Took part in a panel this morning. It was titled The Future of Campus Journalism. The description:
What are we teaching our journalism students? What should we be teaching our journalism students? Given the prolonged state of flux of the journalism industry, it is more important than ever for educators to be conscious of the ever-changing nature of the skills that our students will need to be able to adapt in today’s job market. Panelists will share their experiences with and suggestions for journalism education, both in the classroom and in the newsroom.
I talked about entrepreneurship, partnering with other entities on campus — Samford’s JMC teams with the business school and the law school for combined degrees — and initiative.
Other conference things took place. We attended sessions and other sessions. We visited the welcome mixer and then had dinner across the street at the Palace Cafe:
It was one of those places that was widely suggested to us by friends. (Tell people you are going to New Orleans and everyone has a restaurant list.) I had the braised pork shank:
It only needed to be bigger. And there was banana’s foster, which was prepared and fired in front of us. All the people infatuated by fire recorded the moment. The maitre d made a note of it and called the fire marshal, I’m sure. There was also cheesecake:
Tomorrow I’ll get to take part in two panels at the conference. Also, Wrestlemania is being held in New Orleans. The fans are starting to filter in. And some of the wrestlers. I think Mark Henry is staying in our hotel. That guy is massive.
I went outside and did something today! This was preceded by a few hours resting in bed. I feel better, for the most part, but I’m just so weary. That’s gotten old already.
Anyway, there was baseball tonight. Auburn is hosting Missouri for a three-game series. The attendance was announced as a sellout, the first of the year.
Blake Austin slides in for Auburn’s second score of the game:
The third base umpire blew a call and the head coach, Sunny Golloway, let him hear about it. So did the fans, for quite some time.
It was a pivotal call and, perhaps, cost Auburn the game. The wrong Tigers won, 4-3. The problems were of the familiar variety. Auburn had four errors and stranded eight.
The great thing about baseball is that they’ll play again tomorrow.
Slowing traffic for several miles on the way home …
My first job after college was reporting traffic on the radio. College grad! It was originally supposed to be a job where I flew around as a passenger in a small plane and reported from the sky. Something happened, I forget the details, where the guy I was replacing stuck around. So I worked in the office.
The office was a big bullpen with miniature studio bays instead of cubicles. There was one guy who had the job of calling police stations, listening to scanners and taking the occasional phone call about traffic reports. He was inputting all of this data into the system so that people like me could read on various radio stations in the region. On any given day I was reporting on five or six stations. We all had stations and times and some people crafted miniature personalities behind it. This was, after all, something of a stepping stone job for some people.
One of those guys, an older gentleman, did this cantankerous bit, like the accidents, the minor ones at least, were an imposition to him, already at his office. It was probably funny in a sympathetic sort of way. One day he called a car fire a “Car-B-Q.” That seemed less funny to me, since these are more serious than a fender bender. I always think of that whenever I hear about or see a car fire.
You never hear what became of the people involved. Did they escape safely? How many of their things did they bother to reach for? How did it start? You only know it ruined more than their weekend plans.
Things to read … because that is almost always in the plans.
Some of America’s best cancer hospitals are off-limits to many of the people now signing up for coverage under the nation’s new health care program.
Doctors and administrators say they’re concerned. So are some state insurance regulators.
An Associated Press survey found examples coast to coast. Seattle Cancer Care Alliance is excluded by five out of eight insurers in Washington’s insurance exchange. MD Anderson Cancer Center says it’s in less than half of the plans in the Houston area. Memorial Sloan-Kettering is included by two of nine insurers in New York City and has out-of-network agreements with two more.
In all, only four of 19 nationally recognized comprehensive cancer centers that responded to AP’s survey said patients have access through all the insurance companies in their states’ exchanges.
If you haven’t come around to the reality that there is a difference between “coverage” and “health care” then you are well behind the curve.
The decline is small so far. Video subscribers across the entire pay-TV industry, which includes Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), DirecTV and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), dropped by 251,000 last year to about 100 million, SNL Kagan said in a statement today.
The industry has seen this coming for a while; research firm IHS said in August that TV subscriptions would decline to 100.8 million from 100.9 million in 2013. And cable companies have been suffering declines for years as satellite and phone carriers wrested away market share. In fact, DirecTV (DTV), Verizon and their ilk still gained TV subscribers last year — just not enough to make up for 2 million lost cable subscribers.
Pay-TV carriers have been preparing for this inflection point by developing services for watching video on tablets and smartphones. They’re also investing to boost Internet speeds as broadband services become more popular, often at the expense of TV subscriptions.
On our Blu-ray player there is an option for all manner of non-television video platforms. Most of them you probably don’t even know are out there. Seems we won’t need a la carte cable, we’re going to get it in some other fashion.
Remember when CNN stood for something? Now they’ll fall for anything.
I like to tell people that I think we all have a superpower, no matter how lame. Mine, I say, is that I can always anticipate the size of plasticware needed to store the leftovers. It isn’t going to save the world from alien invaders, but at least it is helpful in the kitchen. Unlike the Incredible Hulk.
It is a fun joke. It usually gets a little laugh. It starts a little “What’s your superpower?” conversation. Tonight, though, in maybe the third such event in the history of my discovering my comic book destiny …
Take note for this this day in history: @kennysmith's super power failed him. He misjudged the Tupperware needed for leftovers. #offday
That was this afternoon, this beautiful, clear, cool afternoon. Not a cloud in the sky, high of 55. Have we discussed how this is March?
Tonight I got a call from Stephen, at around 8:30. He was in town and invited me to his parents’ place to shoot a little pool. So we retired to the basement, my old college friend and his wife, whom I also know from college, and his father. Brooke and Stephen’s two kids were asleep upstairs. We were down among personalized photos of Reagan and antique gas station epherma and Rotary Club paraphernalia and played doubles. Brooke and Stephen won the first game. His dad and I won the next two. We played a game of cutthroat and I won that, too.
