Monday

friends / journalism / links / Monday / photo / Samford / things to read — Comments Off on The kind of Monday where the traffic clears before you get there
4
Nov 13

The kind of Monday where the traffic clears before you get there

I got a call on the drive into work. It was a friend who was some miles ahead of me on the interstate. He was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and was thoughtful enough to offer this heads up. He screen capped a picture of his favorite traffic app map and sent that to me. I compared what his phone said to what my phone said. I was able, while safely not in traffic, to consult a news source on line. Ten miles of interstate were closed.

Surely this means there was a nuclear reactor meltdown at a place where no one realized there was a nuclear reactor meltdown.

By the time I made it to the area, after a bite of lunch to wait out the traffic, it was all gone. The road had reopened. There was a car, Brian said, that had ran off the road. He also sent pictures of a fender-bender or two, the sort of thing that happens in the backup of a larger accident and just ruins your week. He never saw anything that merited a 10-mile shutdown.

Which still doesn’t mean that there aren’t spent fuel roads on some county road overpass.

But my friend called me from his stationary vehicle with a phone he wears on his hip. That signal went off a tower, probably to a satellite synched up to a static Mercury orbit, came back down to me and we conferred like air traffic controls. Then he sent me digital imagery, the stuff no one would have conceived of 50 years ago. And then he beamed me photographs, which would have been a fanciful plot device in a television show even 20 years ago.

And, what a world, we do all of this without thinking.

The only problem with autumn this far south — he said with a vacant sigh, as if any sigh could truly be vacant — is that it doesn’t last very long. Three days, The Yankee says. She’s being sarcastic about it, but only just. So you spend a little time in this beautiful weather, and it has been amazing the last few days, lingering a little bit longer under each tree, for no other reasons than you can and should.

The only problem with autumn anywhere — he said with a more resigned sigh, as if any sigh could be anything more than resigned — is that it is impossible to capture the feeling of autumn, even the muted version we get, in an image. You don’t get the sun just right and the air feels different and the smells you never notice are just shifting in that way that makes you notice them for 23 minutes on a Tuesday, but not again until some day early next spring. If spring is a shout to the senses and summer is a testament of being able to filter out the overwhelming then fall is a gentle nod at imperceptibility. It only barely says “I’m coming.” It usually only whispers “I’m here andnowI’mleaving.” There’s a big heave at the end, of course. “I was there.” Those are the leaves on the ground.

Makes you wonder why we call them leaves.

Here are a few from the yard. By the time I am back under this dogwood the entire thing will look sickly.

foliage

foliage

foliage

I’ll post a few more pictures like this this week. I know you can’t photograph autumn. I know it never catches the moment and, at the end of the day, you have nothing more than multihued tree extremities. But I keep trying, every year.

In class today we talked about public relations, what it is and isn’t. And we began discussing the all-important press release. This evening I worked on The Editing Of Things, which isn’t as ominous as it portends, just unending. I had a soup-and-sandwich dinner, because it was as cold inside as outside, which is to say mildly chilly outside, and ridiculous indoors.

I dipped the toasted herb focaccia bread into the vegetable soup, the flavors of which did odd things to the asiago, roasted tomatoes and basil pesto sauce on the slices of turkey. I say that just to make it sound healthy and exotic. Especially after I just mistakenly saw the nutritional value of that sandwich. Looks like I’ll need a new usual.

Things to read …

The list really shouldn’t include this. A local columnist, in his well-placed displeasure with people that have been elected to office and subsequently gotten themselves in heaps of legal trouble and the community in historic financial trouble, has gotten vivid:

That era of debt and corruption is going to burn for a lifetime. We laid ourselves down with Langford and these banks, and some of these lawyers, and woke up itching with an STD we can’t shake.

Commissioner George Bowman, the lone vote against the new deal, was right when he said poor people will be disproportionately hurt by perpetually rising rates.

Poor people are going to get hosed. Poor people – all residential customers but especially the poor – are going to get hosed worse than they did before the bankruptcy or during it. They are going to get hosed in perpetuity.

