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Thursday

Why I’m still wearing broken glasses

Before Thanksgiving I broke my glasses. There was a wire bookshelf thing in the newsroom, it fell and a bundle of newspapers landed on my nose. Somehow the arm of the wire frame snapped off right at the lens.

Life, being so busy, meant that I could finally this week get an appointment to go get new glasses or contacts — which I was due for anyway. So I booked that appointment on Monday. That appointment was today.

I drove over, parked, walked in, announced I was there for my 1:15 and was directed to sit down. I sat down.

For the next 65 minutes I watched people come in, sit down, get called back and take their appointment. For 65 minutes I did this. And then I left. That was better than trying to express how off putting the entire situation felt. There are, after all, other eye doctors in town.

Smith’s Rule of Business: Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.

And so I now have an appointment on New Year’s Eve, at a different eye doctor.

Things to read … because I can see up close just fine, thank you.

How newspapers lost the Millennials:

The inability of newspapers to resonate with digital natives has left them with a daunting demographic challenge. Two-thirds of the audience at the typical newspaper is composed of people over the age of 55, according to Greg Harmon of Borrell Associates. “The newspaper audience ages another year every year,” he adds. “Everyone’s hair ought to be on fire.”

As the newspaper audience grays, the readers that newspapers – and most of their advertisers – would like to have are, instead, busily racking up page views at places like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox.

(I)t is easy to see that publishers and editors have a higher regard for their products than the next-gen consumers they need to attract. Now, the only question remaining is whether newspaper folk have the gumption – and time – to turn things around.

‘Experiential Journalism:’ How Virtual Reality Could Depict News in 3D:

The news industry is currently grappling with a challenging problem: How can it make news interesting to the younger generation?

Virtual reality offers one solution: Strap them in vision-encompassing helmets and let them experience the news like a video game.

This is about three kinds of silly. Google axes News in Spain in response to royalty law

We’ll let our old friend and colleague Jeff Jarvis take it from here. Spain’s link tax forces Google News to shut there:

Thus a link tax intended to protect Spain’s publishers will only end up harming them — depriving them of untold audience — and could even end up killing the weakest among them. Spain will also bring damage to the web itself and to the country’s reputation, establishing itself as a hostile environment for investment in technology.

Be careful what you wish for, you old, threatened institutions of media and government, huddling together against the cold wind of the new.

A lesser thing is that it helps diminish the spread of information, but that’s most likely a tertiary concern here.

3 Steps to Leveraging Storytelling in Your Presentations:

We no longer want to be lulled to sleep by complicated graphs and bullet points. We expect to be excited, challenged and to reflect on our own experiences. And you can do that many times with the use of stories.

Here’s how you can harness your own personal stories and use them to touch your audience the next time you present.

That’s a fine essay from SlideShare. Click on over.

For a different kind of thing, Storytelling on the Radio Builds Community, On-Air and Off:

What separates radio documentary from any documentary? And what separates public radio journalism from any journalism?

Radio gets inside us. Lacking earlids, we are defenseless, vulnerable to ambush. Sounds and voices surprise us from within. As radio documentary makers, we have this tactical advantage over our colleagues in print, film, television, photography. Our tool is aural story, the most primitive and powerful. Invisibility is our friend. Prejudice is suspended while the listener is blind, only listening.

This is a great read. Just after her retirement from ABC, Ann Compton offers a great look back from her ringside seat for some of our most important recent history. I Spent 40 Years Covering the White House:

I retired from ABC News on September 10, 41 years to the day after I arrived as a network correspondent in 1973. Back then, the Cold War was hot, the Middle East was in flames and Watergate was coming to a boil. When Richard M. Nixon finally resigned to avoid impeachment the following year, the president of ABC News in New York deployed me, his youngest recruit, to the White House beat. No network had ever assigned a woman there, and coverage would demand near constant travel. Being the first woman assigned was not the challenge. It was age. I was 27 years old, inexperienced and untested.

These go together, in order:

Police officer buys eggs for woman caught shoplifting to feed her family in Tarrant:

A woman caught shoplifting eggs in Tarrant Saturday didn’t leave with handcuffs and a court date. Thanks to a Tarrant police officer, she left with food for her family.

Grandmother caught stealing eggs to feed hungry children ‘overwhelmed’ by kindness of police:

By Saturday, the family had gone two days without food. Johnson went to Dollar General on Pinson Valley Parkway with $1.25 and thought that would be enough to buy a carton of eggs. When she realized she was 50 cents plus tax short, she stuffed five eggs in her pocket out of desperation.

