journalism

Instagram / Ireland / journalism / memories / photo / Rowan / sports / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Ewe always want more time
14
Apr 26

Ewe always want more time

A bright and warm and sunny spring day. The sort of day you should have. The sort of spring day you definitely want. The kind of day that, darn it, you deserve after a long hard winter. The things growing outside know it. They know it best of all. I just stood in the window and looked at the snow, this thing was under it for weeks.

So my only problem here is that I feel this blooming beauty deserves a lot more admiration, and a lot more time, than I can afford to give it at the moment. Blooming things should capture our imagination and attention. They certainly shouldn’t be a mere backdrop, a brief bit of mother nature’s colorful palette ignored for the moment, dismissed for the day, unappreciated because we’re busy.

There’s a lot to do during the blooming period, a clumsy scheduling error that occurs every year, and that’s a first world problem.

Which sounds like I want to do a lot of horticulture; I just want to look at the flowers.

If you start at the URL logo in the bottom corner and let your eyes move up the image you’ll see an airliner flying over. Hear it, fetch the phone, open the camera app, find it in the sky, talk about it here. A lovely way to spend a moment outdoors …

… when you’re not admiring the flowers.

In Rits and Trads we talked about youth sports today. Sportsing: what’s the point? Students are always interested in talking about youth sports, because most of them played something, and because travel ball is ludicrous, but kids are great.

Youth sports, we say, helps teach interpersonal skills, helps us learn how to follow rules, participate with others, respect teammates and opponents, and so on. I like to talk about my favorite coach, who wasn’t the best coach, but was determined to teach us more about those things than the game. Since most of us have a very finite window as athletes, that just seems like a good idea. Teach me how to be a better me.

And that let me talk about social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and constructivism learning theory (Piaget, 1964) (and others) and social learning theory, (Bandura, 1977).

Sometimes we are what we see, and social learning theory talks about that.

Of course I put in a cycling video. Paris-Roubaix was just Sunday, it was an all-timer, and someone is out there reproducing the race with their kids. This is remarkably faithful to the actual race.

And we talked a bit about representation. It seemed pertinent since we get that conversation most around the Olympics and thisw was an Olympic year. This video, then, was a cute no brainer.

I showed other videos, too. A friend of mine coaches youth soccer and he has the parents of the two teams form a tunnel and the two teams run through it at the end of the game. He says that by the end of that the kids can’t even remember the score of the game. They’re just having a good time. I showed several things like that. And then we talked about the rituals and traditions in youth sports. The one that no one thought of was senior night.

In Criticism we talked about this story, LeBron James, Cooper Flagg Make History as Fans React to Near Triple-Doubles in Lakers’ Loss to Mavs, which allowed us to talk about curating and context.

Former umps watch their brethren deal with ABS and feel sympathy, pain:

What is a strike?

The answer to that question has traditionally been easy for MLB umpires: A strike is whatever I say it is.

However, amid the introduction of the automated ball-strike challenge system, highly experienced former MLB umps are critical of baseball’s newest technology.

Citing their own observations and conversations with those currently still in the job, the consistent criticism has been simple: What’s a ball and what’s a strike has changed, and they don’t know how, exactly, to call it.

That allowed us to talk, among other things, about who is included in a story, who is not, and why those things might happen.

After class I beat it back home, and to the bike shop. We’d checked our bikes in for an annual tune-up. Mine was about three years overdue. Tune-ups aren’t expensive, but add-ons are. My lovely bride needed new tires and instead of just ordering them and replacing them myself, our friend the bike guy mechanic did it for us. He slapped on the most expensive tires on the market. These things are interwoven with cash money, they have to be.

I told him I’m probably going to go on the market for a new bike this summer. He told me where to shop. A lot of the smaller shops, like his, have been cut out of the roadie market. It’s a square-footage vs. manufacturer demands vs. ROI issue. He has a small shop. The big four bike manufacturers want you to buy a certain number of machines from them (basically on spec) and then sell them. But bikes don’t constantly fly off the shelves, so the store might have to buy 15 or 20 bikes and hope they can sell them. And that’s all a huge risk, or maybe untenable. Here is a sport built on local culture and the source of the equipment is flirting with driving the locals entirely out of business. My guy said I should go over to this other bike shop and get in some test rides, because I want to try different things out. The guy told me to go to his competitor. I suppose, considering how the industry is changing under his feet, that other store isn’t his competition anymore. And this is how manufacturers are marginalizing and creating vulnerabilities in the best ambassadors their industry has.

