Monday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday

Padding with pictures

Nothing but pictures and slideshows and more photos and then some camera things. I’ve stared at so many photographs today I’m not sure what is in focus any more. This one is going in tomorrow’s presentation as the thrill of victory:

That was in 2008. Time flies. She’s gone on to college, made the dean’s list several times and probably graduated by now.

Twitter! For grades! It isn’t just for your breakfast anymore.

It hasn’t been about breakfast since roughly ever, but people that don’t understand it tend to default to such things. A television producer asked me once if I could learn as much about news on Twitter as I could on television. I told him of all of the tidbits I’d learned that day — there happened to be a plane crash and I knew as much or more as you’d get in a television recap of any story — and apologized for not knowing more; I hadn’t been online as much as I normally was.

I think I sold him. But I digress. There is a study that suggests “>Twitter is good for learning:

(C)ollege students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades.

“Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice,” said Greenhow, who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers. “It’s changing the way we experience what we read and what we write.”

[…]

Greenhow analyzed existing research and found that Twitter’s real-time design allowed students and instructors to engage in sharing, collaboration, brainstorming and creation of a project. Other student benefits included learning to write concisely, conducting up-to-date research and even communicating directly with authors and researchers.

I have a Twitter paper that will be published later this year. It will be more about the communal nature of the tool. I look forward to telling you all about it.

I’ll be using this photo essay in class tomorrow. This is the story of a naval EOD who became only the 5th quadruple amputee survivor at Walter Reed, but also his long road back and the love he’s walking with once again. Amazing story, all right there in pictures.

That Buzzfeed piece has turned his friend and photographer, Tim Dodd, into a star. “The site went from boasting 220 views per day at its peak, to 36,000 views per day literally overnight.”

And then The Chive got hold of it. They say they’ve raised $250,000 for Morris in a matter of days.

Media law: SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte on the creep of Hazelwood:

When Hazelwood was decided, First Amendment advocates comforted themselves that the ruling affected only minors enrolled in K-12 schools – and then only in the limited “curricular” setting, such as a class-produced newspaper. That was a logical reading of the case and, as time has proven, an overly optimistic one.

[…]

The creep of Hazelwood onto college campuses is troubling because, in practice, courts regard Hazelwood as a “rational-basis-minus” level of review, under which censorship decisions need only reside in the deferentially viewed vicinity of reasonableness.

[…]

That level of control would be unthinkable in college, where principles of academic freedom are widely accepted to give instructors the latitude to air provocative and even offensive topics. But the inescapable conclusion – that a student could be disciplined for speech that would be constitutionally protected if uttered by a nonstudent – is equally unsustainable. If words are inappropriate for a college audience and might be confused for the government’s speech when uttered by a student, then they are doubly so when said by an adult authority figure.

Quick, fun read: Superman quits the paper.

Tomorrow I’ll use this picture as an argument for taking your camera everywhere:

Took that picture five years ago and remember it like it was yesterday. Not for the picture. I just happened upon that as I drove to a visitation.

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15
Oct 12

“You are pretty strong … for a professor”

I spent a few moments loading up a queue with posts for my Samford blog. Here are two I wrote today, a morning tweet, which I think might become a new feature. There’s also a little post about reverse publishing.

Here are a few more things I wrote, last week, that I neglected to cross-post here:

The business of the business

Digital first, the only way?

On the big switch in local media

Also, I noticed that the particular them I’m using there allows for rotating banners. (Apparently I like them, no?) So I’m loading up on campus shots, which is probably the best part of that blog.

Spent some time in the library today. Spent some time writing letters.

I visited city hall. I learned that while there is the old saying “You can’t fight city hall” you can write a check there.

I had to visit the City Revenue Office, which looks more like a hospital’s information desk. There was a nice lady there who took my check. I needed little tags that would signal the garbage crew to pick up my dead appliances. Stick them on, roll the old washer and dryer out to the curb and, come morning, they’ll all be gone.

That doesn’t even give you time to be sentimental about it. “I had you, washer and dryer, for about 10 years, four homes and countless loads of laundry. Just think of all the dates you helped me get! I’m going to … I promised myself I wouldn’t … sniff … ” So it is good that the system moves so fast; that would just be silly.