Tarrant police officer delivers groceries to woman caught stealing eggs at Dollar General:

Helen Johnson stared in amazement at the piles of food accumulating in her small Tarrant apartment on Wednesday.

“The last time I saw my house this full, I was 12-years-old and staying with my grandmother,” said the 47-year-old mother and grandmother. “I’ve been crying all day.”

Score one for the good guys.

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4
Dec 14

“I’m punching my card”

Busy day on campus and in the office, today. I’ve been making some adjustments to the new website we rolled out this week. It is starting to look pretty nice. Now to teach the quirks to others. That will mean meetings after the first of the year and, until then, a lot of detailed emails to people who would probably wish I’d find another hobby. Anyway, you can check it out at samfordcrimson.com.

I also watched the volleyball team, which has two of our majors, play in the first round of the NCAA tournament. They took an early exit today, but they’ve nevertheless had a great season. Southern Conference champs! And we heard about the coaching search for a new head football coach taking shape. And also there was plenty of things to grade as things wind down.

The key, as ever, is to put yourself ahead of the curve by standing as close to it as you can, because you are always behind.

What’s fun, though, is to look at where your students are now in their writing compared to where they were at the beginning of the term. Some make great strides. Others have made strong refinements. There’s a lot of pride in that sort of evolution. Good for them.

Tonight was the Hanging of the Green and the Lighting of the Way, a late season highlight and a lovely way to spend part of your evening. The Hanging of the Green in Reid Chapel has been marking the Advent at Samford since 1980. The program is based off the traditional Lessons and Carols Service in Cambridge at King’s College. The Lighting of the Way has been taking place on campus since 2001, it usually features a bit of singing or a concert and some impromptu messages and, always, the Christmas story. Dr. Jeanna Westmoreland read the message tonight:

A few hundred students piled out of Reid Chapel, in the background, to the middle of the quad to hear the story and countdown the lights and then hear a show.

The first song started “The weather outside is frightful … ” except it was sunny and 74 here today.

This is the administration building, and I thought the light treated it pretty well this evening:

You remember the movie Footloose, the tale of a young man who taught a rural town how to love and laugh and dance. That movie came out in 1984. I’m going to assume I saw that on cable a year or two later and I remember thinking, as a child, that the premise was a little flimsy.

Can’t dance? In this day in age?

Well. Let me show you what I’ve found in this Crimson drawer I’ve been slowly working through. Note the date, 1988:

Seems the Greeks got a mandate about dancing and guests in their houses and so they pulled out of the big spring show and that caused quite the stir. The story continues:

He got something of a sidebar in the same issue, which traced the contentious issue of dancing on campus back to the 19th century:

Two weeks later, the same reporter is back with an update, the president of the university, the late Thomas Corts, had signaled a formal sea change on the issue:

This was a long time ago. Right? Well, 28 years is ancient to some, and just around the corner for others. Nevertheless, history was made in early February of 1988 at Samford, everybody cut footloose:

In that same issue the Crimson published the results of a phone survey they ran on campus, where they learned that 82 percent of students were in favor of dancing.

I wonder if we’d do a text or an Instagram survey these days.

family / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
27
Nov 14

Happy Thanksgiving

I wrote yesterday:

I’m pretty sure I developed my prowling and curiosity at my grandparents’ place. So many things you didn’t see all of the time, so many things that were different than what little you knew about anything. So many things that spanned ages of time — to a child at least. A lot of stuff got kept by my grandparents — and yet my grandmother also had a clean house.

But the storage building out back … well, I spent all afternoon in there today. We spent time in there as children, probably hide-and-seek and trying to figure out the boxes and stacks of things. I’m sure some of this stuff hasn’t been touched in years, or more. And today I glanced around a few rooms, but concentrated on the books.

I found a few other things too, but this was the first thing I found:

This was a pre-kindergarten gift I’d received. I could place that based on the sudden memories that returned. I hadn’t thought about this helmet in decades, and suddenly there it was in my hands. We were in the apartments at the time, so before I was in school. It explained why I liked guys like Art Monk and Gary Clark and why I’ve always found the Washington Redskins’ color scheme to be one of my favorite. Turns out I was programmed early. I believe this helmet, and some toy shoulder pads and a jersey and so on, were a gift from an aunt.

I’d literally walked into the outbuilding, turned right, stepped up into the first of two side rooms, walked through there and into the back room. You could walk a few short steps in before your path is blocked by boxes and such. I looked down in the first one and found that helmet.

“This was mine,” I said to my grandfather, “and I’m taking it with me … If you don’t mind.”

Of course he did not. I’d cleaned part of the storage area for him and took a few other things off his hands that he wouldn’t have to deal with, books and other things. I found some things he’d want and a few things my mother would like to have.

