Monday « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

Monday

Look up, it is easier to breathe in the sunset

Lovely warm day. I should have started my run a bit earlier. We are in a weather system that means the temperature drops 15 degrees as soon as three tree limbs conspire to block the sun. Before that, though, it was bright and surprising. Short-sleeve weather if you’ve ever needed it in December — and who doesn’t?

But I did my little neighborhood run late in the afternoon and into the early evening. It turned to a chill just as I wrapped up, but I had views like this:

And there is nothing wrong with views like that.

So another three miles down, after three miles yesterday and before a bunch more this week. I’m trying to make my run fast.

“Fast.”

There’s a word that mean a lot without any context. Let’s give it some: I look like a shuffler, I want to look like a runner. That, to me, would be fast at this point. In truth, I haven’t been fast in decades, and even then I was only faster than a person running slowly. I grew up around plenty of fast people.

I wonder if any of them had the chance to go for a run today, or got to see a sunset like that, wherever they are.

Things to read … because this stuff is good no matter where you are.

A nice example of dogged persistence, Meet the reporter who broke Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture story—two years ago:

Two years ago, an investigative reporter named Isaiah Thompson exposed the massive and troubling scale of “civil asset forfeiture” in Philadelphia—that is, how law enforcement exploited its authority to seize cash and personal property suspected to be connected to a crime. The idea is to take ill-gotten gains from drug dealers or other criminals, but Thompson showed that Philly authorities routinely claimed property in cases where the owners were not convicted—and in some instances, not even charged.

[…]

“It shows there’s no substitute for true reporting,” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with IJ. “He’s not just reading the law and talking to a couple people. He went to the courtroom over and over and over, and really explored what happened.”

There’s an accidental insight here, I think: A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link:

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent.

That’s not the problem it used to be, unfortunately, even for the Times. I think I liked it better when that would have been the cause for some consternation.

We’re starting to see this sentiment in more and more think pieces, Defining quality in news has to value the user experience:

You could frame the big challenge for the next few years of digital news this way: How can we create a news user experience that’s as easy and friction-free as Facebook — but as good as the best a dedicated news power user could assemble?

[…]

“Quality” isn’t just about how many foreign bureaus you have or how long your big features can run. It’s about every step of the process that moves from a reporter’s idea to a reader’s eyes. Too many news outlets make too many of those steps frustrating — and frustrated readers are all too happy to go back to playing Candy Crush.

That conversation is a good and needed one. It signals a maturation of the medium. And what the author, Joshua Benton, is saying ultimately leads to an effort to create a variety of interfaces for a spectrum of users. Not every story must be print, or video, no. And not every example in this enterprise need to be the TV attempt at multimedia: the broadcast package over the text of the story. There comes a time where we ask consumers to choose what they want, and we shunt them into not only the stories they want and the format they want (and the advertising they’re looking for) but also give them control of those capsules. We build it, they select how they want these stories and where. We get it there. They move back and forth through the media.

They’re doing that already, just not under one shingle.

And here’s another way the audience is doing it, How Wearable Technology Will Impact Web Design:

A lot of naysayers are quick to write off wearable technology as a fad, but a recent report from Pew Research Center Internet Project indicates that 83% of industry experts believe that wearable technology will see huge growth within the next 10 years. By 2025, we’ll be fully immersed in the Internet of Things (IoT). This means that users will be accessing websites from various platforms, not just desktops and mobile devices.

As technology expands and more users embrace wearables, more of your clients will want to their sites to be accessible. If you’re unprepared for such requests, clients will search elsewhere to fit their needs.

Although wearable technology is in its infancy now, it’s rapidly growing. Expect it to develop like a kid in puberty– overnight.

Slowly, and then all at once.

My friend Ike Pigott wrote this fine piece, The Mammals of Journalism:

A weekly newspaper, serving three cities with a combined population of less than 40,000 people… has a TV studio.

The ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing
The great disruption has happened. It didn’t smack the Earth with a blinding blast; rather, it carried its impact more slowly over decades. The internet, and mobile technology, and codecs, and smaller gear that people can afford, and the ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing… blame them all.

A weekly newspaper has a website, and now it has a TV studio.

The Tribune’s publisher, Scott Buttram, likes to say that the very technologies that have disrupted network television and movie studios and large daily newspapers have also empowered his end of the food chain. The small can feast on the big, because the rules of our media world favor the nimble and the swift.

Flexibility, low inertia, is a terrific attribute these days.

A great show, A&E’s highest rated show, was canceled. But along came Netflix: ‘Longmire’ Season 4 News: Why Cancellation Might Have Actually Helped The Series. These are truly strange times in the entertainment business.

