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Wednesday

The day the sirens went off

My friend the great Ike Pigott came to speak to my class today.

Ike works at Alabama Power and he is a great idea man. His time at Red Cross and, before, that, ABC 33/40 make him a terrific pitch man. He talked to the class about public relations and social media and crisis communications.

He talked about the last series of tornadoes that passed through the state. It occurred to me that every pro we’ve talked to in that class this semester has told tornado war stories. I’m sure every student who is from some other place is wondering why they live here now.

With about a half-hour left in the class the fire alarm went off. Everyone in the room looked at me.

I’m supposed to know this answer.

Fortunately I remembered what we are supposed to do in a fire alarm. (It isn’t like this happens all the time.) So we got our things, felt the door to make sure it wasn’t hot, walked down the hall and exited the building to our exterior gathering space. Class continued as the fire truck pulled up:

It was cold and damp and we couldn’t see any smoke anywhere. Firefighters walked inside and, a few minutes later, walked back out. I walked over to them and said “I have a class full of journalism students wondering what is going on.”

Turns out someone in the kitchen in the cafeteria, which is in another wing of the same building, started cooking something without exhaust fans and that built up smoke for the sensors and so there we were, talking about crisis communication with a firetruck in the background.

That’s a Wednesday.

We went back inside and, at the end of the class, the fire alarm went off again. Turns out that we had gone long on our class, but the students were so caught up in what Ike was talking about that they didn’t mind. He’s just that good.

Also today was the first meeting with the incoming editor of the Crimson. I was up late last night putting together information for him. Want the job? Here are 27 pages of easy reading. Mark, set, go.

He’s been around the paper for the last two years as a section editor and is a smart guy, so I’m sure he’ll do well.

This year’s staff has done a fine job and I’m proud of a lot of things they’ve done. I always like that first new meeting though. It is one of my favorite parts of the year.

Usually it is warmer, mid-April and all. Tonight parts of the state are enjoying temperatures 30 degrees below their seasonal averages. Spring will arrive on a more permanent basis, eventually. Right?

Or maybe we’ll just go directly into summer.

Things to read: The War Eagle Reader was kind enough to reprint the thing I wrote the other day. It let me give it another edit and convinced me I still didn’t adequately make my point. There’s always next time.

Philip Lutzenkirchen wrote an open letter that’s worth reading:

Most importantly I need to thank the entire Auburn Family. You all are truly the best fans in the country. You’ve been on our side through thick and thin and that is appreciated way more than you think. I’ll never truly understand why you all love that goofy, embarrassing, silly, little dance that I did against ‘Bama but I appreciate the love that you have always showed me.

State senators have to be separated:

Alabama state senators and a Senate official stepped in between two of their colleagues during a shouting match between the two men that occurred after a controversial ruling by Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday night.

And this, the sweetest thing you’ll read all day:

Plastic wrappers and other pieces of litter rustled like tumbleweed across the empty space under the bridge yesterday afternoon.

Two hours later, enough chairs were set up to seat several hundred of Nashville’s homeless, enough chicken and baked beans cooked to feed them all.

And a few minutes later, while some were still finishing up their rainbow cake dessert, a cloth was rolled down the aisle and my friend Amanda walked through a crowd of her homeless friends to meet her fiancé at the altar under the overpass.

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Apr 13

Spring, finally

Big temperature shifts. Sun, amazingly enough. Cold in the mornings. Humidity at 74 percent in the evening. Finally spring showed up.

Patton Oswalt will guest star on Parks and Rec this week. The Yankee and I have been watching it recently. It is mindless, but the characters have charm. Ron Swanson being the best thing on network television, I’m pretty sure.

This performance won’t hurt anything, though:

I managed to read two things in The New Yorker today. So, you see, I have to look down upon a sitcom. This is an interesting read about the success of the Boston hospitals:

Something more significant occurred than professionals merely adhering to smart policies and procedures. What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore.

[…]

Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety. Where before we’d have been struck dumb with shock about such events, now we are almost calculating about them.

[…]

We’ve learned, and we’ve absorbed. This is not cause for either celebration or satisfaction. That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune.

Several hospitals are clustered nearby. The medical tent was doing triage quickly. Lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan are being put into use. Stellar work meant people lived.

Here’s another New Yorker piece, about the things we say over and over:

I was in Iceland, talking with Stein, the eleven-year-old son of some friends. His English was dauntingly good—and all the more so given that he’d never spent any real time off the island. I’d just flown over in a packed plane, and I said that tourism seemed to be exploding, and he, deliberating, looking older than his years, replied, “Yes, they come from the hot countries.”

