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Remembering Ottawa

Five years ago we were in Ottawa at a conference. It was a low key trip in a busy time. The conference only allowed for one paper each, so The Yankee and I got to be tourists. We took a walking tour of Ottawa one day, and it was lovely. The sky was overcast and chilly. We got snow flurries and red poppies for Veteran’s Day. We met exceedingly nice people at every turn. We walked through incredibly moving memorials and beautiful gothic revival architecture. It was, I said on Twitter today, a wonderful place to visit as an American. Some things I wrote that day:

We toured Parliament. I gave security fits. It seems the metal detectors there are set to the highest sensitivity. Wrists make them beep. Not watches, but the bones in your body. The security officers were very patient and polite, almost apologetic. But, then, everyone we’ve met in Ottawa has been unfailingly nice.

When we finally made it in we sat through a few minutes of the House of Commons, including their regular question period. We made our way up to the Peace Tower and Memorial Chamber. The Memorial Chamber is a very solemn, quiet place. So much so that I didn’t even take any photographs there. Everywhere else, yes, and they’ll eventually make it into the November gallery when I get that section of the site back up to speed.

The picture above is from the gift shop in the parliament building. The kids working the cash register were not prepared for my line of questions about the Speaker’s Selection syrup. Peter Milliken has been the speaker for forever, they said (since 2001) and so this has likely been the syrup since he took office.

How did he decide on this particular syrup?

“I think it was a blind taste test,” one young lady offered.

But surely not. Milliken is from Ontario, but imagine if he’d chosen a syrup from British Columbia in a blind test. That’d be a bit embarrassing. No, he probably brought his favorite from home. Surely this producer is among his constituency.

Unfortunately I couldn’t bring some home with us. The humorless TSA would not allow it. Perhaps I can order some online.

We visited a fancy mall while looking for hats. Turns out this was the coldest day of the season so far. It was 30 degrees with the occasional flurry and we were out taking pictures all day. The guy working the desk at our hotel directed us to the mall, telling us “You can’t get more Canadian than Roots.” He told us to look for a toque.

This was the sort of mall that made you feel poor just by walking inside. “Authentic Canadian” must mean fooling the Americans. Before we found Roots we found Old Navy. Figuring they would be cheaper we steered that way. Right next to Old Navy was a store called Buck or Two.

Why not? We walked in, found hats right up front and bought two of them. Four bucks.

We found Roots, found the toques. Twenty-six dollars, each.

On our way out of the mall I noted my hat couldn’t get any more American: Made in China.

Take that, desk clerk! You will not be getting any kickbacks tonight!

Sure, we’re staying at the downtown Radisson, but we booked through an online discount site. We = Cheap.

We met some striking museum curators — a noun and modifier that could lend itself to a great band name or a magazine layout. These nice, freezing folks were trying to get better wages and less contract labor in their field. Museum curators are important; these are being replaced, the woman said, by non-experts at a lower wage.

Not Canadian, but what can we do? They urged us to drop this note of protest in the mail to our representatives. My guy wasn’t on the mailing list, what with him living in a different country, but I picked a good sturdy English name from a place I’d like to visit and dropped him a note in the local postal system.

We also saw the Notre Dame Basilica. It is across the street from the art museum — we didn’t go — with the giant spider on the corner. If they make a Night at the Museum III they should start with that. Creepy.We saw black squirrels, the famous canal from which all of Ottawa sprang, Quebec on the other side of the river and some very nice, funky shops.

And, sadly, today all of that was locked down after a shooting at Parliament. It seems the Sergeant-at-Arms put a stop to the chaos. More details will emerge, but at this point one victim, a reservist, and the shooter are dead. The soldier was killed at the national war memorial. The shooter somewhere inside Parliament itself.

A writer wrote that this wasn’t supposed to happen in Canada. We can all sympathize; this sort of thing shouldn’t happen anywhere. Parliament member John Williamson wrote “Parliament Hill is never going to be the same.”

Sad to think of that.

Things to read … because there’s always something to think of.

One more note from Canada, these are the running announcements from the Ottawa police.

We see people starting to talk about this subject. I’ve mentioned it and linked to some essays here. Today is a good reminder that it is a conversation worth having. There are plenty of great points here. User Generated Content: time to consider the ethical conundrums as well as the opportunities:

Steve Herrmann says verification is the main challenge when dealing with user-generated content.

