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things to read

I walked into the end of this one, didn’t I?

Partly cloudy, cloudy, mostly cloudy, scattered clouds. All of that was in the weather analysis today. Also, a high of 59. The low tonight is predicted around 36. More of these were on the ground:

So autumn is over. Fall is here. I propose that we have two seasons. The autumn doesn’t last long, but our coldest season won’t typically show up until the end of December. We have to have something in between, right? So instead of just four seasons, I propose we have five.

This is funny because some would say we really only have three seasons. Or, maybe, even just two.

It is five. You read it here, on the Internet. It is true.

This is one of those things I’ve been hanging on to for several days. I may as well share it here. My colleague David Simpson takes it away:

Because I couldn’t get a projector to work at the National College Media Convention in New Orleans, I read aloud a passage in a “Free Your Writing Voice” session that I’ve sometimes just flashed on a screen. I had not prepared for a dramatic reading, so I was surprised at how powerful it sounded coming out of my mouth.

The audience seemed to like it, though it’s a long passage. So I encourage you to read it aloud.

[…]

I especially loved reading that long sentence. And the two-word emphatic ending.

Click on over to read the passage yourself. I suspect, if you like the art of writing, you’ll appreciate what you find there.

The funniest thing I did today:

Students just offered me a glowstick. Said "As a child of the Cold War I know not to touch glowing things." Radiation humor!

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) November 19, 2013

Yeah, it was one of those kind of days. My office is cold. The newsroom is colder. It might be warmer outside. The students are working on their paper and I’m grading things and working on projects and not touching glow sticks.

Things to read …

Tip pays off for Richmond student journalists:

The Collegian reporters started digging into the past of a law school student when they got a tip that he was a sex offender. Turns out he had served time in prison for aggravated sexual battery.

He had also been ordered to withdraw from the University of Virginia, according to the story Conklin and Arnett published earlier this month. At Richmond, he was the recipient of one of the law school’s most prestigious scholarships and a member of its Honor Council.

Interesting story — here is their reporting — that is continuing. The comments, as always, are insightful.

This is tough all the way around. She wrote the president, he used her tale as an anecdote. And then Washington’s health system found an error. Her rates increased. Then they found another error. Another hike. And now, Woman cited by President as Obamacare success story frustrated by sign up process:

The result was a higher quote, which Sanford said was for $390 per month for a “silver” plan with a higher deductible. Still too expensive.

A cheaper “bronze” plan, Sanford said, came in at $324 per month, but also with a high deductible – also not in her budget.

Then another letter from the state exchange with even worse news.

“Your household has been determined eligible for a Federal Tax Credit of $0.00 to help cover the cost of your monthly health insurance premium payments,” the latest letter said.

[…]

“This is it. I’m not getting insurance,” Sanford told CNN. “That’s where it stands right now unless they fix it.”

[…]

She is sorry Obama mentioned her during the October 21 speech.

“I feel awful about it. I support (the Affordable Care Act),” Sanford said.

But the messy rollout in the other Washington, the nation’s capital, was not far from her mind.

“What the hell? Why is it the same story as the federal government?” Sanford says in disgust with the Washington state exchange. “They didn’t have it ready.”

“They screwed up,” she added.

Comments on that story have been turned off, which is curious, but unsurprising.

The longest (and, in places, wrongest) infographic of your day. Commenters were helpfully pointing out errors here. That’s become its own industry at this point, hasn’t it, correcting the work of others in the comments below …

I await yours in 3 … 2 …

iPhone / journalism / Monday / photo / things to read — Comments Off
18
Nov 13

I never have good titles for Mondays

Here are a few shots of leaves on campus this afternoon:

leaf turn

May they never complete their turn. Because you know they will, and that’ll just leave us sticks in the air, the great surrender of the trees to winter.

Fine day today. Lovely, sunny, weather. Béla Fleck played campus this evening. I talked about cover letters in class. There was the ritualistic grading of things and other typical office efforts. I had a baked potato for dinner. It was all grand in its own way.

Things to read … Smithsonian Now Allows Anyone To 3D Print (Some) Historic Artifacts:

The Smithsonian Institution may have hit on one of the best uses of 3D printing to date. Starting Wednesday, the world’s largest network of museums introduced Smithsonian X 3D, a new effort and web portal to create 3D renderings of its vast and fascinating collections of more than 137 million objects.

Amelia Earhart’s flight suit? Done! Wooly mammoth? You betcha! Abraham Lincoln’s lifemask? Creepy, but it can be yours.

We live in the future, and it is going to have awesome tidbits of the past everywhere.