Shame there’s no municipal-grade penicillin.

Here’s the story: ” I was supposed to be there for her at that moment and I was.” The video is worth 53 seconds of your time:

The newest Pew surveys are out, and there’s so much to unpack. It all defies excerpting in a place like this, so I’ll just give you the headline, which is not as good as the actual read: Twitter News Consumers: Young, Mobile and Educated.

Follow me on Twitter, there is occasionally something for most everyone there. And be sure to come back tomorrow for more leaves and various other observations of the modern condition!

books / errands / iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / photo / Samford / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off on No pigs were harmed in this post; Ritz crackers damaged
28
Oct 13

No pigs were harmed in this post; Ritz crackers damaged

Doctor’s appointment first thing. You arrive precisely at 8 a.m., you are seen right away. Didn’t even have the opportunity to get settled in the waiting room. Or in the examination room. Everything was … unsettled, then.

No. The doctor is a fine fellow, the very personification of sincerity. Firm hand, assuring tone, appropriate levels of sincere concern. We were in and out in no time. All things are proceeding accordingly, nothing to be concerned or alarmed about. All blue skies from here, as they say.

So the lesson is be the first appointment of the day, or you’re waiting for 90 minutes.

A grocery store run for provisions. This, too, is the time of day to be there. I found the crackers. Do you know how many varieties of Ritz crackers there are available to you today? I’ll document this on the next visit, as I was in a bit of a rush today, but there are more non-Ritz flavored Ritz crackers than there are Ritz crackers now. I just want a few sleeves of Ritz-flavored Ritz crackers.

That’s a problem of the 21st century, if ever there was one.

So while that was bemusing, the bread choices were underwhelming. We are a two-brand household. If it is on sale we get the Arnold bread, but it was not on the shelves and the buy-one-get-one signs were not on display. So I turned to the Nature’s Own, which has that comforting title and those marvelous symbols of Midwestern enterprise: wheat and a sugar jar. One loaf of that, one box of crackers, one box of Ibuprofen and (success!) I found English Teatime. Which means I should back up.

In the last half of the summer I cut way back on my tea intake. It turns out I can drink a lot of tea. So we’ve made exactly one large pitcher in the house since July. However, we’re enjoying more and more hot teas. We have an entire shelf in a cabinet stuff with packets we’ve purchased or picked up or been given over time. So there is a lot of sampling going on. Lately I’ve settled on three favorites (because I drink a lot of tea). The problem being I ran out of the preferred variety. I’d visited the giant box store with no luck, but now, at Publix, where shopping is a pleasure, I found the English Teatime again. So I bought a box today.

I’m trying to arrange the part of the day I would drink these in: English Breakfast, Mint and English Teatime. The mint is obviously an after-dinner treat. The Teatime varieties that I’ve had have, thus far, seemed strong than the Breakfast stuff. Though there are people who disagree. All of those reviews came from 1,367 reviews of the Bigelow brand on Amazon. Of those, 15 mentioned Teatime. If there’s one thing we’ve come to love, it is sharing our sometimes-insightful opinions with others. Here are a few more reviews. The downside, of course, being you don’t know what is going on with these folks, and how do you address the reviews that diametrically oppose one another? Of course the lay review is sometimes better than a professional effort, which can seem officious for tea.

Even better are the reviews on Steepster. There are some people in that community who are very casual with their reflections, and others who are trying a bit too hard. (Simply put, did you like it? Was it strong or weak? What was the flavor like? Let’s move on.) Some of them, however, offer incredible bits of biography into the things they write. Seule771, who has commented there 587 times, and presumably mostly about tea, writes:

This tea belongs to my mother-in-law yet, I help myself to a cup of this tea every now and again, as she takes notice of the tea bags missing. I take one tea bag and put it in my cup adding the boiled water to it. Tea colors right away to a pinkish dew, not dark red but more like mahogany; rose-wood red and smells very robust as fine black teas tend to. When sipping of the tea it is malty with creamy texture. This is a fine cup of tea and I don’t need to add a thing to it.

