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The day the sirens went off

My friend the great Ike Pigott came to speak to my class today.

Ike works at Alabama Power and he is a great idea man. His time at Red Cross and, before, that, ABC 33/40 make him a terrific pitch man. He talked to the class about public relations and social media and crisis communications.

He talked about the last series of tornadoes that passed through the state. It occurred to me that every pro we’ve talked to in that class this semester has told tornado war stories. I’m sure every student who is from some other place is wondering why they live here now.

With about a half-hour left in the class the fire alarm went off. Everyone in the room looked at me.

I’m supposed to know this answer.

Fortunately I remembered what we are supposed to do in a fire alarm. (It isn’t like this happens all the time.) So we got our things, felt the door to make sure it wasn’t hot, walked down the hall and exited the building to our exterior gathering space. Class continued as the fire truck pulled up:

It was cold and damp and we couldn’t see any smoke anywhere. Firefighters walked inside and, a few minutes later, walked back out. I walked over to them and said “I have a class full of journalism students wondering what is going on.”

Turns out someone in the kitchen in the cafeteria, which is in another wing of the same building, started cooking something without exhaust fans and that built up smoke for the sensors and so there we were, talking about crisis communication with a firetruck in the background.

That’s a Wednesday.

We went back inside and, at the end of the class, the fire alarm went off again. Turns out that we had gone long on our class, but the students were so caught up in what Ike was talking about that they didn’t mind. He’s just that good.

Also today was the first meeting with the incoming editor of the Crimson. I was up late last night putting together information for him. Want the job? Here are 27 pages of easy reading. Mark, set, go.

He’s been around the paper for the last two years as a section editor and is a smart guy, so I’m sure he’ll do well.

This year’s staff has done a fine job and I’m proud of a lot of things they’ve done. I always like that first new meeting though. It is one of my favorite parts of the year.

Usually it is warmer, mid-April and all. Tonight parts of the state are enjoying temperatures 30 degrees below their seasonal averages. Spring will arrive on a more permanent basis, eventually. Right?

Or maybe we’ll just go directly into summer.

Things to read: The War Eagle Reader was kind enough to reprint the thing I wrote the other day. It let me give it another edit and convinced me I still didn’t adequately make my point. There’s always next time.

Philip Lutzenkirchen wrote an open letter that’s worth reading:

Most importantly I need to thank the entire Auburn Family. You all are truly the best fans in the country. You’ve been on our side through thick and thin and that is appreciated way more than you think. I’ll never truly understand why you all love that goofy, embarrassing, silly, little dance that I did against ‘Bama but I appreciate the love that you have always showed me.

State senators have to be separated:

Alabama state senators and a Senate official stepped in between two of their colleagues during a shouting match between the two men that occurred after a controversial ruling by Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday night.

And this, the sweetest thing you’ll read all day:

Plastic wrappers and other pieces of litter rustled like tumbleweed across the empty space under the bridge yesterday afternoon.

Two hours later, enough chairs were set up to seat several hundred of Nashville’s homeless, enough chicken and baked beans cooked to feed them all.

And a few minutes later, while some were still finishing up their rainbow cake dessert, a cloth was rolled down the aisle and my friend Amanda walked through a crowd of her homeless friends to meet her fiancé at the altar under the overpass.

Auburn / journalism / links / Monday / site / things to read — Comments Off
22
Apr 13

Catchy title here

I’d like to know where I was, a week ago today, when my phone told me about the bombs in Boston. I bet I wasn’t far away from where I was today when my phone buzzed to tell me that the remaining suspect had been formally charged. All of that in a week.

As I said to a classroom today, when an Elvis impersonator sending dangerous things in the mail to people in Washington is your fourth story, that’s a bizarre week.

Seems like a lot longer, doesn’t it?

So there’s something new here. I tweaked the sidebar to the right. Took out the Twitter box. (Follow me on Twitter!) Shifted the table that holds all of those buttons at the top of the page and compressed that side altogether.

