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Wednesday

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15
Sep 10

Some sunny day

The newspaper was put to bed at 12:30 this morning, which is more than an hour quicker than last week. That’s progress. Now I have to warn the hardworking student-journalists that there will also be a night of setbacks somewhere in their future.

The paper looks better this week. In our critique meeting today I picked on a lot of small things. There are a few design issues to work through and some other editing and writing topics to address, but I think this year’s staff can make quick strides. The biggest thing will just be in recognizing the problems early. No easy trick, that.

Some of those things can be fixed quickly, others will take a little time and perhaps a workshop or two.

Today we finished the preparing on our high school workshop, which takes place tomorrow. We’re going to have a record crowd on hand. This despite one or two local high schools dropping their journalism program for the year because of budget cuts. (Also, the Alabama Scholastic Press Association’s workshop is running opposite the Samford program this year, but it hasn’t hurt our attendance.)

I’m only doing one little presentation this year. I’ll be running around making sure the speakers arrived, everything is working and that no one is lost. It is a great way to spend a day, talking with high school students about their newspapers and television stations, showing them around Samford, introducing them to our students and to professional journalists. We have a great time with it and our visitors always seem to enjoy themselves too.

Now that the big day is almost here I’ll probably turn back to student recruitment. Having a gorgeous day on the beautiful Samford campus tomorrow won’t hurt that effort, either.

It is a great job, and an easy day, when you can talk about exciting things like that with young people who are also very much excited about where they are going to wind up, or what they might study when they get there. That’s the sort of enthusiasm that is contagious.

I talked this afternoon with the news director of the campus radio station. She’s one of those same, excited go-get-em types. If you can’t brainstorm up have a dozen good ideas in a hallway with people like that you just aren’t trying hard enough.

I like to drop little nuggets like this into those conversations from time to time.

Reporting has always in some ways been a collaborative process between journalists and their sources. But increasingly, there’s a merger between the source and the content producer. As a result, more journalism will happen through collaborative reporting, where the witness of the news becomes the reporter, says David Clinch, editorial director for Storyful and a consultant for Skype. Journalists, Clinch says, must be able to pivot quickly between the idea of using the community as a source of news and as the audience for news, because they are both.

Students are intrigued by ideas like that, once they realize they’re allowed to think this way. The latest example, included in that link, is the hostage situation at the Discovery Channel offices in Maryland earlier this month. The story came out of a news start up there, which leaned on a Twitter account to break the story. Novel approach, that.

(Not really, I was doing that two-and-a-half years ago at al.com. I set up that account and within a week broke two fires and a prominent business layoff story. Now that primary account, aldotcom, has 6,500 followers and breaks news constantly.)

I say this to your boredom, but it never ceases to amaze me that I get to read and dream up and put into practice and teach these things and call it a career. I’m a lucky guy.

After all, I get to work here:

Where I get views like this:

Visited Walmart tonight for a little of this and that. The irony was on rollback pricing, since I’d noticed earlier in the day that my bank is now running a cashback program based on my “unique spending preferences.” They are running the ads between the lines of my online register. The first offer was for Waffle House, which I visit exactly once a year. (And where I’ve never used anything but cash, making me wonder just how unique these preferential algorithms are.)

The second offer was for Walmart. I made fun of that. And then I found myself there. And then I found this:

Just wrong.

The meme on Twitter tonight was rock ‘n’ roll retractions. I had a lot of fun with these, and want to remember them forever, sooo:

I’ve got two tickets to paradise. Pack your bag we’ll leave during off peak hours.

What’s the frequency, Kenneth. Oh, never mind, I see it right here.

No more ‘I love yous’ but expect late night hang up calls, standing outside of your apartment and pining on Facebook.

After much consideration I am, in fact, not too sexy for this shirt.

You know what? I WILL put a fine point in it. I am the only bee in your bonnet. No one really likes you.

Yes, you may kiss me once. You may even kiss me twice. But, come on pretty baby, you needn’t kiss me deadly.

It has been brought to my attention that I don’t want you to want me, need you to need me, nor would I love you to love me.

Turns out the heart of rock ‘n’ roll is actually the guy that plays the triangle.

