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The first sign of the fall

The maples always give up first. They are always noticeable. This is the first one of the year, and this is how it will go from here on in. Leaves and things falling onto the car, into the yard and showing the thinning trees and the sticks. It is demoralizing, even without the symbolism. But this is how it goes, a bright red, a shocking yellow and then browns and grays and the long, deep holding of one’s breath until the first buds of spring.

I think it will be harder this year.

Slept a lot of yesterday afternoon away. I was just so tired all weekend. Of course by the time I’d recouped enough to feel close to normal evening had arrived. By the time my third wind arrived I was wide awake for the witching hour. So I got a few things off the DVR, at least.

Up early this morning, and then subsequently at ’em. If they ever figure out we’re at ’em things are going to change. No one ever discusses that, but it is a distinct possibility we have to consider.

Class today and then office stuff and helping with a few story ideas. I had dinner at a place where the menu said one price and my ticket indicated another, higher one. I pointed this out to the server, a cheerful woman who has seen me enough to offer a really solid — but incorrect — guess about what I was having for dinner. She laughed it off. I’ll remember that when I don’t go back anytime soon.

After dinner, this was my view:

Which wasn’t bad, really. The maple leaves are getting drunk and falling down, but the temperatures are still nice and comforting and warm.

Things to read … because reading is comforting, and can keep you warm — if you’re someplace warm.

A tragedy, an eventuality, and I agree with Dr. Joyner, this was poorly handled. US Marine First Casualty in Fight Against ISIS.

There’s a great sadness, and surely a great number of people who cared, who now wish they’d had a way to help. A terrible loss, Hazel Green community mourns death of football standout Julian Jones.

He might not be presidential timber, but he’s an interesting man. This is another little insight into the man from Massachusetts, Mitt Isn’t Ready to Call It Quits.

So one team’s quarterback gets hurt. No one else on the team can play the part. So a guy from the other team comes over to take a few snaps, High school quarterback helps opposing team during their time of need.

Are you interested in media law stemming from the Boston Marathon bombing? Well, New York Post’s Shoddy Reporting Leaves Legal, Ethical Lessons.

This is another great piece from last week that should have been written in the last decade, How journalists are embracing the innovation of Twitter.

The Cluetrain, happily, is still making plenty of stops.

I parked under a tree today. Now all of the crevices are filled with tiny leaves. The elms are taking cues from the maples. Quitters.

photo / weekend — Comments Off
5
Oct 14

Catching up

The post of the week that is nothing but pictures. (Other days with a lot of pictures don’t count.) These pictures haven’t landed on the site, they’re holdovers, orphans, random things or whatever you like. They just need to go somewhere, and this is where they are going.

Farming, you’re doing it wrong. This was somewhere in central Georgia:

A Coke ghost sign in Augusta, Georgia:

An old distribution center on Reynolds in Augusta, Georgia. There was no signage, but there’s some yard behind it, a berm and then the river. Maybe it once was a shipping stop:

Also back at the race last weekend, there was a sign by a good-natured heckler:

And another message on a van in the parking deck:

Hard to call this one a ghost sign, it is holding up well, but this is also from Augusta:

How this Augusta street sign doesn’t get stolen every Thursday night is beyond me:

A flower on the Auburn campus:

A bee, also on the Auburn campus:

I donned the good luck sweatshirt, circa 1995, for the game yesterday:

The gameday button:

Finally, a sign taped to the wall in the restroom:

Auburn / football / photo / weekend — Comments Off
4
Oct 14

LSU at Auburn

The Yankee, playing cornhole at the tailgate. I don’t think she’s ever played before. Of course she won.

What follows are just fan pictures. Scroll through and enjoy. It will only take a second:

This first batch are all at the tailgate, of course:

Some people just drink too much …

The hostess of the best tailgate in town:

Her shirt stands for “What Would Bo Jackson Do?” Behind her, he was receiving the Walter Gilbert Award, sort of a lifetime achievement honor. All of this was awesome:

We’d said something to her like “We have guests here and we have to show off. You’re going to be loud, right?” She took this as a personal challenge.

This is what happens when you use one shaker for 11 seasons:

This jacket, you know you want it:

Photobombed!

iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Oct 14

The unknown stories of things

We hope you enjoyed Catember. Allie enjoyed being famous on the Internet. It was another successful month of showing off, cat hijinx and being cute. Life is hard for a black cat.

