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memories

journalism / memories / Monday / Samford / video — Comments Off
16
Apr 12

Meanwhile, in the classroom

I taught about false light in two media law classes today.

The three criteria required for a false light case:

1. Publication of material must put an individual in a false light.
2. The false light would be offensive to a reasonable person.
3. The publisher was at fault.

Two anecdotes from the lecture:

The Sun ran a picture of Nellie Mitchell, a 96-year-old Arkansas woman, in a fabricated story about a 101-year-old female news carrier who had to give up her job because she was pregnant. The Sun’s editors needed a photo for their false story. They assumed Nellie was dead and pulled her picture from a previous true story. She was alive and, by then, feeling litigious. She sued. She won $1.5 million in 1991. (That’s $2.5 million today)

In the 1980s WJLA in Washington, D.C., did a story on genital herpes. The reporter shot b roll on a busy D.C. street. The videographer zoomed in on a woman who was easily recognized. In the 11 p.m. broadcast the anchor read the script “For the 20 million Americans who have herpes, it’s not a cure” as tape rolled with the woman’s image. She won her case and was awarded $750.

I like media law, but I think you have to have an anticipation of enjoyment of it before you take it as a class. I imagine that students who don’t have some inkling of that beforehand find themselves miserable. But it is a vitally important topic.

I think I enjoyed it, in part, was because the first media law case I ever read about was Carol Burnett v. National Enquirer, Inc. I loved Carol Burnett as a comedienne, even if her sketch comedy show (which I caught it in syndication) was for an older audience. It always felt like I was getting away with something to be able to watch it late at night, but I remember thinking that Burnett’s case, while important, probably felt ancient to most of my peers. It had happened almost 15 years before we studied it, an eternity to undergrads. (I did not talk about it in class today.)

And so I vowed to give contemporary examples in a media law context. Need to brush up on the dockets a bit.

To know the more than a name makes a case history more interesting. To see this makes it all stick in your head:

I actually remember that bit, which is remarkable with my memory. I suppose it speaks to the impression those talents could leave upon you. To this day my favorite stylings are physical comedy and the famous loss of composure. I blame Harvey Korman for that:

Had a guest in my Mass Media Practices class today. My old friend Napo Monasterio came over from The Birmingham News to talk about that happy, curious, more-flexible-than-ever place where journalist, coder and designer meet. Napo is from Auburn, though he was a year or two behind me. Now I see his work all the time.

Here are some of his page layouts and the online package that went with it. Now he’s developing apps.

He was formally trained as a print journalist and designer, but his desire to learn new things keeps opening doors for him. I hope students pick up on that.

“Just like a firecracker going off in the air — kabuuuuum.”

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
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:

family / journalism / links / memories / photo / site / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Mar 12

Much better now, thanks

I woke up hungry this morning, which is how I knew things were looking up. Let’s call whatever moved in on Tuesday night and dominated Wednesday a minor, temporary inconvenience and move on.

There is this, though:

When I was in the third grade I came down with chicken pox during my spring break. I was at my grandparents. They were out in the country enough that a trip into town to see the pharmacist was good enough to verify the pox unto me. The druggist suggested I not travel. I was staying with my grandparents for a few days longer.

This would ordinarily not be a problem, but I’d had perfect attendance in the second grade and made it all the way to spring break in the third grade without missing any school. This was upsetting.

And then the itching really began.

After a while it all became miserable, one of the more painful being a spot right on a biceps tendon, irritated each time I walked. But I was fairly well covered in the horrible little blotches.

The only thing that made me feel better was the custom-ordered and custom-heated chicken noodle soup with crumbled up crackers and tea in the red plastic cup.

My grandmother has always been amused by me, and she’s spoiled me with all of her precious heart. (I was her first grandchild.) And so this silly, pathetic little request was honored for almost every meal for the week or so I fought off the chicken pox. My grandmother has a very giving spirit.

That picture is probably a few years before they realized they’d have to buy me that nasty, soothing lotion.

