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Thursday

journalism / links / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
8
Sep 11

Alternate headline: Zzzzz

“But this first night is always a long effort.”

I said last night, around 11 p.m. If I had known better I would have written it differently.

I would have written “It will be a long night.” The headline above this would have read “And by long night I meant …”

And the text would have simply said “5:30 a.m.”

Now, to be clear: I don’t mind. I’ve been tired all day, but that’s part of the job and I love the job. After a series of first-issue problems, trial and errors the new staff put to bed a nice first edition this morning. I wouldn’t have minded a few more hours of sleep before saying that, but that’s the price of education by experience some time.

So about two-and-a-half or three hours of sleep this morning. And then today was our high school journalism workshop.

We had two series of sessions this morning and then two more sets in the afternoon. More than 300 students from across the area joined us.

Southern Living’s Kim Cross discussed their commendable series, Lessons from the Storm as a study in the use of multimedia.

CBS-42 reporter and Samford grad Kaitlin McCulley talked about television packages:

The kids had a great day:

I had an afternoon session, where two of the staffers from The Samford Crimson joined me. You can tell by their reaction that I’d just made a profoundly important point:

Anyway. After the workshop was concluded I taught a class on leads. It is perhaps one of my better lectures, which works out well since it is the first thing you read and an important component of a news story. That’s the first thing the journalism professors read when their students have created another issue of the campus paper.

Speaking of the Crimson, this was a big day. Sure, it was the first issue of the year. And it was delayed because of the storms that caused a campus-wide power outage yesterday. But, the paper returned to a tab size this year.

And the issue looks nice, too.

Also, we re-launched a new version of the Crimson’s website, too. There’s a lot to come from this new design and the content management system behind it — we switched from College Publisher, which is somewhat limited, to WordPress.

Here’s a screen capture of the old version:

And here’s the new version:

In this first issue we already have five feature stories, represented in those thumbnails below the main photograph. Below the fold the stories fall into a neat structure. There’s better comment moderation strength, ease of publication, a system I can teach to new students in under an hour and a very clean look.

Now we just need to put ads on it.

journalism / links / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
1
Sep 11

Things to read

Who is a member of the media? Terry Heaton argues that an appeals court has set the parameters, in a case on witnesses with cameras:

The issue advanced significantly on Friday with a stunning Federal Appeals Court ruling affirming the First Amendment right of citizens to photograph or create videos of police while they’re on duty. Police agencies in some communities were using an odd interpretation of wiretap laws to confiscate the camera phones of bystanders, and the court rightly found that to be unconstitutional.

The decision has far-reaching implications that go beyond the mere taking of pictures at crime, disturbance and accident scenes. By granting everyone this “right,” this ruling redefines “the press” in this country by shattering the myth of privilege associated with working for a so-called “legitimate” news organization. Some will cry that it opens Pandora’s Box, because a clearly defined “press” helps the machine of modernity function. This decision is potential chaotic, for example, to those cultural institutions who have a vested interest in keeping their “news” in the hands of a professional class (that can be manipulated). Think of an agency holding a press conference, for example. If press freedom applies to everybody, then that agency cannot restrict access to only those who work for a news organization.

The decision should make anybody in a traditional newsroom shutter. As we’ve been saying for years, the personal media revolution — what Jay Rosen calls “the Great Horizontal” — IS the second Gutenberg moment in Western civilization.

The full piece is worth a read.

Meanwhile, there’s great empirical evidence that public relations is doing more than coming of age. A New York Times reporter is quoted there, saying “the muscles of public relations are bulking up—as if they were on steroids.”

One of the buzzwords in the business is engagement. Old fashioned engagement still works, as this Canadian example demonstrates:

Not long ago, the Winnipeg Free Press’s social media editor hosted an online chat from her desk at the paper’s downtown news cafe. She had done it many times in recent months but something unexpected happened.

People had taken up the paper’s social media invitation to “join us” in a chat about Google+ with guests including GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram. But audience members started showing up at the cafe in person saying, “I’m here for the chat!”

“I looked at them and thought, ‘Oh…okay. That’s my mistake there. I didn’t promote this the right way,’ said Lindsey Wiebe. “But that’s also a good sign,” she added. “They’re thinking of this cafe as a hub where our events are held.”

Two speeches: This one by a Cronkite School of Journalism professor and news veteran, Tim McGuire, to the Society of Features Editors. He’s calling for a change of mindset in the industry. Baltimore Sun editor and Loyola professor discusses his first day of class speech. It’s a great read.