And it will have, finally, maybe, self driving cars. Think of all the things you could get done on a long drive. Has the self-driving car at last arrived?:

His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It’s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas, and G.P.S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work. Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes, or that he belonged to an élite team of ghost hunters. But nowadays the vehicle is clearly marked: “Self-Driving Car.”

[…]

Levandowski is an engineer at Google X, the company’s semi-secret lab for experimental technology.

Closer to home, Archaeologists finding clues to mining communities atop Red Mountain:

“We didn’t know what to expect,” said Forschler-Tarrasch, who first thought the artifacts might be native Alabamian or Native American pottery. “We were surprised that most of the shards are English and American pottery. We identified one as a piece of German pottery. They are absolutely not from this area.

She speculated that either the workers brought them here, or they were purchased in company stores.

“Many of the shards have little marks on them,” she said. “You can date them based on the marks, and they mostly coincide with the dates of the settlement, so these were contemporary, household ceramics. Most of them are pretty average, but there are a few that are fancier, with some gilding that would have cost more. We have yet to determine what that means for the site.”

There’s just something about Red Mountain — the way the houses cling to the side, the way we’ve cut a road through it, its importance to the region’s development, the high quality ore they took out of there, something — that fascinates. This project, at less than 100 years old in places, is more cleaning up than archeology, but really quite cool.

Food stamp cuts in your state — an interactive infographic. The supporting NPR piece:

When you think of Oregon and food, you probably think organic chicken, kale chips and other signs of a strong local food movement. What probably doesn’t come to mind? Food stamps.

And yet, 21 percent of Oregon’s population – that’s one out of every five residents – relies on food stamps to get by.

Oregon has a host of unfortunate and challenging problems. And thanks for pointing out that 21 percent is one out of every five people. How else could I have figured that out?

Another fact that jumps out when looking at the map: While Republicans have led the call to slash the SNAP program in the House, many of the states whose residents are most reliant on food stamps are reliably Republican and located in the GOP’s Southern heartland. About 20 percent of the population in Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and South Carolina, for instance, receive benefits from the federal food assistance program.

That part, I’m guessing, is where the regional debate in the comments comes from.

No debate here: full day, and so we’ll wrap it up here. Stop by Twitter. And come back here for more tomorrow.

journalism / links / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
14
Nov 13

Now with more JCVD

Thursdays. Better than Wednesdays. Not quite Fridays.

Give it this, if I go down a flight of stairs from my office on a Thursday afternoon, you’d think all of the world has been called home for salvation. There is something about a Thursday afternoon that empties out the central building on campus. It is peaceful, in a bewildering sort of way.

I was all prepared to be dreary about the entire day. It has been cold this week, clear, but cold. So I have been cold. And that gets a little less fun every time. But the sun has been out at times. And now it is getting warmer. And we’re looking at around 70 for the weekend. So that makes things better.

Also, Jean-Claude Van Damme:

It was, as you might imagine, a tough sell, even to a movie hero:

What this commercial really says, you might think, is “I’m ready for my comeback, world.” But JCVD never really left. He’s in a new movie due out next year, which will be his 13 this decade.

Things to read …

‘Gloves come off’ as journalists debunk each other’s Obamacare horror stories. When you are down to the “fact checkers fact checking the fact checkers” story you know you’re getting somewhere:

In the not-so-distant past, mainstream news organizations generally avoided direct criticism of their competitors’ journalism. While it wasn’t unusual for newspapers and broadcasters to follow up on other organizations’ reporting – and sometimes find errors in those earlier stories — such matters traditionally were handled relatively politely.

“Sometimes we would say, ‘Contrary to reports published elsewhere,’ ” recalled Hiltzik, a 40-year newspaper veteran.

But Hiltzik no longer sees the need for such restraint when calling out competing news organizations. As he sees it, the media now promote their stories more loudly, and some organizations tinge them with partisan politics.

“That’s an invitation for the gloves to come off,” he said. “If CNBC is crowing about discovering something and we know they haven’t discovered anything, we should say so.”

Mainstream news organizations’ newfound aggression in fact-checking their fellow journalists may also be a reaction to the rise of websites that offer critiques of the media’s political coverage. Sites such as the liberal Media Matters for America and the conservative Newsbusters helped carve out a new type of media analysis that’s constantly rebutting and fact-checking individual news stories, talk-show interviews, and other political-related content.

Traditional news organizations that delve into media commentary often find it’s popular with readers.

And there it is. The other guy is biased, and my audience likes when I point that out.

For the record, I’m all for peer review and fact checking in general.

