Wednesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Wednesday

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13
Feb 13

Your average, wonderful Wednesday

Resumes and group work today. Group work and resumes. And also the newspaper. A normal Wednesday in many respects. Remarkable for its normal attributes, normal because those attributes are remarkable.

Also, there were Rice Krispie treats in the cafeteria. Fine day, then.

Apropos of yesterday’s Cosby Show videos — clearly there is a 1980s renaissance going on in our home just now — I stumbled on this on Facebook today, Bill Cosby schools us about those crazy sweaters:

“We’re talking about the knit woolen things that look like the sheep were different colors or fell in some paint, right?” Cosby says over the phone. “Isn’t that what you’re talking about?”

Exactly. Besides referring to the sweaters sported by Cosby’s character, Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, to invoke the phrase “Cosby sweater” is to call something garish, tacky, and outdated—in an affectionate way. And in the cyclical world of fashion design, such passé looks have recently inspired a swath of contemporary looks featuring bold, geometric patterns and incorporating a mishmash of colors and textures.

Cosby himself doesn’t even remember when he first heard the term “Cosby sweater,” and is hard-pressed to explain why the style is such a phenomenon among young people today.

“I have no idea, and I’m not going make up anything,” says Cosby, “but I think youthful people have a long time to live, so they can waste some time on something like that.”

Here’s a different sort of word cloud. We’ve all grown used to the ones made from the transcript of speeches. USA Today asked readers to submit one word to describe the state of the union.

Here is the result.

A Poynter list: 5 reasons mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago. Here are a few of the bullets, click over for the rest:

1. A responsive design isn’t a mobile strategy

2. Mobile will not only surpass the desktop, but begin to erode it

3. The desktop decline will pressure news revenues

I’d argue that the separate points are all correct, but that the comparison of the mobile evolution to the Internet evolution is not as neat and tidy as you might imagine.

Here’s another one of those stories that lets you think that “kids these days” are pretty good after all. Fine storytelling, too:

Quite a bit of Tom Rinaldi influence there. Here’s an old Rinaldi piece which hits on similar themes:

Slow piano, reflective pace and tender story; just add tears.

Just add images. PR Daily created a helpful social media photo sizing cheat sheet. Use it in good health.

Leave the Rice Krispie treats to me.

Alabama / Auburn / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
6
Feb 13

The critical use of the word ‘Just’

We discussed critiquing news stories in class today. How to do it, what to critique, what not to get overly zealous about. How to treat this as a constructive exercise and not as a personal reproach, and so on. The idea is that the more you watch things critically — because I make you critique them — the more you’ll see things that work and things that don’t work.

A critical eye is very important in the craft.

So we talked about television packages. I showed this story’s video package, which was still timely early in the week. It was a nice example of localizing the story when it came to the Midland standoff.

The reporter found a local police officer who has gone through the FBI negotiation training and interviewed him about what might have been taking place. It was a helpful story to a degree. There are some vagaries, which is both based on the nature of this officer not knowing every detail about what is happening hours outside of his jurisdiction and a need to speak generally for tactical reasons too. But it is nice localized story. It has some production issues and some very strange B-roll shots. It gave us something to look at.

And then I showed them this:

That is never going to get old, even as fewer and fewer students are familiar with the YouTube sensation.

And then we got started in our efforts to set up WordPress blogs. They are a sharp group of students, and I’m sure they’ll be running the Internet by the end of the semester.

I have done thy bidding, Internet, and given you many more people to add content!

Lovely, busy day otherwise. It was national signing day, and the Crimson’s sports editor was posting stuff continually to their Twitter account. That earned him follows from two of the television stations in town. Nice little reward for his work.

My open letter to new signees got repackaged.

On the way home I stopped at Buy Buy Baby to get something off a friend’s registry. This place is full of things you didn’t know you needed if you’re raising children. Glancing at the products it is amazing any of us made it out of toddler years without these things in our homes.

The store is bright and smells of baby powder. Just add water, I suppose.

That’s an improvement, though, really. The last time I was in this store it was still a Circuit City. As I noted on Twitter, it was dank and dim and smelled of desperation then. I remember trying to test a camera of some device and the guy there was not able to put a battery into the thing.

I looked around at the deep sockets of the eyes of the few people actually in the store, realized that everyone there was touching, but no one was buying. I knew it was over.

Within a year they were all gone.

If only that one floor guy had bothered to look for a battery, things might have gone differently.

But probably not.

Anyway, in a much more pleasant environment with a thoroughly enjoyable young lady helping, I managed to find the appropriate burp cloths. They were very, very decorative. I’m sure yours were just a flat white, once upon a time.