Later, she pulled out an old photo album, most of the contents inside being older than her. Inside were pictures of her grandparents:

I have a few memories of him, but not her.

Here’s another photograph that was inside that albums, my mother, my uncle, their parents and my mother’s father’s parents.

I found two letters from my great-grandfather, W.K., to his son, my grandfather, standing behind him in that photo. Aubra was away at college. In one note his dad was reminding him to write his mother. In the other letter he explained that he could not afford to give him a car and put him through school — the more things change, right? — and gently explained why he had said this or that about some choice the younger man was considering.

I found a book my mother and uncle gave to their mother when they were very young. They’d inscribed it for Mother’s Day. And Mom told me about the last birthday card she got from her mom, a little girl on a beach and the note she’d written in it, which fits pretty much everything.

And so on this Thanksgiving, difficult or joyous or perfectly routine, I suppose it isn’t enough to be thankful for what you have, but what you had and what you remember.

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20
Nov 14

Does this guy look familiar to you?

Yesterday I spent a few minute hanging some newspapers in our newsroom. I took a few ancient issues from frames that were tucked away in a corner and replaced them with more recent and better copy. Now we have a wall that shows off a strong front page from each of the last four years. It looks nice.

But that means I have some old yellow newspapers on my desk. And that means I got to read through them today. And that means I took pictures of the good stuff. Like this guy:

This pair were in the paper because they’d just had a great run at a national debate tournament. They placed in the top 10, having beaten Harvard and MIT and others along the way. Samford’s second team had a great showing, too, but, really, I think we can all admit now that the hair had something to do with it.

He has a very common name, which is a bummer, or I’d look him up and see what what road life has offered him. The newspaper is from 1978, and so many of the folks here are often well placed in their careers. Indeed, among the 1978 newspaper staff there is now a university provost, a reverend, an attorney, pediatrician, professor and more. They seem to have done well for themselves.

You can see a few more items from this 1978 newspaper on my Tumblr site, here, here, here, here and here.

The lead story in that issue was this guy who would soon have a concert on campus:

I have an entire drawer of clips from the 70s and 80s in my office. I’ll get to them soon. The Crimson is celebrating its 100th anniversary in the spring, so we’ll be looking at things a lot farther back than the Carter years. Even still, that hair was worth seeing, right?

The best 3:40 commercial you’ll see this year, and it is based in historical truth some 100 years ago:

There’s also a “making of” video and an “about our video” video. Because if you’re going to run a 3:40 spot, even online, go all out.

A history teacher friend of mine found that online. I was just having a conversation about why history is or isn’t interesting to people, and it so often comes down to the person in the front of a classroom somewhere. I had one great history teacher that made the things she taught about people and their emotions and motivations and not just names and dates, and here I am. I suspect that my history teacher friend, passionate as she is about her subject matter, inspires her students too.

Things to read … because a simple story can inspire, too.

100 years young, Tennessee woman sees the coast for the first time in Orange Beach:

Ruby Holt has seen a lot of things in her 100 years and counting (she’ll turn 101 next month) on this earth. She’s seen two world wars, a Great Depression, 17 presidents and more than a few hard times. But she’d never seen the beach until this week.

Holt made the six-hour trip from the Sterling House senior living facility in Columbia, Tenn., to fulfill a long-time dream of seeing the shore.

(That story made it on the BBC, too.)

Unfortunate news here, Boeing layoffs target 130 jobs in Huntsville, elsewhere

I’d want to change them too often, so I better not put my pictures on my shoes, How adidas puts your images on their shoes:

adidas has let the buying public in on a little secret: the ability to step into a production line with their own shoe design.

[…]

The concept started when adidas began promoting their own product with satellite images of cities such as London, Moscow and Berlin. “The design team was really amazed by the quality of the prints, which led to lively discussions about what other prints we could create,” Schumacher says. “This sparked the idea for an app.”

Customization, the micro-wave of today, the artist’s feet of the future.

The rhetoric being used here is something else, Apple and Others Encrypt Phones, Fueling Government Standoff:

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department delivered a blunt message last month to Apple Inc. executives: New encryption technology that renders locked iPhones impervious to law enforcement would lead to tragedy. A child would die, he said, because police wouldn’t be able to scour a suspect’s phone, according to people who attended the meeting.

If Disney features animals and toys talking behind our backs, and Tron was about the inner-workings of video games … well, wait until someone like Pixar gets a line on this, The Secret Life of Passwords

And that should just about be enough for today. Come back soon. There is always more to see.