I did that so I could expand this main content area. And after plugging away at several different stylesheets for a few minutes I had the new look. It is exactly like the old look — which is what is so nice about it — except for the size. The photographs can be bigger, now.

This will look nice on modern, larger, screens. Even looks nice on my phone, so I awesome that means everyone’s experience with the site is lovely, no?

I’m sure it is not. Some 0.08 of my visitors have been here with a 640×480 resolution. We need a rollout for them as well.

Here’s the solution: bigger screens, kids.

Auburn’s athletic director, who is presiding over a major sport 15-48 record against conference opponents since last season’s baseball tournament, is the only AD in the country who has “fisking poor news reports” as part of his job description. This is part of his second open letter in less than a month:

As Auburn’s Athletics Director, it’s my job – no matter how proud I am of Auburn – to carefully review charges made against our program when warranted.

As the facts demonstrate, the article is clearly flawed. I want you to know that I will always act on the basis of facts. I will continue to fight for Auburn University, and I will continue to defend this great institution against such attacks.

Here’s the first. All of this gives the guy a sympathetic ear from a lot of fans who are ready to see him go. It is a curious thing.

But there’s a real and interesting phenomenon at play as well. I’ve grown convinced in the last five years or so that there is a big shift coming in sports journalism. Beat reporters sometimes have to worry about being frozen out by the team they are supposed to cover. Alienate the wrong person, you don’t get interviews and all of that. This is made possible because the programs have figured out the true power of their brand and the tools they have at their disposal. Auburn didn’t go to the media with these letters, they simply published them on their site and let fans know it was there. Sports writers covered it — that is their job — but they weren’t an integral part of the process as a filter. Sports outlets have the tools, the audience and their message. They don’t need the media the same way they once did. (Well, the TV deals, naturally.)

I see this as a reality, rather than a good or bad thing. It just is. In some respects it is good. In other respects, and in particular in the long term, there are some negative worries.

The old saying was “never pick a fight with someone that buys ink by the barrel.” But if everyone buys pixels … well, that’s just even.

Things to read: The debt-ridden EU stares bankruptcy in the face:

Shouldn’t it be making more headlines than it has that the European Union is today insolvent – since its astronomic debt in unpaid bills is nearly twice as large as its annual income? Such is the crisis lately highlighted by its parliament’s budget committee, which finds that the EU now owes 217 billion euros, or £182 billion, as compared with its current year’s income of just £108 billion. Much of this represents “cohesion funding” relating to Eastern Europe, in contracts agreed under the EU’s current budgetary arrangements. But when, at the end of this year, those arrangements come to an end, the rules strictly prohibit the EU from rolling forward its debts from one period to the next. So, in eight months’ time, it will lurch into bankruptcy.

Wherever we now look at the EU, its affairs seem to be in an astonishing mess. There is the ongoing slow-motion train crash of the euro. There is rising panic over the policy of unrestricted immigration, which threatens at the year’s end to flood richer countries such as Britain with millions of Romanians and Bulgarians. As Europe’s economies stagnate or shrink, the EU’s environmental policies fall apart, with the growing refusal of many countries, led by Poland and Germany, to accept curbs on fossil fuels.

13 Worst Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970:

In 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated — okay, “celebrated” doesn’t capture the funereal tone of the event. The events predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.

[…]

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

That’s one of my favorite, but there are plenty of gems in that list.

Mistakes in news reporting happen, but do they matter?

There’s no excuse for getting the facts wrong. It’s a basic rule of journalism, drummed into every rookie reporter’s head: Get the story right. In addition to potentially harming a news outlet’s credibility, erroneous reporting can have devastating consequences, from ruining a subject’s reputation to endangering public safety. Competitive pressure and the desire for scoops can increase the potential for errors.

But reporting mistakes may not be as consequential as they used to be, media observers say.

