Last thing for the night is a fun new iPhone app I discovered. Storyrobe is a free app that let’s you make slideshows (as mp4s) from your photos. You record narration, control when the image flips and can share your project via Email or YouTube.
The finished product is a bit small, but this could be a useful app for a journalist on the go, or to share events with friends and family. Or even storyboarding jokes. We’ve been doing that tonight too. You’d have a hard time finding something free that can make you laugh for as long as this has done.
You have to know all of the ways you can use the tools you download. Knowing the silly ways are important, too.