So while I’m working on a small project for a guy this evening The Yankee says “Someone is taking our stuff.”

I walk outside and meet Mr. Lauderdale, one of our elderly neighbors who talks fast and thinks big. He’s a retired engineer, worked for AT&T for more than three decades and about half as many corporate names. One of his friendly spies in the neighborhood saw the old appliances and gave him a call. He drove his pickup down the road and there he was, trying to get this stuff in the bed by himself.

So I helped him. Turns out his son is an attorney, his daughter-in-law is a professor of some sort. I told him I was a professor too. And he said “You are pretty strong … for a professor.”

I was moving things one-handed, bad shoulder and all that.

Nice guy. He gave me tips for how to fix some things. Told me precisely what it would cost. Told me how much a telephone pole costs. Gave me a brief history of a river in northwest Alabama. Let me go back inside just in time for dinner.

And now I’ll copyedit a journal article into the early morning hours. Living the dream.

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1
Oct 12

We know these things because of the Internet

Allie would like to thank you for taking part in another successful Catember. The categories are archived in a reverse chronological order, but you might be interested in seeing three entire years of Catember joy. You would start right here.

She would never let on, but I think Allie likes being famous on the Internet. She pretends to be annoyed by some of the cameras — the iPhone in particular, though she is very patient with DSLRs — but she is very proud of the attention. So when I told her this weekend that Catember was almost over — she’s a cat, she doesn’t read calendars — she was a bit sad:

Cats are tough, though. She’ll bounce back soon.

Something new is the Alabama Media Group, which is launching this week. There is a lot of criticism in the fall air, but some people have to do that so they can later point out they’ve been screaming the loudest. This is largely untrodden ground that the people at AMG are walking, but I know those folks at al.com and many of the people at the three papers that are used to producing the old daily miracle. Give them a bit of time and they’ll do some impressive work.

So it is a big week in local news. First, on college campuses everywhere, the Clery Act reports are due.

Can The Boston Globe and MIT hack the future of news together? Maybe for them. But I have this growing suspicion that these answers will all be locally customized:

“In the long term, maybe we’ll come up with something that will matter to the organization, to the bottom line,” he said. “In the short term, it’s just really cool to have these cool ideas floating around.”

Marstall said his goal is to have experimental modules that readers can play with on Boston.com and provide feedback to the Globe Lab. The lab was created for the purpose of exploring ideas that could be transformed into products for the Globe, or tools that could be helpful in reporting, Marstall said. The additional manpower, and brainpower, provided by MIT, will accelerate that, he said.

The reason a handful of news organizations have created their own research and development labs is to have people working on new ideas outside of the day-to-day business concerns of journalism, Moriarty said.

Seems like Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products at the Globe, agrees, doesn’t it?

Pew: After email, getting news is the most popular activity on smartphones, tablets Why are tablets good? These findings:

Another key finding: Almost one-third of people who acquire tablets find themselves reading more news from more sources than before.

What they’re reading is also interesting. Almost three-fourths of tablet news readers consumed in-depth news articles at least sometimes, with 19 percent saying they do so daily.

Here are the revenue notes, from that same Pew study.

I tell students you don’t write question leads or question headlines. Only very, very occasionally, I say, are they appropriate. Here might be an example: Are we already in a recession?

Most of the time and for most people, the difference between no growth and contraction probably doesn’t mean that much. However, we are in a much different situation now than we were in 2007. The Federal Reserve has more or less gone all in with its open-ended quantitative easing. The government’s fiscal mechanism is paralyzed and a large portion of the electorate has no appetite for further fiscal stimulus. If the American economy were to go into a so-called “double-dip” recession the government would be especially hard-pressed to drag us out. It would be a huge blow to the nation’s confidence and would lead to shrinking government revenues and further net job loss in both the public and private sectors.

For those reasons, it’s more than a little frightening that we’re seeing a spate of depressing numbers that could signal a recession on the horizon — or that one is already here.

Read the whole thing.

I mentioned the other day how an old online friend popped up on Twitter out of the blue last week.

The Internet is a lovely thing, really. Tonight I’ve been chatting with a guy I used to play soccer with. He was a defender, probably the fastest guy I played with, who had the natural ability that comes with working really hard at something. We played with a few very gifted guys, but he made himself as good or better than all of them. He was never afraid of work that was hard or to put in the time to make something good.

