I have a very musical sense about things. I know this: One day, many decades hence, before they put me in the cold ground, there’s going to be a ragtime band playing a few tunes. Some of it might sound like this:
The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the great Allen Toussaint are touring together — they’ve never done that before, somehow — and they played Samford tonight. It was a terrific show. Toussaint has 20 records, two Grammy nominations and the National Medal of Arts award. The band goes back 50 years with a rotating cast of members. Some of the current iteration have been onboard for decades. Seeing them all on one stage feels like you’re reaching elbow deep into the hopes, history, irreverence and dreams of Americana. To see great talent like those men playing together is to, perhaps, get a small inkling of jazz as the American art form. Within it all there are discordant notes and spaces and wandering musicians and multiple instruments and it all comes back together again. Americana. They all count their time in music and New Orleans in generations.
Charlie Gabriel, for example, is 81 and has been playing music for at least 67 years. He has four generations of New Orleans musicians behind him and three generations playing below him.
They did play St. James Infirmary, two versions in fact. One of them was perhaps the happiest tune about death you could imagine. The other was very angry, as it should be. Part of that is in the clip above.
Things to read … because there are clips below, too.
A University of Missouri-St. Louis student who uses an online platform to live-stream protests in Ferguson was hospitalized last week after five or six people threw him out of a church, where protesters had gathered to strategize, and beat him.
The student, Chris Schaefer, began live streaming Ferguson protests and interviews on Oct. 23. But during the protest strategy meeting at St. Mark’s Family Church on Nov. 6, he was not recording, he said in a video from a hospital bed.
[…]
Schaefer told police five or six people assaulted him at the meeting because they believed he was recording the meeting, said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a St. Louis County Police Department spokesman. Schaefer ran out of the church to a Walgreens about a half mile from the church, where police responded to a 911 call, Schellman said. Police are looking for the suspects.
New research by social-influence marketing platform Crowdtap indicates that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media.
Those hours represent a total across multiple media sources, some of which are consumed simultaneously.
We all need to develop effective (meaning, sometimes, different) messages across platforms within our unifying themes. It is starting to sound like jazz, no?
I talked about online journalism in class today. I tried to distill the history of the thing into 40 minutes. So I only covered 20 years. My favorite slides included a picture of Kenneth Starr and the text “Starr bypasses the press & distributes a major political document online first — A new relationship between politicians & the public.”
Ahh, the Starr report.
Here’s your trivia for next year. The word hypertext turns 50 next February. Fifty!
There’s another slide that says something like ““Journalism is now a smaller part of the information mix. Advertising works differently online and advertisers may not need journalism as they once did.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. I can’t get to all of that in one class.
Got home to see the in-laws, which was expected. They’ve come to visit for the weekend. This is not a bad thing. They are lovely people. He’s retired and working and she’s an RN. Their daughter took them out to a program about town this afternoon, so I was actually there when they got back in.
We set out for dinner, had barbecue and learned the local high school team found themselves with a 4th and goal from way back. Two incompletions, a 12-yard sack and three penalties for 32 yards forced a punt from their own 46-yard line with 45 seconds remaining. The home team lost by four points in the first round of the playoffs.
A kid who is a junior cried on one team and kids who are seniors on the other team are very happy. We drove by the stadium to see the crowd, but it wasn’t that big, considering. We also let the folks listen to the accents on the high school football broadcasts. We could hear at least four games — down from the regular season numbers. Some of those accents are thicker than others, probably owing to how far in the woods someone is. Sometimes, apparently, you have to be from around here to pick up what was just said. It is pretty amusing.
Things to read … because one of these things will be amusing.
Perhaps you’ve read the resignation email sent this week by a photographer at West Palm Beach CBS affiliate WPEC. Vince Norman didn’t last three months on the job, informing the bosses that “I have reached the limit of what I’m willing to put up with.” My word. What did they do to him?
Here are the inhumane conditions this poor kid was subjected to, as he described in his email.
Robert Frank is 90 years old on Sunday. The great pioneer and iconoclast has become a survivor, celebrated and revered, but still resolutely an outsider. One thing we can be sure of: he won’t be looking back.
“The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old,” he told me without a trace of regret in 2004, when I visited him at his spartan apartment in Bleecker Street, New York, where a single bread roll and a mobile phone the size of a brick sat forlornly on the kitchen table. “There’s no point in it any more for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, ‘why should we remember anything?’ There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.”
