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Birmingham was the dividing line, more or less. To the north people reported snow amounts ranging from three to nine inches. In Birmingham it rained all day. The city started seeing snow late in the day, and it really began to stick after night fall. But it seems to have been a fairly mild event locally.
So I have no nice snow pictures. These photoshops I made, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, will have to do.
Hanging out with the Crimson crew, a crowd so big tonight that it takes two photographs to get them in:
I talked about leads all day, it seems. Lead stories, leads to stories, why this cold weather was leading us farther and farther away from spring.
Things to read … because we have to wait out this cold somehow.
Is Google making the web stupid?
Google (the source of so much traffic) is under huge pressure from Wall Street to deliver increased profits, and until self-driving cars kick in, the largest share of those earnings is going to come from the ads they sell. To maximize their profit, Google has spent the last nine years aggressively working to increase the share of ads on each page in their search results, as well as working hard to keep as many clicks as they can within the Google ecosystem.
If you want traffic, Google’s arc makes clear to publishers, you’re going to have to pay for it.
Which is their right, of course, but that means that the ad tactics on every other site have to get ever more aggressive, because search traffic is harder to earn with good content. And even more germane to my headline, it means that content publishers are moving toward social and viral traffic, because they can no longer count on search to work for them. It’s this addiction to social that makes the web dumber. If you want tonnage, lower your standards.
So. Are you writing for traffic, or for people?
As ESPN Comes To The iPad, It Drops The SportsCenter Brand From Its Mobile Apps:
Behind the scenes, the app update is part of a larger shift within ESPN as a product and editorial organization that is designed to unify all the different ways readers and viewers consume its content. The goal is to have a consistent experience regardless of which platform or device a person is using.
The ESPN product team is working on a desktop web version of the ESPN site — now in beta — that will look and feel a lot more like its mobile apps. That means taking the same sort of three-column user experience that is now available on the iPad and bringing it to the web.
If that sounds familiar, I’ve been saying it since last year. Nice to know I’m on the right track.
(We assume anything in line with an ESPN plan is on the right track until ESPN discontinues that approach.)
Theory: Snapchat launched an app platform:
Discover may look like content distribution, but instead of “publisher” think “developer,” and instead of “channel” think “app.” And then go through the list of capabilities they can bring.
For some years now, if you thought about it, it has made sense to start thinking of the social media item du jour as a tool rather than a medium unto itself. I don’t know everything about Snapchat, but this sounds like the logical extension of that idea.
This makes a lot of sense, I suppose. Wish I’d thought of it. Discovery Is Latest Cable Net to Stop Touting Live Ratings:
“As time-shifted viewership continues to increase, Live + Same-Day data no longer captures an accurate picture and value of our audience, and the lift from Live + 3 for many of our top programs is significant and growing,” said David Leavy, chief communications officer at Discovery.
The company said its top networks saw a 23% increase on average when accounting for viewership in the three days after a program airs versus the traditional live plus same-day metric among adults 25 to 54.
On the record, preemptive finger pointing, is that a good sign? US Officials Admit Concern Over Syrian Refugee Effort.
First paper of the new semester is out today. We have a weird schedule such that we are now three weeks into the term by the time the paper comes out. I wish I had a way to remedy that, but at the moment I do not. This morning, we got this:
So it was a long night last night as they got back into the swing of things. That was followed by class today, two critiques today and various other work-related fun. It was enough to keep me busy in the office. The phone does not ring, but the email does constantly ding.
There are big plans in the first 45 seconds of this video have been pretty influential the last few days:
I showed it to a class. It is going into a big presentation on Friday. It figures pretty highly into conversations like this, as well: How to Advertise to the Millennial Who Hates Advertising. Everybody wants millennials, he said. And you found yourself shaking your head, knowing he was right.
Not the last, but surely the definitive word on this less-than-mysterious subject: Here’s why NBC didn’t fire Brian Williams.
Things to read … because there’s rarely a definitive word. The science is never, really, settled. The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol:
The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.
The group’s finding that cholesterol in the diet need no longer be considered a “nutrient of concern” stands in contrast to the committee’s findings five years ago, the last time it convened. During those proceedings, as in previous years, the panel deemed the issue of excess cholesterol in the American diet a public health concern.
The finding follows an evolution of thinking among many nutritionists who now believe that, for healthy adults, eating foods high in cholesterol may not significantly affect the level of cholesterol in the blood or increase the risk of heart disease.