In all, this tea has a lovely color and aroma of a freshly brewed cup of tea; robust in texture and body with an invigorating aroma to waken or refresh one’s mid-day drawling of sobering thoughts. This is an ideal cup of tea for all occasions.

Makes you wonder what the mother-in-law thinks of the tea, and tea theft in general.

Steepster invites you to “dive into the universe of tea.” But they still don’t offer a simple chart that has “Ease into a restive night” on one end, “Tea for brunches sanguine or sublime” in the middle and “Pulls your taste buds through your eyelids with a domineering efficacy that will remind you of countries lax on human rights policies” on the other end.

This is a tea chart we could all use.

But I digress. Purchasing crackers, bread, Ibuprofen and tea I wondered what the cashier thinks when you checkout by the handful. No one ever gives a consideration to the idea that he or she is judging you when you have a great big cart full of groceries. “Restocking the shelves at home. Big weekend ahead, no doubt,” is about all that the unimaginative cashier could have for that. But when you bring up four items, you get judged, pal. “This guy is having cracker sandwiches. Guess he never heard of Atkins.” And from there that imagination really kicks in.

The great mystery of the day was also found at Publix, where the staff is under strict order to be conversant with everyone that it could be said made plausible eye contact. I guess they have meetings after hours and watch the camera footage. “Jenkins, you ignored two ladies on the canned veggies aisle. One more of those and you’re gone!”

An assistant manager, I saw him just enough to catch that part of his tag, did the standard hello and how are you today. He was walking one way and I was walking the other. By the time I’d given the expected reply he was already ticking off inventory on the cake aisle. Hard to see the point.

Class today featured profile features and editing and the great question “How do I find out about a person’s warts?” One student searched and searched and finally pronounced that Josh Groban, in fact, has no warts. He is, it was revealed, perfect in every way. So there you have it: Jesus and Josh Groban.

She did find a Groban wart — which sounds like an unfortunate looking thing that can be removed in an easy outpatient procedure — but then later conveniently discarded it. The previous narrative was better.

Also, in the class I discovered a book on the Three Little Pigs. This edition was a bit more detailed than I remembered.

It seemed the momma pig pushed them out. The first two got by on begging and convincing naive farmers to gimme gimme. Alas, the most jubilantly drawn wolf possible blew down their homes of straw and sticks. The pigs disappeared just in time, never to be seen again. (One had a racquetball tournament, the other a drinking problem.) The third pig won some bricks in a radio station contest — or stuck up a brick mason, I forget — and built Fortress Porcine. It could not be defeated without air superiority, of which the wolf had none.

ThreeLittlePigs

So the wolf went the other direction, guile. There are turnips nearby, let’s go get them together. This pig, smart enough to take out a loan from Freddie Mac to obtain bricks and mortar, went early and enjoyed the turnips. So tomorrow, the wolf said, let’s try this apple orchard. The wolf, wise to the pig’s game yesterday, also arrived early, but not earlier enough. An hour earlier still, because this pig has insomnia, the pig was up a tree. Never mind how that pig got there. He escaped by the ancient art of distraction and Canidae ADHD.

So the wolf later said, hey, I know this fair, only we have to go there at 3 a.m. The pig, desperate to watch another installment of Adam Levine on a late night Proactive infomercial, reluctantly agreed. But, again he went early. And, again, the wolf almost caught him, but the pig, remembering his ancient Greek — remember, this is the big that baked his own bricks and watches television and scales trees — hid in a butter churn and rolled home right past the antagonist. Porcum ex machina, if you will.

These are the geekiest jokes I’ve made in some time, no?

Recruiting calls into the evening. You leave a lot of messages, you slow down to say your phone number so it can be written down. You always are a little concerned that you might have transposed a few digits.

Occasionally they call you back. Every so often you catch a student at home and they are very excited about the prospect of talking to you. You get to tell this young person all of the cool things that are going on in your department. You mention the neat places students intern and the awesome jobs they get one day.

