Monday

friends / I do not know what is happening. / links / Monday / swimming / things to read — Comments Off on The traditional poor-quality headline above a Monday post
17
Feb 14

The traditional poor-quality headline above a Monday post

And so begins one of the longer weeks of the year. It involves travel. And when there is travel that means return travel. This will be done by car, so there’s a lot of windshield time involved. I’m exhausted already.

But, hey, life is grand. The sun is out. I got to teach today. We talked about social media and then wrote for a while. I had a catch-up session for a few students on WordPress.

I also typed and printed things. Probably emailed far too many detailed email things. You know how that goes.

Then I hit the pool. I swam 1,350 yards — that’s .77 miles — in a pool that was as warm as bathwater. It might sound great, but it felt pretty gross by the end. Despite the short distance and poor form and lack of fitness I’m going to take that one tidbit alone, the pool was too warm, as a sign that I’m becoming a swimmer.

I do not know what is happening.

We stopped swimming because we were meeting Kim and Murph for Thai for dinner. We sat in the most dimly lit restaurant in town and ate noodles and chatted almost until they ran us out. It was nice to see them outside of a football tailgating context. They’re still just some of the loveliest people you could meet.

I feel like I don’t get to eat with an entire table full of sweet people like my wife and Kim and Murphy every night. But I should. (And not just because they are foodies.)

Things to read … because we all like to read.

Heh. New York takes a Twitter beating as news of Remington’s move to Alabama emerges:

Reports Remington Outdoor Co. plans to open a new manufacturing facility in Huntsville are being greeted with cheers in Alabama. That’s not the case in New York, however.

[…]

Gov. Cuomo’s office took to social media over the weekend to refute claims New York didn’t want the Remington jobs.

That’s not stopping people from firing back at Cuomo and the state’s strict gun regulations.

This says a lot, little of it good. For First Time in History, Democrats Won’t Run Anyone for U.S. Senate in Alabama:

Alabama holds an election for U.S. Senate in 2014. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions is running for re-election. For the first time in Alabama history, the Democrats are not running anyone for U.S. Senate. Here is a list of Democrats running in the June 2014 primary for federal and state office.

There are no Democrats running for U.S. House in the 4th and 5th districts. For the 140 state legislative races, no Democrats are running in 57 races. There are no Democrats running for these additional statewide posts: Justice of the Supreme Court, Public Service Commissioner seat #1, and Public Service Commissioner seat #2.

That degree of homogeny can hardly be good in the long run.

Just about the dumbest thing you can read today. Good Samaritan Backfire: How I Ended Up in Solitary After Calling 911 for Help:

As a result of my efforts to help injured bicyclists by calling 911, I was, in short order: separated from my friend, violently tackled, arrested, taken to county jail, stripped and left in a solitary cell. I am writing this story because, if it could happen to me, it could happen to you, and I feel the need to do something to help prevent this brutality from propagating.

The charges were ultimately dropped, but everything that came before it in that tale, if accurate, is well beyond the boundary of acceptable behavior from several of the law enforcement officers involved.

North Korea is fascinating. North Korea is horrifying. North Korean prison abuse sketches – in pictures.

76ers sign Kevin Grow to 2-day deal:

Kevin Grow, a high school senior with Down syndrome who lives in the Philadelphia area, has been signed by the Philadelphia 76ers to a ceremonial two-day contract.

Grow scored 14 points including three 3-pointers and a buzzer beater over the final two games of the varsity season after Bensalem High School coaches put him, the team’s four-year manager, in the lineup.

That almost makes me want to become a basketball fan.

Almost.

(Though you have to like the Sixers now.)

I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / Monday / running / Samford / things to read / video — Comments Off on Run and tell that
10
Feb 14

Run and tell that

We talked about critiquing news articles and television packages in class today. There are many great examples of quality work. There are also a staggeringly large amount of poor examples. They are all useful, but the one is often more fun than the other.

We watched a fire package several times. We closely considered the standard pre-winter weather milk and bread story. We read about a BASE jumper who died, and a restaurant owner shooting at his customers.

And, of course, the package that launched a thousand Antoine Dodsons:

On the one hand, that’s now four years old and I’m impressed by how many students are aware of it. On the other hand, I’m amused that there are people who don’t know it.

The Internet is a magical, large place. It makes you wonder what you’re missing, almost every day.

…

I just read Dodson’s Wikipedia page, and his website, and some link that the Internet gave me where he’s selling customized phone messages. He has had a few songs, and a clothing line, and another random thing here or there.

That guy sure was able to capitalize on the alleged sexual assault of his sister. Turned his family’s lifestyle around, at least for a time. To my knowledge no suspect was ever named. The culture surely has turned, hasn’t it?

The original remix won a handful of video of the year awards and tons of covers and parodies itself, the meta-parody writ large. And then college marching bands took a run at the tune:

I wonder how I can work this back into the class on Wednesday.