[…]

My grandfather was fond of the phrase “Now, I’m not lecturing you.” It sent a sinking feeling into the chests of his children and grandchildren alike, for it reliably heralded a lengthy and dour disquisition on the hardships of life. He came by his lessons honestly. A powerful and athletic figure in young manhood, he was laid low by emphysema in early middle age. Though he was a smoker, I suspect his illness was largely brought on by chemical exposure as a construction rigger back in pre-OSHA days. In any case, pulmonary problems were a grim motif in his life; he lost his first wife to tuberculosis while she was still in her teens.

Of all the helpful lessons he imparted to me, I recall nothing in any detail. No, after all these years, I can retrieve verbatim only one thing he ever said, and this didn’t originate in his dutiful tutoring. It was a spontaneous remark.

[…]

Similar catchphrases, in which casual comments are promoted into a sort of immortality, doubtless exist in nearly every family, every close friendship. I find this notion deeply heartening—that people are everywhere being quoted for lines they themselves have long forgotten. And of course each of us is left to wonder whether, right at this moment, we’re being quoted in some remote and unreckonable context.

What a charming notion.

We need some charm after what happened in West, Texas tonight:

What a terrible scene, hundreds of police and fire and EMT rigs. Triage on the high school football field. Dozens of homes feared destroyed and a casualty rate so high no one will even dare talk about it. (Finally, some sensibility.) All of that in a town of 2,800 people.

This is terrible anywhere, but it strikes a different cord in a place where everyone knows everyone.

So we’ll end on something uplifting from Boston, where people can’t maintain a moment of silence, but they will stir your very core:

More venues should do it that way.

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10
Apr 13

SSCA, Day One

We managed an early morning ride before heading into the conference this afternoon. Here are a few combined pictures:

We climbed out of the neighborhood, went down the side of the hill and turned into another, older neighborhood. We climbed up some easy little hills and I was thinking The Yankee would decide she didn’t like this route. We hit a four-way stop. Across from us two gentlemen were painting S-T-O-P on the asphalt under gray skies. We turned to the right. The road dropped out and then leveled off and we pedaled and pedaled and pedaled over a long stretch of flat ground until we found that Road Closed sign.

This was, I think, exactly how far the glaciers got during the last ice age. If there were any soil experts around I would have asked them. I’m sure there is some sort of evidence in the earth.

So we turned around and went back through the flat part, paced a post office truck and back up the first of the little hills and breezed through the intersection.

We discovered that the return part of that old neighborhood was an even easier ride going back and then climbed back toward where we started out. It was a short ride, but the air was pleasant and the roads were nice and it was good to be outside.

This was doubly nice since we checked in at our hotel, walked to the nearby conference hotel and committed ourselves to several days of indoors activities.

At the conference: My position this year as program chair of the political communication division requires that I also sit on the Southern States Communication Association’s executive council, so I had the good fortune to take part in that late-afternoon meeting. Felt like a faculty meeting in a lot of ways. People talked, they read, jokes were made, votes were had. Agenda items were dealt with in an executive fashion.

We adjourned and I found The Yankee and we met up with many of our friends. Brian from Texas was there, as were Barry and Melissa from Alabama and then Darrell from Texas, too. We talked down the street to a fairly upscale little restaurant called Quattro. The waiter somehow quickly ascertained that we were in town on business and politely announced he did not care. This was not his first day on the job.

We ordered. I picked the most common thing I could find. When the food came. Well, most of it. Mine did not. I made the international symbol for “I’m hungry too,” which is a pouty face. The waiter says “Oh crap!” He looks down at his pad, which instantly makes you wonder if your order was actually placed. He disappeared and returned with my plate. It was a plate of something. It could have been mine. This was a place with a slightly pretentious menu, so what I ordered might have been this, or perhaps something the next table got.

It was good, either way. No one else had complaints.

And, instantly, the jokes of the conference became “Kenny isn’t here” and “Too bad Kenny couldn’t see this.”

This will be a good joke. I just wish it didn’t happen two hours after we arrived.

Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest. I have another executive council meeting first thing and then a panel session to take part in. There will also be many sessions to hear and elbows to rub. It will be a busy day.

Here, then, are a few more pictures from our morning ride:

Things to read: Why paywalls are scary:

The case for paywalls would seem to be compelling: Stanch the decline in print circulation, get paid for producing valuable local content and tap into a fresh source of sorely needed revenue at a time advertising sales continue to shrink.

All good? Not necessarily. The reason to worry about paywalls is that they severely limit the prospects of developing a wider audience for newspapers at a time publishers need – more than ever – to attract readers among the digitally native generations that represent a growing proportion of the adult population.

Alan Mutter there is always thoughtful reading.

Study: Hyperlocal demand driven by mobile devices:

Demand for hyperlocal content is being driven by increased usage of mobile devices according to a study conducted by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) charitable foundation.

[…]

“Both the reach and the consumption of hyperlocal content has been accelerated by smartphones,” Jon Kingsbury, Nesta’s programme director for creative economy, told Journalism.co.uk.

Stop back by tomorrow. There will be more fun things thing, I’m sure.

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Apr 13