Some years later, probably when I was in undergrad, I asked my grandmother if she could spare one of those cups. Because I’ve always amused her, and because I am her favorite (and only!) grandson, and because she is very giving, she offered me two of her red plastic cups, which secret a cure-all elixir from their pores when you are feeling bad. They’ve always held a place of honor in my cabinets.

What, your cabinets don’t have places of honor?

They’ve been in use around here the last few days. I still can’t make chicken soup like she can, even though she just pours it out of a can as I do. Also, she is a better cracker crumbler than I. That’s even more absurd sounding, I know, but it is a truth of life: your grandmother is way better than you are at a lot of things. It’s science.

These days a similar cup is called a Koziol Rio Tumbler. I doubt that’s what these cups are. That name suggests a carefully calibrated focus group that was meant to impart sophistication. My grandparents were hardworking country people. My grandfather was a truck driver, my grandmother worked in the textiles. Their red plastic cups have no name or logo on them. Who knows how long they’ve had them, but it is an easy 30 years at least. They probably bought them because they needed cups, and red brings out her eyes. Or maybe they were a gift from an aunt or someone. What matters is that the magic curative powers within these cups are still working.

(And now, some several decades later, during another spring break, this bit of unpleasantness caught up with me. Parallels!)

Elsewhere: I did a few small things around the house to feel productive. I read a bit and wrote about nine pages worth of things. There’s also the new marker entry.

I’ve recently added some posts to the work blog:

The age of mobile has been here awhile, actually

Lots of links — visual edition

The 1940 Census infographic

Changes in advertising trends

Publishing with WordPress?

That last one, even if you aren’t interested in anything to do with the general journalism theme on the other blog, could be useful.

Finally, I’ve tweaked the front page to the section on my grandfather’s textbooks. That portion of the site is complete, but it was missing something. And then I found that something — a photograph, the one I have of him as a school boy, even if it is a transfer and his bright young face is in a bit of shadow — tonight while working through a box of things in the office closet.

Yes. As midnight approached I was cleaning off a desktop and working through a box of photographs. I am feeling better, thanks. The red plastic cups do the trick.

journalism / links / memories / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off
6
Mar 12

There is a bad pun at the end of this post

Now this was a beautiful day. High of 67, clear, sunny. This is the kind of pre-spring that would make the rest of the country jealous. Sure, our autumn is fairly well abbreviated. And you may keep your winter if you operate under the idea that you need snow to feel complete. But everyone that loves snow is tired of it by March. Everyone that has a fondness for sweaters and layers would love to have a day like this to enjoy just now.

Pretty much everyone below the 38th parallel is enjoying it. Sorry Midwest and New England.

This is an office day, and an office night, so I have no anecdotes. But I have links.

Things to read: The “Dangerous” Veteran: An Inaccurate Media Narrative Takes Hold:

If you’ve read the news lately, you may have seen one of several stories describing recent Veterans as “ticking time bombs” or as “dangerous” on account of post-traumatic stress. It’s a narrative that has persisted for decades, but a handful of recent high-profile incidents have resulted in headlines like these:

Police get help with vets who are ticking bombs (USA TODAY)

Experts: Vets’ PTSD, violence a growing problem (CNN)

Veteran charged with homeless murders: Hint of larger problem for US military? (Christian Science Monitor)

While these stories highlight horrific killings, the connection between disturbed murderers like Benjamin Barnes and Itzcoatl Ocampo and their service in combat is weak—despite what media reports and popular culture would have many believe. And such rhetoric, when solidified in the public consciousness, can have negative consequences for both Veterans and society—like causing Veterans to avoid seeking help or employers to avoid hiring them.

“This is a huge misrepresentation of Veterans,” said Rich Blake, an Iraq War Veteran and psychology doctoral student at Loyola University Maryland. “Crazed? That’s even more extreme.”