Ran a brisk 5K tonight. Felt good, being now about 12 or 15 miles into the new shoes. I’m now in a 4 mm drop running shoe, which doesn’t mean much to me. The old shoes were no longer capable of running. And I’ve had to transition into these. The heel-toe angle is different, and that takes an adjustment.

Also they are incredibly vibrant colors, which I guess might help make me visible on the side of the road, but they are never anything I’d choose for myself. They were on sale and there aren’t many options in my size. So my feet are fancy, and they still move slow.

I do not know what is happening.

Things to read … because there’s so much to learn about.

In a post-Dodson world, why not? Illinois using The Onion to reach young uninsured:

Trying to sell young adults on the idea of health insurance before an upcoming deadline, Illinois officials announced Monday they are launching an ad campaign with the satirical online newspaper The Onion.

Banner ads on The Onion website will depict a toy action figure with the words: “Man without health insurance is forced to sell action figures to pay medical bills.” The ads say: “Get Covered. Don’t sell your action figures.”

Oy.

Professor Reynolds knows not enough people care that they are being spied on. He makes good points here, but they won’t spur anyone to action, either. NSA spying undermines separation of powers: Column:

Most of the worry about the National Security Agency’s bulk interception of telephone calls, e-mail and the like has centered around threats to privacy. And, in fact, the evidence suggests that if you’ve got a particularly steamy phone- or Skype-sex session going on, it just might wind up being shared by voyeuristic NSA analysts.

But most Americans figure, probably rightly, that the NSA isn’t likely to be interested in their stuff. (Anyone who hacks my e-mail is automatically punished, by having to read it.) There is, however, a class of people who can’t take that disinterest for granted: members of Congress and the judiciary. What they have to say is likely to be pretty interesting to anyone with a political ax to grind. And the ability of the executive branch to snoop on the phone calls of people in the other branches isn’t just a threat to privacy, but a threat to the separation of powers and the Constitution.

How much does your school spend on snow removal? Good question. I know Samford spread 35,000 pounds of sand and 4,000 pounds of ice melt. Staff spent 506 hours clearing roads and sidewalks and dozens and dozens of staff members worked for three and four days, straight.

But at least the bookstore sold 428 pieces of clothing — a lot of sweatpants — on that day the campus was closed two weeks ago.

The campus closed early on Friday, last week, as well. And there is more weather coming this week. This is a strange winter for Alabama. The cost of lost time in the classroom has likely been the biggest toll. I’m still trying to get a class caught up. Maybe on Wednesday, if winter allows the class to meet.

journalism / links / Monday / Samford / things to read — Comments Off on Let’s try this again
3
Feb 14

Let’s try this again

The first day of class, take two. After Tuesday’s snow and ice event turned into a systemic and region-wide calamity, our campus was closed for a while. They sent down the CANCELED notices at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Things returned to normal on Saturday. Which is overstating things. Campus was passable by Wednesday. The roads were finally usable by Thursday, when the cold weather broke. But Friday, it just felt like people needed a rest. At least that was part of the reasoning.

Folks had been working for three days straight – and straight is used in the literal sense. You could tell that people just needed a break. I’m sure there were some other logistical reasons and probably even larger, perfectly fine rationale, but at the end of it all, the administrators decided that campus would be closed on Friday. Most on campus activities started again over the weekend. Classes resumed today. (And if you had a Tuesday afternoon class, or later, you hadn’t even met yet.)

Walking in today, then, we started all over again. It seemed liked it had been three weeks since we met last, anyway.

Various things in the class, as they were put into place, proved that missing last Wednesday because of the weather was actually a big deal. Many things had to be re-juggled. How this happened since we lost only one day, I’m not sure, but it took a while to put the moveable parts around the immovable parts in a way that made sense for the larger aims of the class.

So I rebuilt and rearranged parts of the syllabus.

This is the class where we ask students to start thinking about news products in critical terms. So I have them critique the news that they see and hear and read. I have them do this online, so they can learn at least one content management system this term and have place to start putting their news clips, too. We used to have students build faux-websites in Dreamweaver, but that presented unique problems on two or three fronts, so I’ve just streamlined the effort and now we use WordPress. Which means that, today, we spent all day talking about Dashboard.

It isn’t the most exciting day of the term, but it is useful. And I get to show off a cool site or two (like this one) and demonstrate how easy it is to be a modern publisher. I did not make, however, my international author joke. So I have to make sure to get that one in class next Monday.

Also, I need to remember, here, to cross link to things I publish on my multimedia blog. Here are the most recent items now:

Immersive media

Olympic tweets

Simple, effective storytelling

Writing with zeroes and ones

Images tell our stories in many ways

Just so you know the world you’re going in to …

Things to read … because you haven’t yet read enough.

