This is from some recent ride. Certainly not the one I had this evening. I know where the side roads on tonight’s ride go. I did not know where this road went.
I’m going to post that photo again as a test of a new tool I’ve just discovered, an immersive, interactive photo sharing tool called ThingLink.
There’s something of an unwritten rule (and we have many rules) about the unknown road. You don’t look on a map. You don’t ask a fellow rider. If you want to know where that road goes, you travel that road. And before you do that you stand at the head of it, take a photo and then run it through a filter. Then you ride down the road.
It was a dead end.
If you please, put your mouse over that photo. See those little circles? They are all interactive. Most are just notes. There’s one link and one video. And so it is apparent to me right away, this is a useful tool.
Anyway, I rode 20 miles today, I discovered a new tool there and did some other things, all less interesting than those.
I’ve been wondering lately, if you were building from the ground up, what would your marketing/newsroom/studio/entity’s goal be? Or, what era are you building to? Online TV/video market to be worth $35BN by 2018
I had a terrific conversation this weekend, one of those where the other person really crystalizes your thinking in a spare sentence or two. That conversation, with an Army major of strong personal convictions, had to do with standing up for the smaller, weaker, more vulnerable person, and it applies to this terrible story, a sad tale where that did not happen. Felony Counts for 2 in Suicide of Bullied 12-Year-Old:
Brimming with outrage and incredulity, the sheriff said in a news conference on Tuesday that he was stunned by the older girl’s Saturday Facebook posting. But he reserved his harshest words for the girl’s parents for failing to monitor her behavior, after she had been questioned by the police, and for allowing her to keep her cellphone.
“I’m aggravated that the parents are not doing what parents should do: after she is questioned and involved in this, why does she even have a device?” Sheriff Judd said. “Parents, who instead of taking that device and smashing it into a thousand pieces in front of that child, say her account was hacked.”
[…]
“Watch what your children do online,” Sheriff Judd said. “Pay attention. Quit being their best friend and be their best parent. That’s important.”
We had deer burgers on the grill tonight. First time I’ve had deer that way. Adam came and prepared the patties, an animal he’d taken himself. The Yankee made fries and sauteed onions. I started the fire, easily the weakest part of the meal. But the burgers were incredible.
We watched Game of Thrones. He is now through the end of the second season. Don’t spoil it for him.
Sometimes the day gets away from you. Sometimes you get away from the day. Others, one supposes, are pleasantly predictable, moving at just the right pace, each thing approaching as you expected, addressed, completed and reflected upon. In between there are days that have some combination of all of those attributes.
Today was none of those things. Which is not bad, or good, just a thing.
The students at the Crimson went strong until about 3 or 3:30 this morning. That is imprecise, but chronometer precision isn’t a necessary function of my world at that time of day. The late hour, being an early hour, also informs the day.
That’s what I’m getting at here. It was late. Today was early. Things moved accordingly.
That little boy has a disease that has only been diagnosed about 100 times worldwide, and he’s already endured a host of surgeries. Now he’s got a new team on his side:
Had a fun critique meeting today. The silliness overwhelmed us, but work was done. A little more levity in the middle of the week never hurt anyone, and don’t you think that cutline needs better punctuation?
Ran into a former student this evening. She’s graduated. She completed a high profile internship in D.C. She now has a distinguished sounding title at her new job. Charming young lady and talented, with a great future ahead of her. I wonder how many times I say that a year.
Things to read that I thought you’d enjoy. Here’s your daily dose of silly. I remain of the opinion we’re going about this all wrong, but, this story got to use “‘Gestapo’ tactics” in an American headline, so there’s that unfortunate development:
Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.
The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.
[…]
The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.
“She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.
The seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door.
The longer this goes on the more absurd the stories will get, it seems.
This young woman is studying to be a classical soprano in Scotland. She started following my campus blog today. I’ve been listening to some of her performances. It isn’t every day you meet talented singers. She fulfills the requirement. That link takes you to her performance as Eponine.
Parenthood, like war, is a state in which it’s impossible to be moral. Worse, the moral weakness of parents is always on display, for children bear witness to their incessant ethical hairsplitting. It may be delicious fun to tut-tut over the corrupt child-rearing customs (and to pity the progeny) of the aggressively rising class: the mother who, according to Urban Baby legend, slept with the admissions officer (with her husband’s consent!) to get her child into the Ivy League, or the one who sued an Upper East Side preschool for insufficiently preparing her 4-year-old for a private-school test. But such Schadenfreude elides a more difficult existential truth, which is that ever since Noah installed his own three sons upon the ark and left the rest of the world to drown, protecting and privileging one’s own kids at the expense of other people has been the name of the game. It’s what parents do.
