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I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / photo / running / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Dec 14

There’s money big and small in this post

The view from my run this afternoon:

Today’s pace was 41 seconds faster than Monday’s run. I cut 4:07 of Sunday’s three-miler. Tomorrow I’m going to run at a different place, flatter, but with more boring views. I’m going to run farther, and probably slower.

We went back to Ulta today, the store I just learned about yesterday, because there was something there of a cosmetic nature we did not pick up yesterday.

Technology is great, not only does my phone time and map my runs and give me various breakdowns of the poor splits therein, it also gives me an excuse to stand near the front of the story and just scroll through things. I can give off the disinterested vibe without making anyone feel uncomfortable about their choices.

“Oh, no, not that blush, dear,” he never said to any stranger, “it will never work with your complexion.”

Things to read … because this stuff matches your tones.

The one everyone is talking about, Sony Pictures Cancels Holiday Release of ‘The Interview’ After Threats:

The film’s collapse stirred considerable animosity among Hollywood companies and players. Theater owners were angry that they had been boxed into leading the pullback. Executives at competing studios privately complained that Sony should have acted sooner or avoided making the film altogether. To depict the killing of a sitting world leader, comically or otherwise, is virtually without precedent in major studio movies, film historians say.

And some Sony employees and producers, many of whom have had personal information published for the world to see, bitterly complained that they had been jeopardized to protect the creative prerogatives of Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg.

[…]

The multiplex operators made their decision in the face of pressure from malls, which worried that a terror threat could affect the end of the holiday shopping season.

That movie cost $44 million to make, but the losses directly stemming from Sony’s entire cyber nightmare are piling up much higher. Sony’s Very, Very Expensive Hack:

(T)he corporate hack seems likely to be among the most expensive of all time – up there with the 2014 Target breach (price tag: about $110 million), TJX’s 2007 hack (about $250 million), and Sony’s 2011 Playstation hack (about $170 million).

It’s still too early to know just how badly the hack might hurt Sony’s bottom line, especially given that the hackers keep on putting out new leaks and new threats. But some early estimates of the corporate damage have started to trickle out. And $150 or $300 million does not seem like a bad guess at the moment, meaning the hack might wipe out half of the Sony pictures unit’s 2013 profits.

Big federal money coming into UAB … UAB’s annual NIH funding up 20 percent:

The University of Alabama at Birmingham received $225 million in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health during the 2014 fiscal year, which places the school 10th in NIH funding among public universities.

That total is up 20 percent from last year when UAB secured $188 million in NIH funding.

And smaller amounts, too … Meet the 5-year-old Ohio boy who sent his $1 allowance to try to save UAB football.

Rouble turmoil leads to Apple halting online sales in Russia:

The company stopped sales of its iPhones, iPads and other products in the country after a day in which the currency went into free-fall.

The rouble has lost more than 20% this week, despite a dramatic decision to raise interest rates from 10.5% to 17%.

By afternoon trade the rouble was flat with one dollar buying 68 roubles.

Its all time low, set on Wednesday, saw one dollar buying as many as 79 roubles.

Apple last month increased its prices in Russia by 20% after the weakening rouble left products in the country cheaper than in the rest of Europe.

That’s some serious volatility.

The amounts at play here are interesting. NowThis Media Raises Another $6M To Deliver Video News Stories In Less Than A Minute:

(T)he startup has become focused on “being a distributed media company and finding audiences where they live.” In other words, it’s less focused on drawing audiences to the NowThis mobile app and website, and more on finding viewers on social media.

Apparently the strategy is paying off — Mills said the company was seeing 1 million monthly video views as recently as early summer of this year, but it was up to 40 million monthly views in November. NowThis has also launched NowThis Studio, a division focused on branded content, and it acquired another startup, Cliptamatic.

That acquisition provided the foundation for a new platform called Switchboard, which is scheduled to launch early in 2015.