Tomorrow, we run errands! And probably some more fun stuff, too.

errands / history / Monday / Samford — 1 Comment
8
Dec 14

You’ll be jealous of my errands, and these ads

Finals day today. My students feverishly were emailing in the last of the work I’ve challenged them with and made them endure this term. Well, some raced. One student turned in the final work on Friday.

The rest, well, they knew they had until 3 p.m., the end of our scheduled final block.

“Three p.m.,” I said, “does not mean 3:01. One minute after means that’s one less I have to grade.”

They’re going to live in a deadline-driven world.

The last paper came in at about 2:28, so the message was received. Also, I must now grade them all.

Want to see an amazing story?

“Why do it?”

“It makes me feel normal and whole.”

Watch this video. But you have to watch the entire thing. And it is absolutely worth watching the whole thing.

I ran errands today. Here are the three least exciting parts of that: I visited an eye doctor’s office to make an appointment for later in the week. A nice young lady answered all of my questions with a laugh an assuring assurance. They booked me for Thursday.

Are you riveted?

I washed my car. And then I took the floor mats out and dropped them through this shaker machine that gets 98 percent of the grass and leaves and crumbs off of them. And then I vacuumed the rest of the trash off of the mats and the floor boards. I noticed that my car wasn’t completely clean, but it was closer to clean than it has been in a while. I’d been enjoying an industrial grade of autumn dust lately.

I got gas. I dropped my card at the pump twice.

The other thing I did was slightly more interesting than that, somehow, and it will be the subject of Wednesday’s post.

To wrap up today, and in honor of finals — and because these are two of the last four clips I have at the moment, here are two old ads from mid-1980s Crimson issues. Two things you don’t think about so much any more, I’d bet:

John’s is closed now, but it has a special place in history. It was opened in 1959, the first color film processing lab in the state. John was 24. There used to be at least four locations. Two were in strip malls. One building is now vacant. The other now has either a hotel or a car dealership on the old lot. Based on some canceled trademarks registered to the owner, I’m assuming the stores closed about two years after this ad ran. He died just over six years ago.

Bet you haven’t said “I need to run to Kinko’s!” in a good long while:

There are apparently still over 2,000 FedEx stores, which is the brand now, of course. It is the seventh largest printing chain in the country and Kinko’s is nothing but a memory. And it was so close to becoming a proprietary eponym, too.

history / memories / Monday / music / Samford / video — Comments Off
1
Dec 14

The Rushton Carillon

Today’s installment from college newspapers past has to do with one of the iconic images — and sounds — on the Samford campus.

The carillon was donated by Col. William Rushton, Jr. in honor of his family, or his father, Franklin Rushton, depending on which version you read. The Rushtons came south with William Rushton, Sr., in 1881, just after the end of Reconstruction, when Birmingham was only 10 years old. Senior became an ice magnate, a city alderman and put the first cement paving on the ground. His son, Franklin, ran the family ice company, was a chamber president and was a big part of getting World War II vets jobs in the community. Birmingham Ice & Cold Storage Co., meanwhile, was in operation for 92 years before closing up in 1973. Anyway, Franklin’s son Col. William Rushton, Jr., fought in World War I as a young man and rose through the ranks as a reservist after the war. He, like many of the prominent Samford men, was an insurance executive. If it was a regionally prominent organization in the 20th century, Rushton had a role in it. He died in 1987, but he had several years of listening to the beautiful carillon he helped place on campus.

The author of the above article is today a pediatric disease physician in Kentucky.

The campus official he references, Evan Zeiger, Sr., was an Auburn man. He came to Samford in 1956 and retired in 1984. He died just a few years ago. His son, a local neurosurgeon, died in a plane crash in the Gulf the next year.

I actually have a copy of the original notes for this next piece. The editor submitted a list of questions to the university president and he answered from on high, via an assistant’s typewriter. (This being a few years after he shut the journalism program down, a long and interesting tale for another day, which led to pieces like this proto-listicle.)

Bells about to be installed …

This was a standalone photo and, just to the right, you get a sense of the varying sizes of the bells, which allows for the different notes. The first 49 were cast in Holland and, together, weighed five tons. They were originally above one of the chapels. When Rushton came along they added 11 more bells and it all moved to the library, which is what is going on here:

Breaking news! Here are the library steeples, old and new! (Being located in the center of campus, no one ever had an opportunity to see them … )

Finally, the bells were put in above the library, the weather cooperated and the steeple work was completed, the clavier arrived and was put into place and Mr. Knight was ready to play.