You forget entirely that, for some reason, there was a Three Little Pigs book in the classroom today.

Then a bite to eat and reading and writing this and doing other things that I couldn’t make into a silly play on words. It is a fine life.

Things to read …

This story has the best quote about a silly adventure imaginable. People wobbled but the record didn’t go down:

“Everything that could go wrong went wrong between rehearsal and execution,” she said at halftime. “We had some folks to come late, we had microphone problems, we had sound and speaker problems, we had some timing problems. But it does not mean we’re going to give up.”

Not to worry, Gene Hallman, president of the Alabama Sports Foundation, tells us: “The Mayor will make sure the PA works properly next year.”

This is a great relief to everyone, except people holding the current Wobble record, one assumes. I’m uncertain what that number is, or if Guinness recognizes it. None of the stories I’ve read so far have addressed that angle.

Here’s one of those obvious stories that only clicks when it is actually written, and it has given rise to a terrific expression. The Information-Gathering Paradox:

The Internet industry, having nudged consumers to share heaps of information about themselves, has built a trove of personal data for government agencies to mine — erecting, perhaps unintentionally, what Alessandro Acquisti, a Carnegie Mellon University behavioral economist, calls “the de facto infrastructure of surveillance.”

This is interesting. There was an unfortunate bomb threat at Central York (Penn.) High School recently, but … Central York High School journalists tweeted live updates about the bomb threat:

Students turn to social media when something happens, and Fuhrman and Kristen Shipley, editor-in-chief of On the Prowl, the school’s entertainment magazine, began tweeting the news through @CYHSProwler.

They reported as the students moved from the football stadium to the baseball field and finally to the soccer field. They reminded everyone to remain calm. They informed students about when they could return to the school building to retrieve their belongings.

The student journalists also tweeted pictures from the scene and interacted with those on Twitter. They responded to questions, saying they would seek answers if they didn’t know.

Sounds like they handled it like pros.

Meanwhile, Old Meets New: Newspapers Take to Instagram:

Newspapers haven’t flocked to Instagram the way they have to Facebook and Twitter. Which makes sense. Instagram, unlike the other platforms, can’t drive people back to the site because the photo-sharing platform doesn’t embed live links. Also, they can forget about monetizing.

Still, some papers that do real journalism (and are looking to attract real readers) are on the photo sharing site, if only to have another venue to showcase their occasionally stellar photography – or, at the very least, remind the digital kids that they still exist.

What about that other shoe? Some health insurance gets pricier as Obamacare rolls out:

Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don’t qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.

“It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” said Harris, who is three months pregnant. “This increase is simply not affordable.”

[…]

Pam Kehaly, president of Anthem Blue Cross in California, said she received a recent letter from a young woman complaining about a 50% rate hike related to the healthcare law.

“She said, ‘I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,'” Kehaly said.

The Los Angeles Times goes on to note that some of those who will actually benefit will do so because “the federal government picks up much of the tab” to demonstrate they couldn’t connect a straight line with a ruler and a dotted path.

Quick hits:

Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov’t Benefit Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers

America’s New Lost Generation, in One Map

Army Fleet Service at Fort Rucker to lay off 300 workers by year’s end

Hundreds attend vigil for shot Mobile bicyclist Joe O’Brien

Toddler battling leukemia crowned homecoming queen

Owing to the wise decisions of the good people at News 4 San Antonio I could not embed the video from that last story. That’s a beautiful little girl though. Here’s her homepage. That’s two leukemia stories I’ve seen in six days. Here’s the National Marrow Donor Program site, which explains the donation process and lists all of the drives going on around you.

More on Tumblr and plenty more on Twitter.

books / history / journalism / links / Monday / movies / Samford / things to read / video — Comments Off on I write of fine days, burgers, radio and books
21
Oct 13

I write of fine days, burgers, radio and books

Just another fine day, where most people struggle with Mondays I can look at this one as one that just came my way, sailing through like a leaf on a calm, moving stream. The weather was delightful. Sunny and warm, a nice change after I had climbed off my bike last night, panting a little more than I should for the regular ride, walk out from under a dark sky into the chill borne of damp clothes and a tiny breeze. That was the first signal of the changing seasons. Today was the rebuttal.