Three recent items on the other blog:

Localizing the big stories

Have you tried SoundCloud?

USPS to drop Saturday deliveries

I have a lot of things stored away to write over there. Get used to the links, I guess.

Saw this sign, the oracle of our time:

I know the owner. His son and daughter are friends. The sign has become a big fun quasi-event lately. It isn’t true until Krystal’s says it is, and all that.

When I took that picture it was halftime in the Alabama-Auburn basketball game. Alabama was leading Auburn 23-13. Halftime. In a basketball game, full of varsity, scholarship players. Presumably for both teams. (So you see why the word “Just” is important on that sign.)

In the second half Auburn went on a 36-14 run — that was all of the scoring. The final was 49-37, Auburn. Weird game. But Auburn held Alabama to its lowest point total in the 146 game series history, so there’s that.

history / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
30
Jan 13

Emergence — seemingly coordinated movement

Big storms, bad weather overnight and this morning. Campus delayed opening for a few hours. The most destructive elements of the storm were elsewhere, thankfully, not nearly as severe or widespread as it could have been.

There was a leak in my office.

My desk faces a wall. On the other side of that wall is a part of the campus radio station studio. Behind the wall to my desk’s right is part of the newspaper’s newsroom. The wall to my left opens to the exterior of the University Center. There’s a large, long window that looks out onto a green hill, a parking lot and a tree line in front of the next building up the hill.

From the top of that window there was a long, slow dripdripdrip. Under loud booms of thunder I called the facilities department to see about this leak. Our building is about 60 years old, so there are leaks from time to time. Offices across the hall had a good scare in the last year or so. The radio station had a leak, too, but managed to avoid damage. An office on the floor directly below the newspaper had a leak a few weeks ago. The folks that did the repair work surmised it must have gotten there from the newspaper, but we showed no damage. There are a few ceiling tiles in the hallway that have seen better days.

But now the gutter outside my window is threatening neatly stacked piles of paper filled with lecture notes and classroom exercises.

I met a man today who started his career at Samford years ago as a member of the campus safety department. He told me a story about working a late shift in the guard shack at the entrance in his first few weeks on the job.

A car pulled up, he asked to see some identification. The driver couldn’t produce any. He’d left his wallet and license at home.

The man, citing state law, said “I should make you park your car and call you a cab since you have no license with you.”

The driver said he’d turn around, head home and fetch his ID.

The next day the new guard was talking to his boss, who’d just had a conversation with his boss. They talked about the man he’d encountered last night. Older gentleman. Tall. Well dressed. Turns out the car was driven by Dr. Thomas Corts, the president of the university. The new employee didn’t recognize him.

The president said the man at the guard shack had behaved appropriately. And he should never do that to the president again.

We all had a nice laugh. Corts stepped down as the university president in 2006 and died four years ago. People still tell great stories about him. They all have some lesson in them, which is probably one of those marks of a good man. This one was pretty clear: You never know when you’ll meet someone important to you.

We talked about those kinds of first impressions in class a bit today. We talked career expos, first impressions and so on. It was resume day for the intro class. The Career Development Center led a great discussion on the Dos and Don’ts.

Rule Number One: Don’t use your mother as a reference.

Things to read: 4 TED Talks every journalist should watch.

For 40 years, this Russian family was cut off from all human contact, unaware of World War II:

Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer hysterical and, though still obviously frightened, “frankly curious.” Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, “We are not allowed that!” When Pismenskaya asked, “Have you ever eaten bread?” the old man answered: “I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.”

Birds dancing in the sky, beautiful and hypnotic:

I remember discussing this phenomenon in a leadership class once, discussing birds flying in formation. Emergence:

A school of fish or a flock of birds is not controlled by any leader. Instead, it emerges naturally as each individual follows a few simple rules, such as go in the same direction as the other guy, don’t get too close, and flee any predators.

Surely someone made some sort of Aristotelian reference. Of course Aristotle also thought it was transmutation … But Aristotle had a lot to say about rain.

journalism / links / music / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Jan 13

Voices of the past

I am not sure where today went. I’m going to blame the emails, literally hunders of them, that I wrote today. Also there was reading materia. Reading my material and then reading for a class I’m teaching. Somehow the day disappeared.

So, here, have some interesting links.

As ESPN Debated, Manti Te’o Story Slipped Away:

Some inside the network argued that its reporters — who had initially been put onto the story by Tom Condon, Te’o’s agent — had enough material to justify publishing an article. Others were less sure and pushed to get an interview with Te’o, something that might happen as soon as the next day. For them, it was a question of journalistic standards. They did not want to be wrong.