Steve Knight, who has been doing this here for almost 40 years, has long been one of the most interesting people on campus:

I recorded a snippet in April of 2012. Here’s what it sounds like when you stand just under the bells:

Curiously, if you are in the library, you hardly here them at all. That’s by design.

I’ve never been up the ship’s ladder, as Knight called it, so I’ve never seen him perform. Seeing Knight actually play is a marvel, check out this feature piece one of our students produced:

The carillon is a wonderful feature on this beautiful campus. We’ll call it a day right there. Plenty to go around for tomorrow, be sure to stop back by when you can.

history / journalism / links / Monday / music / Samford / things to read / video — Comments Off
24
Nov 14

Bono in history

I found this clip last week and was waiting for the right time to use it. Turns out today is the right time, which is to say I didn’t want to wait any more. Bono walked around on Samford’s campus one night. I’m not gushing about Bono, but enjoying the perceived incongruity of that. Bono taking an impromptu tour, doing who knows what:

The band was in Birmingham that November, 1988, touring in support of Rattle and Hum. Desire had topped the charts in the UK and Australia and had peaked at number three in the U.S. A few days after their stop in Birmingham Angel of Harlem was released as a single. They made the video the year before, in Memphis:

Wikipedia suggests that Bono has forgotten a lot of the lyrics to the song.

But imagine it, walking around on your small private college campus and there suddenly is one of the biggest young musicians in the world standing in front of you. Crazy.

Not everything in 1988 was good news. Here’s an example from earlier in that year where a writer does a pretty nice job of localizing a compelling slice of one of the biggest stories of the decade.

It is always interesting to see how stories like these evolve over time.

Both of those reporters are still in town. One of them is now a consultant, the other is in corporate communications. We always tell students where their peers intern or their first jobs — because a lot of those are great jobs. But knowledge like this makes me want to say to students, “Yes, when you work your way through that first job or two, there are some even cooler roles in your future.”

Things to read … because reading will be important in the future, too.

I’ve interviewed Pat Sullivan. He is a modest man, a gentleman, and he likes to understate things and put the spotlight on others. Q&A with Auburn great Pat Sullivan as he brings Samford to Jordan-Hare

Since we’re coming up on that time of year, I’ll link to this, but you have to click over and read the very end yourself. It is worth the click. Behind College Football’s Most Amazing Play:

Davis was an offensive dynamo in high school, but Auburn’s coaches pitched him on two other roles: playing cornerback and returning kicks. After Davis committed in Dec. 2009, he said: “They think I can make history down there.”

[…]

“Touchdown, Auburn—an answered prayer!” shouted veteran CBS broadcaster Verne Lundquist, who was calling the game. After the 109-yard touchdown return, Lundquist allowed for 65 seconds of silence so viewers could drink in the fan celebration as the TV audience swelled to 21 million people. Above the field, in the coaches’ box, Johnson and his fellow assistants were high-fiving. “We had never worked on it,” Johnson said of the play. “It was the most amazing thing.”

One last sports story, where the New York Times apparently wants FSU fans to do their job for them, F.S.U. Coach’s Call-In Show Is a No-Sin Zone.

And now a few drone links … Gorgeous Drone Video of the Tallest Church Tower in the Netherlands Bursting Through a Sea of Fog:

To get the perfect aerial drone shots of the Dom Tower of Utrecht, Dutch filmmakers Jelte Keur and Reinout van Schie had to wait a full 10 months for the perfect weather conditions to arrive. But once they did, the minute forty-five of footage they captured made it all worthwhile.

Penn State crop educator explores drone-driven crop management

Drone Flights Face FAA Hit

A few local stories … Birmingham dropped from list of 2016 DNC contenders

Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits against businesses on the upswing in Alabama

Man, I hate clickbait headlines. So here’s the part the author really wants you to read, This guy is fixing the U.S. Capitol dome, but what he says about Alabama workers is the real wonder:

He tells of the way guys who learned to work with metal as mechanics and automakers – regular guys with problems and pasts and views that didn’t extend much beyond their own homes – “can challenge and perform the task before them” in a way that lives up to the expectations of the very architect of the Capitol.

“They are typical Alabamians who work with their hands, and I’m proud of them,” he said. “I tell them you will have a job in this country as long as you can work with your hands. And you will.”