I wonder how many people are celebrating with breakfast for dinner tonight.
The UK has lost her way. There’s just no other way to say it:Charlie Hebdo’s UK distributor gave police list of stockists ‘in case of community tensions’ … then officers went to newsagents to demand names of customers who bought it
Two more police forces have been caught asking British newsagents which sold copies of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for details of the customers who bought it.
Officers from Wales and Cheshire police have approached shopkeepers and demanded personal information on readers of the magazine, according to reports.
It comes after police in Wiltshire caused outrage by demanding similar details be handed over in the wake of the Paris attacks.
A video from campus. You should check out the Christenberry Planetarium, which is awesome and too often overlooked:
We always ask their secret: 109-Year-Old Man Spends His Time Knitting Sweaters for Tiny Penguins. Australian Alfred Date says the secret to his longevity is just “waking up every morning.”
So, on those days when you wake up in the afternoon …
Here is a map my phone recorded:
That’s off of a fitness app. A company has a run app and a walk app and a walk-your-dog app (no kidding) and a cycling app. Naturally, that’s the one I got first. Why they don’t simply integrate these into one utility escapes me, but we do know that dog lobby is a powerful one. Anyway, I share that map with you because, on Monday, I tried out one of the gyms on campus I’d never been in before. It was built in the 1960s and has a track running around the outer ring.
Something about the building, though, interferes with the signal getting to the phone and the app. That’s two laps around a circular track floating above a standard gymnasium. The website tells you the distance, but the app was very much in disagreement. So I just turned it off and thought about downloading the walk-your-dog app.
Which probably would have been better than the run, or the way I’ve felt for the past two days. I still have grapefruits in my calves from the exertion, an easy five-mile run. (I knew the lap count and my general time.) Apparently I didn’t stretch enough and I’m reminded of this every time I walk down stairs right now.
Also, we have interesting little maintenance vehicles on campus. They are probably nicer than the older golf carts with plastic screens. And they have racing stripes:
I just thought you’d like to know that.
At this pool, we prefer calm and restrained play:
And, ladies, wear your swim caps. I love the coloring on that sign, which probably was installed and hasn’t been reconsidered in years. I love the way the light falls across it and the tile behind it. The building was built in 1961, so the sign went in sometime since then.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on campus, Samford completes purchase of Southern Progress property:
Looks like the 70s. MT @adeelnyt: First time @nytimes has used readers' Instagram photos on front page. Wonderful. pic.twitter.com/t5nLPzJ7aA
— kenny smith (@kennysmith) January 28, 2015
There are going to be some thorny ethical issues here. I refer you to item five under the “Rights” section of Instagram’s terms of service, “You will not remove, alter or conceal any copyright, trademark, service mark or other proprietary rights notices incorporated in or accompanying the Instagram Content and you will not reproduce, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works based on, perform, display, publish, distribute, transmit, broadcast, sell, license or otherwise exploit the Instagram Content.” There’s also a “We will not rent or sell your information to third parties outside Instagram” passage elsewhere in their terms.
Here, then, is a recent eyetracking study that says “Study participants were able to tell whether a photograph was made by a professional or an amateur 90 percent of the time.” The findings there also suggest professional photographs were twice as likely as user-generated photographs to be shared, that more time was spent with professionally generated photographs than with user-generated images and respondents rated shots for their memorability, the top 20 were done by pros.
So go on with Instagram, newsrooms.
I’m a fan of user generated content. I have a presentation on just this topic in a few weeks at the Alabama Press Association. UGC now has a valuable and, at times, vital role in the work of a news outlet. There are caveats and concerns: quality, accessibility, accuracy and, as above, issues of legality. Once you get beyond all of that — and that will take some doing — you get down to today’s example. Used in bulk like the Times did above it comes across as either a novelty (“We’re hip”) or a concession (“We couldn’t get our light painters outside to shoot the snow”).
Plus the joy of filters.
This story, which defies excerpting, just keeps on giving: Alabama police officer handcuffed, Maced fellow officer in front of confused mayor.
If you were waiting for the rest of the equation on relations with Cuba, that’s starting: Raul Castro: US must return Guantánamo for normal relations.
On Hitler’s Very Stationery is something we should all read. It’ll take you just a moment, and it is too good to excerpt. Read it.
