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things to read

Anyone notice the weather today? Not me.

A long day in the office. There was reading and recruiting and renting a van and finishing the last plans for a trip and grading. lots and lots of grading.

I’m not even sure that I left the building until dinner time.

ComScore says if you aren’t mobile you aren’t anywhere:

(T)he effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.

The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.

[…]

As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.

Oh, and this is a hint about what is going to happen to television in the next year or two:

There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.

From the Student Press Law Center: Journalism groups express frustration with NCAA policies affecting media.

Ten media organizations sent a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association last week expressing its frustration with the athletic group’s unwillingness to discuss journalists’ concerns about credentialing and other issues.

“The undersigned organizations are writing to express our profound disappointment with the NCAA’s recent actions affecting journalists’ ability to cover your member institutions’ activities,” reads the letter, which was signed by representatives from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Student Press Law Center, among others.

“In short, our concerns and frustrations are mounting, with a long period of unproductive interaction leading to this follow up letter.”

Restrictions placed on media credentials is the main concern raised in the letter, a situation that has become more onerous in recent years, said Kevin Goldberg, an attorney who represents ASNE.

The letter cites instances where reporters have been faced with “unduly restrictive credentialing conditions” with regard to social media use and other coverage efforts.

More and more you see programs doing more and more of their own media, in inventive and more direct ways than the media outlets are providing. They are going directly to their audience with an effective aspect of branded journalism. Programs are going around the media filter, utilizing their hyper-control of their access to the on-field product and speaking directly to their fanbases.

This is a big deal for the media outlets, of course, who are presently getting edged out. They’ll need to find a way to deliver a new and compelling aspect or version of the product to the wider audience to compensate.

In some respects this is not unlike what is happening with political reporters. Poynter reports: White House press complain about access to president.

President Obama’s staff “often finds Washington reporters whiny, needy and too enamored with trivial matters or their own self-importance,” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in Politico. So they limit the president’s availability to the White House press corps, hand out photos and do document dumps on Friday afternoons. “Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access,” VandeHei and Allen write.

Bo knows Samford! He’ll be doing a little fund raising in April:

The Samford Athletics Department will hold its fourth-annual Bulldog Bash dinner and silent auction, presented by BB&T, April 25 at the Pete Hanna Center on Samford’s campus. Heisman Trophy winner and former National Football League and Major League Baseball star Bo Jackson will be the featured speaker at this year’s event.

The Bulldog Bash is a silent auction event hosted by Samford University to raise money for the athletics department and its 17 teams. Tables can be purchased for $1,500, with each table seating eight people. Individual seats are also available for $250. A limited number of premium tables which included a private meet and greet with Bo Jackson are available for $3,000.

I bet fellow Auburn alum and Heisman trophy winner Pat Sullivan, the football coach at Samford, helped make this good news happen. Pretty cool stuff.

On the other blog I linked to a nice piece from Prof. Mindy McAdams. It is about learning code. You should check it out.

Tomorrow: We take a field trip to AMG in the Birmingham News building. Should be fun.

iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
14
Feb 13

Happy Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine’s Day. It was clear and cold. I spent time this evening making a birthday video and working on my computer, which refused to load iMovie for much of the night. Happily, the Internet was able to save the day after a delicious Valentine’s steak dinner. I deleted everything related to iMovie except iMovie, restarted the machine 49 times, bribed, threatened and cajoled the thing and, finally, the program loaded.

And so I was able to edit the video and send it off just in time. It was, I think, a good video.

I found a neat app that mimics a depth of field to your cameraphone photos. It is called Big Lens and is done by touch. It works pretty well. Here’s a before and after:

I overdid it a bit on the effect in this first example, which just goes to show how differently things look on a phone screen compared to a monitor. But, still, there might be something useful in the app. A phone’s camera can be very useful, but it has a few obvious shortcomings. Maybe things like this app will help. If you don’t mind editorializing.

Things to read. A recent panel asked “What role does computation have in the practice of journalism today and in the near future?” That is a fine read. My answer: More and more every day.