She’s curled up sleeping somewhere as I write this.

What do you suppose this is?

I caught the quickest glimpse of it on the freeway. The left lane is closed for repaving. The big orange barrels that come with road work are jutting out into the newly redone right line far enough that you’re driving at least halfway onto the shoulder. Fortunately, that was recently paved as well. At least the traffic is moving through the area, and the work is high quality. It is one of three or four stretches of road construction between here and there on that interstate.

None of which explains what that device does. I think it might perhaps have something to do with lane marking, but you can’t see a paint container there.

Things to read … because … we have to fill our own paint containers?

How media outlets are ‘gamifying’ the news:

News organizations are increasingly turning to video games to attract online readers, especially younger ones. The games hold promise — not just in terms of generating more readers and traffic hits, but in terms of helping people understand and consume news in different ways.

[…]

“It’s important for us and our journalists to not allow a medium to develop that we’re not going to at least explore,” Anthony DeBarros, director of interactive applications at Gannett Digital, said in a Digiday story this week. “It’s important to understand how we can be a part of an emerging medium.”

There are several great examples of emerging ideas in that story, including work from the European Journalism Centre and Al Jazeera.

How newsrooms can make the most of their archives:

In 1950 William Faulkner wrote “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” in his novel Requium for a Nun. However, the quote gained renewed attention in 2008 when then-candidate Obama gave a major speech on race in America. Obama was tapping into the archives of American culture to add context to the news of the day and connect that moment to the long and troubled history of race in America.

The Internet has made this idea of the past living alongside – and interwoven with – the present more true now than ever. Today, even relatively new newsrooms have vast and quickly growing archives of work to tap into and build upon. These archives hold huge potential to add context to current events, fuel community engagement and even serve as a new revenue stream.

Tablet Magazines Are Lousy, But J-Schools Can Make Them Better:

Though Apple claims it has sold more than 200 million iPads since 2010, not many of those users subscribe to magazines. Replica digital magazines accounted for only 3.8 percent of total paid circulation in the first half of 2014, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. To put this in perspective: National Geographic won the National Magazine Award for best tablet magazine this year. The Geographic’s paid print circulation is 3.5 million. Circulation for the tablet edition: 164,408. The “best” the industry has to offer amounts to less than 5 percent of paid circulation. (Blame the AAM, in part, for the industry’s reliance on tedious replica apps; they are the only versions counted in a publication’s rate base, which help determine its ad rates.)

While magazines are still producing tablet issues, they haven’t saved the industry like we hoped. But that doesn’t stop journalism schools from making them a focal point in the curriculum.

The White House Wants to Reveal Where Government Drones Fly:

The White House is getting ready to send out an order to make agencies open up data on where they fly drones and what happens to all of the data they collect.

Right now, only the government is actually allowed to fly drones legally. Commercial drone use is banned by the FAA, although it gave out several permits to movie and television production companies to let them use drones, and gave unique permission to a company in Texas to let it use drones in a search and rescue mission.

The new executive order would specifically tell federal agencies to open up data on its drone fleets that it has kept secret for years. Although the new rules would cover all federal agencies, the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have the largest fleets and would be most affected by the disclosure rules.

We talked about this today in a Crimson meeting. I am no expert on the extent of this issue, but it is an interesting topic that comes to light from time to time, and should be held up for examination more frequently, Reports on college crime are deceptively inaccurate:

The crime statistics being released by colleges nationwide on Wednesday are so misleading that they give students and parents a false sense of security.

Even the U.S. Department of Education official who oversees compliance with a federal law requiring that the statistics be posted on Oct. 1 each year admits that they are inaccurate. Jim Moore said that a vast majority of schools comply with the law but some purposely underreport crimes to protect their images; others have made honest mistakes in attempting to comply.

In addition, weaknesses in the law allow for thousands of off-campus crimes involving students to go unreported, and the Education Department does little to monitor or enforce compliance with the law — even when colleges report numbers that seem questionable.

Here are Samford’s published data covering 2011 through 2013 and for September 2014. I wonder if there is a story there …

Auburn / football / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
30
Sep 14

It must be Tuesday

A passing thought this morning, as I walked from here to there: I am not sure if I’ve ever been on the Samford campus when the power went out. All of the lines here are buried and the service has always been excellent. The things we take for granted, no?