Your child constantly puts you in quandaries, but everyone is right there, so ignore the lice, do their homework, hold your kid back, game the system. Everyone is doing it!
Not being a parent, I can only pretend to understand. Surely I’d want the best, and to see my child was well prepared for this and that as possible. But I’m also fairly certain that, on the off chance I did not have a perfect child, I’d want them to learn from any struggles and imperfections, so that they could, maybe, appreciate the things that come easier to them and see those less ideal moments for what they really are.
But, then, I have probably fewer answers than the author of that piece, I know. I’m only trying to be a member of her “aggressively rising class” a frame through which she portrays the most condescending examples of life you’d find in almost any other magazine, but just feel so delightfully tacky here.
Most parents don’t think of themselves as the kind of people who prize winning above all. Most hope to teach their kids what used to be called “good values,” which a previous generation learned in scouts or church: kindness and compassion, respect and responsibility, to “do unto others” and be grateful for small things.
Society now looks back and down upon solid values as quaint relics of a past age, because moral equivalence has diminished even the Golden Rule.
And then: “All the data show a generation far less ethical than their parents.” Soon after we’re learning of “a hazy space where right and wrong seem porous” which is just a logical excuse to allow for more modern superiority through the ill-defined virtues of a mantra that says no one is wrong, unless their righter or wronger than me: “There’s lots of room to wiggle here. Especially when the transgressions get you where you want to be.”
So we suggest that parents do all for their kids yet haven’t transferred a moral foundation which just makes things somewhat foggy and non-descript, but, hey, it’s for the children and so then all bets are off.
This is an article indulging our judgmental lapses. So you think I don’t raise my children according to what I read in New York Magazine, thank heavens. And you read the wide-ranging examples offered by this mother of a 9-year-old and you wonder about the ethics of others. It is, as she says, tough out there. You get the feeling it is the most difficult when she intervenes, though.
Finally, a few things from the multimedia blog that I forgot to mention yesterday:
Lamar Phillips, the owner of Goal Post Bar-B-Q in Anniston, on Friday closed the doors to his restaurant for the final time.
He said he will sell the business, a fixture of Quintard Avenue since the 1960s, but declined to provide the potential buyer’s name or that person’s intentions for the building.
That Anniston restaurant has some of the best neon around:
I took that picture on Valentine’s Day in 2007. We had dinner that night at a catfish joint. Had I been thinking we would have gone to Goal Post. Catfish was not the best Valentine’s dinner. (Because barbecue is the ideal, of course. And it would have run me $12, apparently.) But we sat right down at the catfish joint, if I recall. Anyway, it was being in the same place that mattered. That year The Yankee was in Atlanta and we spent a lot of time on I-20 going back and forth.
Certain stretches of that road bring it all back.
Anyway, Goal Post was great. The neon is the best in that part of the state. The kicker actually puts the ball through the uprights. You can just see the other parts of the neon fading into the darkness. It looks great in motion. And that kicker has never missed.
Hope they are doing business there again soon.
I hope those American tourists can figure out a way around this barricade at the World War I memorial. I’m more troubled by the presumption that someone would tell you where you may practice your rights.
But the doings at the World War II memorial, just down the mall, are of course getting a lot of attention:
Greatest Generation
“@SykesCharlie: Best WWII Memorial Sign: "NORMANDY WAS CLOSED WHEN WE GOT THERE, TOO."”
The first time I visited the World War II memorial, it was about midnight on a cold December Saturday. It was open, as it was designed to stay open.
The memorial has 4,048 gold stars, each representing 100 Americans who died in the war. “Closing” open memorials with the simple intention of inconveniencing people is, well, simple. But you’ve learned to not expect a lot of nuance out of Washington D.C. these days.
In front of the wall of stars there is the message “Here we mark the price of freedom.”
Here’s a story with a great pull quote: “(W)hen he called the parks service, he was told they would face arrest. ‘I said, are you kidding me? You’re going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn’t for them it wouldn’t be there. She said, ‘That’s correct sir.””
It is shameful to make sacred places props, both the closing it and the photo opportunity it turned into for some congress members, but there’s not a great supply of shame in Washington.
And, think, we’re just getting started. We’re going about all of this all wrong, on both sides.
