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.
