Lovely, cool day today. Sunny and clear and a high of 52. Winter, such as it has been, is on notice. We’re preparing to move toward spring. Oh, sure, there will be one or two chilly revolts between here and there, but the corner is in view and we’ll soon round it, and look to find another beautiful spring waiting on us.

Everything will go according to plan: the blooms, the longer sunshine in the afternoon and then the warm days and cool evenings. About that same time will come the leaves, sprigs at first, and then dots and finally, suddenly, that one day when your eyes are overwhelmed by the verdancy.

The leaves!

And then, almost as quickly, your brain will get used to it.

There are the leaves.

The mind is amazingly adaptable like that.

Class today was marred today by a technical problem. I could not show the videos I wanted to show for news critiquing purposes. I will show them Wednesday. Problem solved! Adaptability!

Things to read: Budget outlook worries state legislators :

A decision by Alabama voters to transfer $437 million from savings to fix the General Fund over three years may not be enough to help state agencies that provide programs affecting every state resident.

According to the Associated Press, legislators are worried that the programs could end up with less money for operations in the coming fiscal year.

I, for one, am shocked by this shocking revelation, which finds us all shocked by shocking it is.

Here’s what the state’s elected officials said before they asked primary voters, not the general ballot, for permission to raid the trust fund to pay standard bills:

Gov. Robert Bentley and legislative leaders said Tuesday they are committed to paying back the money if Alabama voters agree to take more than $437 million from a state trust fund and use it to prevent huge cuts in spending on state programs for three years.

Bentley said the commitment should help garner more votes for the proposed constitutional amendment, which is the only thing on the statewide ballot Sept. 18.

So here we are today, probably a few days from the first state legislative vote that would pay that fund back, but:

State agencies that provide programs affecting every Alabama resident could end up with less money for operations in the coming fiscal year even though voters approved shifting $437 million from savings to shore up the beleaguered General Fund over three years.

[…]

(L)egislative leaders said the outlook is troubling despite the extra money provided by voters. State agencies have been asked to prepare operating plans based on budget cuts of 5 percent to 10 percent for the new fiscal year.

Coupons for everyone, then.

Mobile couponing is set to be the next big thing:

The rapidly expanding adoption of mobile couponing is poised to become a major challenge to one of the most profitable and important revenue streams remaining for newspapers: preprint advertising circulars.

[…]

(A)s consumers and marketers rapidly embrace the power of mobile phones to deliver the right deal at the right place and time to exactly the right customer. While only 6.0% of mobile phone owners used mobile coupons in 2012, the number rose to 16.3% in 2012 and is projected to leap to 24.3% by 2014, according to eMarketer, an independent research company.

Who wanted Oreos during the Super Bowl Blackout?:

When a power outage at the Superdome in New Orleans stopped the game between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers for an epic 34 minutes, Oreo’s team took action and posted a simple ad that was retweeted, or shared, more than 14,500 times on Twitter. The message: “Power Out? No Problem” accompanied with a picture of a cookie with the line “You can still dunk in the dark.” How did 360i –the agency responsible for the ad– do it so quickly?

[…]

Oreo’s instant Twitter ad stood out on a night when 30-second ads on TV cost $3.8 million. It helped demonstrate the power of ingenuity over money, and social media over traditional forms. It is likely part of a coming wave of real-time advertising that reacts, like a political campaign war room, to real-time events.

This is going to be great. A clever turn of words, the almost just-right photograph filtering through your various media streams, and all of it precipitated by some external event.

And then it will be clunky. Somewhere it will get out of control. (Some agency is bound to overreach.) And, pretty quickly, we’ll imagine that its always been just like this.

I think this means that more and more of those agency assets become in-house products.

The little boy in Midland is safe, after a week in captivity, being rescued at about 3:12 p.m. today:

4:36 p.m. Law enforcement officials confirm Dykes is dead but declined to say whether they shot him or if he shot himself. Dykes was seen with a gun in his hand, Richardson said.

4:30 p.m. Steve Richardson, Special Agent in Charge of FBI’s Mobile office said that at 3:12 p.m, the FBI safely recovered the child. He said that within the the past 24 hours negotiations deteriorated, and fearing the child was in imminent danger, agents entered the bunker.

That brave little boy turns six this week. Tonight he’s playing with his family again. Follow excellent coverage here.

Why government needs watchdogs: Ruling to open DCS records a victory for children. That’s in Tennessee, where the state was trying to block a big records release when it comes to child deaths under the observation of the state Department of Children’s Services. Victory, indeed.

Classes started back today. This is one of my favorite days, the syllabus day. I can just prattle on and on … but you have to find the right mix of that on the first day.

You have, precisely, a six-and-a-half minute margin of error there.

But things went smoothly. There was only one question after class, and just a few during. That means that everything has been explained perfectly in a triumphant victory for reason and straightforwardness. Or you’ve been tuned out. You can never tell.