Let’s do the time warp, but only the once, so we do not create space continuum problems.

I’ve reconsidered it, and I would do anything for love, provided it is legal in my state of origin.

Turns out we did not rock the casbah, but we dropped a few bunker busters in the vicinity.

Nope. That was most definitely NOT paradise that I saw there by the dashboard light.

Don’t stop believing. Unless you’ve been swayed as of late by Christopher Hitchens.

Welcome to the jungle. We’ve had a change of heart and you can live quite prosperously here now.

The government now tells me I was born on a protected wetland, born on a protected wetland.

In da gatta da vitta you should know that I am merely fond of you.

Turns out the fire should be on the water and the SMOKE should be in the sky. Deep Purple regrets the error.

We decided to not live in a yellow submarine because, on reflection, that’s just stupid.

About that Lola thing … sorry.

Changed my mind. Not working for the weekend. I have to pull a double shift at the 7-11 on Saturday.

Ok, you talked us into it. We WILL take it, if you’re talking about a general wealth redistribution program.

I’ve had a change of heart. Do not pour your sugar on me. I’m on a low cal diet.

Been thinking about it. Should have never gone electric. Regretfully, Bob Dylan.

The London Tourism Board has asked me to rephrase. There are no werewolves here.

Yes, I said that Friday I was in love, but I was just lonely.

Tons more here.

More photographs from the 1939 World’s Fair will be along in a bit.

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8
Sep 10

Just your average unusual day

The paper was put to bed at about 2:30 this morning. I slept for about four hours and then started this new day.

Hit the gym for squats and arms and rode 10 miles on the bike.

Visited Sam’s Club, because I need a new tire for the car. I made the mistake of arriving before my puny little membership would let me in. I could, the nice lady at the door said, upgrade my membership. But I can also wait 20 minutes and save 60 bucks. So I did.

While they put on the new tire I walked around the store. Figured this would be an opportunity to test the microphone on the iPhone in a noisy environment. Also, it was a good time to make fun of product packaging. Most of these jokes aren’t especially good, but the microphone proved better than I expected.

It is sensitive to movement. You can really tell when it is closer to my face based on the sound. Next time I’ll try an attached microphone to see what that sounds like. I’ll also not be buying a tire, next time. Already that experiment is more fun.

Returned to the office — wasn’t I just here? — and looked over the paper. Not a bad start. There are obviously things on which we can improve, and I’ve no doubt that will happen.

We had a critique meeting this afternoon where we discussed what went right and wrong and what to fix for next time. I told them of my high expectations for the year. I want them to set high goals because they can reach them. They have a lot of exciting things in the works for the year and I want them to see those plans come to fruition.

Here’s the requisite welcome back type story. Super Bowl champion Tony Dungy dropped in for a surprise visit, which also made the front page.

Had lunch with the university communications people. Critiqued the paper. Visited the library. I found a big stack of negatives and compact discs of old photojournalism assignments. I found at least one sitting U.S. Senator was in the 20-year-old stack of negatives. The special collections people in the library basement like that sort of thing.

The extended family got a bit more extended. He arrived a few days early, but is handsome and smart. Word is that he’s already teaching calculus in the nursery. I made a video for him, but managed to delete it. Just imagine it as being the funniest thing ever composed on a phone, and then reduce your expectations by 17 percent.

Returned to studying.

I purchased, and nearly filled, that binder tonight. The good news: only the last 100 pages of that are for my class tomorrow.

So back to it, then.

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1
Sep 10

And having turned the page

Poor soundbites from the president and indistinct ends aside, we’re now in the new post-modern when it comes to the United States in Iraq. There is a bit of dissembling and, of course, best-foot-possible posturing going into the spin, but the fighting isn’t over. There will still be combat and sacrifice and families separated from loved ones in this, the fourth chapter of the Iraq War.

I covered the launch of the war while in Washington D.C. Like many others I know friends or family who served there. Fortunately they’ve all come safely home. Here’s hoping the rest get back safe, too.

Random journalism observations of the day: Nice to see Chris Fowler can keep his journalistic distance and not shill for Nike. That sort of thing stopped mattering a long time ago, but still.