People are forgiving, to a point, if you acknowledge the problem. Those are errors that apply to the individual outlet. All of these things, however, become cumulative on the business as a whole, a function of trust, and so pieces like this become dangerous.

Here’s the top comment as of this writing: “The fact that this ‘journalist’ doesn’t seem to think mistakes/lies matter is an example of why the pubic doesn’t trust the media therefore they don’t buy newspapers or watch the news.”

Many of the people in the comments tend to disagree with the nature of this particular article. But mistakes don’t matter, we’re told.

iPhone / links / photo / site / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Apr 13

Spring, finally

Big temperature shifts. Sun, amazingly enough. Cold in the mornings. Humidity at 74 percent in the evening. Finally spring showed up.

Patton Oswalt will guest star on Parks and Rec this week. The Yankee and I have been watching it recently. It is mindless, but the characters have charm. Ron Swanson being the best thing on network television, I’m pretty sure.

This performance won’t hurt anything, though:

I managed to read two things in The New Yorker today. So, you see, I have to look down upon a sitcom. This is an interesting read about the success of the Boston hospitals:

Something more significant occurred than professionals merely adhering to smart policies and procedures. What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore.

[…]

Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety. Where before we’d have been struck dumb with shock about such events, now we are almost calculating about them.

[…]

We’ve learned, and we’ve absorbed. This is not cause for either celebration or satisfaction. That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune.

Several hospitals are clustered nearby. The medical tent was doing triage quickly. Lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan are being put into use. Stellar work meant people lived.

Here’s another New Yorker piece, about the things we say over and over:

I was in Iceland, talking with Stein, the eleven-year-old son of some friends. His English was dauntingly good—and all the more so given that he’d never spent any real time off the island. I’d just flown over in a packed plane, and I said that tourism seemed to be exploding, and he, deliberating, looking older than his years, replied, “Yes, they come from the hot countries.”

[…]

My grandfather was fond of the phrase “Now, I’m not lecturing you.” It sent a sinking feeling into the chests of his children and grandchildren alike, for it reliably heralded a lengthy and dour disquisition on the hardships of life. He came by his lessons honestly. A powerful and athletic figure in young manhood, he was laid low by emphysema in early middle age. Though he was a smoker, I suspect his illness was largely brought on by chemical exposure as a construction rigger back in pre-OSHA days. In any case, pulmonary problems were a grim motif in his life; he lost his first wife to tuberculosis while she was still in her teens.

Of all the helpful lessons he imparted to me, I recall nothing in any detail. No, after all these years, I can retrieve verbatim only one thing he ever said, and this didn’t originate in his dutiful tutoring. It was a spontaneous remark.

[…]

Similar catchphrases, in which casual comments are promoted into a sort of immortality, doubtless exist in nearly every family, every close friendship. I find this notion deeply heartening—that people are everywhere being quoted for lines they themselves have long forgotten. And of course each of us is left to wonder whether, right at this moment, we’re being quoted in some remote and unreckonable context.

What a charming notion.

We need some charm after what happened in West, Texas tonight:

What a terrible scene, hundreds of police and fire and EMT rigs. Triage on the high school football field. Dozens of homes feared destroyed and a casualty rate so high no one will even dare talk about it. (Finally, some sensibility.) All of that in a town of 2,800 people.

This is terrible anywhere, but it strikes a different cord in a place where everyone knows everyone.

So we’ll end on something uplifting from Boston, where people can’t maintain a moment of silence, but they will stir your very core:

More venues should do it that way.

friends / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
11
Apr 13

SSCA, Day Two

It rained today. That was fun, walking from my hotel a half-mile in a cold rain, dark as night rain, using a tiny little umbrella. Down there was the Seelbach Hotel, where the Southern States Communication Association’s annual conference will take place. I had to cross a street that allowed for two left lanes to turn, which meant I almost never made it across. I had to time an intersection where, somehow, passing cars had managed to drag the manhole cover out of its home. That seemed dangerous for drivers.