One of my jokes didn’t get laughed at. But the rest got good giggles, so if you factor in the questions to chuckles ratio the day worked out well.

There were also two meetings. Important information was imparted. Tasks were distributed. Notes were taken. They were good meetings.

At dinner I stepped out of my comfort zone. I went to Jason’s Deli, which is perfectly normal. But! I read the menu, and with the nice lady who always sees me and makes small talk like we’re old friends waiting patiently, I ordered something else.

I’ve probably been going to one Jason’s Deli or another for five or six yeas. This is only the second time that I’ve deviated from my usual.

Usually when I go somewhere new I go with the menu item named after the place. That dish can’t be bad, right? So tonight I extended that idea a bit because Jason’s has a sandwich named after the founder’s dad. Pure winner, right?

Great sandwich. I may go back again tomorrow.

Things to read: Inside Advance’s Post-Standard newspaper as it transforms this week to digital first:

There hasn’t been the same level of outcry in Syracuse, but Rogers acknowledges that the cutbacks will take a toll. “There has not been outrage,” he said. “There’s been disappointment. There’s sadness. It’s the hardest for people who are not [digitally] connected. There are a lot of people … who are really going to miss the seven-day newspaper. I’m going to miss it.”

But while the dramatic reorganization may seem like a gamble, it’s the prospect of not doing anything that genuinely worries him. “To do nothing, that’s suicide,” he said, citing the industry trends. “Is this a risk? The risk is to not do anything. Have we found the right solution? I think we have. Time will tell. But I know that by doing what we’re doing, we’re going to be so much better off than if we hadn’t done anything.”

His optimism isn’t shared by everyone involved with the paper.

The three Newhouse papers in Alabama made the switch last fall, you might recall. They are growing into the new model right about on pace. There have been stumbles. There are critics, but there are a lot of positives.

Anytime you see a newspaper in the middle of a transformation you see quotes like this:

The new model doesn’t have a place for columnist Dick Case, 77, a Syracuse fixture for over 53 years who received word that his services would no longer be needed at the paper. “I think that all of us understood that the nature of the newspaper was going to change,” he said, “but I don’t think anybody had any idea of when that would happen. And it happened sooner rather than later.”

I love the idea of staffers who’ve worked at newspapers for decades. They have so much institutional history and community memory. They’re a gem to talk to and learn from. They are often vital and funny and crusty people with a lot to tell us all. But this quote just makes no since. Sooner rather than later? After all of these years, after your sister papers made this move, this caught you by surprise?

(Update: Case’s last column is here. He’s been doing this my entire life. He’s talented and will be missed by many. He’s going to volunteer at the historical society. And if you need to, you can reach him at his wife’s email. That’ explains that.)

CEOs Using social media: Statistics, facts and figures:

Four out of five employees (81 percent) believe that CEOs who engage on social media are better equipped to lead companies in the modern world, and 82 percent of customers are more likely to trust a company whose CEO and leadership team are active on these channels.

There’s one of those famously long Internet infographics there, too.

Now recording: Knight funds an app for collecting oral histories:

Knight News Challenge winner TKOH wants to create a solution for oral storytelling that would work for kids, grandparents, audiophiles — or, yes, journalists. As envisioned, it would be a lightweight app for mobile devices that makes the setup and recording of stories simpler. TKOH, a design studio based in New York, plans to use its $330,000 award from Knight Foundation to build out its prototype of the app and begin testing it in rural communities in New Mexico.

“It’s a need we all have,” Kacie Kinzer, of TKOH, tells me. “There’s someone we know, a friend, a family member, who has incredible stories that must be kept in some way.

[…]

The app, tentatively called Thread, would be a kind of all-in one app, pairing audio and video, giving the user a choice of how they want to record a story. Once the story is captured, the file would be archived in a non-proprietary format and made available on the web. With the money from Knight, the team at TKOH will complete the prototype of the app and build a web platform that would act as a repository for stories and enable sharing on other networks, Kinzer told me.

One more method never hurts.

What it feels like to be photographed in a moment of grief:

“I sat there in a moment of devastation with my hands in prayer pose asking for peace and healing in the hearts of men,” she recalls. “I was having such a strong moment and my heart was open, and I started to cry.”

Her mood changed abruptly, she says, when “all of a sudden I hear ‘clickclickclickclickclick’ all over the place. And there are people in the bushes, all around me, and they are photographing me, and now I’m pissed. I felt like a zoo animal.”

What particularly troubles her, she says, is “no one came up to me and said ‘Hi, I’m from this paper and I took your photograph.’ No one introduced themselves. I felt violated. And yes, it was a lovely photograph, but there is a sense of privacy in a moment like that, and they didn’t ask.”

Every journo should read pieces like that about every year or so. There’s a lot to learn in circumstances like this, too.