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13
Nov 14

History, the leaves of the present, and the news of the future

A little cool, out, and yet bright and sunny. From the parking lot to the office I get to pass under and by a few bright trees, here are some maples I picked up in Talbird Circle — named in honor of the antebellum president of the university.

He accepted a captain’s commission in the 11th Alabama, stepping down after three months in 1861. The 11th Alabama fought in Virginia, but Talbird, older and not in the proper condition, mustered out before the shooting began.

He returned to Marion, to the school, and then took a colonel’s commission in the 41st Alabama infantry in May of 1862. The 41st marched and skirmished and fought in Tennessee, Mississippi and, briefly, in Virginia, but Talbird wasn’t around for all of that. He served for only a year, primarily at a prison camp, and then perhaps went with the regiment where they fought at Murfreesboro, before leaving the 41st because of a disability.

After the war, Talbird did not return to the university, but went back to the pulpit.

James E. Sulzby, Jr., a Samford grad and lay historian, wrote of Talbird:

It may be said that during the presidency of President Talbird, the college enjoyed its greatest prosperity until that time, yet experienced discouragements and disasters. President Talbird worked diligently on the endowment funds in an attempt to relieve the college of any indebtedness and to guarantee its future success. President Talbird, by his consisten Christian spirit, his fine administrative qualities, and his devotion to the Confederate cause, won in the estimation of all who him a position of wide influence.

Sulzby quotes an 1857 clipping from the Marion Commonwealth where a student wrote “There are not three students in the College by whom President Talbird is not dearly loved.”

And, hey, if only two people don’t love you, that isn’t so bad.

The modern campus has the cul-de-sac named after him. And there are pretty trees, with pretty leaves. I am sharing five of them with you here, having picked them up and carried them into my photo studio. There is more to read, after these:

Things to read … because sometimes words are worth a thousand words.

I hope we’re pleased with ourselves, Rural hospitals in critical condition

Since the beginning of 2010, 43 rural hospitals — with a total of more than 1,500 beds — have closed, according to data from the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. The pace of closures has quickened: from 3 in 2010 to 13 in 2013, and 12 already this year. Georgia alone has lost five rural hospitals since 2012, and at least six more are teetering on the brink of collapse. Each of the state’s closed hospitals served about 10,000 people — a lot for remaining area hospitals to absorb.

The Affordable Care Act was designed to improve access to health care for all Americans and will give them another chance at getting health insurance during open enrollment starting this Saturday. But critics say the ACA is also accelerating the demise of rural outposts that cater to many of society’s most vulnerable. These hospitals treat some of the sickest and poorest patients — those least aware of how to stay healthy. Hospital officials contend that the law’s penalties for having to re-admit patients soon after they’re released are impossible to avoid and create a crushing burden.

So this sounds bad, Hearing aids stolen from 88-year-old retired naval pilot, but the update suggests one of two happy endings. Company to replace hearing aids reported stolen from 88-year-old veteran plus, the end of the story says the hearing aids were miraculously found. I thought, in reading the first story, that that would ultimately be the case. Funny how calling the police and finding the news media is calling the office can make that happen.

This is one of those shame-it-happened-but-the-timing-was-good kind of stories, Alabama team doctors help save life of LSU policeman struck by car after game:

Alabama team doctors Lyle Cain, Norman Waldrop and Benton Emblom climbed into a motorcade leaving Tiger Stadium on Saturday night, expecting to chat about the Crimson Tide’s thrilling 20-13 overtime win over LSU on their way to the airport.

Less than a mile from the stadium, however, they found their skills needed to save a life, as a car had struck an LSU campus police officer who was escorting the motorcade on a motorcycle.

“Our first thought goes from, ‘Wow, we just won a huge game,’ to ‘Wow, we need to try to save this person’s life,'” Waldrop said.

You don’t say … Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program:

The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Is it just me, or have you noticed fewer “But if you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” replies to news like that these days? Seems like you get a lot more “Meh,” instead.

An idea whose time has come, StoryTracker is a new tool to track how news homepages change:

Hopefully you know about PastPages, the tool built by L.A. Times data journalist Ben Welsh to record what some of the web’s most important news sites have on their homepage — hour by hour, every single day. Want to see what The Guardian’s homepage looked like Tuesday night? Here you go. Want to see how that Ebola patient first appeared on DallasNews.com in September? Try the small item here. It’s a valuable service, particularly for future researchers who will want to study how stories moved through new media. (For print media, we have physical archives; for digital news, work even a few years old has an alarming tendency to disappear.)

I wish there was the same sort of thing for old broadcasts. When you invent your time machine, take something like this back with you and just scoop the radio and television signals out of the air, would you?