Time Warner looks to unload their print properties. It is all very much up in the air, but this is going to be a big story.

Need a last-minute card? Consult The Auburner for all your Valentine’s Day needs.

And, finally, I received an email intended for someone else. It was from a florist. The inscription read “I just wont you to no I love you.”

Proofread, friends.

Now I must go give my cards …

Auburn / Glomerata / links / music / photo / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
7
Feb 13

We have a mystery song

Stayed cloudy and gray and dim all day. Never topped 55 degrees, according to the local weather station. Though it never really felt like that warm. I had a few minutes that I could have pedaled around on my bicycle, but I did not. Too cold. Presently my baseline is 52 degrees.

So I stayed inside and did other things. And I counted the minutes until dinnertime, when we could enjoy the rest of last night’s delicious gumbo. Homemade and good stuff. You should be so lucky!

Every so often you see stories about social media fatigue. On the other hand, here is a piece discussing Innovative uses for social media:

(W)e predict that in 2013 social media intelligence will become much more commonplace as businesses, government agencies and not-for-profit organisations seek to leverage this new, unparalleled wealth of information.

There’s a list. It should include things like tracking illness, moving money, wide scale gaming, collaborative art and more.

To aggregate or not to aggregate. The debate continues:

aggregation or curation is a fact of life in the digital age — just as record companies have had to learn to live with rampant downloading and sharing of music, publishers of all kinds are trying to get used to the idea that their content is no longer under their control.

… which is fine as a philosophical point. The reality is you can’t put it back in the box.

Here’s a new show to watch:

The Weather Channel’s latest reality show, and coastal Alabama’s latest taste of reality-show exposure, “Reef Wranglers” makes its premiere at 8 p.m. Central time on Tuesday, Feb. 12. It’s a limited four-episode series focusing on the adventures of the crew at Reefmaker, a business based at Walter Marine in Orange Beach.

Should be worth it for the underwater scenes. Ignore the stereotypes, if the producers allow you.

I got a new Glomerata today. Actually I have a few new ones to add to the site, so I’ll do that in the next few weeks. But this one is especially special, one of the earliest editions. Inside was this:

There are two pages of sheet music to this diddy. This book is so old that it is entirely possible that no one alive has ever heard this tune. Can’t wait to know what it sounds like.

Come play it for me?

Alabama / Auburn / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
6
Feb 13

The critical use of the word ‘Just’

We discussed critiquing news stories in class today. How to do it, what to critique, what not to get overly zealous about. How to treat this as a constructive exercise and not as a personal reproach, and so on. The idea is that the more you watch things critically — because I make you critique them — the more you’ll see things that work and things that don’t work.

A critical eye is very important in the craft.

So we talked about television packages. I showed this story’s video package, which was still timely early in the week. It was a nice example of localizing the story when it came to the Midland standoff.

The reporter found a local police officer who has gone through the FBI negotiation training and interviewed him about what might have been taking place. It was a helpful story to a degree. There are some vagaries, which is both based on the nature of this officer not knowing every detail about what is happening hours outside of his jurisdiction and a need to speak generally for tactical reasons too. But it is nice localized story. It has some production issues and some very strange B-roll shots. It gave us something to look at.

And then I showed them this:

That is never going to get old, even as fewer and fewer students are familiar with the YouTube sensation.

And then we got started in our efforts to set up WordPress blogs. They are a sharp group of students, and I’m sure they’ll be running the Internet by the end of the semester.

I have done thy bidding, Internet, and given you many more people to add content!

Lovely, busy day otherwise. It was national signing day, and the Crimson’s sports editor was posting stuff continually to their Twitter account. That earned him follows from two of the television stations in town. Nice little reward for his work.

My open letter to new signees got repackaged.

On the way home I stopped at Buy Buy Baby to get something off a friend’s registry. This place is full of things you didn’t know you needed if you’re raising children. Glancing at the products it is amazing any of us made it out of toddler years without these things in our homes.

The store is bright and smells of baby powder. Just add water, I suppose.