Remember when Boston stood for something? Blogger threatened with 10-year prison sentence for posting public official’s phone number. A journalism student recorded and published a portion of a phone call with a police department PIO. That individual — filed a criminal complaint. The details of which would seem to refute her complaint under Massachusetts law. A blogger caught the story and published this … ahem … public servant’s public phone number on his site. Now she’s pressing charges against him:

An outraged Miller blogged about the incident. “Maybe we can call or e-mail Richardson to persuade her to drop the charges against Hardy considering she should assume all her conversations with reporters are on the record unless otherwise stated,” Miller wrote, providing readers with Richardson’s work phone number.

That produced still more calls to Richardson’s work phone. Apparently, the calls alarmed Richardson, because last week Miller received notice about another application for a criminal complaint. This one accused Miller of witness intimidation, a crime that carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

“I’ve never spoken once to Angeline Richardson, who I’m supposedly intimidating,” Miller says. “I’ve never sent her an e-mail, never made a phone call.” And he says that there’s been no allegations that his readers have threatened Richardson.

People are being threatened by police for sharing already publicly available information. And this is in modern Boston, the incubator of freedom, making all of this even dumber than it should be on its own merits.

(UPDATE: The complaints have rightly been dropped.)

This is a good story and a brilliant design by the folks at New York Times Magazine. Read it on a computer, not a phone or tablet: A Game of Shark and Minnow. This may be one of those pieces you can refer to in layout sessions, or at cocktail parties when you need to one up the new guy.

This family has had 34 foster kids in their home. And now they’re holding a 5K awareness event. Some kind of story.

And then there’s this quote, “It’s a hard thing for your heart when they go home, but it’s an incredible blessing for your family and to a community that will open their homes and hearts to do that. We’re honored to be a part of it.”

But the quote of the day award, if there was such a thing, goes to this nice lady on Humans of New York.

Curiously, that’s the same thing Jean-Claude Van Damme said before that video.

Auburn / football / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / running / things to read / video / weekend — Comments Off
13
Nov 13

I ran a lot, let’s just leave it at that

Here are two extra photos from last week’s fall foliage kick. This tree probably won’t have anything left on its limbs the next time I see it. But it is flaring beautifully:

This, more about the sun and the darkness, really, is at my grandparents’ place. While I prefer the longer days like everyone else, we do get some great angles from the sun this time of year:

Elsewhere, I ran my first 10K tonight. I was going to run the usual five, but everything felt OK, so I kept going. When I got to five miles, my previous personal best, I decided I could press on to get the nice round kilometer number. And everything felt more or less OK.

And that continued until I stopped running and took a shower. After that it all seemed like a bad idea. Since then, through the night various and different parts have been achy. My feet and my knees. My feet and my quads. My feet and my calves. Always my feet.

Clearly I have room for improvement.

Things to read …

Which brings us to this, from the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of considerate opinion and coverage of serious issues: OK, You’re a Runner. Get Over It. Once upon a time, kids, the Journal did write about serious things. Promise. I suppose we should blame the Internet.

I learned new terms today: “Snowplow parents” and “teacups.”

This young woman was on track to graduate early. And then she had a bad car accident, with a traumatic brain injury. She had to learn to walk and talk and feed herself again. And then she went back to school and graduate. That’s the short version of a remarkable story. Now her brother is trying to raise money for continued therapy. Read about it, and please share that link.

My friend Jeremy from The War Eagle Reader recites the greatest story ever written about a college football game. Worth a listen for football fans:

Here’s the text version.

family / history / journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
12
Nov 13

What do a 1977 news clip and a 2013 report have in common?

No one could fault you for waking up and thinking it was colder. Cold, even. It was time. You somehow knew it. Probably because meteorologists had been telling you this for several days.

So you put on a sweater and then a jacket and then you still remark on the brisk coldness of it all. Knowing, because you’ve been listening to meteorologists talk about the weather, that the real cold is coming tomorrow during the pre-dawn hours.

Because arctic blasts the day after a pitch-perfect, cloudless sky, 72-degree afternoon aren’t enough. No. You need to get into the 20s.

So I’ve been doing what everyone does in the cold: staring at the forecast for the next warm day. This afternoon the Saturday projections started at 75. It dipped to 69. And then it went back up to 72-partly cloud, where the forecast sits now. The signal is clear: Prepare for rain to fall from the ground into the sky.

And now for something completely different. My mother sent me a link to a decades-old newsreel. The lead story was an airplane crash, one that killed my grandfather and 71 other people. There were 22 survivors and five local hospitals were engaged. It remains the worst airplane disaster in Georgia’s history. I’ve written about all that before, but the first 60 seconds of this video are different. This is an accidental documentary on the Tennessee Valley in 1977. (WHNT took the air in 1963, founded by a former WAPI man, Charles Grisham. I also once worked at WAPI. It seems everyone in broadcasting did at one point.)

