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Today is the day for it.
Here is, perhaps, my favorite interpretation of it. The grail of Van Morrison collectibles — back when the physical media and other realities made it difficult to acquire — this is actually an outtake His Band and the Street Choir sessions in 1970. Amazing stuff.
This was worth saving for its own post.
The Southeastern Raptor Rehabilitation Center (a unit of Auburn University’s College of Veterinary Medicine) released this bald eagle back into the wild at the E.W. Shell Fisheries Center on Saturday.
The adult bald eagle was found nearly a year ago in one of the Fisheries’ ponds. The eagle recuperated and is now flying well on its own, hopefully back to his old nest after being released near the location where it was found.
The experts said they couldn’t find anything wrong with the eagle, despite a full battery of tests, it just didn’t seem to have the necessary endurance or desire to fly. Looks good now though.
The Raptor Center says it takes in between 200 and 275 birds of prey from across the Southeast and has treated and released thousands of birds back into the wild.
Mowed the lawn. Shivered during the first part of it. This is May in Alabama. So glad we licked that global warming thing.
Or maybe they were right in the 1970s and global cooling is upon us. Nah, probably not. Complex, multiple ecosystems moving with and against each other and al that. But it was another day of supposed rain that proved to be clouds that stayed a while, whispered on us and then never had the decency to melt away like a bad rumor would. When I started mowing the lawn I thought I would be rained out.
So I had a few minutes late in the evening to ride my bicycle. This is a silly thing, but I have new water bottles — because the old ones are a bit small and have a weird top I don’t like and they now have 3,200 miles on them — and I wanted to try these out. They are simple, basic, straightforward and inexpensive plastic that holds a lot of water. This, I thought, would be a good thing in the summer. If the season ever considers approaching.
The high today was a pleasant 63, with overcast skies throughout.
So I hopped on the bike, swung the headset through the sidewalk and down the short driveway and into the road. I had about three pedal strokes in and, you won’t believe this, I noticed the water bottles made the bike heavier.
I ride an aluminum bike with a carbon fork. Altogether it weighs somewhere around 18-20 pounds, probably. I’m not a $6,000, 14-grams of carbon guy. But I notice things. When I switched from Continental racing tires to kevlar training tires I noticed a drop off in my incredibly limited performance. When I put a Gatorskin on the back wheel when I was finally able to return to the bike at the beginning of the year I noticed there was a bit less resistance and, hence, more speed.
I notice things like this on my bike. It is a simple perception. (And my bike’s geometry isn’t even dialed in.) The Yankee says it is like the Princess and the Pea.
So I ride up to the next town. My shoulder hurts. My shoulder gets better. My water bottles are full and heavy. Not bad, heavy, but noticeable. They’re there. I ride back down through the rural backroads to get close to home. And there I got a runner’s stitch, which slowed me down a bit. That went away. So I pedaled on through our local time trial area and saw the sun for the first time today, just as it was retiring for the evening. Back past the state park I went, having a grand ol’ time and showing one on the computer, too. Raced up College, to the art museum, turned and headed home.
I was out for just under an hour. I went through two residential areas, a golf course, the big shopping district, past two country cemeteries, more suburbs, a state park, another commercial strip, an art museum and a city park. In all of that time I was never more than five linear miles from home. What a great town.
Also, my water bottles are heavier. That must account for my little boost in speed: more mass moving downhill.
Things to read: 14 tips for journalists on Facebook. Number six is share breaking news. Number seven is keep followers updated. Nevertheless, this list might still be useful to someone.
Trend watch: Digital marketing services:
When in doubt, do it all
In 2008, The Dallas Morning News began to experience what publisher and chief executive officer Jim Moroney called “a significant decline in print ad revenue for the second consecutive year.”
The paper approached the problem by diversifying from several angles. It “aggressively” sought more commercial printing and distribution, and now prints The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Investor’s Business Daily, along with USA Today, formerly its sole commercial printing client.
The Morning News also created CrowdSource, an event marketing division, as an addition to its portfolio. The purpose was to generate incremental revenue while engaging consumers with the brand. Last year, for example, CrowdSource created an event called Walk In The Park to bring residents out to a new downtown park in which the paper sponsors a reading and games room. Currently, CrowdSource is working with other organizations on a 50th anniversary commemoration of the JFK assassination in Dallas.
Another new part of the company is 508 Digital. This business — named for the address of the newspaper’s building — operates like an agency, offering digital, social media, and search engine optimization services for small- and medium-sized businesses. Speakeasy is another marketing and promotions division that provides social media strategy and execution for local businesses that offers “content marketing delivered via smart social media.”
