Wednesday


4
Apr 12

Biscuits, rust and authors

The second-biggest problem with the camera in the iPhone is the depth of field. This looks like a lot more food than it really is.

biscuit

But, then again, there’s the app that let’s you blur out everything but your focus. (And that biscuit was delicious.) There are also apps that turn your HDR photo into HDRerer, which makes rust look magestic. This is through my dirty windshield, in an oddly lit part of the day, so it doesn’t pop as it could, but:

Jeep

Think that guy is a beach bum in training? His flip flops do.

To see the real work of an HDR app, consider this picture from a few years ago:

MommaGs

And here’s the treatment:

MommaGs

It really jumps, doesn’t it?

There’s no real particular point to that, other than to say that I had a biscuit for lunch. If you didn’t, you should have. And also, the amount rest of the food really wasn’t that impressive. I’m blaming the frame of the barbecue chicken. The biscuit was the best part, though.

We had a bestseller speak in our class today. Nancy Dorman-Hickson co-wrote the biography on Joanne King Herring, who is a icon of the Republican party in Texas. You might recall her from Charlie Wilson’s War, which demonstrated her role in drumming up support for the United States’ proxy role in the Russo-Afghanistan war:

She was upset, Hickson said, by how overtly sexual she was portrayed in the movie. She is a gentile, Southern lady and so on.

Hickson was great in the class where she talked about freelancing and becoming a book author. She said she got that book contract, in part, because Herring’s people Googled “Southern writer” and “Christian.” And when they did, a small magazine piece she wrote on a Lutheran church event got her foot in the door.

There was a small handful of writers they decided to try out. The prospective authors were to have a phone conversation with Herring, and from there write one of her stories, trying to capture her tone and rhythm.

Hickson says “She was to share one story. Joanne is Southern. Multiple stories ensued.”

Well, yeah. That’s as natural as biscuits.


28
Mar 12

Oh snap!

We are so very fortunate those words did not define our generation. You’ll see why at the bottom of the post.

Riding through the neighborhood the other evening I found I’d picked the neighborhood time for bicycles. Usually I see the ladies walking, or a mixture of people taking their dogs for a stroll. I often find kids out in their yards, but never anyone riding a bike.

But on this particular weekend evening I found four of them. I caught up with two at the stop sign that leads to the creek. At least one of them was even greener than I am. He was struggling with something at the intersection and his friend had turned and was waiting for him up ahead, his thigh across his crossbar.

The second pair I met soon after. The first I passed easily enough, he was just out for a ride. His partner wanted a race. And so surged up the hill after the creek. He was pedaling furiously, constantly looking over his shoulder. I pedaled furiously, clicking down through the gears and tapping out a rhythm I’ve never tried on that little hill. At the top he turned right and I turned left, but I had him. I was no good for the next few miles after that, but I would have had him.

It would be better if I didn’t get competitive about this sort of thing, as I am a bad cyclist.

But today, when I sat in my office doing office things, I thought about that hill. I thought about that little attempt at rushing up it. I thought about how my legs weren’t burning. That was a nice thought, for sitting in the office.

In class one group of students did a presentation and part of that was asking the question “Is print dead?” What followed was the best conversation of the entire semester. There were many different stances. Some said yes, some no. Others took the middle ground and wondered why we don’t simply say that print is changing. There were strong opinions. It was so great we’re turning it into an assignment.

Maybe I should have started the semester asking that question.

Things to read from my journalism blog: The interactive infographic uses a fancy ProPublica design as an example.

The increasingly useful Internet radio where I realize how many streaming apps I have on my phone, and we are teased with next month’s announcement of even more surprising smartphone penetration.

Two prisms, two news brands pulls together two stories, one on Al Jazeera English and the other on the growing Patch network. Both good reads of successfully growing (in different directions) projects.

From my evening drive:


21
Mar 12

All will be better tomorrow

… but I feel like this today:

Allie

Whatever is going around, as I’ve heard no one say recently, makes me want to sprawl on a chair arm for comfort.


14
Mar 12

A random assemblage of stuff and things

My favorite meme of all time has become a campus group’s poster:

DuCreux

That, of course, is Joseph Ducreux, who was a French portrait painter at the court of Louis XVI and after the French Revolution. He liked physiognomy, assessing one’s personality by their facial expressions, hence his unorthodox portraiture, like this self-portait and, of course, the very famous Internet joke. You can’t even find the original set anymore, so buried are they amongst everyone’s contribution.

Two students showed this video in class today during a demonstration about advertising. The gasps from the rest of the class were great. See if you can figure out where this is going:

Happy birthday to The Birmingham News, which turned 124 today. This is the June 20, 1900, front page:

BirminghamNews

So the paper was 12 years old at the time. I haven’t seen any of the first volume’s front pages.

Things to read: Ad execs bullish on digital, marketers on social: Data reveals ‘disconnect’ with agencies:

Advertising executives -– both marketers and their agency representatives -– continue to increase their optimism toward digital media options, and are beginning to swing toward it as more of a “branding” than a performance “option,” but there are some significant disconnects between the way they look at various digital media silos. While agency executives tend to be far more bullish on the overall use of digital media, marketers are much more optimistic about budgeting for social media.

The findings, which are part of new, detailed analysis coming out of Advertiser Perceptions’ Fall 2011 survey on ad executive attitudes and optimism about media, show the overall index for digital -– including online display, search and video advertising –- trending upward, but the sentiment appears to be driven primarily by agencies. That insight is interesting, because the bottom line of big agencies appears to be benefitting from their continuing shift toward a greater reliance on digital media, according to a Pivotal Research analysis released Monday (OMD, March 13).

“But there is a discrepancy in the way marketers and agencies are seeing it,” says Randy Cohen, a partner in AP — which produces an ongoing series of ad industry tracking studies under its Advertiser Intelligence Reports banner, including this one. “It’s a disconnect,” he says, adding, “But agencies tend to do what marketers want them to.”

If that’s the case, social media should be the primary beneficiary, according to Cohen, because marketer sentiment is building much more favorably toward social networks versus the rest of the digital mix.

Things to read from my Samford blog:


7
Mar 12

Where I brag on CBS-42

I like to poke fun at television news, but it is all in good fun. I have a great respect for the hard work they do and the service they can provide. And I’m not just saying that because my wife is a former (Emmy-nominated) producer. Birmingham, despite its relative small size, is a great television market. This is the place for sports, the hardest weather market in the country and has as much, and more, news as the next place. (And as of this year and the county’s bankruptcy — the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the country — they’ll have plenty of stories for a long, long time.) Because of all of that they pull in great talent.

And that talent is very gracious, across the local industry really, but specifically I must point out the nice folks at WIAT CBS-42.

CBS

Here’s why. One of our classes takes field trips to learn about the various aspects of the media industry, and between the four (or five) sections of that class we hit all the stations in town. I visit WIAT when I teach the class and we went there today. Today also happened to be the day that the bingo trial, the biggest criminal trial of the year where defends were accused of using campaign contributions to buy and sell votes on state gambling legislation, came down with their verdicts: not guilty.

So it was a busy day in their newsroom, but we had a great tour. The students enjoyed themselves, learned about the business first hand and met some of the local experts, talking with reporters furiously working in their edit bays, meeting people like the assignment editor in the newsroom, watching the producer make his sausage in his booth and talking with nice, engaging and talented people like meteorologist Mark Prater:

CBS

It was a great tour. They all are. The local media is very kind to our program at Samford.