And a fine one it was today, too. Sunny, with high skies. I don’t think that means anything, but I use it on days like today, when the sun is always out of the way of the direction you’re looking, you have just enough clouds to give some perspective and set off the cobalt blue sky.

I was enjoying myself well enough that I drove right past the exit where I occasionally pick up a Whataburger. No matter, there was another one a few stops down. The one I usually hit has great fries and the buns are perfect. And something on the burger there always falls onto my shirt, which I hate, but I can set my clock by it.

The one I visited today, the backup spot, has perfectly reasonable bread, which is to say like most places, but you don’t really talk about it. Now the first one has bread so good you say “Get a load of this bread! Taste the flour signature! Can you smell that baking!?” or whatever you say to your friends. And no one ever says those things, but they would there.

The one I visited today, the backup spot, did not have perfect french fries. And at my regular stop I have had near-perfection in a fried length of salted tuber. They were fine, today, but trending to old. The tea, however, was perfect. The preferred Whataburger has lousy tea.

So, would it be odd to order just the sandwich and fries at the one place and then stop again, later, to get a drink?

They are both owned by the same guy, I read today in that restaurant standard, the food review mounted on the wall. The reporter asked him what he’d have as his last meal. He said he’d have the number two. I prefer the single, myself.

In class today we worked on polishing and editing stories. And so students wrote and rewrote and we came up with new ways for them to see old things. Writing, I tell them constantly, is a process. And you have to love the process. If you become infatuated with what you think is your finished product you’re going to have a hard time in many respects.

I was talking with a glass blower a few years ago, and he said that about his craft. It takes about 10 years, he said, to master the art, and you have to love the work, because you will break your heart breaking glass for 10 years. When he said that I knew precisely what he meant. Though that gentleman, I’m sure, is a better writer than I am a glass blower. But we could relate. And he had huge furnaces.

Never mentioned that I finished reading Hello, Everybody a few days ago. I probably never mentioned I was reading it, either. It is a history of the rise of radio in the United States and the author has plenty of terrific personalities to illustrate his tale, which chronologically starts with KDKA, the famous and historic AM station in Pittsburgh and goes through the end of the Hoover administration. Like so many aspects of society, we find ourselves looking at FDR as a new chapter. In the story of radio, however, the story was prior to and during the Hoover years. He was, as secretary of commerce, the man instrumental in the early years. He played, as president, an active role during the maturation process. All of that is in Anthony Rudel’s book, which starts with the legendary tale of John Brinkley.

All Brinkley wanted to do was to put goat glands into men suffering from impotency and other maladies. And sell people miracle elixirs. And tell everyone about it on his huge transmitter. And get filthy rich doing it. His is a great tale, one of those that is probably slipping away into history, but is worth reading about. And when you read about him, the image you picture looks almost exactly like the man himself. It is uncanny.

That’s just one story. You’ll learn about evangelists, crime and entertainers, including Roxy Rothafel, who was perhaps the nation’s most famous performer during his run. Ever heard of him? Funny how that happens. Turns out, though, that Rothafel was the type that launched a thousand ships. He gave a lot of mid-20th century performers their start. He was an enduring influence on even more. So everyone that was old when I was young, they were young on his show once upon a time.

Also, and most interesting, you can take significant passages of this book detailing the growth of radio. Take out that word and put the words “world wide web” in those places and you’d see incredible parallels.

So I put that book down, which is great because I’ve been reading it forever. Today I picked up Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light. He’s finally finished his trilogy of the European Theater of World War II. They are heady books, filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.