Good guy. We grew up together. We avoided trouble together. We probably caused some, too. Here’s a grainy and bad picture of an OK picture. This is some birthday of mine, probably 12, I’d guess.

We were at a restaurant called China Doll. For my birthday, and by then I’d gotten to that awkward feeling of people giving me presents, he gave me a knife he found in a scabbard he’d made. It was a very nice and thoughtful gift.

We lost touch somewhere just after high school, which is one of those small things that shouldn’t happen, but now he’s popped up on Facebook.

He’s got a beautiful wife and a handsome son. He’s in Afghanistan and, for him, that seems just about perfect. (Told him I was teaching journalism. He said he’d always thought I would have made a great comedian.)

I see his pictures and he looks exactly the same, just a little more intense. There’s a picture of him and his mother on there that I could write full essays about.

He’s got plans to open a paradise resort, hopefully some time next year after he rotates out. Told him I’d swing by and help him hammer things.

Hey, I can bend nails in paradise, too.

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24
Sep 12

The happy headlines

This shot is from standing just off the quad on the Samford campus, which is probably humming with people throwing frisbees whenever you read this. It doesn’t really matter when you read this. Frisbees are being thrown.

Anyway, I’m lucky enough to go in this building to work every day:

My office is on the third floor, and off the left side of the photograph.

Or, if you’re reading it at night, there is a small chance that some of the students are trying their luck wading through one of the fountains without getting caught. There are differing opinions on the challenge involved with that.

Samford is a great place, a happy place. I think I’ve met one person there who was not smiling. This is my fifth year on campus. That’s a pretty good ratio.

Oh, I’m sure some students have less than happy moments. Most people don’t like tests, or last minute projects.

Which is why I’m working long and hard on tomorrow’s lecture topic: Headlines. Everybody loves them, until they have to write them.

Occasionally I take a break from writing this stuff and pulling examples, surfing some of the best newspaper design across the country that landed on doorsteps this morning. (It is difficult to provide a good example on question marks in headlines, for example.) When I do push back from this PowerPoint there are two or three other tasks demanding attention.

Emails to write, letters to compose, numbers to crunch.

Living the Monday dream, friends.

Sad to learn of Paul Davis’ death. He was one of those strong regional voices of journalism. He helped launch a lot of careers. And those careers served communities and inspired others.

He knew the value and he taught a lot of us about it too.

It is too bad we only really contemplate that connectedness at the end. In the end that connectedness is what we hold on to.

The second most important headline of the day: AP promises members it won’t break news on social media. Everyone else will.

There are different audiences here, of course. AP sells news to media companies who sell the news to the general public. But the public, of course, have ways of seeking out the information they want. They’re often using Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter for their own wires.

And, sometimes, with poorly written, unhappy headlines.

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17
Sep 12

Know what today is?

We’re getting that autumn light. Bested only by the great relief of spring light — Winter is leaving! — that soft, golden orange of a fall evening is like receiving an invitation for an event you’ve never quite been able to attend. You’ve always wanted to go, but it has always been out of reach, or you’ve always been unavailable.

He said, ruining a perfectly fledgling analogy.

You can’t go to the sun because you’d burn up. So, really, you’ve now received this invitation but realized That’s lovely, though, I remember what happened to Daedalus’ son. I’ll keep my wings undamaged, thanks.

Another Monday, another day of nothing exciting to report. All of my Mondays feel the same: email, reading, making class notes and looking forward to Tuesday. And the sun, always the sun.

A few things elsewhere, then: Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams: Don’t just teach skills, train young journalists to be lifelong learners:

The ability to learn on your own and teach yourself new skills depends on your willingness to play, experiment, make mistakes, and stick with things that take much longer than you had expected.

This will actually come up in my class tomorrow, the joy of learning.

The 150th anniversary of the bloodiest day in U.S. history, Antietam. And there’s also a series of then-and-now photographs, using the same photographic techniques.

Finally, today is Constitution Day. Celebrate with a First Amendment quiz. If you make it all the way through and ace every answer you can call yourself a real party animal. And you will have also passed the bar in Maryland.