My class visited Alabama Media Group today. I saw old friends, nice folks with whom I used to work that I don’t hardly get to see enough today. I didn’t even see everyone that I still know from al.com, but I saw enough of them to build that sense of melancholy of friends on hold or, the silly notion of being placed on hold. Silly because we are all still moving, because perhaps one day some of those circles will become concentric again.
Alex Walsh, an economist who does data journalism for AMG, was one of the people who spoke with my students.
The layout will be different. There will be less floor space in general and more room for collaboration. It is meant to be more open and inviting to the public. The new building will probably re-shape the culture of the company in ways they don’t understand yet. I suggested they need to install a Waffle House.
Then I’d have more reasons than friends to go visit.
Hit the pool tonight. I did it despite, for most of the first half of the thing I was trying to ignore my brain, which was urging me to get out of the water. My collarbone hurt. I drank a bit of the pool. The pool was closing soon. You’re surrounded by other people plodding along.
I don’t know how to process the information that I am faster than someone in the water. (I do not know what is happening.)
So I didn’t drown, but I did swim 1,750 yards. That’s still a mile.
Showered. Had dinner at Chic-fil-A and then visited Walmart. So I have a half-dozen new Walmart stories.
No?
Things to read … instead, then. This is another one of those quick, link only versions. But they are of high quality:
Hey, if you drive a high end car, the rules just don’t apply. Ask this guy, who has a sweet little Jaguar, which he parks wherever the heck he wants.
So that’s a Tuesday for you, then. My righteous indignation must be saved until the end of the day and finally expelled upon a guy who doesn’t understand the standard parking lot conventions by which the rest of the peasantry must abide.
On Bruce Pearl, the Auburn mood:
As we allow ourselves to be caught up in the Bruce Pearl fervor Auburn fans change their brackets. AUBURN WINS ALL THE TROPHIES!
In one day Bruce Pearl brought more enthusiasm about basketball (Basketball? Basketball.) to Auburn than anyone since Chris Porter terrorized everyone. In one day Pearl stirred pretty much everyone, even if you didn’t have an emotional investment in basketball. It is really rather remarkable.
Jay Jacobs said “I just wish he had some personality.”
It took Bruce Pearl less than two minutes to point out Gus Malzahn at Tuesday night’s press conference in Auburn Arena introducing him as Auburn’s new basketball coach . It took him 17 minutes to get around to his wife. In between he talked about his son, his assistants and the need to have your family with you in life.
“Chances are you’re going to see me with my clothes on most of the time,” Pearl said, but that wasn’t the highlight of the night for a man seemingly full of highlights.
People keep asking — Is this real? Because right now, everything seems like a highlight from someone else’s dream. When you listened to the gathered crowd sing him
Happy Birthday, it was easy to wonder. Is this real? You could wonder, when he feigned a bit of “Aww shucks” and then directed the singalong before saying “How about if we make a deal? How about if we celebrate my birthday at the tournament next year?” It was easy to wonder. Is this real?
And when Jay Jacobs, caught up in the spirit of the thing, took a shot at the media, it was easy to wonder. When the crowd chanted for Gus, and you realized: these might be high water times in the athletic department, you could wonder, is this real?
Pearl vowed his team would work hard. He said they wouldn’t be fun to play against. He reveled in the crowd’s adoration. He glowed when he mentioned his contract. He made a joke about whether he could teach a class on ethics. The high-energy pizza provider, the salesman, so pleased to step back into the game he loved said, yep, this is real. And real, now, not next year. Pearl made a point of that: “The players will not hear me say ‘When we get our own players.’ Those are my players, right there, and I’m their coach.”
The highlight of the night was perhaps when he said to the crowd and cameras that he is mindful, “as a coach and even as a father … I let a lot of people down … and so that’s why I still walk around with pain.”
As he talked about how he has found “this part of the country to be a part of the country that offers grace,” you might have found a different side to the high-energy, enthusiastic, Personality of Pearl.
It is hard to imagine Sonny Smith or Tommy Joe Eagles or Cliff Ellis running into a thundering mass of students and fans on the airport tarmac. But Bruce Pearl is saying to anyone who will listen that he is grateful and that he has been humbled. To Auburn folks, that seems real.
And you remember: Auburn loves a comeback. And they’ve got their next feature performer. That’s real.
And then I wrote this:
Sometimes, writing is like being a painter filling a canvas. Sometimes, editing is like being a sculptor finding the story in the stone.
Things to read … are just quick links this time. Just because I didn’t write 1,600 words on them (like yesterday) doesn’t mean they aren’t worth your while. Do check some of them out:
Everyone seemed OK. The troopers were there. We had just a slight slowdown and I met no ambulances coming the other direction for the rest of my drive. Even still, you see these small accidents and know that these people just had their week ruined. And on a Monday morning, too. But at least everyone is OK.
And now, to change the subject, here’s another hit from Kid President:
It is probably selfish to say, but I hope that guy never changes.
In class today we talked about mobile marketing. This is the part of the conversation where students always find the line dividing acceptable and creepy. Say you’re walking down the street and your phone buzzes, “Hey! We noticed you’re just a block away from Starbucks. Couldn’t you go for a nice coffee and muffin? Here’s a coupon!”
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
In November, the Macy’s department store chain began testing a product called ShopBeacon at stores in San Francisco’s Union Square and New York’s Herald Square.
The app, created by Shopkick Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., enables a merchant to offer discounts on specific products that a customer has expressed interest in or, perhaps, has lingered near, prodding him or her to buy.