So I suppose, this June, I’ll be doing that. Maybe, if I do it right, I can be gripped by paralysis by analysis and not buy a new bike at all.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy this close encounter with the roadside sheep with me, won’t you?

Ya know, we have some neighbors that have two small sheep herds. They don’t let them roam around, and we’re all the lesser for it.

journalism / Rowan / sports / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on The editor in me wishes I’d become a better writer
3
Mar 26

The editor in me wishes I’d become a better writer

Woke up tired, going to end it that way. And was tired most the way throughout. It was another busy and full day, too. When last we talked, I was taking a brief break from the big job packet. Yesterday was the clear-my-head-of-it day. Tonight, I started working on a dead tree edit.

You can edit the file you’re working on, but there’s a lot more you can catch on paper. At least that’s what I tell myself. It has the added benefit of being true. Also, this is a mortifying exercise.

I found the first typo on the Table of Contents. By page four I found my sixth correction.

It went on like that, for about 15 pages, which was just about all I could stand tonight. I’ll do the rest in the morning, and send it off.

I’ve read Dillard, I’ve admired Steinbeck’s journals, and Sarton’s memoirs. I’m sure they’re all more interesting than that, and — though it has been a while since I’ve read some of them, I don’t recall them talking a lot about editing comma splices and redundancies.

Today in Rituals and Traditions the students presented some interesting traditions that they found. I’m sure they all worked tirelessly, evaluating any number of these things from across the country and the world, studiously evaluating the premise behind any number of these things from all of the sports. That, I hope, is what they took from my directions. I wanted them to find something interesting, figure out where it came from, and tell us a bit about the thing. Why does it matter, and so on. The goal was to expose everyone in the class to a bunch of new ideas. You never know from whence inspiration will come. By and large, that’s exactly what they did.

Someone showed us a video of lighting the beam.

Someone else talked about the milk at the Indy 500.

And we also talked about how the Philadelphia Union bang a drum.

And maybe the inspiration will be that we wire a light to a drum, a drum soaked in milk, and then the most valuable player of the game will hit the drum over and over until the stadium lights come on. And then we’ll throw octopus on the playing surface. That Detroit Red Wings tradition keeps coming up in class, somehow.

In the Criticism class we talked about two pieces. The students picked these, and if nothing else it lets me prove there’s something to take away from anything we can read. Take, for instance, this column from The Athletic. The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room:

In the immediate aftermath of their victory, the team took a customary, congratulatory call from President Donald Trump, and some players laughed at a misogynistic joke about the gold-winning women’s hockey team that many Americans wouldn’t find funny. They celebrated in the locker room with beer-chugging FBI Director Kash Patel, who is now under scrutiny for using taxpayer money to fund a sports getaway. Then, after a wild night of partying in Miami following their return from Italy, some members of the team announced plans to step in the House Chamber – a stage upon which symbolism is never neutral – and make an appearance at Trump’s State of the Union.

In normal times, this would be an obligatory celebration for a championship team. They take presidential calls. They party too hard. They visit Washington and stroll through the corridors of power.

But this isn’t a neutral climate. This isn’t a neutral president. And in a nation this polarized, the proximity carries weight whether the players are being intentional or merely naive. America no longer experiences these rituals in the same way, and it may never again. Athletes would be wise to recognize that, in this climate, celebration is easily repurposed into political capital.

So we talked about how columns are different than articles, because we live in a time where people don’t read enough to have learned to distinguish between the two. It is, and take my word for it, a real problem.

That piece also let us talk about the Miracle of Ice, which at least one person was not at all familiar. So, as I reminded myself these are 21st century students, I tried to paint pictures about the Cold War, the Carter administration, small fuzzy TVs and nationalism. So we also talked about nationalism in sport, and the politics of sports in two different ways. And then the propaganda value of politicians (of any stripe) glomming on to successful sportsball teams.

All of which is what I planned on at the beginning of the semester, even if they didn’t.

We also talked about this story, Phillies make sure Kerkering ‘knows he’s not alone’ after tough error:

Nick Castellanos watched from right field as Orion Kerkering’s ill-advised throw home sailed over catcher J.T. Realmuto to end the Phillies’ season.