The Washington Post is closing all but two of their local bureaus. This is almost always a series of unfortunate events. Less coverage is never a good thing. The reasons why might surprise you.

family / history / photo / Thursday — 1 Comment
25
Aug 11

Family pictures

Had the chance for a quick family trip and, amidst the visiting, I got a few old pictures.

This is my mother’s father. He died just after I was born, and so I know him through stories and pictures. Hard to imagine your grandfather ever looked like this, isn’t it?

Here is his father, W.K., on the far left:

Now I have a picture (or a scan of a picture) of my great-grandfather as a child. The man next to W.K. is his father, W.J. , my great-great-grandfather.

W.J. was born in 1860 and died in 1948. He might have had memories of the Civil War, definitely Reconstruction and probably read all about World War II in his local paper. Based on W.K.’s birthday, you can put that photograph as circa 1910.

The above dates are from Tidwell’s The Frank and Jesse James Saga. The book changes the family narrative somewhat. Prior to researching that text for this post, the thought was that there was an adoptive relationship. But, the book has a written family history that indicates that W.J., the older man in the above picture, was a cousin of the James boys. W.J. was orphaned as an infant (his father died in a Civil War prison camp and his mother died soon after) and adopted by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Joshua James, was the uncle of Frank and Jesse James.

Moving a generation or two into the future, here’s a picture I’ve had for some time:

That very tall man young man in the background is my grandfather. The woman to his left is my grandmother. Their kids, my mother and uncle, are in the front center. The older couple are my mother’s father’s parents, my great-grandparents. My great-grandmother, on the far right, looked that way until the day she died four decades later. In 1995, she became the oldest ever graduate from the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters was the youngest graduate, in the 1960s.) My great-grandfather, the oldest gentleman in the picture above, is the kid on the far left of the previous, ancient picture.

On the other side of the family, here’s a picture of my maternal grandmother’s father:

That’s me on the right, and my cousin on the left. She’s all grown up, and has three kids who are now older than she is in that picture. I doubt she remembers him at all.

That building is still standing at my grandparent’s home. I have two or three scant memories of this great-grandfather, his home and the stories about others’ memories. Research on this side of the family isn’t as well developed, but can be traced back to a few family names I’ve never heard of elsewhere. Alas, there are no ties to outlaw folk heroes.

I love old pictures and the stories they whisper.

journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
25
Aug 11

Things to read

Martin Belam, on the future over the past:

What concerns me is that there are a whole generation of students who are being encouraged to pay for qualifications that will equip them to work in a 90s newsroom, because the people designing the courses and the industry input they receive are all from people who cut their teeth in a 90s newsroom.

A piece worth reading in its entirety.

Five curation tools you should know about. Pearltrees is a new one to me. I’ll check it out this weekend. The others are variations on one another, reminding you that you don’t have to be in every space. At some point these things are competing with one another. You want to be doing your work on the one that is the winner, which is to say has an ease of use, flexibility to do what you need and the place where your audience is willing to follow (or is already building a community). Otherwise you just build up platform fatigue.

What’s more, curation is a function, not your every solution. All of these things, all of them, are options, tools and components at your disposal. As a journalist your job is to amass large amounts of information, filter, screen and select. Your job here, with these many platforms, tools and doodads, is similar.

Copy editors: read the story before writing the headline.

Also, beware of sneaky copy in those pull out boxes.

Everyone knows of Twitter, and the wise ones are using it to their advantage in their professional life. But now comes Pinq Sheets:

Unlike Klout and other similar services, Pinq Sheets is keyword- and campaign-based, as opposed to user-based. And because Pinq Sheets uses Twitter’s streaming API (instead of the search API), Pinq Sheets subscribers can pull down entire Tweets, rather than just numbers.

Pinq Sheets also does the dirty work for you, compiling the data in readable graphs (see below) that can easily be distributed to your clients. This is pretty stellar. When we do reporting for our clients, we find they love graphs and infographics. When we can make them pretty AND useful, so much the better. Seeing information and insights, for some, is often more valuable than reading a report.

[…]

Additional features include showing users which individuals talk about a particular hashtag or search term the most, giving you valuable insights about either your brand or the brand advocates/influencers.

“If you’re trying to market to a niche, this is the tool that’s going to tell you how to do it and who to talk to,” Jen says.

Robust tools get stronger all the time.