Somehow the side of my suit coat that I kept facing the buildings I walked past was the sleeve that got wet.

I was asked “Is it raining?”

No. I danced under a sprinkler on my way here. Gene Kelly has nothing on me.

We had our early morning Executive Council Meeting, Part II — This Time It’s Personal. Worked through the agenda in about 90 minutes or so, just long enough to dry out.

In the late morning I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel session titled “Tips, Tricks and Techniques: Teaching Media Writing to Today’s Students.” The program describes the panel:

Media writing is no longer a one-size-fits-all endeavor, as we are now training students to work in a variety of platforms, including online and social media. Panelists will share their experiences and adventures in teaching, complete with some tips for those just starting out.

I talked about media critiques and literacy and spelling tests and writing strengths and our upcoming curriculum offerings and all manner of things like that. I don’t think we got very deep into social media, which is a shame, there is a lot to talk about there.

We had lunch at a place called Potbelly Sandwiches. Here’s the stove they have in the middle of the store:

Philo D. Beckwith, by the way, was a stove maker, a philosopher and a mayor. His company, Round Oak, became the Estate of P.D. Beckwith Incorporated sometime after his death, but the company would thrive until just before World War I. The Depression hit them bad, and the company sold out after World War II. They tried to make a comeback in the ’50s, but it was short lived. And while I can’t confirm it because almost every site Wikipedia suggests is no longer live, this stove might be a century old, circa 1915. These days it is just waiting in line for a sandwich.

“Is it raining?”

No. This is just the style back home. We’re counterculture.

I listened in on a panel on the 2012 presidential debates. There were some impressive scholars sitting at that table. The thing that struck me the most was how similar the general ideas were to what we said in this same panel last year during the primaries. Also, there were a lot of references to thing said in the popular media.

Other panels came and went. This was the first day and they were a rush of a blur or, more appropriately, a hectic, moving kaleidoscope of rushing, blurred movement. Our really big blur of paper and panel sessions starts tomorrow, though.

Followed a small group of friends and fellow compatriot scholars to a place called Bluegrass Brewing Company for dinner. I think a concierge suggested it. I had the chicken milanese, mostly for the tomatoes and capers. This worked out well since the tomatoes and capers were the best part of the dish.

We sat in the hotel lobby and told stories for far too long, and so it was another late night, but it was a late night with charming, smart, talented and funny people. There was must hard laughter. We were fortunate to fall into this group three conferences ago now and are fast friends because they talk about the same kind of research, but we also have common schools in our backgrounds. Most importantly they are all just lovely people. There are four Smiths and three or four other people who come in and out of the group and they’re all getting Smith names, too. We plan on taking over things when the conference least expects it.

We imagined this over ice cream, so you can imagine how diabolical our plans are.

And, in addition to last night’s invisible Kenny jokes we also have the “Is it raining” commentary, because everyone else is seemingly staying in the Seelbach. It rained all day. (We’d hoped to sneak in a little bike ride, but no.) Three people asked me about the evidence of precipitation they’d noted on my suit.

My favorite one was the third version: “Is it raining outside?”

No. But in the basement there are cloud bursts and rainbows and thundershowers everywhere.

Things to read: Mobile journalism: It’s not “the web only smaller”:

Mobile media are an increasingly important tool for journalists. They can deliver a new audience if you learn to adapt your content for that audience. If you’re not sold, yet, on why journalists need unique mobile skills consider a few tidbits:

62% of U.S. respondents get news from their phone weekly (Pew Research Center’s, State of the Media 2013)

36% get news from their phone daily (Pew Research Center, State of the Media 2013)

88% of U.S. adults owned a cell phone of some kind as of April 2012, and 55% of these used their phone to go online (Pew Internet and American Life Survey, “Cell Internet Use 2012”)

People with less education and income (some college or less and household incomes less than $30,000) use their cell phones as their primary means of accessing the Internet (Pew Internet and American Life Survey, “Cell Internet Use 2012”)

17% of cell phone owners do most of their online browsing on their phone, rather than a computer or other device. For some, their phone is their only option for online access. (Pew Internet and American Life Survey, “Cell Internet Use 2012”)

No one be surprised this time.