Castellanos saw the Dodgers pour out of the third-base dugout, sprinting past a stunned Kerkering to swarm Andy Pages at first base to celebrate their 2-1 walk-off National League Division Series-clinching win.

Then, Castellanos broke into a sprint of his own. He rushed past the euphoric Dodgers on the infield dirt to get to a visibly emotional Kerkering.

“That’s second nature. That’s instinct,” Castellanos said. “I understand what he’s feeling. Not the exact emotions, but I can see them. I didn’t even have to think twice about it, that’s where I needed to run to.”

And here we talked about tone and intentions and beat writers. There’s something to learn in every story. At least for me.

Especially when you print them out.

baseball / journalism / photo / Rowan / sports / Wednesday — Comments Off on I found Bigfoot, he’s looking for money, same as everyone
4
Feb 26

I found Bigfoot, he’s looking for money, same as everyone

Below the little banner is the summary of Tuesday. Here, above it, is a brief recounting of Wednesday.

I woke up, did all of the morning’s readings, did the email work. I had lunch. I had a meeting with faculty. I did more email. I wrote a message for my online class. I will send it, some 600 words of insight and updates and cheerful wisdom, tomorrow. I also finished prep for both of tomorrow’s classes. In one, we will talk about a few more typologies, I will stretch two pages of notes into 25 minutes and then we will develop questions for a survey. (I have seven of them already written down, but I’m only showing them three. Don’t tell.) In the other class we will watch a documentary. I also graded some stuff that needed grading. (Everyone did well, as expected; hopefully they’ll keep it up.)

I met with a student and solved several problems. The first problem was how to make Zoom work for both of us. The second problem was about how to do an assignment. Happy to help! The third problem: “How I am explaining something so poorly to this crop of students, when I have explained this same thing, with precisely this same language, to students in 2025 and 2024?” Parts of that problem may never be solved.

I also set up a meeting for Friday. Now I have two Friday meetings. One is at a very precise time, because faculty are keen on precision of schedules. The other is right now “friday works !” But, dear student, Friday does not work. A specific time would work. It is to be a Zoom meeting, sure, but I’ve done the sit in front of a Zoom window waiting for someone to show up all day thing a few times (ahhhh, 2020 …) and that’s too big an ask at this point. Open up your daily planner and figure out a good, specific time and we will have a grand and productive chat.

We’ll get there.

After all of this, it was time to catch up on the evening’s worth of reading.

I do a lot of reading. I think more of it is going to start coming from international media, and also books.

Do not get me started on the Washington Post, lest I bring out my press section banner and write a thousand brisk words about the obvious incompatibility between oligarchs and watchdog journalism, and the cute way little masthead slogans presage the ending of legacy media.

Instead, yesterday!

This was the view on the way to campus Tuesday. Everything looks exactly like this. This all fell from the sky Saturday night and Sunday a week ago. Monday, I helped a neighbor dig out their sidewalk, because this stuff is going nowhere. The longterm useless forecast says we might see 39 degrees Wednesday of next week. Maybe 40 on Friday!

That’d be a full three weeks under 40. That seems … excessive.

In Rituals and Traditions — Rits and Trads if you’re in a hurry — we discussed why we watch sports. I had a list of typologies to share. As we talked about the reasons why people watched sports they managed to list five of the six typologies I had listed before I put them on the screen. So now I’m a magician.

Then I broke them into their groups, because group work will be an important part of the class, and we’re heading that direction rapidly now.

In my Criticism class we talked about our first two stories of the semester. We discussed this story out of Texas.

The Liga Venezolana is a local example of how the millions of Venezeulans who have scattered across the Americas have brought with them an invigorating enthusiasm for the “American Pastime.” Leaving behind a country rife with political and economic turbulence and arriving in new landscapes where they are often scapegoated in political rhetoric, they have used the sport they know best to root themselves in a sense of home.

The league immigrants have created in Austin is far from the popularly imagined recreational softball scene of on-field beers and calm. The Liga Venezolana’s fans know how to intimidate. Its teams operate social media accounts. Many of its players, like Mao, have recorded strikeouts or stolen bases as pros on minor league teams. The league keeps stats and operates livestreams. Its intensity has made it a social focal point for the fast-growing Venezuelan immigrant community that has settled in North Austin, Pflugerville, Cedar Park and Leander in recent years. Since 2021, the league has ballooned from four to 22 teams and from about 70 to 600 players.