“The biggest challenge of all is establishing something is true and retaining peoples’ trust at a time when information is moving so fast it can be very, very hard to check.”

He says that although the speed of the news cycle makes verification difficult, newsrooms need to make sure it’s correct before publishing or broadcasting.

“Or at least if you’re not quite sure, you need to be very clear [about that]”

However, Claire Wardle says the phrase ‘we cannot independently verify this’ is doing a disservice to the audience.

“Until we sort that out, we’ll have content being run too quickly with these caveats, and this isn’t transparent,” she says, indicating that there needs to be more transparency when dealing with UGC.

It is booming. Inside Bloomberg Media’s digital video business:

Bloomberg.com’s desktop site racked up over 5.3 million unique video viewers in September, more than triple the amount it ran a year earlier, according to comScore. Making that more impressive, overall unique visitors to Bloomberg.com declined slightly during that period, from 8.7 million to 8.2 million. That’s important, considering Bloomberg fetches $75 CPMs for its video ads, according to Marcum.

“The world leaders in business are tremendously appealing to advertisers, and we have them,” he said.

These are ambitious numbers, and even if they are close to accurate … Worldwide Subscription Video-On-Demand To Grow Nearly 30% In Revenue In 2014:

Information research company Gartner expects consumer spending on SVOD services to grow 28.1% in 2014 and 18.2% in 2015. Gartner says spending on SVOD services in North America is on pace to improve 28.5% in 2014 and 18.6% in Western Europe. Emerging territories will see a 53% growth rate in 2014.

What Journalists Worry About in the Middle of the Night: I find items 10, 9 and then, ultimately, 2 particularly worrisome.

Thursday update: A cartoon from Halifax’s Chronicle Herald by Bruce MacKinnon, with proceeds from the reprints going to the family of the fallen soldier:

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21
Oct 14

I will, in fact, run to wait

Looking forward to tomorrow. Our student journalists have a big story coming out. It is complex and sensitive and it is well done, a compliment to the people who’ve worked on it. I read it tonight — which is unusual, as an adviser I do not interfere with their editorial decisions, meaning I generally see everything as a regular consumer — and I’m proud of the work they’re doing.

This is a fun, loud, sharp, sarcastic group. They do their work throughout the week and they put their newspaper to bed early on Tuesday nights. But not this week. Tonight was a late night with lots of copy and good quotes and ink on hands. There was plenty of layout experiments and squibble marks and bleary-eyed readings of federal definitions.

The work is good. It is honest and fair and thorough. Our editor-in-chief has spent a lot of time writing it. She’s proven why the job is hers and is proving why she can handle the investigative work. I think she’s going to be proud of it all, after she has put the story to bed and steps away from it for a minute or two.

In the copy room … I’m making copies. I had to re-load the machine with paper. No one ever considers the humble wrapping paper that holds the copy paper together. Maybe we should:

But I always like jam with my paper.

International Paper, under their Hammermill brand, has a program with St. Jude. One of their patients drew the fish.

Now I want to copy more things, to see what is on the next ream of paper.

Things to read … because someone put it on paper. Or a server.

Getting the truly geeky out of the way first: How A/B testing became publishers’ go-to traffic builder.

Journalists’ obituaries are usually a bit self indulgent, but this is a good one about an important figure in the industry: Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor, dies at 93:

See? Ben Bradlee and ‘the best damn job in the world’.

Few ever think about the importance of Barber, just north of Birmingham, but that place is important: Motorsports museum’s economic impact far reaching.

I’m not going to think about racing for at least a week, but here’s one last important economic story: Talladega Superspeedway impact transcends the track.

In a random musical moment I wondered: Whatever happened to Live?

Turns out they have a new album, their first in something like eight years, coming out next week. Here’s one of the new tracks:

But that’s not Ed Kowalczyk. He’s not been with the band in years. (Apparently it was not an amicable breakup.) He has a solo album out. And, in this just-released video, he smiles. This seems unnerving, somehow:

That’s what happens when you wonder about things from 15 years ago.

Here’s a thought exercise: Isn’t it interesting how things are so different for you than they were 15 years ago? Isn’t it even more interesting how things are so similar? Discuss.