The average person now consumes twelve hours of media, checks their phone close to 110 times and sees an estimated 5,000 marketing messages each day. When most of us also regularly put in 8+ hours on the job, it’s no wonder our collective attention span is more taxed than ever.
[…]
As a marketer or advertiser, all this is also a reality check and constant reminder about how precious attention has become. If you’re thinking about what this means for your marketing efforts, or you’re producing a lot of quality content but struggling to get noticed, here are four principles you can apply to win anyone’s attention.
To be sure, the notion that the television may go the way of the Sony Walkman may sound like hyperbole. Some 34.5 million flat-screen televisions were shipped in the United States last year alone, according to figures compiled by IHS Technology, a global market research company — a substantial number, even if sales are down 13.75 percent, from 40 million, since 2010.
Yet by another, more geek-futurist view, it seems easy to start their obituary, even as manufacturers race to keep up to speed by churning out web-enabled smart TVs. The smartphone age has been cruel to devices that perform only one function.
I’m thinking I should perhaps rename things around here “Multiple.” The other day I pointed to a story that hints at the need to consider your multiple audiences on multiple platforms with a unified theme. A week before I offered you an essay with this basic premise: In many companies, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question, “What business am I in?” The answer seemed obvious to me, you’re in multiple businesses. That is the adaptation that technology is offering you — pretty much in every field.
In different ways and for different reasons, those are all big deals.
Finally, a slideshow. I link to Mobile is eating the world because I think Benedict Evans is saying something I’m saying, only more eloquently. He’s arguing that, essentially, you don’t need to define the future of technology and the future of mobile, because they are the same. Technology, he says, is now outgrowing the tech industry.
The first inkling of that I got was when we saw the mobile data outpacing the adaptable — and amazingly fast, rapid-fire — world wide web on growth and standards. To Evans, a strategic consumer technology analyst, this comes down to the availability of tech. (If I understand him correctly, that is.) Those are issues of supply and logistics and resources and global wealth — in the macro sense. This is not, then, the technological singularity. That comes later.
I wonder if that happens on a Friday.
It might. The odds aren’t terrible — one in seven, I’d say — but it isn’t happening tonight.
Did you see the post from earlier today? The historic marker series is finally back. I’ve been sitting on pictures that just haven’t been uploaded for no reason whatsoever and it seemed a good time to return to that. It only takes about two minutes to put together, after all. So why not? The previous post links to the most recent material.
I’m playing with an app that lets me make a slideshow on my phone. This is SnapAudio, which allows me to record six or 15 or 30 seconds of audio. That would seem like plenty. It is pretty easy to use, too. I shot these pictures on my phone walking from the car to the office this afternoon. I recorded the audio — too much of it I think, but this is only a quick test of functionality — this evening and then uploaded it to YouTube from my phone.
Also, I am going to have to do more voice work. That doesn’t sound as it should.
Everything looks a bit square, but otherwise this could be useful.
Know a slideshow app that doesn’t reduce everything to squares and allows you to record audio? I’m always taking suggestions.
Things to read … because I like to give suggestions, too.
CBS launched what may be the modern media-industry version of a CNN with a new broadband-distributed news feed that will send live, anchored news programming to Internet-connected TVs and other devices – an attempt by the company to monetize its CBS News unit without the old-world hassle of building a cable-TV network to do so.
They say they are aiming for something in between TV and video on demand. The most telling thing will be its degree of adaptability.
What do the reports reveal? Two things: 1) there has been an enormous increase in the use of sneak and peek warrants and 2) they are rarely used for terrorism cases.
First, the numbers: Law enforcement made 47 sneak-and-peek searches nationwide from September 2001 to April 2003. The 2010 report reveals 3,970 total requests were processed. Within three years that number jumped to 11,129. That’s an increase of over 7,000 requests. Exactly what privacy advocates argued in 2001 is happening: sneak and peak warrants are not just being used in exceptional circumstances—which was their original intent—but as an everyday investigative tool.
Second, the uses: Out of the 3,970 total requests from October 1, 2009 to September 30, 2010, 3,034 were for narcotics cases and only 37 for terrorism cases (about .9%). Since then, the numbers get worse. The 2011 report reveals a total of 6,775 requests. 5,093 were used for drugs, while only 31 (or .5%) were used for terrorism cases. The 2012 report follows a similar pattern: Only .6%, or 58 requests, dealt with terrorism cases. The 2013 report confirms the incredibly low numbers. Out of 11,129 reports only 51, or .5%, of requests were used for terrorism. The majority of requests were overwhelmingly for narcotics cases, which tapped out at 9,401 requests.