Anyway, the first 60 seconds of the newscast, the day after the big crash:

Dig that slate! The data says 97 percent of American homes had televisions by 1977, but only 77 percent were in color. Consumers had in 1972 started buying more color than black and white sets. This period is often called the initial “replacement period.” Older 1950s sets are first being discarded and upgraded with modern sets.

Missy Ming in New Hope! She’s going to talk to a survivor who crawled out of the wreckage. She sits on the Commission on Higher Education today. She still gets asked about the story.

Michael Lamothe on the existential beat. Why, indeed. Lamothe is now retired and doing a bit of freelance work. He’d been out of school just two years when he filed that report. His last job was at a Rochester, N.Y. station.

JACKIE KENNEDY IN FAYETTEVILLE WISHES SHE COULD HAVE BEEN THERE BECAUSE THIS STORY HAS NO TEASE AND BAD AUDIO. Someone from Huntsville is going to have to tell us about where Kennedy went. She has that common problem among simple Internet searches: a famous name.

Quick cuts: Fire! A body! The Iron Bowl!

Some things will never, ever change.

A trailer torn apart. A road grader. Really big race cars at Talladega (probably). An ambulance. Jimmy Carter! That guy! From California. Didn’t he used to act? And wasn’t he just the governor out there? Boy, aren’t you glad that’ll never happen again. And, yet, there’s something about him …

A kid swimming! A crop duster! The News Station graphic, supered over the coolest looking fire truck ever. “A complete report of this day throughout the Tennessee Valley.”

Did you catch that great old Arby’s sign in the background of the night-traffic shot? A perp is going to the pokey! Don’t look at the face. And in case you missed that one, here’s John Law cuffing and stuffing another. An accident report. Another person on a gurney. Random golf-track-basketball’s first flop! Don’t forget sports! Did we show you the Iron Bowl!?

What in the name of Uncle Walter is that cubist set?

A little much for 1970s rural Alabama, don’t you think? Oh, sure, they had the rockets, but that didn’t make their DMA cosmopolitan. And yet you’ve got the Action News team standing there just … standing, showing off those sharp blazers.

Their slogan back then was “Keep Your Eye On Us.” That was shot on 16 mm, as all of the WHNT broadcasts were until 1979 (“The News People”) when they went to 3/4. All of the old archives had been lost and forgotten. Someone had stored them away at the University of North Alabama, and now they are back in the station’s hands and some of them are making their way onto the Internet so we can say “Look at those clothes.”

The station’s imaging slogan today is “Taking Action. Getting Results.”

I’m not sure the slogans are important — I always thought there was such a thing as over-imaging, which means I could never be a consultant, since they’ll brand the Action Victim if they thought it would let them get the calls in there one more time — but I reprint them to be thorough.

Things to read …

But first! Another video. This has been making the rounds, via Independent Journal:

Also about Veterans Day: A compilation of heartwarming (and clever) homecoming videos. And did you know that a Birmingham man is a big reason we have that day? True story.

Somehow this doesn’t sound good: Even doctors in dark on health plans. And, meanwhile, Bill Clinton is back, and he’s determined to make all of this very awkward for the current administration. Clinton to Obama: Let Americans keep canceled health plans:

Former President Bill Clinton said that President Obama should honor his oft-repeated pledge and allow people to hang on to health care plans that are being canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

“I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got,” Clinton said in an interview at OZY.com published on Tuesday.

Quick hits:

Hancock Bank brings corporate hub, 200 jobs to Montgomery
Growing number of federal workers say they’re unhappy on the job
Alabama investment by Japanese firms tops $4 billion
Google is now bigger than the magazine and newspaper industries
To find real value in digital media, look for the bandwidth hogs

And, finally, here’s a video of a buddy of mine from way back in school. We played soccer together and reconnected online this year. His accent is thicker, but he looks almost exactly the same, half a lifetime later. He’s good people. And now this story:

I like how the reporter, Johnny Archer, let his subjects’ technology work as his visual element. Anyway, I found that video on David’s wife’s Facebook page. My old friend’s bride and son are OK. But the situation in the Philippines is dire. How bad? CNN sent Anderson Cooper’s eyes.

“I fear anarchy happening in Tacloban City,” said CNN iReporter Maelene Alcala, who was on vacation in Tacloban where the typhoon struck and was evacuated to Manila. “It’s like survival of the fittest.”

Tacloban, the provincial capital of the island of Leyte, was ground zero for the typhoon that struck Friday, leaving the city in ruins and its population of more than 200,000 in desperate conditions.

“The whole scene was like something fresh out of a movie. It was like the end of the world,” Alcala said.

The estimates are that the storm pushed more than 580,000 people out of their homes.