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Friday / history / journalism / photo / Rowan — Comments Off
21
Nov 25

There are many questions

We had a faculty meeting today. Many speeches and introductions. It is part of moving into, and creating, a new college. There are many questions, we don’t yet have all of the answers, but good and talented people are working on it. Answers will be found. These things don’t happen overnight.

Here’s how overnight they don’t happen. We’re in a one-year status quo pattern. As that happens many new procedures are implemented. It’s the first year of a three-year fact-finding and solution-creating process. Sometimes it seems like three years might not be a long enough for that. Sometimes you’re made aware of all that goes into it. And then you’re made aware of all of these other things too. And then there are concerns you aren’t familiar with. There’s a lot that goes into it. You can see that even if, like me, you’re only familiar with just the trees in your section of the giant forest. And people get highly specialized, of course. Also, this is not a thing that happens all of the time, these big department-college merger things. No one specializes in that. But campus communities do love making committees, and sometimes you get some great work out of them. I’m sure that’ll be the case in this instance.

This meeting was held in a building with a big auditorium, because this new college is a huge college and it needs the space for meetings such as these. Down the hall from this auditorium are the offices of the RTF department, and parts of the journalism department, which is moving in there. And on the walls are a lot of old newspaper front pages. These are always such great displays. Maybe I’m one of the only people that stops to look at them, but that’s why they’re there.

Those walls have framed prints of local and campus papers, as all journalism departments seemingly have. The farther you get from this January 1991 issue, above, the less frequently new pages appear. It occurs to me that one of the less important, but nonetheless sad, side effects of ending newsprint is that one day we’ll have no more displays such as these. The last yellowing page on the wall there is a 2018 installment of a local paper (then in the process of being assimilated by a larger entity) running their Super Bowl edition. I wonder who was in charge of deciding which ones to keep. Some are obvious, some may take a little more contextual appreciation.

You could study the look of this paper, and I have considered it. For its day, that’s a strong small paper design. The layout only feels long in the tooth to my 2025 eyes. You’re nine years into the influence of USA Today and all of the influences that emanate from there. I can’t speak to the history of that particular publication, but a quick glance at their digitized archives on newspapers.com suggests they were pretty responsive to industry and consumption trends in that era. Most importantly, it is sharing the information you need, and you know there’s more inside.

Also, there are no ridiculous SEO headlines. It was also all done locally. In 1991, the layout was made with some relatively basic software. If they were using QuarkXPress, this paper was very much an innovator. It would be five more years before a version worth talking about was released. It’s also possible that they did a lot of that with razors and glue. Old school.

Not that you came here for a lot of thoughts on old software. Not that you knew what you were getting here to end the week. I didn’t know either, to be honest. I also don’t know what we’ll have here next week. There will be something, though. We’ll need to check in on the kitties, for instance. There will be some other stuff, too. What will it be? It’s a good question. There are many questions. We’ll find out together.

Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
20
Nov 25

This long day featured shooty hoops and a diversity lecture

In my criticism class we talked about this documentary, which begins with a basketball tournament hit by a dangerous storm. In fact, a desperation three-point shot at the end of one game sent it to overtime, which kept everyone in the Georgia Dome, while a tornado hit downtown Atlanta. Hence the title, Miracle 3. But in the second act, the tournament officials have to figure out how to continue their event because the Georgia Dome is now unusable. So they moved across town to Georgia Tech’s gym, which seems like an impressive feat of logistics.

And in the third act, Georgia, who had a thin and bad team that year, went on the most improbably run, winning three games to win the SEC tournament, another miracle 3, of a sort. But not more so that the jump shot that may well have legitimately saved lives.

It’s a pretty good documentary. The class was into it. We talked about media aesthetics and a few of the tangential points included in the documentary. Someone looked up something about the film as we talked. If nothing else, we’re fostering some good curiosity. But, hopefully, we’re doing more, as well.

In org comm we discussed diversity. We started with the SPLC’s Frame acrostic. We talked about diversity, and stereotypes, and explicit and implicit prejudice, and different sorts of discrimination, your standard greatest hits collection.