This entire day has felt like that moment just before you release the sigh, he said, not fully knowing what that means.
Or … I could try that again.
This entire day has felt like that moment just before you release the sigh, he sighed, knowing exactly what that meant.
Each time I went outside the sky was this light, slate gray. Even the grays couldn’t be bothered to bring a full palette. Like the sky said “Ya know … forget about it.”
So it was that I found myself bending over to study the leaves on the ground, where there was some actual color. I picked up a few to bring inside for a picture, but I’m not sure why.
All of this probably sounds like I am in a mood, but I am not. Well, I am in a mood, but it can safely be categorized as “good.” I’ve just not been especially impressed by the day.
There was a class though, and there was a newspaper meeting and then some time signing things and copying things and marking up papers. Last night I solved a networking problem. One computer wouldn’t reach anything, a student said. The ethernet cable had been removed. Broken clips sink ships. Today I’m dealing with a scanner problem. Bad software helps the enemy everywhere. Technical support is not my job, but I suppose it is really all of our jobs these days, not unlike wartime security and the old propaganda posters.
I love those old posters. At the Churchill Museum in London I was confronted with an entire room of them I could purchase. My wife and her mother, who were also in the museum, knew I was a lost cause and left me there to go do something else. A friend and former boss owns the poster printing company linked above, with tons of great old art. I’ve spent a lot of time pouring through those as well. In both cases I’ve never managed to buy anything. The next one is always better. There’s that moment before the sigh again, I guess.
Anyway, I can’t make the scanner work with the new computer. I’ve downloaded the things and read all of the forums and installed, changed, rebooted and all of that. I know how to have a good time, boy. Ultimately, though, I’ll need the actual tech folks — the real heroes in any business — come and get this situated.
So I may as well go back to looking through ancient posters — here’s one with a guy in an arm cast and sling in the background with text that says “Don’t get hurt.” In the foreground there’s a GI sprawled out, dead. “It may cost his life.” What a crazy poster to have hanging in the factory —
Suddenly, there’s a big squealing sound. Not the speakers, not the phone, but the scanner, which is in between them. Unplug the scanner, the squeal goes away. Try to scan again, it still will not initialize. There will be no beaming of data this day. We’ll have to send the shuttlecraft, keptin.
This can only mean that later, or some time tomorrow, that random squeal will start again.
Things to read … because reading is never random. (You’ll see. One day.)
If Democrats were going to hold off a Republican tsunami, they needed their base voters to come out to the polls and pull the lever for the president’s party. That didn’t happen where Democrats needed it to. Especially with young voters. Nationally, Democratic base groups — young voters, single women, African-Americans and Latinos — posted numbers that looked more like the Democrats’ 2010 midterm “shellacking” than Obama’s 2012 re-election victory. Most strikingly, voters 18-29 nationwide were only 13% of the electorate in 2014 (compared with 22% for GOP-leaning seniors.) In the 2010 midterms, young voters made up 12% of the voting public. In contrast, during Obama’s re-election victory in 2012, 19% of the electorate was under 30.
Nearly complete election results indicate that about 41 percent of Alabama’s nearly 2.9 million active registered voters participated. A gubernatorial election traditionally attracts more than half of Alabama’s voters.
Maybe if the Democrats would put someone on the statewide ballots …
A West Virginia University freshman who did most of her campaigning out of her dorm room became the youngest state lawmaker in the nation Tuesday.
Republican Saira Blair, a fiscally conservative 18-year-old, will represent a small district in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, about 1½ hours outside Washington, D.C., after defeating her Democratic opponent 63% to 30%, according to the Associated Press. A third candidate got 7% of the vote.
In a statement, Ms. Blair thanked her supporters and family, as well as her opponents for running a positive campaign. “History has been made tonight in West Virginia, and while I am proud of all that we have accomplished together, it is the future of this state that is now my singular focus,” she said.
Ms. Blair campaigned on a pledge to work to reduce certain taxes on businesses, and she also holds antiabortion and pro-gun positions. She defeated Democrat Layne Diehl, a 44-year-old Martinsburg attorney, whose top priorities included improving secondary education and solving the state’s drug epidemic.