Big names in journalism links: How Steve Jobs changed journalism. A study on Rupert Murdoch’s troubles. The semi-retirement of Jim Romenesko and his impact on journalism.

Was Twitter a vehicle for riots in England? A Guardian study:

Analysis of more than 2.5m Twitter messages relating to the riots in England has cast doubt on the rationale behind government proposals to ban people from social networks or shut down their websites in times of civil unrest.

A preliminary study of a database of riot-related tweets, compiled by the Guardian, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting.

Timing trends drawn from the data question the assumption that Twitter played a widespread role in inciting the violence in advance, an accusation also levelled at the rival social networks Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger.

That’s part of a quality series from the Guardian, Reading the Riots.

books / cycling / history / links / Thursday / video — Comments Off
18
Aug 11

Your average Thursday

Another day of fun and joy, and concerted attempts to maximize my time in the air conditioning. Not sure why, the heat index only made it up to 94 today. That’s a break around here at this time of year.

In a related story: It is August in the Deep South.

So I read and cleaned out inboxes and things like that. Took a trip to the local bike shop where The Yankee had to buy a new tire and tubes. I had to buy new tubes. Your paranoia grows incrementally with each additional ride you take without a spare.

Later in the day I stuffed my little bike bag full of the all-important things, CO2 cartridges, the extra tubes and so on, and hit the road for a brisk ride. It was the evening, it looked overcast and I was chasing the daylight. I got in 20 miles, dodging and weaving around traffic that has suddenly become a lot more dense (the college kids are back) and less accepting of cyclists (the college kids are back?). This could turn into a long lament about traffic and space and all of that, but it is a tired argument. I’m just going to make a custom jersey that says something like “You should move” and have an arrow pointing to the left.

Learned the power of the head shake this evening, though. I was stuck at an intersection and as the light was about to change I tried to clip back into my pedals. Just as I did this, leaning to the left, a car decided being behind me wasn’t as good as being beside me. I glanced back just far enough to see the hood and shook my head as I pedaled in front of him for the next 300 yards. Felt very European. That’ll show him!

I did some research, but it is far from over, meaning there are a lot of open tabs and windows on my computer.

I did this for fun. The Daily Show had a good run at class warfare tonight,

The Daily Show – World of Class Warfare – The Poor’s Free Ride Is Over
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes

So I looked up some stats. I picked 1980 at (almost) random. The percentage of U.S. households with:

Clothes washer: 73
Dishwasher: 38
Refrigerator: ~100;
Black and white television: 43
Color television: 88

That was in 1980. I picked the year since some insist on comparing President Obama with President Carter. Also, because of Lou Gannon‘s biography on President Reagan. In it, he noted that 4,414 individual tax returns with adjusted gross income of more than $1,000,000. In 1987 there were 34,944 such returns. During that time, Cannon observed, there was a huge increase in the purchase of small appliances and durable goods.

Critics of the new prosperity managed to remain unimpressed by the longest sustained economic recovery since World War II and the steady advance of American living standards. They viewed the Reagan years as an enshrinement of American avarice, epitomized by the “greed is healthy” speech of convicted Wall Street financier Ivan Boesky. Throughout most of the Reagan presidency the complaints of these critics were drowned out by the clamor of the marketplace.

A quarter of a century later, in 2005, these were the same categories, in percentages:

Clothes washer: 82.6, up nine percent
Dishwasher: 58.3, up 20 percent
Refrigerator: ~100, steady
Television: 99.8 percent
Cable TV: 79.1 percent, black and white is no longer listed
More than two TVs:at 42.9 percent

That’s U.S. Department of Energy data, used in a Heritage Foundation report, which also points out that 88.7 percent of American homes have a microwave and 84 percent have air conditioning?

What does it mean? You can decide that on your own. Should it reshape my position? Probably not. It should, however, make one realize that wealth, poverty, success, comfort and pain are relative. After all, the U.S. poverty line for a family of one is defined at $10,890. That income would put you in the 86th percentile on a global comparison according to Global Rich List. It is also longitudinal, and dovetails with class expectations: a very basic middle class lifestyle today would make you look like a king in your great-grandparents era.

Possessions aint everything^*, as the poet William Payne wrote, which brings us back to money for groceries and bills and pills. And that circular argument is where we’ve been politically for years. It’s almost enough to make the unassuming sort wonder why right-thinking people would ever get in that business^**.

^{* Air conditioning, I maintain, is pretty stinkin’ vital.}

^{** But you know better.}