Finally, the Dallas Morning News started two magazines, Texas Wedding Guide and Design Guide, as yet another way to expand the brand and increase revenue.
Based on results thus far, Moroney said, “We will continue to pursue a strategy that builds new sources of revenue off the foundation of our brand, our core competencies, and our infrastructure.”
That one is worth the long excerpt and worth the read.
New York Times launches web-only documentaries with Retro Report:
The New York Times is launching a series of short, web-only documentaries with Retro Report, a nonprofit news organization that aims to investigate “the most perplexing news stories of our past with the goal of encouraging the public to think more critically about current events and the media.”
The videos will air each Monday at the NYT’s baby boomer blog, “Booming,” and on Retro Report’s website. Each will be 10 to 15 minutes long and accompanied by a story by NYT reporter Michael Winerip. The first one, “The Voyage of the Mobro 4000,” looks at the garbage barge of 1987.
This one has a small Alabama hook. And is moderately interesting. But 12 minutes is a lot to ask of online audiences with only mildly interesting. Judge for yourself:
Fascinating video interview here. AP’s global video news chief: Sorting out contributors vs. activists in Syria:
With little access to the raging civil war in Syria, the Associated Press has been relying on a citizen journalists with smart phones with the Bambuser app to stream live coverage of the conflict, explains Sandy MacIntrye …
Not necessarily just observers, he notes that many of the contributors are activists and he explains how they and their associations are clearly identified and authenticated.
TV is the next model to be disrupted. It’ll persist, but they’re going to be hurt badly. You can already see it in YouTube’s numbers, in the ratings, in the financials and second-screen habits. If you are in television, or invested in TV marketing, and not already thinking down this path you should probably pick up your pace. This might help. 10 reasons to combine your TV And web video ad campaigns:
TV still makes up the vast majority of advertising media budgets, by far. But it’s no secret that today’s TV audience is also watching their favorite shows online. If you’re a marketer, you know that this is an important shift in viewer behavior that could impact the effectiveness of your TV campaigns. But you don’t know how it impacts your TV efforts or what you can do about it. There’s one way to find out: Manage and measure TV and online video together. When you do this, numerous new synergies and opportunities will arise along with the answers.
A reporter at the Toronto Star erred, significantly, and the newspaper is fixing the problem. Talk about a paper getting it right. Toronto Star will hold training sessions for reporters following front-page apology:
Star investigations editor Kevin Donovan will lead mandatory training sessions for reporters following an embarrassing incident last week, Star Public Editor Kathy English writes. The Star published a story accusing provincial parliament member Margarett Best of vacationing in Mexico while she was on medical leave; reporter Richard Brennan misunderstood a tag on a photo on Best’s Facebook page, English writes, and didn’t tell her that was the subject of his story when he tried to get comment.
Now all the reporters are getting a brush-up.
Finally, it pays to stick with a story. This one has been going on for three years.
“Another thing with neurological progression is that it’s five steps forward and three steps back,” she said. “It’s peaks and valleys. It’s not continual.”
[…]
After everything he’s been through, Kevin said he will keep trying to get back to being normal again.
“I’ve just been working so hard…and I’m getting better,” Kevin said.
Read that, meet one tough eight-year-old.
I’ve just this now learned an interesting thing about WordPress. When you are in the Dashboard, after you’ve clicked Posts you get that list of entries you’ve been writing about. Some people, and I’ve seen you, have many different posts in progress at one time saved as drafts. I don’t usually write drafts, unless I’m interrupted, but it happens every so often. And it happened last night when the computer popped and the screen turned gray.
Well, OK then. I stared at it for a respectful amount of time, checked the plug, the battery, did the random search on the keyboard for the Any Key and then rebooted the thing. It all came right back. Somehow rebooting the machine, restarting the browser and restoring the tabs meant that I’d created two versions of the Sunday post. I published one, didn’t realize I had the other and it stayed on as a draft.
Write me! Write me!
I didn’t notice that until just now. I have two posts titled Catching Up. Well, click, examine, verify. Problem understood. Now it is time to run the resolution protocols, initiate. So I did all that, realized the draft could be deleted …
No! No! Not me!
And clicked Trash — if ever there was a more prescient judgment of the thing you’ve been working on, there it was. When I clicked Trash that joker disappeared.
There was no “Are you sure?”
“Really sure?”