The books are fairly dense, but they are hardly complete. (Which is not a criticism.) The first thing I did when I picked this up today was to flip through the index. No one I’m related to is there. I looked up the regiment my great-grandfather was in. It is listed exactly twice, almost in passing. I’ve recently condensed that unit history into a chapter-sized file for family reading, and those troopers did stuff. (France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, was given to 67 members of my great-grandfather’s division. His regiment alone earned 24 of those. The division scored 651 Silver Stars, 35 Distinguished Service Crosses and one Medal of Honor.) But they don’t even make it into Atkinson’s book. It is a telling example of how big the war was. Hard to wrap your mind around if you weren’t there. Probably impossible when you were in it.

And you’ll pardon me if I get nerdy here: Atkinson’s prologue is 41 pages. It starts, after a bit of scene-setting in Britain (and oh, how Atkinson can set a scene) with the famous meeting at St. Paul’s. It looked something like this:

Though I never bought Selleck as Ike.

Anyway, I made it 10 or so pages in to the Atkinson book over dinner tonight. Good book.

Things to read, which I found interesting today … This was written by the president of the state press association. It is an important, if technical and legal, piece. State Supreme Court demolishes Alabama Open Meetings Act:

“Justiciability.”

“Redressability.”

These two tortuous legal terms were used by the Alabama Supreme Court last month to deliver a devastating one-two punch to Alabama’s Open Meetings Act.

First the court proclaimed that our state legislators do not need to hold any of their meetings in public and do not even need to follow their own rules. Then the court placed severe limits on the qualifications of persons who can sue under the open meetings law, although the law plainly states that “any Alabama citizen” can bring such a suit.

Speaking of media and the law, Samford just announced a six-year journalism and mass communication-slash-law degree track. You can read about it here.

Get ready for something new from the Associated Press. Associated Press Is the Latest News Organization to Try Sponsored Content

The Associated Press is planning to introduce sponsored articles into the stream of news stories on its mobile apps and hosted websites. The rollout is expected in early 2014, with potential sponsorship deals centered around major events the AP is planning to cover, such as the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the Academy Awards.

[…]

The move to sponsored content is part of a broader effort to open a new line of revenue at the AP, where just 2% of total revenue comes from advertising, including mobile banner ads and units across a handful of websites populated with AP content. Another 13% of comes from services the AP offers media outlets. And 85% comes from licensing content to subscribers such as TV stations, newspapers and websites, where the AP is not hopeful about expanding income.

They’re getting in the game a bit late, in terms of platforms available to advertisers. However, not every company and agency have gone this route yet, so who knows how it will work.

I fear they will all be even more 45- or 60-second spots in the style of television commercials that get in the way of some important story. The best video ads online are at YouTube, the ones that you can skip. Make a great ad and keep the audience, maybe even for your mini-opera. Can’t hold us after six seconds? Well, you tried. Sorta. Now we’re going to see what Lady Gaga is up to.

This is unfair, as AP’s video is usually quite good, but one of their lead pieces as I wrote this was “Sleeping Driver Wakes Up, Causes Atlanta Crash,” which is almost one of those “We have video, and so this is news stories.” I’d share it with you, but AP doesn’t allow for their videos to be embedded. Maybe they can work on that next.

Oh here’s the actual raw footage, sans the carefully re-enacted emergency phone call that they put into the AP package:

Something the video is strange. It feels incomplete, somehow. Particularly when you read WSB’s accompanying story. Weird scene, bad wreck. But you would have never heard about it if not for the videographer who was already there.

history / journalism / links / Monday / things to read — Comments Off on Happy Columbus Day
14
Oct 13

Happy Columbus Day

Happy Columbus Day!

I’ve never been to a town named Columbus. To my recollection I’ve never met anyone named Christopher.

I’ve known several Italians. As far as I know none of them worked for any Spanish royalty.

I’ve seen the ocean, but usually on a motorized vessel, and never in ships of three.

I’m not a fan of subjugation, tyranny or any of the other things that we’ve lately come to attach to the explorer.

He was apparently tall. Six feet says the Internet. He weighed 237 pounds. Or 159 pounds. These things all seem difficult to know, particularly since we don’t know what he looked like.

Clearly I have nothing.