But this was the shot of the night. Mr. W. dropped the two in the corner pocket without the 13 even noticing.
Always such a reserved gentleman, it seems he was something of a pool shark in his younger days. You’d never expect it to know him.
As we played Stephen regaled us with impersonations and tales of his in-laws. Before we played he told one of those “Well, I’m old enough now, dad, you can’t do anything about this” story. Stephen is a lawyer, so he used the old statute of limitations line, which made it sound so important, particularly opposite the silly story he told. It involved mud and a lot of walking, like more than a few stories of youth in the South.
So I look at us. I think of all of our other friends, some who came up in conversation tonight and others who didn’t. How did we all get here, sitting over a pesky three ball I can’t knock down, in a life grand as all this?
Life gives you interesting questions on a Thursday night, doesn’t it?
I got caught in the rain a few times today, so there’s that.
I dried out sitting on a waiting room sofa, talking with a colleague about Texas and grandchildren and holidays. That was nice, since yesterday I’d sat in someone else’s office and talked about communication plans and how you’d restructure your entire workflow if you were given the opportunity. These are little insights into other worlds that I don’t normally see, in my office or with my students or in my car or wheezing through a workout. We talked about internships in one of those meetings yesterday and externships today. Sometimes the circles complete themselves.
Sometimes the umbrella leaves drip marks as you walk up two flights of stairs.
I don’t know what that means. I only know you can never shake enough drips out of the things, and then I feel responsible to patrol halls warning people of the wet floor I made.
Things to read … because nothing of great interest is coming to mind.
What if front pages were selected by newspapers’ readers instead of their editors? At NewsWhip, we’re always interested in the news stories people are choosing to share – and how those stories differ from the normal news stories editors put on the front pages of big newspapers. So we ran a little experiment.
On Wednesday morning, we gathered the front pages of leading newspapers in several countries. Then we used Spike to check the most shared stories from each one.
A little work at our end, and we used those most shared stories to make new “people powered” front pages for each newspaper – giving the most shared story the most prominence, the second most shared the second most prominence, etc.
I was going through the most read and most commented on stories at al.com to do a mock up of the local outlets. But I decided against it when, even in March, most of the lead stories would be about Alabama football.
This move requires uptake, but the right kind of uptake. Ideally, it would generate new value among the web scofflaws while not harming Getty’s business with pro publishers. I’m not sure these embeds hit that balance. The workflows are too ungainly for the people who currently have contracts with Getty, true, but they’re also not quite easy enough to be a good substitute for people who don’t mind stealing. My wager is that, as transformational as this announcement might seem to be, Getty’s embeds won’t be pockmarking the web.
But no matter how it turns out, give Getty a lot of credit for being willing to take a highly unorthodox stance. It’s an effort very much worth watching.
So more illustrations for blog posts everywhere, I guess.
Newsweek returns to newsstands Friday with a small press run (70,000), but it’s hoping to make a big impact with its cover story, which claims to have actually tracked down the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, the man credited with inventing Bitcoin.
As the story goes, Nakamoto doesn’t open up much except to say that he’s not involved in Bitcoin anymore, but senior staff writer Leah McGrath Goodman manages to wring out a nearly 3,400-word profile of the California man, who’s described as rumpled and unkept and living in a modest home, despite having a fortune estimated at $400 million.
Doctors announced that they may have possibly cured a second baby born with AIDS by administering antiretroviral treatment within hours after birth.
Doctors revealed on Wednesday that the baby was in remission from the virus at an AIDS conference in Boston. The girl was born in suburban Los Angeles last April, a month after researchers announced the first case of a possible cure, a baby from Mississippi. The Mississippi case was a medical first that led doctors worldwide to rethink how fast and hard to treat infants born with HIV, and the California doctors followed that example.
Two of the 10 best barbecue chains in America are right here in Alabama, according to the food website The Daily Meal.
Birmingham-based Jim ‘Nick’s Bar-B-Q, which was founded by father and son Jim and Nick Pihakis in 1985, is No. 1 on The Daily Meal’s 10 best list.
That is a list of chains, mind you. And while I enjoy both of those chains, if you were talking singular barbecue experience there are about five other places you might choose first. In a related story: There is such a thing as eating too much delicious barbecue, but no one has found that amount yet.
That post is a bit self-serving, particularly given the gravity of the situation. Also, it seems that another, equally important question is: “Why is this taking so long to address?” This story is from a year ago:
There are other television examples from 2012. The systemic problem in the state’s prisons didn’t just creep up on anyone. And while there’s no finger-snap fix, it reads as if change is slow to come. But AMG is on the case now. Every little bit of attention helps in a progression story.
Rutgers University is not backing down in the face of a faculty eruption over the New Jersey state school’s invitation of Condoleezza Rice to deliver this year’s commencement address.
The Faculty Council at Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus is trying to oust Rice, a former secretary of state, national security advisor, and provost of Stanford University, as the university’s commencement speaker because she does not “embody moral authority and exemplary citizenship.”
Taking issue with Rice’s politics and career, professors passed a resolution Friday imploring the university’s Board of Governors “to rescind its misguided decision” to invite Rice and give her an honorary degree. Faculty councils on Rutgers’ Camden and Newark campuses are expected to do the same in the coming weeks.
If only the secretary was of a serious caliber of whom the Rutgers community deserves:
Apparently no one has uploaded a video of that 2011 Snooki speech. You do see a lot of “Rutgers angered by” links, though.
I bet they all went up and down the halls at dear ol’ Rutgers, warning of the drip that was coming.