Then we tried to tease out some of the things that weren’t included in the basic overview, which allowed us to discuss sports and people with special needs. Turns out that 47 percent of kids with special needs are playing a sport, and some 30 percent of adults with a disability are physically active.

And then we talked about this story I ran across recently. A small town high school had a local elementary school student take part in some pregame football ceremonies. The kid is autistic, so they had to figure out how to accommodate her needs. They talked to some experts, and local businesses, and they set up a place where she could enjoy the game. Then this amazing thing starts happening, other people in the community start coming to the games, people who had never gone to games before. We also talked about the Philadelphia Eagles, who have a hugely robust Autism Foundation. The franchise has hired 35 employees who are on the spectrum, in a demographic that experiences 85 percent unemployment. They’ve also trained 700 stadium works to work appropriately with fans with autism, and they have sensory facilities. Some Eagles execs have personal connections to autism, and that’s how it began six or seven years ago. And, since then, the Eagles Autism Foundation has raised more than $10 million autism research and programs.

Which was a great way to end the day, teasing Tuesday’s discussion about inclusion.

I drove us home in near silence. The day had just wiped me out, somehow. And the drive seemed to take longer than usual. This evening, one set of things has been taken off my plate, annoyingly so. But there’s still much to do. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to that.

baseball / cycling / football / links / Rowan / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
18
Nov 25

Just class stuff today

In my criticism class today we discussed this story. College sports’ racial, gender hiring practices getting worse instead of improving:

College sports received a C for racial hiring practices when it decreased slightly from 75.1% in 2021 to 73.3% in 2022. College sports also received a C for gender hiring, with 74.1%, which was a slight increase from 2021 when it was 72.8%. The combined grade was a C with 73.7%. That was down from 74.0% in 2021. In other words, overall, equal opportunity hiring practices are getting worse instead of improving.

As we look at the sidelines in the tournament, we see the best record for hiring of people of color and women as head coaches. But the coaches of color represent a fraction of the student-athletes on their teams. In 2021-22, Division I men’s basketball Black student-athletes made up 52.4% of the total, compared to the 24.8% of Black head coaches. We have a smaller percentage of Black head basketball coaches now than we had 17 years ago, when 25.2% of the Division I head basketball coaches were Black.

This is a project Professor Lapchick and his team at UCF undertake every year. They grade out the big professional sports leagues in the U.S., and also collegiate sports. The students picked this little story to read, and so we talked about the grading system a bit, Lapchick’s work, and also some of the math involved here, which was hilarious. A few of those students are in my organizational communication class, and they don’t know it yet, but we’ll be discussing Lapchick on Thursday, too.

We also considered this CNN piece. This injury has plagued MLB for most of the last century, but a new phenomenon is emerging:

It is an injury which has plagued Major League Baseball for the best part of the last century. The ligament in your elbow which connects the bone in your upper arm to the one in your forearm – and is only about as strong as “a piece of celery” – tears, leaving you unable to throw and facing a very lengthy spell on the sidelines.

This season, the likes of Gerrit Cole, Corbin Burnes and Shane Bieber have all had Tommy John surgery – the most popular procedure to repair a torn UCL – while Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani made his long-awaited return to the mound after almost 22 months away following the second elbow surgery of his career.

Dr. Christopher Ahmad, Tommy John expert and head team physician for the New York Yankees, has performed the surgery on some of the biggest names in baseball. But he has also been privy to the other side of the story.

“The alarms are going off on how devastating this problem is to the youngest players,” he says in an interview with CNN Sports.

One of the series of questions I try to get the students to answer is who is a story for, and who is the disadvantaged person, or group, in the story. Sometimes that’s subtle. Sometimes obvious. Wouldn’t you know it, at least two people in the room say they knew someone that had already damaged or ruined their UCL by high school.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the “piece of celery” imagery out of my mind when watching people throw a baseball.

We also discussed the Slaying the Badger documentary, which we watched last Thursday. I showed it because we watched a football-center documentary just before, and we’ll watch a basketball-themed documentary just after. There’s something to be said about watching something you nothing about. Plus, it’s a dramatic story.