And, now, how a bill becomes a law:

Some tech links … How 3-D printing is revolutionizing medicine:

The researchers began by taking a CT scan of the baby’s chest, which they converted into a highly detailed, three-dimensional virtual map of his altered airways. From this model, they designed and printed a splint—a small tube, made of the same biocompatible material that goes into sutures—that would fit snugly over the weakened section of airway and hold it open. It was strong but flexible, and would expand as the boy grew—the researchers likened it to “the hose of a vacuum cleaner.” The splint would last for three years or so, long enough for the boy’s cells to grow over it, and then would dissolve harmlessly. Three weeks after the splint was implanted, the baby was disconnected from the ventilator and sent home. In May of 2013, in The New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers reported that the boy was thriving and that “no unforeseen problems related to the splint have arisen.”

This sort of procedure is becoming more and more common among doctors and medical researchers. Almost every day, I receive an e-mail from my hospital’s press office describing how yet another colleague is using a 3-D printer to create an intricately realistic surgical model—of a particular patient’s mitral valve, or finger, or optic nerve—to practice on before the actual operation.

Medical science development is amazing stuff.

And so much of it started right here, The First STAR TREK Scene Shot 50 Years Ago This Week

Introducing Charted A new way to share data:

Charted is a tool that automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data.

[…]

Charted is open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co. The publicly-hosted charted.co works with files that are already publicly accessible to anyone with the link (e.g., Dropbox share links). For protected or sensitive data, you can serve your own instance of Charted on your secure network, which is what we do at Medium.

A few journalism links … This will be interesting, Vine shifts from comedy clips to a valid journalistic tool

This is a fine idea, but I always wonder about the efficacy. Not everyone sees the top-down organizational plea. But some is better than none, and that some will, in time, influence others, making it more efficient. So, then, it is worth the try, Establishing Social Media Hashtag Standards For Disaster Response

Hard Comparison: Legacy Media vs. Digital Native

And, finally, for you history buffs and forensic fiends, New mystery arises from
iconic Iwo Jima image:

You have seen this photo because on Feb. 23, 1945, in the middle of one of the fiercest battles of World War II, a group of U.S. Marines carried a flag up the highest peak on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. As six men struggled to plant the flagpole into the ground, an Associated Press photographer, who was worried he would miss the shot, clicked his shutter without even looking through his viewfinder. You have seen this photo because it’s one of the most famous photos in American history.

Eric has stared at this photo for hours. He has zoomed in on the black-and-white image until he can see the creases in the men’s helmet covers and can study the unique shapes of their noses. He has combed through dozens of other photos taken that day atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. He has watched a film clip of the famous flag raising so many times he has each frame memorized.

[…]

He has stared at the photo for the better part of a year, and he’s convinced that he and another amateur history buff have discovered something that has apparently eluded military leaders, World War II experts and historians for nearly seven decades.

Ultimately, I think I agree with Professor Sherrard. Compelling, but perhaps not necessarily to the level, yet, of proof.

I love everything about this story. People with passion and attention to detail, an explanation for that thin strap, the dismissal by their “betters,” the source material for us to make up our own minds. I love all of it.

It is perfect. Perhaps not in the sense of IDing the specific Marines (I wasn’t there, after all) but it is a lovely dash of storytelling.

Now, to write my way back to the beginning, I’ll humbly suggest a new meme where Bono is inserted into historic photographs. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Monday / photo — Comments Off
17
Nov 14

An actual Monday

My first job out of college was traffic reporting. I think I did that four about four months before finally landing in news. One guy there once reported a car fire on the freeway as a carbecue. It sounded clever but I found it mean-spirited. Here was someone having probably one of the worst days of their year, losing who knows what and, for an encore, having to deal with insurance people. Making jokes just seemed like piling on.

I think of that every time I see a car fire, like I saw today.

And then, some time later, I changed lanes, topped a little rise in the road and found myself parked on the interstate. Three lanes going nowhere, for about an hour.

Turns out, just up the road, a dump truck lost its load.

As I told a colleague, even if I’d wanted to make up a reason to not be in the office I wouldn’t have thought of that. Who’s ever heard of a dump truck throwing dirt and gravel all over the pavement as the poor guy is driving from A to B?

In one of those philosophical cases of one-never-knows it is entirely possible, I suppose, that had someone’s car fire not slowed traffic down back there I could have had dirt poured all over my car further up the road. Sitting on top of the overpass and feeling it wave and whomp whomp with traffic coming from the other direction doesn’t seem so bad in comparison.

Rather than worry about a Monday — hey, the guy in the car fire wasn’t hurt and there didn’t seem to be any ambulances at the inadvertent dump site — let’s look at some pictures.

Here’s a mini-essay on tree doughnuts:

More tomorrow, on what will not be a Monday.