NowThis seems to work better in the app than in the browser, a good first step for social reach. I just watched four videos on it. Things move fast there. You get context, but not a complete story. There’s a fine idea there, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it matures.

errands / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
16
Dec 14

Where I amend my reindeer antler policy

Enjoy the Glomerata post I put up earlier today? Have you been checking out the Battle of the Bulge map posts? I’ve got about two more weeks of those, tracing my great-grandfather’s time in Europe.

I woke up this morning and did one of my favorite things, which is sit with breakfast, or tea or both, and read. I got a lot of reading in this morning and then we did some paperwork errands this afternoon.

I drove The Yankee to Target and she picked up two shirts. We walked down the street to a store called Ulta, which is not missing an R from the sign. I’m not sure I knew this store existed until this afternoon, but then I’m so rarely on the cosmetics market these days.

We picked up grain and sourdough bread at the grocery store. I remembered we needed some eggs, so I hustled to the back corner and got the six-pack container. The first one I opened had a busted egg, which reminded me of my best poultry story. I told it to my lovely wife and the cashier at the front of the store. One of them found it funnier than the other, but they both smiled politely.

We saw this car. Now, ordinarily, I’m not a fan of the reindeer antlers, but I’m willing to change this stance. The rule now is this: if you put those things in your windows, you must commit to the giant red nose on the hood of your car.

We had a dinner guest tonight, one of our sweet friends who brought a soup and stayed for brownies and a movie and uses the word “assuaged” correctly. It was a lovely evening.

Things to read …

I remember waking up on this December morning in a full sweat. It was unseasonably warm. That afternoon we watched the F-4 tornado ravage Tuscaloosa, just 35 miles away, on television. That night, up the road in Birmingham, I drove home under the largest snowflakes I’ve ever seen in the South. It was a tragic and weird day. Celebration Of A Life Saved

Many of your remember this remarkable photo by Michael E. Palmer that was in the Tuscaloosa News, the day after the December 16, 2000 EF-4 tornado that killed 11 people. Michael Harris carries an unconscious Whitney Crowder, 6, through debris in Bear Creek Trailer Park after the tornado passed through. Whitney’s father and 15-month-old brother were killed in the tornado.

That post is two years old, when young Whitney was graduating from high school. It was a nice bookend to that tale.

So these two guys are political activists. They represent different parties and they are brothers. They were on C-SPAN to promote this documentary about the weird dynamic all of that creates. They got into a political name-calling debate and then the show started taking phone calls. Then … well, just watch and see:

This is worth a read. Former AP Reporter: I Didn’t Leave Journalism, It Left Me

A journalist for more than 40 years, Mark Lavie was based in Jerusalem for most of them and then in Cairo for two – during the “Egyptian Revolution.”

Lavie is no longer a journalist.

But he didn’t leave the profession, “it left me,” Lavie says.

Now Lavie is speaking out in as many fora as possible. He seeks to alert the public about the dramatic difference between what journalism used to be – and still pretends to be – and what it actually is.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, Advertisers Will Pay Up To 40% More For TV Sponsorship Deals Linked To Social Media, Says TV4

“It means that we need to work with story-telling on digital platforms, and that we need to engage and potentially also reward our users,” she said. “This is obviously very interesting for us, both from our perspective, and also from a commercial perspective, in terms of what we can offer our advertisers on these platforms.”

Lundell said that TV4’s experiments with extending linear TV formats into the social media sphere had shown that “you need to pay more than for ordinary sponsorship – and advertisers are prepared to do that. So, yes, we’re making money.”

The first thing I thought when she said “work with story-telling on digital platforms” was wondering why plots of scripted shows aren’t continued on other platforms. You already see supplemental webisodes of some of your more engaged shows, why not story arcs on Instagram?

First there was ESPN, the movie channels, last month it was CBS and now … Up To Speed: NBC to jump into live-streaming

This is solid. 5 tips for streaming live video from a smartphone

Livestreaming video from a mobile phone is a way for journalists to get footage which may not be possible to film with more traditional broadcast equipment.

“There are sometimes these stories where you don’t want a big camera crew, you want to try and keep a relatively low profile, in riots, in public disorder, or in places where you need to be sensitive,” Sky News correspondent Nick Martin told Journalism.co.uk.