I was impressed, they seemed to like it more than I would have expected. It is a trick and a challenge to try to explain a sport to an audience who may have no understanding of the sport, while also reaching an audience that knows a great deal about it, while also telling a riveting story. For the most part, the filmmakers here did that. (The book is better. Yes, the documentary was inspired by a book.)

I was proud of myself. I did not get too far into the weeds on the cycling minutiae while trying to answer their questions. That would have been easy to do.

Why was he wearing this jersey and now wearing that jersey? What’s the deal with stages?

You don’t need to know the sport to follow the story, but knowing the sport heightens your awareness of a film.

In org comm we had a great negotiation activity today. I was nervous about it, but it worked out well. I had one student play a quarterback who is about to become a free agent. I specifically chose a student who can be loud and opinionated and, often, correct, to be the player. That kept him out of the back-and-forth. I had two others play his agents. One of them a super smooth charmer, and another who is quite the thoughtful analytic type. They did their work with their client in the hall, and then they would come in and meet the team leadership for the negotiations.

The rest of the class I broke into groups representing his team. I wanted one person to be the GM, a student who also seems worldly and practical. The rest of the class broke up into various VP offices and so on. There was some designed conflict between those franchise groups, and every group had a certain series of motivations and criteria I gave them.

It took exactly one round for them all to get into the exercise. It took them five rounds of offers and counter-offers for them to reach a deal.

The most fascinating thing happened. though. Two of the team groups were supposed to be resistant to making a deal for budget and other considerations. So they had conflict with the boss group, my three-headed GM hydra. The GM(s), though, wanted to make the deal. So they had to go back and forth, which became incredibly animated. One group convinced themselves they were absolutely opposed to the signing. But when they finally reached a deal, franchise GM(s) and player-agents, everyone was so happy, and the various groups, even the ones that had been opposition just moments before, were “Welcome home!” and “Welcome to the team!”

The actual player will be a free agent soon. I’m curious to see how close, or how far off, our mock negotiation was.

I’m also wondering how we can take this org comm class and do more things like this, which are marginally practically and a lot of fun.

Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
13
Nov 25

Some days barely get titles

In class, we watched the documentary, “Slaying the Badger.” Last time we had a football documentary. Next time it is basketball, so I wanted to make a point about how we might see things in a program featuring a sport with which we aren’t that familiar.

Plus, it’s one of the greatest races of all time. And the documentary, which is gripping, is based on a book that’s even better. And next Tuesday we’ll see what they have to say about it. Hopefully it will be a useful conversation.

In org comm we discussed negotiations. I asked them what they have negotiated about. No one really had much to offer. Finally, someone said something like ‘We’re young. We don’t get to negotiate. We just do what we’re told.’ And I suppose there’s some truth to that, but then we spent some time expanding our ideas about what negotiations are. Then we talked about different sorts. Next week they’ll do a little in-class negotiation.

And I guess that was the day. I spent some other time working on other things, some things which are coming due in the immediate future and, thus, require the incredible crush of clarity that means my words will get blurry almost immediately.

I will print things out and pore over them, word-by-word. Tomorrow is going to be a lot of fun.

So let me get to that. I would call it a head start, but that implies beginning. I am not beginning. I am months into this project. Eight, nine, maybe 10 months into this. That’s not a beginning. I’m well beyond a head start. Let me, then, get back to building up some momentum.

journalism / links / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
Nov 25

I saw no electrically charged particles released by the sun

We had a special visitor in my criticism class today. My lovely bride joined us to take part in our conversation on one of the articles the students selected for us to read. I was glad to have her there. A lot of times you just need more expertise than you have. And my expertise — such as it is — is limited to begin with. The story was actually an opinion column, which allowed us to discuss some of the differences between them.

From MTG to Charles Barkley, ignorance was on display about trans athletes:

Even on positive stories, like Tifanny Abreu ending a playoff hot streak with a Superliga title in hand or Nikki Hiltz on the charge in Grand Slam Track, the level of anti-trans ignorance is toxic.