Check this out, I’m still working my way through the high school workshop circuit and I just found a school where every teacher has, and uses, a blog for classroom purposes. So every student is required to visit it, which means we now have the four R’s: reading, riting, ‘rithmetic and RSS.

Journalist, entrepreneur, philosopher, pundit Alan Mutter muses about a return to the Tampa Model, tying a newspaper and a television station into one newsroom to share coverage, merge manpower and effect cost savings. For a while the idea was thought of as the future of the news industry, but as Mutter notes, the joint Tampa Tribune and WFLA enterprise has not been without it’s difficulties. Others in the comments note a few other aborted examples.

At the macro level the problems are abundantly cultural. What newspapers are after and what television needs are different. The language the two newsrooms use are different. The skill sets, obviously have more than a little variation. Television staffers write differently than newspaper folk. Print reporters don’t always function in the visual medium as well as they might like. The presently natural place to put together a combined print and video product is on the web, but most traditional print and TV organizations aren’t exactly comfortable with that.

So, in a merger, the problems that Tampa model has exhibited for the last 10 years become apparent. Perhaps the problem is in the merger. Maybe the way to proceed would be with a creation of an entirely new news operation.

We’re working to converge our newsrooms at Samford and I’m hoping we can make great strides to do even more of that this year. In many ways these transitions have to happen slowly and, I think, culturally. The people doing the work have to see the need and the value, and that can only happen over time.

A new generation of students who are using the Internet as a matter of course in every classroom are already learning the values of accessibility, utility and multimedia.

On the site I’ve started a new September feature. I shot lot of pictures of Allie the other day, so I figure I’ll add a new cat picture every day. Because if the Internet isn’t powered by cat photographs yet some IT guy somewhere is working on making that happen.

Also I’ve split up some recent posts, pulling out the regular features from the daily entries. I’d been on the fence about it for some time, but figured if I was going to do it now was the time. Better to pull out a handful now than a few more handfuls in the future. This presumes I’ll decide to separate them in the future, of course. I separated them in the present because … let’s say a phone booth landed in the front yard with a future version of me and told me I came to that decision.

A phone booth? I hate to pick on Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure for the film’s otherwise excellent authenticity, but they really whiffed on the phone booth, didn’t they? The goofs on IMDB, they are priceless:

There is a heinous number of most egregious factual errors in the depiction of the famous historical dudes, their lives, their works, their time periods and the state of their hearing.

Someone, upon having that idea, was very happy to find that no one had written any notes for the movie on IMDB.

I forgot to mention that I made the front page of al.com yesterday. I could say that in some way or another every day once upon a time. The sports producer wrote me a few weeks ago to ask if I’d participate in a roundtable discussion throughout the football season. Here’s a segment of my first installment, the topic Auburn’s chief worry:

Break them down: QBs, wideouts (to a smaller extent) and every individual grouping on defense. These are the ones you have to look at. All of those guys have different numbers on the jersey, but the name on the back may as well be John Q. Potential. There’s loads of it, but it now simply has to develop. Stars no longer matter. Recruiting class rankings are now ancient window dressing. The feel good quotes from teammates and coaches must now be tested — and not against the Arkansas States of the world. At this point we must all just see who pans out and how.
[…]

Even if one of the other elements can’t reach it’s potential, though, the regression to the mean seems an improvement over last year’s baseline. And you can worry less because there is no way humanly possible that each unit finds itself in that situation. Overall, Auburn finds everything looking shinier than this time last year.

Special teams, I concluded, is on the clock.

We’re grilling hamburgers tonight. I’m getting my act together for class tomorrow and, soon, uploading the newest additions to the 1939 World’s Fair section. Come back to see those, and more, soon.

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25
Aug 10

Got your days confused?

I do, apparently, but as personal problems go it is mild and worth working through. There could be so many more. Your starter may not start, for example. Worse still, your alternator may not alternate.

Happily all of the various mechanical parts of my lovely automobile are doing just what they are supposed to do — taking the action, adding the -ER at the end to give it a name and then safely transporting me from A to B. I have my health. I have many other wonderful things we sometimes ask overlook. In that context, my confusion over whether it is the 25, the 26 or the twenty-thirtheighth is not the biggest problem in the world.