Things to read, which I found interesting today …

We live in the future. ‘Bionic Man’ Walks, Breathes With Artificial Parts


Well, yeah. Walmart shelves in Springhill, Mansfield, cleared in EBT glitch:

Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.

The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.

The “Salute Seen Around The World” Wounded Ranger Salutes Commander Despite Injuries:

Despite being in intense pain and mental duress, Josh remained alert and compassionate to the limited Rangers that were allowed to visit his bedside. Prior to Josh being moved to Germany for his eventual flight to America, we conducted a ceremony to award him with the Purple Heart for wounds received in action.

A simple ceremony, you can picture a room full of Rangers, leaders, doctors, and nurses surrounding his bedside while the Ranger Regimental Commander pinned the Purple Heart to his blanket. During the presentation the Commander publishes the official orders verbally and leaned over Josh to thank him for his sacrifice.

Josh, whom everybody in the room (over 50 people) assumed to be unconscious, began to move his right arm under the blanket in a diligent effort to salute the Commander as is customary during these ceremonies. Despite his wounds, wrappings, tubes, and pain, Josh fought the doctor who was trying to restrain his right arm and rendered the most beautiful salute any person in that room had ever seen.

Maybe because he is a Ranger, but that story reminded me of this one, from 2009.

And they are both stories we should never forget.

On the other side of the spectrum of the human condition, email is hard. Technology and the College Generation:

Morgan Judge, a sophomore at Fordham University in New York, said she thought it was “cool” last semester when a professor announced that students could text him. Then she received one from him: “Check your e-mail for an update on the assignment.”

“E-mail has never really been a fun thing to use,” said Ms. Judge, 19. “It’s always like, ‘This is something you have to do.’ School is a boring thing. E-mail is a boring thing. It goes together.”

[…]

Brittney Carver, 20, a junior at the University of Iowa, said she checks her e-mail once a day, more if she’s expecting something. Before college, she used e-mail mostly for buying concert tickets. She said she would never use it if she could avoid it.

“I never know what to say in the subject line and how to address the person,” Ms. Carver said. “Is it mister or professor and comma and return, and do I have to capitalize and use full sentences? By the time I do all that I could have an answer by text if I could text them.”

I feel bad for these students insofar as they don’t realize how these quotes come off in the story. But the piece’s general observation is sound. Students don’t often react to email the way that email senders would want them to. That’s a real problem, though I’d never considered email as hard.

Soon we’ll be Snapchatting all of our coursework, one supposes.

I will not be Snapchatting coursework.

Happy Columbus Day!

Catember / journalism / links / Monday / Samford / things to read — 1 Comment
30
Sep 13

Good for 63.73 percent of the people in the poll below; they said ‘Who cares?’

Didn’t you love Catember? We love Catember. That’s the fourth year I’ve put that on the site, and it is probably one of the more popular things going. You can follow this link to the Catember category and see all of them. Allie is wacky as ever.

This morning she got locked in a linen closet. Because if you go to that part of the house then you must be going into that room. And if you are going into that room it must be because you are going to open the door for her.

It is a neat trick, really. She jumps up to a second shelf, while ducking down to avoid hitting the third shelf and fitting in a narrow space on top of beach towels. She likes to be on clean things. Very fussy.

Talked about news leads in class today. Riveting stuff. Here are some of the slides:

My favorite part is finding examples of bad leads. New York Times, student media, the local pros. None of us are immune. I read a dreadful one out of the old gray lady today. It violated almost every rule of thumb you would ordinarily use.

Otherwise, the day passed as it should.

Things to read that I thought you might find interesting:

Auburn-Opelika named as top place to retire

More than 2,000 NASA workers in Huntsville look to Washington today as government shutdown looms

Shutdown would lead to 2,000 civilian furloughs, no pay for military at Maxwell

Here’s an interesting profile on author and “performer” Malcolm Gladwell who has a new book out. He addresses critics. And his hair is still artistically unkempt:

“When you write about sports, you’re allowed to engage in mischief,” he says. “Nothing is at stake. It’s a bicycle race!” As a serious amateur runner himself (just the other day, he finished the Fifth Avenue Mile race, in Manhattan, in five minutes and three seconds) he’s “totally anti-doping … But what I’m trying to say is, look, we have to come up with better reasons. Our reasons suck! And when the majority has taken a position that’s ill thought-through, it’s appropriate to make trouble.” His expression settles into a characteristic half-smile that makes clear he’d relish it if you disagreed.