J-Schools, Invest in CAR:

There is an economic argument for this. While journalism jobs are in a general decline, it was made abundantly clear at NICAR’s recent Computer Assisted Reporting conference that the demand for data and interactive journalists outweighs supply; it is essentially “raining jobs.”

Tomorrow: The conference really picks up.

journalism / links / Monday / Samford / things to read / Twitter — Comments Off
8
Apr 13

Ziggy’s not so sure

I watched one of the lesser Quantum Leaps late last night.

This is 8 1/2 Months, the one where Sam is about to deliver a baby with the help of a kindly old doctor. I don’t remember this episode. I’m trying to imagine the pitch at the creative table. “Let’s see what the imaging chamber does with vastly different biology. And spice it up with an Oklahoma dirt version of Steel Magnolias!”

There’s a poor man’s Susan Sarandon, a poor man’s Olympia Dukakis and more ’50s “I hear tell she ain’t got no horse sense” vernacular than you can shake a colorblind cat at. The best part is when Al, Sam’s faithful friend in the future who appears in the form of a hologram who serves as his guide, shows up. This is the actual dialog.

Sam: “I can’t have a baby!”

Al: “I know, but Ziggy’s not so sure.”

Computers.

Also, the baby, in utero in the 21st century, is bonding with Sam in 1955. Not everything in the third season was genius.

The great Anne Haney guest stars. Because this is the 1950s she is there trying to coax Sam into giving up the baby so that it can be sent off to some quiet home that is better suited for it than an 18-year-old girl, or a middle-aged, time-traveling, brilliant-scientist-with-an-amnesia problem. Haney’s character could not close the deal though, because Sam has been operating all this time that he’s leaping into these lives to put right what once went wrong. It wasn’t for a few more seasons that we realized he was dead. And these must just be really excitable neurons firing off at the end.

Imagine if there had been popular message boards around when this TV show was on the air. Or if JJ Abrams was involved.

If/when they re-launch this series, I’d watch this episode again. I’d sit through it, I’m saying, but only if JJ Abrams isn’t around to make the foggy mist from the trees turn into the evil alien that is ready to fell us all, and also, there is a massive conspiracy that only Al can uncover, if he doesn’t get unplugged.

I hate relaunches.

Anyway, Anne Haney would get her revenge. She showed up again eight months later (in realtime) as a different character set in Arkansas two years earlier (the drought episode). This made sense on Quantum Leap and quite possibly nowhere else.

And then, finally, after we’d met the father-to-be — he worked for Sam’s dad in the oil fields, but was going off to college in the fall, he was all “I’d want no baby!” — we have the moment of truth. At the pitch table with the writers this was great. “OK, then we’ll have Sam go through all seven stages of grief to acceptance. It’ll be a comical ride from the front door of the hospital into the delivery room. And we’ll show stirrups again! And then Sam, who is intent on keeping this baby, will finally be resistant about having the baby, because, you know, he’s got boy parts, except he’s a woman in this episode.”

And someone says “Wait. He — ”

And then the first guy again, says “They’re watching NBC. They’ll go along with it.

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

Now Al pops back into the delivery room to tell us that the baby has disappeared in the future. Sam is in stirrups in the past. Puuuuush!

The doctor, played by Parley Baer, who is a poor man’s Barnard Hughes, who played the curmudgeonly old doctor in Doc Hollywood, says “I see a head … ”

And Sam leaps.