So late this afternoon the power blinked. And it blinked again and then once more. After a few minutes, wherein students in the newsroom were confessing their fears of the dark and people and clowns and four-leaf clovers and who knows what else, the power blinked one more time.

We noticed the hardwired connection first.

The wireless was down as well. There’s a router right outside the window. Turns out that continual green ring of light means something. You never notice it until it is a pale red, which means you don’t have an Internet connection, so you have the opportunity to notice the telltales on routers:

Telnet was beginning the march.

All of our phones and Internet are tied together in a VOIP, so they didn’t work. Some of the locks on campus are tied into that network, so those doors didn’t work.

I raided my emergency peanut butter stash.

Also, the printer died, because today was a Tuesday:

I’ve renamed that machine the Lazarus. It keeps coming back, though we’ve been worried about it for almost four years now.

Somehow, the cash registers in the cafeteria and food court were online. So the crisis was merely humanitarian rather than truly dire. And the IT people here know their stuff. In perhaps an hour or two — who can tell the passage of time without the web? — things began returning to normal.

But all of that let me hear this:

Student 1: “What did we do before the Internet?”

Student 2: “We were prepared for it.”

For a group of people who grew up with the Internet always at their beck and call, this is an interesting point. There’s a story in this. I wonder if anyone will write it.

Things to read … because people went to the trouble to write it.

Mike Lutzenkirchen is an incredibly brave man, Philip Lutzenkirchen’s father uses son’s life — and death — to motivate high school players:

Mike Lutzenkirchen, standing before the James Clemens High School football team in its weight room Tuesday afternoon, called out Logan Stenberg, the Jets’ offensive tackle, and had him leave the room so that Lutzenkirchen could illustrate a point.

After Stenberg obliged, Lutzenkirchen said, “He just stood right there in the flesh. Now he’s not here. A teammate. That’s how quickly it can happen. That’s how quickly you can lose somebody.”

His son, the former Auburn star Philip Lutzenkirchen, one of the Tigers’ most popular players in recent seasons, was killed in a car wreck in Troup County, near LaGrange, Ga. He was 23 years old.

Mike Lutzenkirchen, who also spoke to the Huntsville High football team Tuesday evening, shared an array of statistics about his son’s sensational career. There was one stat he saved until the last, the one that is most staggering and devastating.

“Listen to this closely: Point three seven seven,” Lutzenkirchen said. “That was Philip’s blood alcohol content.”

Hard to imagine what he must be going through.

And now, for something a bit lighter:

Journalism and tech links:

VR journalism! Harvest of Change: Iowa farm families confront a nation in transition

A Wearable Drone That Launches Off Your Wrist To Take Your Selfie

The (surprisingly profitable) rise of podcast networks

Staying connected with college graduates: Social media and alumni

Magazines Get a Way to Measure Their Reach Across Media Platforms

Things you don’t want to hear from your doctor, American Family Care alerts customers of stolen laptops containing patient information.

I’m having my students read this story this week, Dispatcher reflects a week after Birmingham UPS shooting: ‘I asked God to lead my words’:

“The officers, they did a great job,” said Davis, otherwise known as Operator 8061. “They did a good job in responding and getting me notified so that I could make my notifications.”

Davis, an 18-year BPD dispatch veteran, said she was just one of many dispatchers who sprang into action when the first call from the UPS customer center on Inglenook Lane came into the radio room at 9:21 a.m.

“Had it not been for my coworkers helping me, it would not have gone as smooth as it did,” she said. “It wasn’t just me. It was a team effort. I was proud to be a Birmingham Police Department dispatcher that day.”

The challenge of that day isn’t unusual. Dispatchers and officers deal with a crisis of some sort almost each and every day, though not usually to that extent.

About 10 calls came in to the radio room almost simultaneously after the shots erupted in the UPS warehouse. Those nearly dozen calls accounted for one dispatch, one of 11,663 dispatches handled by BPD last week alone.

And then there’s this stupid story, New York artist creates ‘art’ that is invisible and collectors are paying millions.

If the empty art studio burns down, how much does the insurance company pay out?

You can only figure that out with an Internet connection.