Here’s an insightful New Yorker piece on the Guardian taking on the British government:

At 5:23 p.m., roughly eight hours after the encounter in his office, Rusbridger ordered the Guardian to post the G.C.H.Q. story on its Web site and then in its print edition. Although the British government had taken no further action, the mood in the Guardian’s offices was anxious. As the stories based on Snowden’s revelations were taking shape, Rusbridger had hired additional security for the building and established a secure office two floors above the newsroom, just down the corridor from the advertising department, to house the documents. When he flew to New York to work with his team there on the stories, “he couldn’t talk on the phone,” his wife, Lindsay Mackie, said. “He couldn’t say what was going on.”

It has been the Guardian’s biggest story so far. With eighty-four million monthly visitors, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Guardian Web site is now the third most popular English-language newspaper Web site in the world, behind London’s Daily Mail, with its celebrity gossip and abundant cleavage, and the New York Times. But its print circulation, of a hundred and ninety thousand, is half what it was in 2002. The Guardian, which is supported by the Scott Trust, established nearly eighty years ago to subsidize an “independent” and “liberal” newspaper, has lost money for nine straight years. In the most recent fiscal year, the paper lost thirty-one million pounds (about fifty million dollars), an improvement over the forty-four million pounds it lost the year before.

Last year, Andrew Miller, the director of the trust and the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group, warned that the trust’s money would be exhausted in three to five years if the losses were not dramatically reduced. To save the Guardian, Rusbridger has pushed to transform it into a global digital newspaper, aimed at engaged, anti-establishment readers and available entirely for free. In 2011, Guardian U.S., a digital-only edition, was expanded, followed this year by the launch of an Australian online edition. It’s a grand experiment, he concedes: just how free can a free press be?

For reasons big and small beyond this story I really, really hope they make it.

Somebody had to say it. I say it to my freshmen (your job is learning as much as you can and selecting and sharing the most critical parts) and I’ve told it to old reporters (do what you do best and link to the rest) and pretty much anyone in between (solicit and cultivate your community) who’d care to disagree. But the truth is the truth. Journalism *is* curation: tips on curation tools and techniques:

Curation is a relatively new term in journalism, but the practice is as old as journalism itself. Every act of journalism is an act of curation: think of how a news report or feature selects and combines elements from a range of sources (first hand sources, background facts, first or second hand colour). Not only that: every act of publishing is, too: selecting and combining different types of content to ensure a news or content ‘mix’.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in his talk to employees at the Washington Post said: “People will buy a package … they will not pay for a story.” Previously that package was limited to what your staff produced, and wire copy. But as more content becomes digitised, it is possible to combine more content from a wider variety of sources in a range of media – and on any one of a number of platforms.

Curation is nothing new – but it is becoming harder.

It is becoming faster, with stronger feedback, and with more and more places to monitor and share. So, in that sense, yes, it is harder. Really it is more intensive, and more thorough.

And then there’s this embarrassment: AJ and Katherine: A kiss is just a kiss, or is it? (poll)

We can’t let people live their personal lives. And by people I mean a young woman who’s caught a minor bit of celebrity in the most 21st century way possible and a college student. We must speculate. Are they on or off? Here’s a photo gallery! And take this poll! Now let’s bring in our kiss expert (“lukewarm at best”) who is really, and I’m not making this up, the public safety reporter.

A commenter wrote “AL.com, please use the poll results to help refine the amount of time you spend covering Katherine Webb stories. Thanks.”

Others:

Carol’s reply:

It is a good thing bandwidth is cheap. So is the content.

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