This year, and especially last week, has been one long real-life comment section if you are trans, and especially if like sports. Politicians put on a show of ignorance at a hearing and then Charles Barkley — purportedly an ally — continued that ignorance with his insulting comments about trans athletes.

A House subcommittee hearing last week was another opportunity to show how ignorant and bigoted the GOP majority can be toward transgender Americans and how they use sports drive it home with pride. The focus was on trans women in fencing. It centered on a match where a cis woman fencer forfeited a match against a trans woman fencer and became a cause celebre to the anti-trans movement.

We talked about some of the specifics in the column, we talked about the outlet, Out Sports, and we talked about the power of the context of the links the author shared, including this really useful primer, Cracking the code of bias against transgender athletes:

The anti-trans crowd relies upon the fact that most readers and/or sports fans will not bother to check the facts for themselves, in part, because the sport is more obscure.

[…]

Fact checking would have perhaps saved Chesworth some embarrassment, but that’s the rub here. A transphobe counts on the general public to not research the claims for themselves.

I’d given that additional read, because it had some key terms to it, but it also allowed me to make a different and larger point. You could change some of the terms and that guide would help readers understand any sort of propaganda.

From time to time, as we discussed the piece, I would steal a little glance to my left to see if this was where the eminent Dr. Lauren Smith would chime in. She is an expert in this field, after all, and I just happen to listen to her talk about it. But she never interrupted me, never felt the need to correct me. So I guess the details are rubbing off.

Then we discussed this other story which I assigned to the class, The predatory web of sextortion increasingly ensnares young athletes:

John DeMay and Jenn Buta say that since they’ve made Jordan’s story public, they have heard from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who have been victims of sextortion at some level.

“Just this week I had four reach out in a 24-hour period,” Buta said.

The parents’ advice for teens getting targeted is simple: Shut off the computer as soon as a questionable message pops up, walk away and then go tell a trusted adult. The criminals are looking for money, and if they think an avenue has dried up, they’ll likely move on. It’s like a fish wiggling off the hook. But if they believe a fish is still on the hook, there is no amount of appeasement — or payouts — that will stop them from pushing for more.

“If you don’t engage with them, they’re going to stop and move on,” John said.

Meanwhile, NCMEC suggests immediately reporting the account to a social media platform and reaching out to the organization’s hotline: 1-800-843-5678. Laws and policies can help keep the image off the internet.

“We can help,” Coffren said. “We can handle it.”

A slew of new state laws — often pushed into passage by victim families — have made sextortion a felony. Law enforcers say that since most of the international criminals don’t believe anyone will actually take their own life, they won’t actually face criminal consequences for what they believe is just a minor financial crime.

It’s why a message had to be sent.

It’s a horrible story, shocking in its details. Important in every respect. In this class we ask a set of questions about who a story is for and who the disadvantaged people are, and this story had plenty of obvious answers, and some thoughtful and unexpected one from a few students, as well.

For a lighter time, after that class ended and I moved to org comm, we talked about the concepts of conflict. (Later this week and next we move to negotiation.) The class broke up into four groups, each had a different sort of sports-centric conflict they had to resolve. One had two teammates pursuing the same woman. Another had a play-coach disagreement on tactics. There was a third conflict about playing time on a co-ed intramural team. The fourth was a conflict stemming from a captain’s favoritism among teammates. They had to understand the problem, detail the framework of solving it and create reasonable solutions. They were into it, right until the end. I think the windows face the wrong way in that room and when there was nothing in the sky above the gloaming, that was pretty much it.

Maybe they were looking ahead to seeing the Northern Lights. They were probably disappointed. We had good skies for it, for the most part, but nothing out of the ordinary. Still, it’s a delight to go outside, shiver, look up and see all of this.

It is even nicer when you rush back inside nine or 10 minutes later, because it is that time of the year now.

The time of year where I have already decided which jacket I’ll wear to campus for tomorrow’s faculty meeting. The time of year when I wonder when we’ll see the 60s again. The long-range forecast says we’ll get 60 on Sunday. But I think that’s just an automated template from the weather site. It’s also the time of year where you wonder how long I’ll complain about this. That’s a fair question. The answer is: until April, for some silly reason.