That’s an improvement, though, really. The last time I was in this store it was still a Circuit City. As I noted on Twitter, it was dank and dim and smelled of desperation then. I remember trying to test a camera of some device and the guy there was not able to put a battery into the thing.

I looked around at the deep sockets of the eyes of the few people actually in the store, realized that everyone there was touching, but no one was buying. I knew it was over.

Within a year they were all gone.

If only that one floor guy had bothered to look for a battery, things might have gone differently.

But probably not.

Anyway, in a much more pleasant environment with a thoroughly enjoyable young lady helping, I managed to find the appropriate burp cloths. They were very, very decorative. I’m sure yours were just a flat white, once upon a time.

Three recent items on the other blog:

Localizing the big stories

Have you tried SoundCloud?

USPS to drop Saturday deliveries

I have a lot of things stored away to write over there. Get used to the links, I guess.

Saw this sign, the oracle of our time:

I know the owner. His son and daughter are friends. The sign has become a big fun quasi-event lately. It isn’t true until Krystal’s says it is, and all that.

When I took that picture it was halftime in the Alabama-Auburn basketball game. Alabama was leading Auburn 23-13. Halftime. In a basketball game, full of varsity, scholarship players. Presumably for both teams. (So you see why the word “Just” is important on that sign.)

In the second half Auburn went on a 36-14 run — that was all of the scoring. The final was 49-37, Auburn. Weird game. But Auburn held Alabama to its lowest point total in the 146 game series history, so there’s that.

journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
5
Feb 13

The past and the present all come together on this page

Cloudy and in the mid-60s today. For February? You take it. We’re going to get a bit more of the chilly stuff, you can count on it, but we can also enjoy the trend toward nice spring days.

Rosa Parks is getting a stamp. She would turn 100 today.

You might not see that stamp on Saturdays:

Saturday mail delivery costs the U.S. Postal Service $2.7 billion a year, and it’s a burden the cash-strapped agency is trying to shed — to the dismay of greeting card makers everywhere. Cutting Saturday delivery is a key part of USPS’ five-year plan to save $20 billion by 2015, but it is bumping up against businesses such as Hallmark that benefit from six-day mail delivery.

That story also tells you Hallmark spent $240,000 for lobbying on postal issues. I wonder what Hoops and YoYo would say about that.

Journalism is the best job ever:

Yes, there are too few really good jobs and too many people fighting for them. Yes, salaries start out quite low. Yes, the hours can be long and irregular. Yes, the industry is in a period of extreme disruption, with lots of old jobs being destroyed, and the new ones typically offer less security and require different skills.

None of that changes the core fact here. For those who are cut out for it — and that’s definitely not everyone — journalism is a uniquely rewarding, wonderful career.

Most of his reasons are wonderful. But I wonder: Does he have a robot?

Where Visual Revenue believes it can add real value is in being able to recommend specific actions within an editorial framework outlined by the organization — that is, using an algorithm to tell a newsroom when it should tweet and also what it should be tweeting. Mortensen likens these computerized suggestions to the role of a deputy editor: Someone who knows the editorial values of the paper, and can determine the best publishing strategy as a result. Except, in this case, that someone is a robot.

“We set out with this idea of empowering the editor, but not to beat him to the extent where we can automate his job,” Mortensen said. “We actually sit down with the editor in chief and ask him, ‘Give me my instructions just like you tell your deputy editors what they can and cannot do.’ Then we simply adopt those, adhere to those as strictly as possible. And if I’m brutally honest with you, of all of the editors, you’ll see that we’re the only ones that only adhere to the guidelines because we’re an algorithm not a human.”

Another upshot: Non-humans aren’t tethered to print-era concepts that have bled into an online era of publishing. A robot doesn’t care about newsroom culture or tradition; it only cares about the data.

When the machines can accurately read the traffic flow patterns at intersections, that’s when you worry about them taking over. Until then, they are just helpful.

My friend Andre Natta at the Birmingham Terminal asked “What is Virtual Alabama?”

So glad he asked. In answering his own question he shared this case study, which really only seems to scratch the surface, when you think about it:

Finally, the Alabama Backroads Cycling Series. I want to do it. Think I might (try).