That’s a great perspective. A few years ago I did some consulting for a PTSD organization, met a lot of great people from all walks of life — the Vietnam veteran who walked across an entire state every year as a personal awareness campaign, the woman who’d been abused as a child who had to tell everyone she met that PTSD isn’t exclusive to members of the military — and ultimately found the misperceptions easy to understand. But they’re almost always misperceptions. There’s a quote in this piece that makes a great shark attack analogy, for example.

Facebook’s US User Growth Slows but Twitter Sees Double-Digit Gains:

As recently as 2010, growth in US Facebook usage was well into the double digits, at 38.6%, eMarketer estimates. But with 116.8 million US internet users already logging on to the site at least once monthly that year, growth rates were bound to plateau.

By 2011 Facebook user growth rose a comparatively small 13.4%, and this year will be the first when growth rates drop to the single digits. Rates of change in the US will continue to decline throughout eMarketer’s forecast period.

On Twitter, by contrast, growth is stronger. Last year’s 31.9% increase in users outpaced that of 2010, when growth was at 23.5%. Similar to Facebook’s trajectory, Twitter’s growth rate will also fall in the coming years, but still remain nearly four times higher than Facebook’s growth rate in 2014.

Twitter is smaller, so there’s the issue of scale, but what I’d like to see is abandonment rates and existing customer use rates.

Some papers see Q1 sales rise – first since 2006:

In a series of informal conversations, some publishers counted it as a victory that their numbers in the first two months of 2012 were equal to those of the prior year. Others reported that their sales met or surpassed conservative budgets that forecast single-digit declines between this year and last.

“It looks like the cycle finally has turned,” said an executive who could not discuss specifics of his company’s sales because it is publicly traded. “People counting out newspapers have not taken into account the effect of the weak economy. It won’t take much of an improvement [in the economy] for us to see real increases in profitability after the cost-cutting we have be doing for the last several years.”

While a turn in the economy is bound to be helpful, it must be noted that every other medium has long since rebounded from the Great Recession, which technically ended by mid-2010 (though it is of little consolation to those continuing to suffer from foreclosure, unemployment and financially challenged retirement).

The comments paint a different picture, and the most recent Pew research paints a different picture, but any good news for the newspaper business would be welcome. Hopefully such good news wouldn’t be a signal to publishers that they’ve weathered some sort of storm and return to their traditional business-as-usual models. Inertia is a problem.

And is often the case, I’ll leave you with a little something to make you smile.

What do you call the sum of the diagonal elements of the tensor of inertia?

The spur of the moment.

And they say physicists have no fun.

Alabama / Auburn / cycling / memories / overwriting / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
28
Feb 12

Bo Bikes Bama

Bo Jackson, that Bo Jackson, will ride across Alabama in April, east to west, as a fund raiser for tornado relief.

The man is intense even in promotional videos. I want to ride along. At least for a little bit, if not an entire leg. (I’d prefer the Bessemer to Tuscaloosa day obviously, since we both grew up there.)

You can ride with him.

If I were able to ride with him the only problem would be figuring out to get ahead of him several times so he can pass me and I can describe the sound. So I can write things like this:

Bo riding a bike is an angry mashing of steel gears. Gritting carbon fiber against melting alumnium. He flings acidic drops of sweat behind him, furious that he has to stop and replace his pedals every 45 minutes or so. He’s riding a Trek because it is built like a tank, but he still grinds them into dust. I bet he could ride the 300 miles in the better part of an afternoon if he catches the red lights right. But since he has to wait so often for wheel rebuilds it stretches this thing out over a week. I bet the turbulence behind him helps clean up the tornado debris on some of those central Alabama roadsides.

And not one man will sneer at him when he coasts into Tuscaloosa, because they know.

I told a friend that I was trying to explain Bo to my lovely bride, who was busy being a little girl in another part of the country during Bo’s prime while we were busy agog at what the man could do. A few years later and superlatives can ring hollow. He suggested the uninitiated watch this:

If I rode with Bo I would not act like a fanboy, but I would ask him about coming home to raise money. And I would ask him about his VOX2 Max. And I’d playfully suggest we sprint to the next road sign, just so I could say I’ve been beaten by the best.