We also talked about this story.

Dr. Christopher Ahmad, Tommy John expert and head team physician for the New York Yankees, has performed the surgery on some of the biggest names in baseball. But he has also been privy to the other side of the story.

“The alarms are going off on how devastating this problem is to the youngest players,” he says in an interview with CNN Sports.

“When I first started doing Tommy John surgery about 25 years ago, the population who I was operating on who needed the surgery were essentially very high-level players – they were college prospects destined to be professional, or professional players.

“Now, the population who needs the surgery most are kids.”

Of the 10-15 Tommy John surgeries that he performs every week, Ahmad estimates that between eight and 10 are on high school children, with some even still in middle school.

For a first week of talking about stories, the interactions were pretty good. Started strong, and faded away a bit, perhaps. But we’ll get it there.

I tried, during that class, to play some audio, but the sound was tricky. Knowing I was going to show a documentary, I stuck around to tinker with it. Eventually my lovely bride came in to look for me. Then a woman who had a later class came in to get ready. I don’t know how many degrees we all have, but it took that many degrees to solve the problem, a problem I finally figured out by … adjusting the volume.

To be fair, there are a lot of options and buttons and switches.

Opposite from the elevators in our building are TV monitors and they’re programmed with the time and weather and promoting various events and services. Pretty standard stuff, usually. Sometimes something interesting is on the screen and I can see it for 2.7 seconds, just long enough to realize it is interesting, but not long to read it all. And there are a lot of things to promote. No one, not even me, is going to stand there and wait for the interesting thing to pop back up again.

But sometimes the elevator is slow, and sometimes you can catch a good one.

That’s the total promo. No contact info, no club or school or department affiliation, no deadlines listed. But it’s intriguing enough, I guess. Unless they, whoever they are, are trying to tell people that winning a scholarship is as likely as seeing Nelly, or Bigfoot, or aliens. Clearly it raises more questions than answers. More space was needed, I guess.

Older analog styles are the way to go with sophisticated messaging that has a lot of words, or dates, or URLs. Our building doesn’t have a lot of bulletin boards, which is a bit of a shame. I love taking a few moments to read the useful things, the random things, learn about new clubs and interest groups, and enjoy the truly wacky stuff people produce for public billboards. It’s cleaner and neater, sure, but we are just a tiny bit the lesser for it.

OK, now, on Wednesday, I’ve written about Tuesday and Wednesday. You know what that means for tomorrow, then, right? Back on schedule again. You’re relieved, I can tell from here.

journalism / links / sports / Tuesday — Comments Off on Would you like to plug away at work for me?
6
Jan 26

Would you like to plug away at work for me?

Last night we went to a township meeting. A family friend was being installed to office as a supervisor. In my mind’s eye, I was picturing a giant metropolis. Big marble stairs, doric columns, a lot of media in period inauthentic wardrobe. Big, ridiculous flash bulb cameras. It was, in fact, a small place. The township is the sort that has a part time police chief. Where the supervisor meetings are held has a grand table, long enough to seat five people tasked with the important duties of the community.

Sometimes the room hosts potlucks.

There were 40 people in the audience, and that just about filled the room. Six or seven people were holding up their phones to record the historic moments of their friends and loved ones being sworn in.

There stood a judge at the front of the room. She is married, I learned later, to one of the administrators. In her full regalia, she swore in five new people, three township supervisors, an auditor and a tax collector. She enunciated carefully. “UniTED,” and “FIdelity.”

Even the tax collector got a round of applause, which probably doesn’t happen again during his tenure.

With the positions filled, the supervisors held their regular meeting, a tight series of procedural votes to start the new year. Partnerships with other cities, the formal hiring of a few new police officers, a resolution or two. It took 21 minutes.

If you need a shot of democracy, go take part in your local government. That’s where the real and immediate work that impacts you and your community is conducted. They need you, your voice, your thoughts, your energy. (Plus it is sometimes unintentionally entertaining.)

The thing about this form of government is that it only works if the people take part.

Just to round out today’s post, before I get back to work. This isn’t a story — it is a list of photos and brief bios — but that is a dynamite headline. Finally got the framing right. Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter

Meanwhile, over in the UK … Government demands Musk’s X deals with ‘appalling’ Grok AI deepfakes:

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has called on Elon Musk’s X to urgently deal with its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok being used to create non-consensual sexualised images of women and girls.