Maybe I share that story with students. No pressure, folks.
CBS plans to launch its new digital news channel tomorrow, an effort to get the broadcast network into 24-hour news. CBS Interactive head Jim Lanzone confirmed the company’s plans for the news video site during an onstage interview with me at the Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland
If they do something different with that, they could find some success. If the plan is simply to be a 24-hour news channel online … CNN or MSNBC awaits.
The panel stressed that not all of the old values have been swept away. “It’s really old-fashioned: can I find it out, is it true, can I stand by it? That level of trust is really important,” said Sutcliffe. “I’ve got a story, but does it stand up, is it true, what are my sources?”
“There will be two types of parallel journalism going on – the facts on the ground from people who are there, foreign correspondents, and people like us who filter,” said Little.
Some of the filters will be the same media organisations who employ on-the-ground correspondents, though. Time, for example, has a division focused on breaking news, which is deliberately kept separate from its foreign correspondents.
“We’ve hired a bunch of very young people in New York and Hong Kong and they’re essentially aggregating as a breaking news service: when anything appears from a reliable news organisation, quickly write two or three paragraphs and get it out there,“ he said.
Every quote in that piece is worth reading. I hope the students will give it a glance. You should too.
And then let go of that sigh. Tomorrow is Thursday, and yours is going to be great.
We haven’t enjoyed the Things to Read section here in several days, which means I have a backlog of links for you to enjoy. This works well for content today, which has otherwise been spent almost entirely doing necessary but generally uninteresting things. I’ve got about two dozen more interesting items to share, promise.
(If you’re here for the sappy stuff, there first installment is next. There’s another great one at the end of the post.)
First, the Lauren Hill video package by Tom Rinaldi:
(T)hroughout the game, televised live by FoxSports Ohio, she never seemed to stop smiling. She had a noticeable glow and bounce in her step while on the court.
During an in-game interview on FoxSports, she quickly corrected a broadcaster who referred to the game as her last, saying it was her first college game. Hill told reporters after the game she hoped to be well enough to try to play again.
Hays and Koskinen said they found Hill genuinely inspiring and not a subject of pity.
“She is just the most upbeat person despite what she’s going through,” Koskinen said. “Her smile lights up a room. She wants to hug you every chance she gets. You can’t help but want to hug her back and smile. She’s someone I will truly admire the rest of my life.”
The teams dined together Saturday night at the Firehouse Grill in Cincinnati, and the Terriers were nervous about meeting Hill.
“What do we say to her?” Hiram players asked their coach.
Before long, the teams were laughing together, crying, and laughing some more.
Breakfast, shower, shave, mirror. Almost a year. He is 56 now. He looks at the scars across his face, around his ear, along his upper chest and right arm. He gets dressed and goes outside to his truck, and there’s the fence that he somehow managed to climb even though he was bleeding, and there’s the field he staggered across to a rutted road where he was found.
This is how most days begin for Creigh Deeds, a father who had a son with mental illness, who struggled to understand him, tried to get help for him, and was ultimately left alone to deal with him, and who now looks over at the barn where he had so suddenly dropped the feed bucket.
“I lost a tooth over there somewhere, a gold tooth,” he says, shaking his head a little, and then he goes to work.
An armed security guard who was on an elevator with President Obama had not been convicted of a felony, as previously reported, according to two people briefed on the incident.
The man, who worked for a private security contractor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was removed from the president’s elevator during his Sept. 16 visit to Atlanta. The man was questioned by Secret Service agents after he did not comply with a request from agents that he stop recording images of the president with a camera.
Agents became concerned that the private contractor might be a risk to the president because of his behavior; others who later ran a background check on the guard discovered some prior arrests in his history.
[…]
The guard was terminated the day of the presidential visit to the CDC — when his supervisor at the security contracting firm arrived to find agents questioning the guard, he told him to turn over his gun on the spot.
The Obama administration’s Syria strategy suffered a major setback Sunday after fighters linked to al-Qaeda routed U.S.-backed rebels from their main northern strongholds, capturing significant quantities of weaponry, triggering widespread defections and ending hopes that Washington will readily find Syrian partners in its war against the Islamic State.