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20
Oct 14

Monday’s deep diving

Here are a few video clips from the day at the races. I didn’t shoot much of anything worthwhile and certainly not enough to tell an actual story, he said, again. But I have the video and it doesn’t have to live on my phone forever. So I threw a few of them together and called it “Things with engines moving very fast.”

And so another week begins, with the strings that drew the last week to a close pulling loose and then taut against the tendrils that start this week. In a conversation with a student on Friday evening barbecue kept coming up as a story example, which I interpreted as a clue that I needed barbecue. So I had some kind or another on Friday night, Saturday and last night. After dinner last night there was laundry and the blur of one week turns into the whirr of the next. Here we are.

Today we discussed feature stories. It was great, we sat out under an oak tree and batted around ideas that students are working on. It was a beautiful afternoon under a shade tree.

And then back to the newsroom, where I fixed something I’d broken Friday night. That took about an hour, wrapping up the ends of something I’d begun at the end of last week. And then office work, trying to wrap up the ends of a department project that goes on and on.

Also, there is a ceiling tile to replace. We had a saggy slab of high density mineral fiber pulp that finally gave way. And now all of the cold or warmth from outside is falling in through the attic. So a call to the nice people in the facilities department, who gave me a promise that they would come, sometime soon, to fix the problem.

There are, of course, also the tedious and silly routines and errands that really fill our day. Most of this particular day’s chores won’t even mean anything in the long run. It is a Monday, after all.

Things to read … because it is a Monday.

And now we’ve localized the American Ebola story, Alabama teacher on leave after traveling aboard same plane, but on a different day, as Ebola patient:

The Phenix City Board of Education placed a high school teacher on paid leave after learning the employee traveled on the same airplane that carried a person with the Ebola virus the previous day.

The school board placed the Central High School teacher on 21 days of paid leave despite the Centers for Disease Control and the Alabama Department of Public Health insisting there is no risk of the teacher being exposed to Ebola.

Superintendent William Wilkes wrote in a letter to parents dated Oct. 19 that the teacher was being placed on leave for the incubation period of the Ebola virus “out of an abundance of caution.”

The comments are almost all with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

I usually don’t enjoy Q&As, but this one is entertaining on a variety of subjects, In Conversation Marc Andreeseen:

You could probably bring in the whole online-education movement. But for me, the question is, who does the best with online schooling? And it’s mostly autodidacts, people who are self-starters. They’ve found that people from low-income communities actually get the least out of it.

It’s way too early to judge, because we’re at the very beginning of the development of the technology. It’s like critiquing dos 1.0 and saying that this will never turn into the Windows PC. We’re still in the prototype experimental phase. We can’t use the old approach to teach the world. We can’t build that many campuses. We don’t have the space. We don’t have money. We don’t have the professors. If you can go to Harvard, go to Harvard. But that’s not the question. The question is for the 14-year-old in Indonesia staring at a life of either, like, subsistence farming or being able to get a Stanford-quality education and being able to go into a profession.

The one other thing that people are really underestimating is the impact of entertainment-industry economics applied to education. Right now, with MOOCS,11 the production values are pretty low: You’ll film the professor in the classroom. But let’s just project forward. In ten years, what if we had Math 101 online, and what if it was well regarded and you got fully accredited and certified? What if we knew that we were going to have a million students per semester? And what if we knew that they were going to be paying $100 per student, right? What if we knew that we’d have $100 million of revenue from that course per semester? What production budget would we be willing to field in order to have that course?

You could hire James Cameron to do it.

You could literally hire James Cameron to make Math 101. Or how about, let’s study the wars of the Roman Empire by actually having a VR [virtual reality] experience walking around the battlefield, and then like flying above the battlefield. And actually the whole course is looking and saying, “Here’s all the maneuvering that took place.” Or how about re-creating original Shakespeare plays in the Globe Theatre?

Sorta makes you want to invest in VR, doesn’t it?

And, finally, speaking of James Cameron, here’s some deep diving that should be filmed. It would be a 12-minute long film. New World Record for Deepest Scuba Dive:

Due to the requirements of decompression and the need to expel nitrogen, the ascent to the surface required a staggering 14 hours.

Sorta makes breaking the surface anticlimactic, no?