“Cause we think it’s Trash. Mullenweg says so right there. But if you want to keep this around, you might think about Cancel.”
“No?”
“OK then.”
“Last chance.”
“Seriously.”
“Can’t you hear your words dying?”
“Fine. Let it be on your head.”
“We can’t drag this out any longer. This platform powers 16 percent of the web you know.”
None of that. Just gone.
I’ve just written 300 words on the a delete function. (It took about two minutes. It will not be trashed.)
So a lovely Monday. The sun was out, just a hint of warmth in the air. We hit 76 today, which is just two degrees off the average. I believe I’ve said it three times already this year, but spring is finally here. And if we’re proven wrong again we’re all going to write Al Gore a note.
After purchasing locally grown, artisanally-made carbon offsets printed on fair trade, Brazilian rainforest hand-woven stock. When those come in, and we’re shivering in May, we’d write the former vice president and congratulate him on his success at beating back global warming. The suggestion would be that maybe he turn down the air conditioners in his mansion, close the doors and windows and let us get on with the season.
But it has been lovely today, even for Mondays, which are never really all that bad. I had a burger for lunch, because it is Monday and I do that every other one or so. I watched this clip that landed in my Twitter feed:
It truly is all of the things Ray Hudson said, and so was Hudson’s call. If you don’t know the sport I can’t explain to you how impossible it is to do what Lionel Messi just did. What Hudson suggests is that Messi is a mutant, and that might not be far from the case. He’s short, but fast. His pace over the ball belies his size. He has amazing control of everything, himself, the ball, sometimes defenders and maybe the tides. He has the benefit of playing on a terrific team with other potent weapons and in a system that benefits him perfectly. All of these things are true. It is also true that, for the last three years or so, he’s been not far from becoming the greatest player of all time. And he’s only just entering his prime.
Not nearly as good as all that, but 60 Minutes recently produced a package on him:
Anyway, yes, a beautiful Monday. Everyone is smiling on campus. What’s not to smile about? The sun, the sky, progress!
Someone asked me last week about teaching at Samford. What are the students like? I get this question from time to time. It is a good question, because I get to talk about what they are, and what they are not. I’ve had students who take spring break trips to Jamaica, but not the tourist part, the part where they go do mission work. I have students who’ll spend a summer involved in third-world countries, doing their part against this or donating to that. They are, by and large, extremely motivated, caring people.
And then I get to share anecdotes like this one that President Westmoreland shared today:
One night last week this post appeared on the Samford Facebook page:
“I’m a Homewood PD Officer. I was in the drive thru at McDonalds last night about midnight – I work night shift -to grab a quick dinner. There was a car load of Samford students in front of me. When I got to the window to pay I was informed that the students had paid for my meal. It was a small gesture but it was a bright spot in my shift. Please share this on the page – with any luck they will see it and know it was greatly appreciated.”
In class today we discussed movies and the trade publications of journalism. A student stayed late to work on her foreign language homework. Two others were designing an advertisement sample.
I saw a former student who is shooting a video package and we talked about his summer plans covering political activism in Washington D.C. He’s interning at a church right now, too. Multiple internships are important these days.
Most are drawn to hard work, which suggests they can be successful. They all seem to come from places that make them care about the things around them, which gives me great hope that they might all be content.
If, that is, I warn them about this delete function in WordPress before it is too late.
I’ve forgotten this, but we’ll make up for it now. Normally I add these links at the end of the week, just to be synergistic, but have neglected to do so the last several weeks. So here are things I’ve posted on my campus blog:
Five things to count on and remember in big stories
What do journalists do if the 3G network is down?
Don’t get absorbed in this Twitter mystery, this isn’t the Zapruder film
Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing over West, Texas
Studying the atmosphere in West, Texas
Beware the television GFX error
Also there are two new images on my Tumblr blog, which has once again returned to action. The first one is here, and has a long quote, which all the Tumblr kids go crazy about. The second one is a drawing involving babies and hearts. What’s not to love?
And, of course, there is always much more on Twitter as well. Tomorrow, more Tuesday than anyone knows what to do with, also the spring picnic!
I’d like to know where I was, a week ago today, when my phone told me about the bombs in Boston. I bet I wasn’t far away from where I was today when my phone buzzed to tell me that the remaining suspect had been formally charged. All of that in a week.
As I said to a classroom today, when an Elvis impersonator sending dangerous things in the mail to people in Washington is your fourth story, that’s a bizarre week.
Seems like a lot longer, doesn’t it?