Oh, you didn’t even notice, but I’d mistakenly dated the blog. You didn’t notice, did you? Oh, good. If you had I would go out back and make a flogging spectacle of self-flagellation. So, a thousand humble apologies.

Beyond maintaining a straight gig line I don’t recall having any sort of obsession of minute detail before I built my first web page. I blame Tim Berners-Lee and the summer of 1996.

Anyway. Hit the phones today, in a terribly exacting way. Tis the season to call all of the high schools in the region and remind them about the upcoming journalism workshop for high school students at Samford. It is a tricky thing, catching teachers on the job. Often they are in class, as you might expect.

Some of them have voicemail. For others you must simply leave a message the old-fashioned way, with an office aide, and hope it gets through. Those I’ll be calling again next week.

The workshop, though, is a strong one. We’ll have several hundred students for a day of magazine, newspaper, yearbook and broadcast sessions. The high school students get to meet our faculty, visit our beautiful campus and hear from industry leaders. They get war stories, advice, the chance to get a little insight on what kind of work they could do one day and so on. It is a fine workshop, I’m glad I’ve had the chance to work on it the last two years.

Somehow, during the day of calling, I managed to get the operator. That’s not right. I landed in the operator’s voicemail. This would surprise most people, as we still think of the operator as a bank of individuals with a nasal voice sitting at a giant console full of patch cords. Operators have voicemail?

And what would the function of that be, anyway? I needed your assistance with a particularly tricky area code, and also, was feeling a bit lonely and wanted to chat. But you’re not there. So … I guess I’ll just Google it. Thanks, though.

So I left a message in a nasal tone, asking if they could ring me back and put me in touch with someone in Peoria.

I don’t know anyone in Peoria, but I’ve always been anxious to learn how a great many things played there. This would seem to be the time to find out.

I’m still waiting for the operator to return that call.

Made jambalaya for dinner. We’d picked up fresh sausage at the meat lab recently and I’d mentioned it to The Yankee. She thought that might be a good idea. For jambalaya, though, you need musical accompaniment. I considered Pandora, but I guard my minutes there carefully now. To the App Store!

You want zydeco? There is no app for that.

You can, however, get a stream from the legendary WWOZ. (Rush right now to grab yourself a wonderful community-supported radio experience.) It was jazz night, and that works for sausage and Cajun concoctions. Ultimately I think the Italian seasonings in the sausage muted the festivities in the jambalaya, but you live and learn.

I listened to jazz, from New Orleans, almost 400 miles away in my kitchen tonight over my phone, via my wireless network. This modern world, and the Internet will never cease to impress me. I credit Berners-Lee for that, too.

adventures / links / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
18
Aug 10

Warming the lamp

That was the afternoon. A threat of meteorological drama which pittered and flittered into nothing. But for a while it looked as if something was about to descend from the clouds.

But that was just part of the day. There was scanning. And scanning! And also I reproduced a digital representation of some real-world items into my computer. Finally, I placed things on a glass that covers a light, pressed a button and watch the light move in a predetermined back and forth fashion.

Took The Yankee out to dinner at the local First Date Place. Haven’t been there in maybe 12 years. (I’ve had dates since then, but just not there.) Provino’s has moved since my last visit. The new place though manages to retain much of the look of the old location. The restaurant was a little cleaner and brighter than my memory — but my recollections can be dusty and dim.

It was good back then and Provino’s was good tonight, too. The garlic rolls still come out in a pool of melted garlic. The salad is cheesy and … well, it is a salad, OK? She had the chicken francese, I had something that was acceptable, but wouldn’t be my regular dish.

Before we ordered The Yankee said “Maybe it will be like Rome.” And then the waitress walks up and says “My name is Amy Leigh and — ”

Yes, exactly like Rome.

Random things: Noted the Eight Commandments of the gas pump. There were more, but they didn’t focus group well. The second one is well written. I do not follow the one about cell phones, because I am not orthodox. I had a picture re-published on The War Eagle Reader. And, tomorrow, it is back to class; so tonight it is back to ironing.