The BBC has seen multiple examples on X of people asking the bot to digitally undress people to make them appear in bikinis without their consent, as well as putting them in sexual situations.

Kendall said the situation was “absolutely appalling”, adding “we cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these degrading images.”

In sports media news, NBC is set for Olympic spots.NBCU breaks Winter Olympic ad sales record with sellout:

Today, amid CES, NBCUniversal announced it had sold out of its Winter Olympics ad inventory, with a month still to go before the games. In the process, the company set a new Winter Olympics ad sales record, with the highest linear and digital revenue it’s ever recorded. Plus, the company scored a record number of advertisers. With the news, NBCU has sold out inventory for the Winter Olympics, the NBA All-Star Game, and the Super Bowl, which make up what the company calls its “Legendary February” programming.

[…]

Among other highlights, the Winter Olympics is adding more than 100 new advertisers for the upcoming Games. Of its total advertisers, 85% of brand partners are investing in Milan Cortina digitally, and advertiser adoption of Peacock’s ad innovations has grown 31% from Paris 2024 to Milan Cortina 2026, according to the company.

Plus, the company said nearly 60 advertisers are using unique marketing elements, up more than 174% from Beijing 2022.

That’s a lot of new advertisers. I wonder what we’re going to see. I wonder what they’ll say about us.

adventures / Instagram / journalism / memories / photo / Rowan / television / Tuesday — Comments Off on No title Tuesday
23
Dec 25

No title Tuesday

When we got in last night, the first thing I did was put my things down.

No, that’s too early, let me back up.

When we got in last night, we stood on the curb at the airport for some time. The place we used as a park-and-ride had one shuttle running to the airport the week before Christmas, which seemed smart. It was cold. We waited. But it was at least night to be out of an airport, off of planes. Our trip began just before 6 p.m. and we landed just after 11 p.m. Not bad, considering we had a short layover in Detroit. It turned out that we took the same plane, so we disembarked long enough to grab a bite, and then get back on the plane. For our first leg of the flight I sat next to a retired Delta pilot. He is now flying rich people around out of Detroit. There are, he said, five wealthy families in Detroit and six jets. Then he showed me his Christmas card from Bob Seger, who is one of those families.

We covered a lot of ground as we were flying over the ground. The styles of flying, how much money people typically earn before they buy a plane of their own, some of his anecdotes, and so on. He asked me what I do for a living, and I told him, and he found this interesting, so we talked about media for a long while. One of my former students is in Detroit, and he has surely seen him on CBS. He was very curious about the nature and process of media, and the conversation gave me more grist for my “people don’t understand what we do” mill.

It goes both ways, of course. I’ve been on many planes, and I can fly one just as well as he could produce a media product. We think we know about other things because of our experience, but it’s not an expertise. He told me the progency of the plane we were on, and told me about the insulation properties of the fuselage. I know nothing about his business. Now, let me explain the basics of local media economic models.

There’s going to be a hypothesis in there, somewhere, eventually.

We left him in Detroit, it was his last work for a week. It sounds like has a pretty good gig for a retired man. On the second leg of the trip I sat with my lovely bride. She watched a documentary, I caught up on the day’s news. I also learned that one of my former students will be on national television on Christmas Eve. She’s a meteorologist, having gone from Greenville, North Carolina to Albuquerque to San Francisco, a real talent, a credible forecaster and now she’s getting turns on national TV.

I bet she could have told me whether I had on enough layers for the curbside cold. Standing there, getting on the shuttle, getting to the car and getting home, might have taken about the same amount of time as either one of our flights this evening.

And so, finally, the first thing I did was put my things down. Then I petted the cats. They were very insistent and full of attitude, as if to say “These are the hi-jinx you could have enjoyed if you’d been here the last week.”

Today, there has been a lot of desperate cuddling.

And a lot of loud complaining.

One of their friends spent the week with them. They had a good time. I saw the photos and videos. I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling with this act.

But the kitties are doing well. And all of the cuddling slowed down today’s grading. This last batch took the afternoon and the first half of the evening. Much longer than necessary, but the class was the class was the class.

I’ll submit the final grades tomorrow, marking the end of the fall term. I’ll take a few days off. And then, starting Saturday, I’ll go back to designing a new class for the spring term. This will be my third brand new class in as many terms, and my 11th new prep in six semesters.

That, if you are not in this business, is a lot.

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