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17
Oct 14

The ball joint and groove

I don’t read a lot of FAQ pages, but maybe I should start. The random question can be the best. You’ll see why below.

I left campus at 7:30 tonight. I had a meeting until about 7 p.m. with students. Students gathered until 7 p.m. on a Friday night. They did this after working late into the evening last night o put their paper to bed. And then they sat around in the earliest part of their weekend and talked with me about their work. Their dedication to their craft is so very admirable.

And then, at home tonight, I learned that our postal crew understands humor. Specifically, irony, a bend across the link of the envelope, right on the stamp that says “Do Not Bend.”

Fortunately, they also understand unwanted mail. I must get this same envelope every other month. I open it, remove the return envelope, skim the contents and practice my best wrist-rotating exercises 16 times. Sometimes I get another rip and tear in there. Sometimes the tension of the paper is too much and I think back to that year we managed to get a huge stack of unnecessary phone books. YouTube was just becoming a fixture. I found videos teaching me how to rip phone books. I managed to perfect the technique, at least one svelte editions of the phone books. Now, I’m destroying junk mail. It has much greater tensile strength.

If they’re going to bend it — it is more malleable than a phone book — the mail carrier may as well just keep the thing themselves, right?

Things to read … because when you see good things, you shouldn’t keep it to yourself.

Syracuse basketball’s Orange Madness: Details on selfies, student dunks, legends:

Why selfies and not autographs?

“We just felt like it would be more of a keepsake for our fans to take pictures and pass them around on social media,” Donabella said.

It has never occurred to me to get the autograph of a college athlete. I’ve covered a lot of them, and I’ve watched and cheered for many, many more, but autographs, no. I once sat on a sofa and talked dry cleaning with the fastest man in NCAA track and field. But it never occurred to me to take a photograph with him. (“Back in my day … “)

I have a few autographs of a few others — my first one, I think, is a now faded slip of paper with Kenny Stabler’s name scrawled on it. Later I managed to get a few photographs with famous people. I prefer the photos. Though the Stabler story is pretty good.

The explanation is easy, Twitter Is Finally Explaining Its Suggested Tweets Strategy:

When Twitter first started testing these suggested tweets a few months ago, it didn’t explain the change very well to users, most of whom were confused and even angry when they started seeing content in their stream from people they didn’t follow. Twitter often experiments with new features without adding much of an explanation early on.

Thursday’s blog post is Twitter’s attempt to quell those concerns and offer some insight into the company’s strategy.

They are doing it to frustrate me. If I wanted those extra tweets they’d be in my feed. So you’re offering me discovery by way of people I follow. They have a way to share information with me already, using the retweet button. When you add the favorite button to all of that, well you’re just making buttons redundant, you’re messing up the temporal flow of things and just being tedious, all based on an algorithm.

I have a lot of thoughts on this subject. It all boils down to humanism.

If this story is even close to true … 19-year-old dies naked on cell floor of gangrene; lawsuits target deaths in Madison County jail”>

Your daily Ebola update:

Advisory on Ebola coverage

Amid Assurances on Ebola, Obama Is Said to Seethe

You don’t see the word “seethe” in headlines very often.

Finally, we’re going to the race at Talladega this weekend. We’re trying to figure out how much time to allow for traffic. I’m reading Yelp reviews and random things people have written on various sites (“Leave home: August | Leave the race: After the national anthem.”)

I found myself reading the Superspeedway’s FAQ:

18. Can I get married at Talladega Superspeedway?

Couples wishing to exchange vows on speedway property may do so within the confines of their spot in one of the parks. Weddings are not allowed on speedway property that is used for competition during race weekends.

We got married in lovely and historic downtown Savannah, Georgia. I am now kicking myself I didn’t think of the race track.

I’m sure someone wants to marry during a yellow. Someone else wants to marry and cause a yellow. I wonder if the minister says something like “If anyone has any reason why these two should not be wed or why Jeff Gordon shouldn’t be put into the wall in turn four, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

And, of course, the F in FAQ stands for “Frequently.” If it means anything, it wasn’t the last one on the list, either.

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16
Oct 14

There is a video at the end of this post

I’m writing this at the end of a long day, in the middle of a short week, which feels like a long week. But I have a reasonable lecture prepared for tomorrow. The news crew has finished their paper for tomorrow’s edition. I’ve worked on running projects and I ran from working projects.