Bless those hearts full of integrity. What’s that ESPN? Yet another bizarre update in the bizarre story? OK:

A source close to Te’o gave ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap documents that the source says are Te’o’s AT&T phone records from May 11 to Sept. 12, the date that the woman was supposed to have died. The logs are not originals, but spreadsheets sent via emails, and could not be independently verified.

They re-wrote it, but I recorded the original passage on Twitter. The earlier version said “Their veracity couldn’t be independently confirmed, but the source insisted they are genuine.”

The source insisted. In a story about hoaxes. Journalistic standards.

Jobs: Recession, Tech kill middle-class jobs:

Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.

And the situation is even worse than it appears.

Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market.

On the other hand, Lowe’s is hiring 54,000 and 9,000 permanently. And union membership is down in Alabama.

Finally, A 1951 home recording from Hazel Street. Kim and Herb are celebrating 25 years, and all of their friends recorded a message on a Wilcox-Gay Recordio.

That’s via James Lileks. And since he didn’t, I’ll wonder why it is that this recording fascinates in ways 60 years from now that nothing we produce on Instagram or Pinterest or anywhere else won’t in 2075.

Here’s Bill Wagner, a coal man, who — think about this — was about to hear his recorded voice for the first time ever.

Here’s a raucous group sing:

Here’s evidence that teenaged girls have giggled for generations. This song is from 1935, the first country song by a female artist, Patsy Montana to sell more than one million units. So maybe this was recorded by amateurs now lost to history in the 40s or 50s.

Here Albert is recording a message in California for friends or family back home in the midwest during World War II:

Those were all thrift store finds. This one is a family heirloom:

There are at least several dozen of these on YouTube. I could listen to them all day.

That is not where my day went.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — 3 Comments
16
Jan 13

I love everything about riding in the rain

I love everything about riding in the rain, so the hour I spent outside today was a delight. It started out just cool and overcast, but before I got halfway to the second turn I was in a drizzle. And then came the plet, plink, blet of the raindrops as I cut through town.

My jacket kept me warm as I watched the drops get ready to fall from the bike frame. I love dodging little puddles standing in improbable places and the little patches of grease and oil that stand out on the road in the fresh coating of water.

I love how that one drop of water forms on the bottom of my helmet and hangs on for the longest time, intent on finally hitting the ground somewhere else. How my glasses get rain on the inside and out, and how the rain is cold enough to keep them from fogging up, but still makes them almost useless, so you wind up peering through the space between glasses and helmet.

My gloves are soaked, but warm, and the cold feeling of the soles of my shoes pushing off the ground when a red light flips to green. I like how the little Cateye computer is apparently waterproof, and how the little tool bag under my saddle gets wet from probably every direction.

When the rain gets into my shoes, and my socks are full of the stuff I imagine that it makes me ride stronger, because of the extra weight pushing down into the little circular stroke on the pedals. It probably doesn’t, but I like to imagine it does when I lean over the handlebars and imagine this little roller is the biggest hill that’s ever been topped.

And then, on the downhill side, I felt like I was riding a bicycle again. Maybe that means I’m mostly recovered from my spill last summer. I didn’t think about my shoulder or the sound or that long and still-somewhat ongoing recovery, just the ride. (And how all of my fitness is gone.)

I love the sounds, the whizzing of the tires through a thin film of water and the trickling of runoff into the drainage system. When you pass by them on both sides, you get that rumbling drainage sound in stereo.

Something about the rain and the gunmetal skies and the water on the road changes the nature of noise. There is one brief moment, somewhere around 21 miles per hour, when the wind sounds like a car beginning to track you down. In the rain that is muted, and amplified. You have to go a little bit faster to get that sound. So when I came down the last two little hills when I turned toward home I got to dive into four little turns to build a little more speed the reward is even louder.

And then, having circled the town and the ride is nearing its end, the rain does too. It was with me the whole time, and so there I am, imagining through my foot over the top tube, giving my legs a break and lungs a rest. Passing underneath the beautiful, bare oaks in the bottom of the neighborhood, I get the gravity shower. Everything but my back is wet, because I’ve opened my jacket.

I love everything about riding in the rain. Except the cleanup. Now it is sprinkling again and I have to get the helmet and the jacket and the shoes off so I can grab a towel to dry the frame and components on my bike.

And I’m getting grease and dirt and grim everywhere. My wheels are covered in the stuff for reasons I can’t explain. And the back of my jacket is dirty, from back wheel spray I guess. I towel off the big parts and wipe down the rest with paper towels. Then I can finish my water, of which there is plenty because I found myself just inhaling the fresh stuff on the ride. And then a chocolate milk and a shower and finally I can be dry again. But I love everything about riding in the rain.