I plugged Hughes, who has 101 titles on IMDB and Baer, who has 270 titles, into the Oracle of Bacon. They have at least five different one-step-removed connections from one another, including Coreys Haim and Feldman. Why either of them felt the need to work after that, I don’t know.

The gentleman that cuts my hair some times remembers me better than other times. He sees a lot of folks, of course. Today was one of those days where it all clicked. He remembered I taught journalism and wanted to know what I thought of “that Selena woman.” You know how you can change the subject when something like that comes up? “Fox News!”

So we talked about something going on in the Aurora shooting case, where a reporter is refusing a judge’s orders and may be going to jail. We did not have to talk about that Selena woman. Just as well.

(My answer would have been “I was never that strong of a creative writer, and so I am not really the best person to ask.” Because when everyone else is saying everything there is to say about a particular topic, what’s the point?)

So I left with a nice new hairstyle and we talked about photography in class this afternoon.

I have to pack a bag. Here, have some things to read.

How mobile has changed daily news consumption and why you need to understand it:

Mobile devices have extended the time frame during which publishers need to pay attention to the content they are putting in front of consumers, but it has also massively increased the complexity of news consumption throughout the day. That makes delivering the right content in the right way at the right time far more challenging.

If you are in the communication business and you aren’t by now paying attention to mobile growth I’m not sure what will convince you.

Journalism’s decline boosts j-schools

“There is something new to learn [at journalism schools] for the first time since the advent of broadcast journalism in the 1950s,” said Steve Shepard, founding dean of CUNY’s school, which enrolled its first class in 2006. “And it’s much harder to learn it on the job—if you can get a job—because there’s much less mentoring going on compared to my day.”

[…]

Professors acknowledge that they’re sending students out into a tough, unpredictable environment, but say that is part of their education.

Master a skill set, learn more about another one. Consider a double major. Redouble your best writing and editing efforts. Realize the first job probably isn’t going to be The Job. Show them what you have and demonstrate your potential. Work hard. Do good work. Build your portfolio.

That’s the way of it.

Press angry over Obama’s lack of access:

Newspapers and reporters are being left out of the equation, even such established publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Reider reports that Obama “has turned to regional reporters and TV celebrities who are less likely to challenge him.” Obama’s go-to interviewer is Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” who in January conducted an interview with Obama and Hilary Clinton. The interview was heavily criticized as being “soft.” This is the complaint of many of Obama’s interviews. He is effectively bypassing reporters who ask the tough questions.

First of all, that’s a poor headline. President Obama is accessing things just fine. He’s just not giving the press corps the time of day.

Second, not many people in that particular room are asking “tough questions” these days when they do have the opportunity.

You can look at that in one of two ways. You could scream “Libruhl meeeedia!” Or you might consider that these people are on edge because a.) they have a job to do and b.) when the time comes to talk to someone more important than poor Jay Carney they are chilled because they don’t want to be shut out in the future because c.) see part a.

Also, the president has his audience, he has an embarrassment of riches of media that aren’t in the White House press corps that are just thrilled to have him on the Morning Zoo. And the president also has a communication office that can these days speak directly to his constituency. He doesn’t need the media right now.

That’s the same thing I’ve been saying about athletic departments for four years now, by the way. If you have a devoted following and the tools to go directly to them, sans filter, you’re going to take advantage of that opportunity. The journalists tasked with covering that particular beat are going to be marginalized.

I don’t like it. (It is fraught with danger.) I just see it.

Peektures. Margaret Thatcher came to Samford during the university’s 150th anniversary. She’s here with then-president Thomas Corts.

A picture of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, visiting Samford in 1992 for our 150th Anniversary. twitter.com/SamfordU/statu…

— Samford University (@SamfordU) April 8, 2013

They are standing in front of the library and Dr. Corts appears to be point out some feature of the administration building, Samford Hall.

I wonder what she was thinking.

How did we get into space and the moon? Really big ladders, of course. And, also, a tall chalkboard.