So there’s something new here. I tweaked the sidebar to the right. Took out the Twitter box. (Follow me on Twitter!) Shifted the table that holds all of those buttons at the top of the page and compressed that side altogether.
I did that so I could expand this main content area. And after plugging away at several different stylesheets for a few minutes I had the new look. It is exactly like the old look — which is what is so nice about it — except for the size. The photographs can be bigger, now.
This will look nice on modern, larger, screens. Even looks nice on my phone, so I awesome that means everyone’s experience with the site is lovely, no?
I’m sure it is not. Some 0.08 of my visitors have been here with a 640×480 resolution. We need a rollout for them as well.
Here’s the solution: bigger screens, kids.
Auburn’s athletic director, who is presiding over a major sport 15-48 record against conference opponents since last season’s baseball tournament, is the only AD in the country who has “fisking poor news reports” as part of his job description. This is part of his second open letter in less than a month:
As Auburn’s Athletics Director, it’s my job – no matter how proud I am of Auburn – to carefully review charges made against our program when warranted.
As the facts demonstrate, the article is clearly flawed. I want you to know that I will always act on the basis of facts. I will continue to fight for Auburn University, and I will continue to defend this great institution against such attacks.
Here’s the first. All of this gives the guy a sympathetic ear from a lot of fans who are ready to see him go. It is a curious thing.
But there’s a real and interesting phenomenon at play as well. I’ve grown convinced in the last five years or so that there is a big shift coming in sports journalism. Beat reporters sometimes have to worry about being frozen out by the team they are supposed to cover. Alienate the wrong person, you don’t get interviews and all of that. This is made possible because the programs have figured out the true power of their brand and the tools they have at their disposal. Auburn didn’t go to the media with these letters, they simply published them on their site and let fans know it was there. Sports writers covered it — that is their job — but they weren’t an integral part of the process as a filter. Sports outlets have the tools, the audience and their message. They don’t need the media the same way they once did. (Well, the TV deals, naturally.)
I see this as a reality, rather than a good or bad thing. It just is. In some respects it is good. In other respects, and in particular in the long term, there are some negative worries.
The old saying was “never pick a fight with someone that buys ink by the barrel.” But if everyone buys pixels … well, that’s just even.
Things to read: The debt-ridden EU stares bankruptcy in the face:
Shouldn’t it be making more headlines than it has that the European Union is today insolvent – since its astronomic debt in unpaid bills is nearly twice as large as its annual income? Such is the crisis lately highlighted by its parliament’s budget committee, which finds that the EU now owes 217 billion euros, or £182 billion, as compared with its current year’s income of just £108 billion. Much of this represents “cohesion funding” relating to Eastern Europe, in contracts agreed under the EU’s current budgetary arrangements. But when, at the end of this year, those arrangements come to an end, the rules strictly prohibit the EU from rolling forward its debts from one period to the next. So, in eight months’ time, it will lurch into bankruptcy.
Wherever we now look at the EU, its affairs seem to be in an astonishing mess. There is the ongoing slow-motion train crash of the euro. There is rising panic over the policy of unrestricted immigration, which threatens at the year’s end to flood richer countries such as Britain with millions of Romanians and Bulgarians. As Europe’s economies stagnate or shrink, the EU’s environmental policies fall apart, with the growing refusal of many countries, led by Poland and Germany, to accept curbs on fossil fuels.
13 Worst Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970:
In 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated — okay, “celebrated” doesn’t capture the funereal tone of the event. The events predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.
[…]
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
That’s one of my favorite, but there are plenty of gems in that list.
Mistakes in news reporting happen, but do they matter?
There’s no excuse for getting the facts wrong. It’s a basic rule of journalism, drummed into every rookie reporter’s head: Get the story right. In addition to potentially harming a news outlet’s credibility, erroneous reporting can have devastating consequences, from ruining a subject’s reputation to endangering public safety. Competitive pressure and the desire for scoops can increase the potential for errors.
But reporting mistakes may not be as consequential as they used to be, media observers say.
People are forgiving, to a point, if you acknowledge the problem. Those are errors that apply to the individual outlet. All of these things, however, become cumulative on the business as a whole, a function of trust, and so pieces like this become dangerous.
Here’s the top comment as of this writing: “The fact that this ‘journalist’ doesn’t seem to think mistakes/lies matter is an example of why the pubic doesn’t trust the media therefore they don’t buy newspapers or watch the news.”
Many of the people in the comments tend to disagree with the nature of this particular article. But mistakes don’t matter, we’re told.