“You can use that technology which is smaller and more compact to still get what you want to, but not [have] all the big crew considerations that we have.”

Media organisations such as ABC News have also started looking at mobile livestreaming as a developing part of their video programming.

For journalists who want to incorporate video streaming into their work …

As I told a colleague this evening, within the next year or two we’ll likely say if you’re not doing video with almost everything, you’re going to find yourself behind.

That’s why I spent the better part of my Saturday night building up video templates for future projects.

journalism / links / Monday / photo / running / things to read — Comments Off
15
Dec 14

Look up, it is easier to breathe in the sunset

Lovely warm day. I should have started my run a bit earlier. We are in a weather system that means the temperature drops 15 degrees as soon as three tree limbs conspire to block the sun. Before that, though, it was bright and surprising. Short-sleeve weather if you’ve ever needed it in December — and who doesn’t?

But I did my little neighborhood run late in the afternoon and into the early evening. It turned to a chill just as I wrapped up, but I had views like this:

And there is nothing wrong with views like that.

So another three miles down, after three miles yesterday and before a bunch more this week. I’m trying to make my run fast.

“Fast.”

There’s a word that mean a lot without any context. Let’s give it some: I look like a shuffler, I want to look like a runner. That, to me, would be fast at this point. In truth, I haven’t been fast in decades, and even then I was only faster than a person running slowly. I grew up around plenty of fast people.

I wonder if any of them had the chance to go for a run today, or got to see a sunset like that, wherever they are.

Things to read … because this stuff is good no matter where you are.

A nice example of dogged persistence, Meet the reporter who broke Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture story—two years ago:

Two years ago, an investigative reporter named Isaiah Thompson exposed the massive and troubling scale of “civil asset forfeiture” in Philadelphia—that is, how law enforcement exploited its authority to seize cash and personal property suspected to be connected to a crime. The idea is to take ill-gotten gains from drug dealers or other criminals, but Thompson showed that Philly authorities routinely claimed property in cases where the owners were not convicted—and in some instances, not even charged.

[…]

“It shows there’s no substitute for true reporting,” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with IJ. “He’s not just reading the law and talking to a couple people. He went to the courtroom over and over and over, and really explored what happened.”

There’s an accidental insight here, I think: A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link:

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent.

That’s not the problem it used to be, unfortunately, even for the Times. I think I liked it better when that would have been the cause for some consternation.

We’re starting to see this sentiment in more and more think pieces, Defining quality in news has to value the user experience:

You could frame the big challenge for the next few years of digital news this way: How can we create a news user experience that’s as easy and friction-free as Facebook — but as good as the best a dedicated news power user could assemble?

[…]

“Quality” isn’t just about how many foreign bureaus you have or how long your big features can run. It’s about every step of the process that moves from a reporter’s idea to a reader’s eyes. Too many news outlets make too many of those steps frustrating — and frustrated readers are all too happy to go back to playing Candy Crush.

That conversation is a good and needed one. It signals a maturation of the medium. And what the author, Joshua Benton, is saying ultimately leads to an effort to create a variety of interfaces for a spectrum of users. Not every story must be print, or video, no. And not every example in this enterprise need to be the TV attempt at multimedia: the broadcast package over the text of the story. There comes a time where we ask consumers to choose what they want, and we shunt them into not only the stories they want and the format they want (and the advertising they’re looking for) but also give them control of those capsules. We build it, they select how they want these stories and where. We get it there. They move back and forth through the media.

They’re doing that already, just not under one shingle.

And here’s another way the audience is doing it, How Wearable Technology Will Impact Web Design:

A lot of naysayers are quick to write off wearable technology as a fad, but a recent report from Pew Research Center Internet Project indicates that 83% of industry experts believe that wearable technology will see huge growth within the next 10 years. By 2025, we’ll be fully immersed in the Internet of Things (IoT). This means that users will be accessing websites from various platforms, not just desktops and mobile devices.