Moderate rebels who had been armed and trained by the United States either surrendered or defected to the extremists as the Jabhat al-Nusra group, affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through the towns and villages the moderates controlled in the northern province of Idlib, in what appeared to be a concerted push to vanquish the moderate Free Syrian Army, according to rebel commanders, activists and analysts.
Other moderate fighters were on the run, headed for the Turkish border as the extremists closed in, heralding a significant defeat for the rebel forces Washington had been counting on as a bulwark against the Islamic State.
The head of naval intelligence has not been able to view classified information for an entire year.
Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the director of naval intelligence, had his security clearance suspended in November 2013 after being investigated for possible misconduct. In the year since, no charges have been filed and there is no sense of when they might be, leaving the Navy in an untenable situation.
If classified information is being discussed at a meeting, the director of naval intelligence has to leave the room.
If Branch drops by a subordinate’s office, the space must be sanitized of any secrets before he enters.
CNN, covering the pressing Internet “news,” Internet lusts after new mugshot guy. If we get to a point where we call this news, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Better than calling content like that “culture.” Already it is filed under “living,” which should always be noted with something just above derision.
It’s Election Day in America. What with candidates vying for control and issues that need deciding, voters may find themselves confused about where they stand. Thankfully, some very savvy media designers have come up with delightful tools for understanding the election and its outcomes.
I love campaign tic tocks. This is the first one I’ve found from the midterms, there are some very interesting presidential critiques in there as well, the sort of thing you don’t often see about a sitting president. Battle for the Senate: How the GOP did it defies excerpting, but check it out if you’re interested in campaign news.
Which is as decent a transition as any toward the more media-based material. This video is titled College journalist disarms police confrontation and is worth watching:
Rice University launched a free Advanced Placement biology course Monday on a Web site overseen by two other elite schools, a potentially significant milestone for a movement that aims to bring college-level courses to high school students.
[…]
Sometimes students pay to take AP classes from online providers. Advertised tuition for such classes ranges from $75 to more than $500.
“Our program you can take for free,” said Reid Whitaker, executive director of the Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship at Rice. “This is a comprehensive program. Free resources. That’s a game changer.”
You’d think that has to impact the AP business model.
YouTube’s challenge is to replicate this fandom offline, beyond the teens and tweens who roved the halls of VidCon. The site is already rolling out billboard and video advertising campaigns to expand their stars’ reach, and to make them more than just Internet famous.
When I wandered just a few steps outside and spoke to food vendors or hotel employees, I found no one had heard of stars like Meghan Tonjes or Tyler Oakley—the kind who drew crowds inside the convention center.
For VidCon attendees who grew up with YouTube, the distinction between “YouTube famous” and “famous famous” may be meaningless.
No one ever said “Ed Sullivan famous.” The modifier is merely a diminishing agent. Ultimately you don’t see that person at the airport and say “Oh, she’s only YouTube famous never mind.” You know of her or don’t. You can see that entire thread here.
Wondering why you’re not finding great success with your alumni social media marketing? Well, wonder no more because we’ve done some digging, and figured out just how you can revamp your social media behavior for the betterment of all. In this blog, we’ve broken down your alumni into three groups based on age and interest because a variety of alumni means a variety of tactics for social media inclusion. The results may not be what you would expect (and if they are, Bravo!). Take what we have to show you today and stop wasting your time. Start creating impactful relationships with your alumni via social media.
Every few minutes, a new buzzword rips through the business world, skids, gets a few quick books written on it, and ends up in a pile of tired terms next to “synergy.” Today, one of the biggest corporate buzzwords is “storytelling.” Marketers are obsessed with storytelling, and conference panels on the subject lately have fewer empty seats than a Bieber concert.
[…]
Good stories surprise us. They have compelling characters. They make us think, make us feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that numbers and text on a slide with a bar graph don’t.
I saw this elderly gentleman dining by himself, with an old picture of a lady in front of him. I though maybe I could brighten his day by talking to him.
As I had assumed, she was his wife. But I didn’t expect such an interesting story. They met when they were both 17. They dated briefly, then lost contact when he went to war and her family moved. But he said he thought about her the entire war. After his return, he decided to look for her. He searched for her for 10 years and never dated anyone. People told him he was crazy, to which he replied “I am. Crazy in love”. On a trip to California, he went to a barber shop. He told the barber how he had been searching for a girl for ten years. The barber went to his phone and called his daughter in. It was her! She had also been searching for him and never dated either.