High quality navel-gazing here, Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present:

Six decades after Hartley wrote his famous line, the past is no longer a foreign land. Instead we’ve brought a weirdly literal truth to William Faulkner’s famously sphinxlike aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Take the Kennedy assassination, for instance. In honor of the event’s 50th anniversary last November, CBS streamed four straight days of its news broadcast from the period surrounding the killing so you could experience what it had been like in real time. Or consider this: World War II buffs can download radio broadcasts and listen to the rise of Hitler or the news from D-Day as you would have heard them back then.

More often, though, we don’t immerse ourselves in history; it’s just there whenever we want it, living right alongside the present. We can trace ideas backward in time, either by searching Google Books or (for a sum) through thousands of academic journals, using a few keywords to find sources that once were the sole domain of historians. Pick any historical subject and the Internet will bring it to life before your eyes. If you’re interested in vaudeville, you’ll find videos galore, while college football scholars can browse Penn State’s 1924 yearbook, complete with all the players’ names and positions. And every day, more history keeps washing up. Not long ago the news went out that a Philadelphia woman named Marion Stokes had recorded 140,000 VHS tapes of local and national news from 1977 to her death in 2012. Her collection has been acquired by the Internet Archive, and soon it will trickle onto the web.

This omnipresence of the past has weird effects on contemporary culture. Take any genre of music, from death metal to R&B to chillwave, and the cloud directs you not just to similar artists in the present but to deep wells of influence from the past. Yes, people still like new things. But the past gets as much preference as the present—Mozart, for example, has more than 100,000 followers on Spotify. In a history glut, the idea of fashionability in music erodes, because new songs sit on the same shelf as songs recorded five, 25, and 55 years ago, all of them waiting to be discovered. In this eternal present, everything can be made contemporary.

Just wait until the next time you see a favorite actor that you see regularly from some production from the 1980s or 1990s. And then, when you see them now, think of reading that again.

Why is local news innovation struggling financially while national thrives?:

Why does digital news media seem so vibrant on the national level and so anemic on the local level?

First, venture capitalists and other professional investors have little interest in businesses focused on one community. News is tough enough to make money on but at least if you’re national you can generate massive numbers of ad impressions and the possibility of Amazonian reach. Venture capital investors can only get 5x return or more for businesses that promise national or global scale.

[…]

Another challenge faced by local news startups relates to the nature of digital advertising. Because national digital properties – Google, Yahoo, AOL – can target ads to particular zip codes, local advertisers can reach their customers through them, without having to advertise with a local company. In effect, a local media company is now competing for ad dollars not only with the other media in town but with massive, national institutions with better technology and larger sales forces.

Also, infrastructure. The local shops need to be well-staffed with talented people. If you don’t have that, you won’t have much. Sadly, there have been a lot of cuts across the industry of old hands. Meanwhile, the younger staff that were hired to replace them, typically in a digital capacity or one-man band scenarios, are still learning their craft. Audiences pick up on that sort of thing.

The most convoluted lead of the day, and it isn’t the reporter’s fault. Kerry, Hagel urge ‘transatlantic renaissance’ to confront political and security challenges

MUNICH — In an unusual joint appearance overseas, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told European allies Saturday that Washington would depend more heavily on them to tackle a litany of political and security crises, even as the two pushed back against concerns that the Obama administration was abdicating leadership on the same issues.

And, finally, about that Super Bowl Coke ad:

Monday / movies / Samford / video — Comments Off on First day of classes
27
Jan 14

First day of classes

As I got out of the car we were in the process of temperatures dropping from the low 60s into the low 30s. It isn’t usually as noticeably dramatic as all that, but I can say that after class I went from my office to the gym and from the gym to my car and it was dramatic.

And by the time I made it from the car to the restaurant it was cold. In the restaurant the staff was quoting Coming to America.

So I quoted it with them, which they found amusing. And then a lady asked me if I knew the name of the elephant in the movie. Like everyone knows the name of an elephant in a quarter-century old movie. I said as much online, where I soon learned that everyone knows the name of the elephant.

First day of class today. I had notes and had practiced the syllabus speech and all of the opening day material, as I always do. It never plays out in the classroom the way it does in my mind. So maybe I should just develop the syllabus and wing it from there.

It is a fun class, though. We take field trips. I always enjoy this one.

It is really cold now. The weather moves in tomorrow. Are you ready?

cycling / Monday / photo / running — Comments Off on A photo week – Monday
20
Jan 14

A photo week – Monday

Took this shot while out riding yesterday.

riding

It was my first ride of the new year. There’s been cold and things to do and waiting until we had everything just right and so on.

So we found the flattest 20 mile route we could think of nearby and then added an extra leg on that plan, all of which seemed uphill, which was brilliant in retrospect. We ended up doing just under 23 miles, which was great fun. Then The Yankee got a flat just before we were done. I was behind her, watching it go down before she noticed it, so when she stopped I was already throwing a leg over the top tube and reaching for my pump.

The crisis was no crisis. In a moment we were going over the last hill before home, where I took that picture, the scenery marked the end of a nice ride.

Today was meant to be a rest day. So late in the evening I was feeling antsy and went for a three-mile jog. I’m turning into one of those people, apparently.

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