As technology expands and more users embrace wearables, more of your clients will want to their sites to be accessible. If you’re unprepared for such requests, clients will search elsewhere to fit their needs.

Although wearable technology is in its infancy now, it’s rapidly growing. Expect it to develop like a kid in puberty– overnight.

Slowly, and then all at once.

My friend Ike Pigott wrote this fine piece, The Mammals of Journalism:

A weekly newspaper, serving three cities with a combined population of less than 40,000 people… has a TV studio.

The ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing
The great disruption has happened. It didn’t smack the Earth with a blinding blast; rather, it carried its impact more slowly over decades. The internet, and mobile technology, and codecs, and smaller gear that people can afford, and the ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing… blame them all.

A weekly newspaper has a website, and now it has a TV studio.

The Tribune’s publisher, Scott Buttram, likes to say that the very technologies that have disrupted network television and movie studios and large daily newspapers have also empowered his end of the food chain. The small can feast on the big, because the rules of our media world favor the nimble and the swift.

Flexibility, low inertia, is a terrific attribute these days.

A great show, A&E’s highest rated show, was canceled. But along came Netflix: ‘Longmire’ Season 4 News: Why Cancellation Might Have Actually Helped The Series. These are truly strange times in the entertainment business.

Tomorrow, we run errands! And probably some more fun stuff, too.

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14
Dec 14

Catching up

The weekly post of photos I haven’t yet placed before you. I’m almost pictured out over this last week, so this will be brief. But it will nevertheless be terrifying.

For instance, this … didn’t we learn anything from Jurassic Park?

Read the fine print there.

This is a coozie, and as custom coozies go this is a doozy.

Hey, puns are sometimes frightening.

I saw this while looking for the yearbooks that I collect. This is from the wrong school, and there’s a skeleton on the cover. But why?

It comes from Emory, and a friend of mine matriculated to the old private school in Atlanta. I sent him the picture and he wrote back “Dooley lives!”

Does he ever. He’s the “Lord of Misrule” and safeguards “the spirit of Emory.” He also has a nice bio page at Emory. When he appears it sounds like he runs the joint, which could be good or bad depending on whether you are the target of his plans. And …

Well, the university produced a video discussing the backstory and showing off some great old photos. Check it out:

And that’s why there’s a skeleton on their yearbooks. Dooley lives! (There are several Twitter accounts.)

adventures / football / history / links / memories / photo / things to read / video / weekend — Comments Off
13
Dec 14

A standard rambling Saturday of fun and memories

Every so often we have to make Allie, The Black Cat, famous on the Internet. This morning she was posing so patiently in the sun. She doesn’t mind the actual camera, but today I had the phone and she does not care for the phone in her face. Who can explain cats? She didn’t mind so much today, though, I guess because of the warm sun, but who can explain cats?

We watched the Army-Navy game. We attended one a few years ago, it was a great, chilly day and it is a game that everyone should go to at least once. (We want to go back.) You get a fair amount out of the experience watching the game on TV, CBS has done a nice job with it over the years.

To see the track athletes run the game ball onto the field and to watch the flyovers in person is a different thing. You’ve probably never seen the “prisoner exchange” of returning cadets and middies to their own sides after a student exchange program at home. Television doesn’t often show you the young men and women sworn into the service at the game and it doesn’t allow you to talk to graduates of both academies. For all the care that CBS gives that game, you just can’t absorb it all from the screen.

To watch the cadets march on, or to watch the teams sing their schools’ alma maters — my favorite college tradition of all — that’s an in-person experience you need. Here’s my video from 2011, shot on my first iPhone. It looks fuzzy after a few downloads and uploads from service to service, but it offers a nice little stadium view:

Here are some of the photos I took from our 2011 trip.

Of course, the hype videos always play better at home. You can hear them better. These were my favorites today:

More were collected for you here.

I’ve always cheered for Navy — the Department of the Navy was important in my childhood world — but two years ago, watching that late Army turnover, I softened up. The Black Knights were about to score late and break what was then a 10-game losing streak to the Middies. But they fumbled inside the 20 and I decided, about 40 seconds into the video here, that no rivalry should ever have more than a three-game losing streak. Everyone should know what it feels like to beat the other guys once in their career.