Wait. That’s not right. I worked on ongoing projects. Later, I went for a run. It was not a fun run. I’ve had one or two of those (I do not know what is happening) but this one wasn’t one of them.

I enjoyed the end of a lovely sunset, however:

And because I was looking that direction I saw this sign … I wonder how many people honked.

Someone approved that sign:

Things to read … because they were approved too.

This was 160 years ago, Samford Recalls “The Midnight Fire”:

On the night of Oct. 15, 1854, the young college’s only building – which housed students, classrooms, laboratories, equipment, books – was destroyed by fire. All the young college’s property was lost, and one student died as a result of injuries sustained in the fire. Located at the time in Marion, Alabama, the college was not quite 13 years old and could have been devastated by the fire.

But, it was a story of heroism during the fire that has carried forward in the university’s history and folklore. Harry, the college janitor and a slave belonging to President Henry Talbird, was among the first to awaken after the fire was discovered. According to accounts of the tragic night, when told to escape while he could, Harry replied, “Not till I wake up the boys.”

He went door to door through the building on his “errand of mercy,” according to reports of the time. When he reached the last room on the upper floor, he was faced with flames where he could not reach the stairs. He jumped from the hall window and was fatally injured.

Put these two together:

HBO to launch standalone streaming service in 2015

CBS follows on HBO’s heels with launch of web-only streaming service

You notice there’s first a premium cable station and a broadcast going the same way. The dominos are at the very least moving. I can’t decide if this puts ABC’s ESPN properties in the sweet spot or puts them behind the eight ball. I’m leaning toward the side that suggests that gives ESPN all the power in the remaining deals.

I suppose I should find this interesting, but mostly I’m not sure why an advertiser and creative think I should give feedback to an ad: If You’d Like To Interact With The Future Of Audio Ads, Please Say “Proceed”.

White House pool reporters test own news distribution system:

White House journalists are creating an alternative system for distributing their media “pool” reports in response to the Obama administration’s involvement in approving and disapproving certain content in official reports.

[…]

Reporters have complained that the Obama White House exploits its role as distributor to demand changes in pool reports and that the press office has delayed or refused to distribute some reports until they are amended to officials’ satisfaction.

But now, some journalists are sharing their White House reporting using Google Groups — the digital service that allows registered users to receive and send information within a closed circle. In an early test of the supplemental system, journalists shared pool information about President Obama’s trip to Chicago this month. The system has been used for “advisories,” such as where the pool is assembling, when another pool report will be issued or whether a correction is in the works.

Because training demonstrates it is more of an evolution than a revolution? The smartphone revolution and why training matters

From the Department of Who Knew? Publishers want out of Apple’s Newsstand jail:

Apple was supposed to save publishers, but these days, it seems like publishers need to be saved from Apple.

Three years ago, Apple introduced Newsstand, a feature that gave iOS users a dedicated home for their digital magazines and newspapers. The app, designed to look like an actual physical newsstand, was good news, too, for publishers, which finally had a way to better stand out from other non-magazine apps.

But three years later, publishers say that Newsstand is holding them back and, in some cases, actively hurting them.

Three years ago, keen observers saw that coming.

This defies excerpting, but it is well said if you haven’t compiled this general sentiment in the last 10 years ago, The bad news about the bad news

And, finally, today’s This Kid Is Cooler Than We Are story, Montevallo first-grader raising money to help Children’s of Alabama cancer patients:

After one of her peers at Montevallo Elementary died of cancer over the summer, first-grader Kayla SanRoman remembers the sight of the many yellow ribbons hanging in the school’s hallways.

At just 6 years old, Kayla knew she wanted to help somehow.

On a piece of white paper, she created a flyer that included a picture she drew of a stick figure with a frown and the words, “Donate muneye for cancer. We hope you can donate to childes hoseital.”

[…]

Kayla has raised $105 as of Wednesday in an effort to get as much as she can by the end of the month to help children with cancer at Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham.

“I’m trying to get a lot of money so I can donate there so they can probably maybe help them,” Kayla said.

The kids are better than alright, no?

Finally, I shot this today. Just put my photo in the windowsill and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened: