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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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30
Sep 12

Catching up

The Sunday installment that is long on pictures! And sometimes there is even context!

OK. The context is that these pictures are holding serve for Sunday. I pressed the shutter button recently and didn’t have anywhere to put these pictures, but I still wanted to share them. Better than writing about football, which I’ll do below anyway.

This guy ran up on the back porch one day recently. Not sure what he was looking for. Of course I couldn’t get the cat to pay attention. Maybe that’s a good thing, since she wouldn’t have had idea how to react to seeing this:

Last weekend I took this picture of my lovely wife. Behind her you can see the picture of a young man who is trying to wear her number:

Here is a pepper. We got it out of a basket of locally grown veggies lovingly assembled by hand. Now we need to find a recipe that calls for one red bell pepper. Did you know that Christopher Columbus is who we blame for the inaccurate name? Or that this thing is loaded with vitamin C? Or that the test can depend on growing conditions like soil and when it is picked and how it ripens? Wikipedia taught you that:

Breakfast! We love breakfast at the Barbecue House: The secret is the bacon, I think. Yes. The secret is always the bacon.

Cam Newton, when he scores touchdowns in the NFL, gives the ball to kids in the stands. Sometimes it is a Christmas miracle. Today, just another day of a kid wearing an Auburn hat and Carolina teal and getting something great to talk about in school tomorrow. And that’s the only excuse for this color scheme:

We blew a bulb in the kitchen. The Yankee, who’s never been a fan of the style of lights that were in the kitchen, bought some new ones. The box says “natural light.” When they get warm, they are supposed to radiate us with 1080 lumens, which is how lights measure horsepower.

I measure it this way: If I turn on the lights in our kitchen and the lights dim at the Eagles game in Philadelphia, these are plenty bright.

Now we can see everything in the kitchen. So we’ll invest in more 409 …

Auburn / football / friends / history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / site / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
29
Sep 12

A Saturday mishmash

Something I wrote, and photographs I took, last spring made it on to the Smithsonian Magazine’s website.

It has some formatting problems that weren’t there in my submission or the version they returned to double check. No matter. There’s a better, longer version, published here, but, still, Smithsonian.

This is hardly the biggest thing in the world or even the best publication news I’ve had in the last month. But I get to say I’m published on the Smithsonian’s site.

Again.

Back in the old days — and I mean about 1996, which is in no way old, or far enough removed to suggest they are the old days — I perfected my dry sarcasm and speed typing on a chatroom site that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. As we have learned is the norm, a bigger company bought the little company. They made changes, ruined the aesthetic and people left. Some of those people stuck together on ICQ. My ICQ number, which I can’t grab at just this moment, was shockingly low. But the friends stuck together, from Maryland and out west and the Deep South and somewhere in London and in Australia.

One by one they all sort of fell away. Life demanded them. They grew bored. They lost their password or their Internet connection. And finally that group was down to just two people. So there was me and this Australian lady. We’d talked for a couple of years by then. Carol was friendly, and liked folk music and all manner of interesting decorative styles. She worked in the government in Canberra and had a big burly husband who sounded hysterical.

We even talked on the phone a few times. We discussed the virtues of the Australian accent in the United States and my accent, which she found charming, in Australia. I was well underway in my broadcast career by then and thinking a lot about sound. Carol figured I could do very well in Australia. I hatched the sort of plan that you never even try to implement — summer in Australia wooing girls with my southern accent and then running from the winter there to have summer at home in the States, wooing girls with a blended Aussie, Southern accent.

She was my mother’s age, almost. So I jokingly called her my Internet mom. Or, mum, being Australian and all. Her parents were English, but she was raised in Australia, so she had a terrific mixture of both sense of humor. She was a sweet lady.

And yesterday she found me on Twitter.

“You remember me!” she said.

It was the biggest, dumbest smile of the day, lasting into the afternoon.

Saw that this is closing.

Sent the picture to The War Eagle Reader. They made a few calls and turned it into a story.

I have claimed DIBS! on the neon sign out front. You. Can’t. Have. It.

Legendary Auburn quarterback Pat Sullivan told me his Heart of Auburn story last year:

Sullivan looks at his career through those relationships he’s cultivated along the way. His Heisman Trophy experience was no different.

Back in those days the announcement came as a halftime feature during the Georgia-Georgia Tech game. Instead of being on the front row in New York, Sullivan was in Auburn.

“We were actually at practice that day because we had Alabama on Saturday. My parents had come down to hear the announcement … Our TV went on the blink so we had to go rent a room at the Heart of Auburn. We watched it on TV just like everybody else,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan, perhaps the last Heisman Trophy winner to stay at the Heart of Auburn, says his room number has been lost to history. There are plenty of clear memories from the night, though.

“After the announcement we went back over to (Beard-Eaves-Memorial) Coliseum and all my teammates, coaches and their families, (Auburn President Dr. Harry) Philpot and Coach Jeff Beard (then the Auburn athletic director) were all there and I was able to share that with them. That was something that I’ll never forget because I know I didn’t win it by myself, they were a part of it.”

Remember, I’m claiming the neon sign out front.

Links: Iranian news agency uses The Onion. And that says pretty much everything about the gulf between two cultures.

Hints that water once flowed on Mars. In every previous instance of water in human history scientists have found life. Does that project out to Mars?

Sadly, Birmingham News staffers depart as paper ceases daily publication. On Monday the new company, Alabama Media Group opens for business. I have friends and colleagues at both. There are plenty of talented and caring people involved. I project, after a slow start, big things.

Presidential ad spending soars past $700 million means I’m glad I don’t live in a battleground state.

Oh, lovely, sweet Friday

Today I purchased the 2013 sticker for my car tag. Take that, Mayans.

My DMV experience lasted 33 minutes, which was the longest I’ve ever waited in my two years visiting this particular office. But it is the end of the month.

Usually the post office here takes longer than the DMV. I’m pretty sure I’ve tapped my toe in our post office for longer than 33 minutes.

This was nowhere near my longest DMV experience. I seem to mention the DMV every year. Once, in Bessemer, I read the better part of a book while in line. I seem to recall I took a two-hour lunch break to mutter at the DMV in Homewood one year. The other times I’ve bothered to quantify it have all been four, six, 20 minutes or noted as “painless.” I checked.

I’ve had a big week, coupled with a long few days, where I did too many things and now my shoulder is informing me I regret those decisions. Can’t wait to tell the ortho about it next week.

Suffice it to say, because I’m tired of even writing about it: I’ve figured out it takes precious little to aggravate my collarbone, the muscles in my one shoulder and, when that really gets going, across my back into the other shoulder and up into my neck. Maybe I should do less.

Maybe I should do like these guys:

hammocks

This is studying on the Samford quad. Hammocks are a big part of the culture here. I’m surprised the administration allows it to continue, but I’m proud they do. I’m also surprised the hammock scenes don’t make their way into more of the promotional literature they send out.

I should write a memo about that …

Nah. I’m taking the rest of the evening off from writing.

Tomorrow: the return of an old friend!

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27
Sep 12

Critique day

Our regular critique of The Crimson was moved to this afternoon. Here is a big stack of newspapers:

We had four pages in color. It was a 12-page paper today. We went through every one of those issues, just to see if we could find the typos in the same places in each copy. We did.

(Find the same errors. We did not go through every issue. We are thorough, but we have other responsibilities, too.)

You can read The Crimson here, of course.

And now, a few pictures. This is meant to reflect a full day of newspaper topics, email, meetings, text messages, library time and cleaning my office and is in no way designed to get us over 100 photos for the month. That is purely a happy coincidence.

(That total doesn’t even count Catember.)

This is the Davis Library at Samford. I visit there from time to time to enjoy the plush leather seats and the many books they have. And also access to scholarly topics. Yesterday I read through about 30 papers in here:

Here’s a side view. Every so often I catch the perfect moment of the afternoon. The sun is at this precise moment realizing it is no longer high and suddenly sinks far more rapidly. But first it sets that window on fire:

And, just a moment or two later, now looking to the west, here is the view of Hodges Chapel, with vinyl canopies going up for some Friday function:

Samford does have a beautiful campus. I took these shots while playing with Picle. Audio! Video! On the iPhone! Together! With no editing-in-post! Drag and drop! And then I learned Picle doesn’t let you embed. That would be an oversight, guys. Embedding is important.

Anyway, here are a few quad shots taken while the carillon was playing the afternoon concert.

Lucky to go to work there.

Video of the carillon? Sure. I shot this in April:

Steve Knight, an amazing man, is the carillonneur.

A new photo found its way onto my Tumblr. And, of course, plenty more ramblings on Twitter.