But it was not to be then, or today, of course. Navy has won 13 in a row, but Army is getting better.

I do enjoy the Army-Navy game.

Things to read … because there are other sports to enjoy.

The headline ruins this great high school basketball story:

Your team has not suffered like the Climax-Fisher Knights.

No matter how Raider-y or 76ers-esque your program is, it has not endured their unique brand of pain. Even Prairie View, the Division I-AA football team that lost 80 straight games during the 1990s, has technically suffered a shorter string of defeats than the Climax-Fisher girls basketball team, which finally broke its four-year losing streak Tuesday despite incredibly unfavorable odds.

That’s a happy finish.

I remember covering the accident that started this story years ago. It was probably one of the last stories I did before I moved to KARN in Little Rock. It was a terrible accident, to be sure. Dangling power lines killed a 7-year-old and changed a 4-year-old boy’s life forever. But this story is thrilling to read today. Good for him. Ward Webb lost his feet at age 4, but the Mountain Brook linebacker never says ‘I can’t’:

Mountain Brook football coach Chris Yeager remembers the early days of watching Ward Webb train with other players.

As teens sprinted up and down stadium steps for conditioning, Yeager remembers, they told Webb to go to the side and use the handrails.

Webb, who lost his feet at age 4 and uses prosthetic legs, refused.

“He wants to be like everybody else,” the coach said. “He’s falling down those steps and that’s just typical Ward. He absolutely believes he can do anything anybody else can do. I’ve been coaching him for 3½ years, and I have never heard Ward Webb say, ‘I can’t.’”

This is a neat concept. Not sure if I’d want to work there, but I’d read the product: A newspaper and a hotel, all in one. If you’re interested, here it is now.

St. Patrick’s is beautiful. Immediately below are a few of the pictures I’ve taken on visits to Manhattan over the years. The cleaning, though, has done wonders. St. Patrick’s unveils its immaculate facelift

This is an interesting visual mashup, and it leads to some spooky results. Battle of Nashville Then & Now is worth seeing, and the bigger your screen, the better.

In elementary school, during the third grade, let’s say, we buried a time capsule. It seemed a very big deal at the time, of course. I think it was a garbage bag-lined ice chest or something like that. And possibly they dug it up sometime later that night after we all left school. But we took it seriously, because it was very serious. It would be important when they dug it up in 50 years. All of this has come to mind a few times since, and now I wonder if anyone knows about it, if anyone remembers where it is or even cares. Were there 10 or 15 such time capsules buried on that playground? And did they dig it all up when that school built the big gym next to it? All of that is boring. This is amazing: Time capsule found at Massachusetts Statehouse:

Crews removed a time capsule dating back to 1795 on Thursday from the granite cornerstone of the Massachusetts Statehouse, where historians believe it was originally placed by Revolutionary War luminaries Samuel Adams and Paul Revere among others.

The time capsule is believed to contain items such as old coins and newspapers, but the condition of the contents is not known and Secretary of State William Galvin speculated that some could have deteriorated over time.

Officials won’t open the capsule until after it is X-rayed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to determine its contents. The X-ray is scheduled for Sunday.

Time capsules are fascinating things. Who came up with this idea? And why can’t I open them for people?

We went for ice cream last night. One of those places where you drive over, park, walk up to the window and order under the humming neon lights. There’s a list of the ice cream flavors of the day, and the flavors are always changing. This is a challenge for me. Occasionally I find something I really like, but it is never there twice.

Tonight we pulled up about a half hour before the place closed and the guy at the window, Matt, knew it. He was older than the usual high schooler working there and he knew that too. The Yankee ordered her usual. I hemmed and hawed and agonized.

What is the Oreo cheesecake like? I asked.

“It tastes like cheesecake … with Oreos,” Matt said.

He gave me a sample. He was correct. I ordered it.

It was good. I’ll probably never see it offered there again.