“We can find out where you are standing and how long you’ve been standing in front of the Michael Kors handbag and if you haven’t purchased,” Macy’s Chief Executive Terry Lundgren said at an analysts conference in November. “And if you haven’t, I’ll send you a little note to give you encouragement to do so.”
And that’s the new world in which we shop. Or does something like this just push you further away from brick and mortar stores?
I didn’t mention it but I did have a nice, brief bike ride yesterday evening. I got in a quick 14 miles, wherein I managed to have two thoughts. The first was that I haven’t been riding my bike enough. I knew this because I hit too small little uphill segments and pushed my feet down and accelerated and that was a wonderful feeling. The ride was really meant to be the first half of a brick workout, where I would take on a long run. Just as I went back outside, though, it started to rain. And while I enjoy riding in the rain, I don’t much see the need to run in it. But the other thought I was continually having on the bike was “I wanna run.”
I do not know what is happening.
I did not run, however, because of the rain. This evening I swam a mile, 1,750 yards. It even felt pretty good, which doesn’t happen often. Didn’t want to run, though!
Things to read … because I still don’t want to run.
“It actually started with me reading an article by Steven Levy in Wired about algorithms and news content — ‘Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” Christer Clerwall tells Wired.co.uk. “My first thought was ‘maybe it doesn’t have to be better — how about ‘a good enough story’?” Sadly, Wired may turn out to be the architect of its own destruction. Because Clerwall, an assistant professor of media and communications at Sweden’s Karlstad University, has found the answer to this question. And it’s yes.
This is the second small study I’ve seen like this. Both have to do with sports copy, which probably means something. What may be promising, however, is that as the algorithms improve this could free up writers from the more basic stories and allow for better storytelling.
Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was jolted awake at 6:25 a.m. on Monday by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and went straight to his computer, where he found a brief story about the quake already written and waiting in the system. He glanced over the text and hit “publish.” And that’s how the LAT became the first media outlet to report on this morning’s temblor. “I think we had it up within three minutes,” Schwencke told me.
If that sounds faster than humanly possible, it probably is. While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.
The copy, which you can read in that story, was basic, to the point, and not perfect regarding style, but it shared the pertinent information, apparently within three minutes. What happened afterward was telling. ” Quakebot’s post had been updated 71 times by human writers and editors, turning it from the squib above into this in-depth, front-page story.”
This first story, the early morning Quakebot copy, is a first step. It didn’t save the day, or save even a big part of a reporter’s day, but it is the sign of a utility to come, or, rather, a tool that is already here.
Daily time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the U.S. for the first time, according a newly-released 2014 AdReaction study from Millward Brown.
Americans now spend 151 minutes per day on smartphones, next to 147 in front of TVs. But the numbers are even greater elsewhere.
“2013 was the first year for multi-channel video industry losses, but the modest losses represent only about 0.1% of all subscribers,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “While the overall market remains fairly flat, further share-shifting has taken place. Cable providers now have a 52% share of the top multi-channel video subscribers in the US, compared to a 58% share three years ago.”
We are at something of a hinge point in entertainment history.
The three news reports followed the same format: Television reporters walked into schools with hidden cameras, under the premise of testing the security measures. Each time, the anchors provided a sobering assessment of the findings.
[…]
Critics say these kinds of undercover efforts do not provide an accurate portrait of school safety, and question whether they serve any public good. Some journalists question whether the news organizations become too much a part of the story, and whether it is dangerous for reporters to wander into schools now that students and staff are often on heightened alert.
The Sunday post with the most! Pictures without context, that is. We’re just passing the time with a few extra photos that haven’t landed anywhere else. On with it, then.
On Saturday night, after the baseball doubleheader, I bumped into my friend Phil Smith, who is a local photographer. He said the gang was all going to Little Italy for pizza. And, apparently, I’m a member of the gang. Hooray!
Anyway, we sat down at a corner table and this was right in front of me:
Allie has been exceedingly cuddly the last few days, even for her, which is saying something. She says hello:
Just as I was about to head out to the airport this evening to pick up my lovely bride this song came on the radio. I haven’t heard this in a while and, surprisingly, the song holds up pretty well.
Freshman Keegan Thompson threw his second consecutive complete game, striking out 10 and scattering four hits while allowing two runs. (So it was a disastrous 5th inning by his standards.) He threw 121 pitches. His 111th pitch was clocked at 91 mph. The kid is unbelievable. I hope they don’t break him.
Auburn won the first game 5-2 to take the series from the visiting Aggies. Thompson came out in the second game and played first base for a while. Auburn was put away easily in the last game of the series, falling 9-0.
So let’s talk fans! This group includes two of the four new Aggie friends we made today. Scroll beyond the photographs. There are things to read below the pretty pictures.
Things to read … because today hasn’t been all about baseball.
International news: Venezuela is likely more important to us than Crimea, though whatever Putin is doing in the home office is interesting. Meanwhile, just common sense suggests that of all the places you could cut the military here, slicing off parts of the navy is an inherently risky strategy.
Journalism items of interest: The lengths people will go to try to prevent reporters from doing their jobs often borders on the absurd. Here are two examples, and correspondence from Great Britain, which has been milling about on the wrong, lost, broken path for a while now, it seems.
Just stories: The first one is just strange, the kind where you know you don’t know the whole story, where maybe the whole story doesn’t matter so much, so long as the person is OK.