By the end of the decade, a nearly nine-fold increase in the volume of devices on the Internet of Things will mean a lot of infrastructure investment and market opportunities will available in this sector.
[…]
Who wins if any of these scenarios takes place? Semiconductor, network, remote sensor and big data vendors will be the lottery winners of such Internet of Things growth, to name a very few. Big data especially: 75 billion devices all generating signals of data to be analyzed and measured, many of which in real- or near-realtime? That’s got big data written all over it.
Designers and engineers look for opportunities in problems. In something that massively big maybe the idea is to look for the problem. My bet is on networking the data — which is challenging in volume — and predictive algorithms.
Now, what would you do with that, if you knew what to do with that?
Sticking to the newsroom, then, there was an afternoon of grading things. And then, in the early evening, we critiqued the Crimson. High story count, but it needs better art, not their best design. As always there were a few critical copy editing points. A solid effort, but, perhaps, not the one of which we are capable.
That’s what the next issue is for, of course. Check out the what the hardworking students at the Crimson are doing, here.
On the drive home I spent a lot of time thinking about the run I was going to do. What? This is supposed to be a rest day, anyway, and I’m thinking about running? As in, I found myself looking forward to it.
I do not know what is happening.
So I ran through the neighborhood in the darkness. Only two stretches of which don’t have good light. One of those, of course, being the short bridge over the creek at the bottom of the neighborhood. There’s a light at the far end and a light down a way from the other side. And, right in the middle of the two sits the bridge. Between having no oxygen in your brain and no light for your eyes it looked like there were goblins and monsters on the bridge.
The newspaper industry, they gave it away online for a decade or more, suddenly decided to charge for it online and now, I’m sure, are stupefied by this news:
Now that roughly a third of the nation’s newspapers are charging for access to their web and mobile content, the early evidence suggests that digital audiences aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about paying for news as publishers are about charging for it.
Although digital-only subscribers make up 37.6% of the total circulation of the Wall Street Journal and 34.4% of the total readership of the New York Times, the number of digital-only subscribers at Gannett, the largest publisher of general-interest newspapers in the land, is 2.2% of its average aggregate weekday circulation of 3 million subscribers.
Notwithstanding the relative productivity of their paywalls, the paid penetration at the Journal and the Times pales in comparison to the success that Netflix, Spotify, Major League Baseball and other ventures have had in selling entertainment-oriented digital content.
Some of those entertainment and news comparisons stretch the bonds of credulity, but they do say one thing: People will pay for a service online, just not the news.
It is simple economic theory, really. You can easily charge for a scarcity. There is a great volume of news, analysis and information around us. Some of it isn’t worth the download to be sure, but a great deal of it is readily available.
You might say it isn’t the news they need. You might be right, to an extent. You might also be called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that.
At the end of the day your news seeker is a resourceful individual. He or she has plenty of options to find what they want, or at the very least, enough to make them feel they’ve gotten what they need.
So the search for a compelling and profitable news model will continue. Even as I remind you that news has always been a (civically minded) loss leader.
Reviewed the newspaper this afternoon. They are designing a sharp looking product — and they were only in the newsroom until 2:30 this morning, so that is an improvement. Today we talked about story selection and word use.
Pretty soon I’ll run out of things to find wrong and will simply be down to the very subjective things.
Here is the rainbow I saw on the way home this evening:
One of the meteorologists said there was a storm in some little town, a wide spot on the road really, to my east. I was on the interstate about 20 miles away. I glanced up and saw the clouds. I looked back to the road. I glanced up again and saw the rainbow.
I’ve been saying for some time now that I want an aerial drone. You can chip in for a nice one for me and I’ll think of you every time I fly it and edit amazing (to me) videos.
If that’s too expensive, I’d understand. You can always train an eagle and strap a camera on its back. I’d take that:
I never get tired of these crowd-funding stories. This one is about a woman in Texas who is fighting stage four lymphoma. Her family asked for help getting a good place to tailgate before a Texas A&M game. Someone picked up that idea and ran with it. And then Aggies from all over the world, people who didn’t know each other, did something amazing. The video is a bit long, but it is worth it:
Last night the student-journalists at The Samford Crimson wrapped things up at about 3 a.m., a two hour improvement from last week.
At their critique meeting this evening I bragged on them — they’re doing a really good job at such an early point in their newspaper — and told them we were already down to picking on a lot of little things. Soon we’ll be on to the tough love, and challenging each other to go from good to great.
