Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

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9
Oct 14

Things that remain

This was on the dessert stand in the cafeteria at lunch:

I did not eat any of them, nor did I even try to use my standard rationale: I ran five miles this morning. I can eat a cake. I think it was something about the message. Why does one eat love? How does one eat faith? You could go the metaphorical route, aim for the biblical teaching or, like me, just be a little weirded out by pink icing.

If you stare at those for a second you realize someone wrote all of those out by hand. That’s another thing. How do you expect me to eat that? You wrote faith on a cake square and now I devour it in two bites?

And what of the hope? 1 Corinthians is hardly complete without it.

Man, this is a great diet plan I’ve discovered, huh?

So, yeah, five miles. I can do six miles, no problem. (I do not know what is happening … ) I once knocked out eight miles around the neighborhood, with a fair bit of walking in it. But, still, eight miles. Here’s the problem: I need something to ward off the boredom. Around mile six I’m just ready to move on. Any tips?

Things to read … because you can always find helpful tips if you read enough.

I’m a big fan of making sure students never ask a rhetorical question in their copy. There are times it works. Too often, though, it leads to things like this non sequitur, “Are you a Red Bull Drinker? Do you want to be?” Red Bull Settlement: How to claim your piece of $13 million

There’s a great line in this story, which is always a difficult one to tell, Jury hears emotional testimony from Leonard’s father during sentencing hearing:

Wright, who wore clothes he borrowed from Leonard, pleaded with the court to spare his son, who is facing the death penalty for fatally shooting three people and wounding three others during a party at the former University Heights apartment complex on June 9, 2012.

The dad is in and out of prison, he tells the judge and jury he was never really in his son’s life. He’s actually been hauled to this hearing from his prison sentence. And he’s had to borrow his son’s clothes. The reporter told me he’d noticed that the tie was familiar. He’d seen the defendant, and now his father, wear it. That’s the sort of reporting you can’t get over the phone or in a rewrite. Message: Go to the place you’re writing about.

The trend continues, Marketwatch editor: Most stories will now be less than 400 words:

We need to reshape how markets and financial stories are told to better reflect how they are consumed. What do I mean by that? Like most news sites, MarketWatch still leans too heavily on the 750-word story — a legacy of print newspapers that has outlived its usefulness. We want to go shorter – and longer.

The majority of our stories will soon be under 400 words — breaking everything down into short bursts of news and insight that cut straight to what is most important to readers, without all the empty calories and filler journalists love to stuff in the sausage . We will also do longer, deep dives on important stories that warrant such treatment. This is the way the digital news is going: tall and venti, no more grande.

Let’s play ‘Can you find all the snippy bits?’ The “priesthood” is real and we do not need another one.

Perhaps you’ve seen a list like this before. This one has alternatives! And, yes, it has a gif, but it is from “Princess Bride,” so it gets a pass. So many qualifiers! 5 weak words copywriters and bloggers should avoid (and what to use instead).

Mobile news consumption hits the tipping point:

Now that mobile traffic is at or near 50% at many newspapers, editors and publishers need to put ever more of their thinking – and resources – into optimizing products, content and advertising for not only smartphones and tablets but also for such emerging devices as smart watches, smart televisions and whatever smart stuff comes next. As discussed below, mobile publishing is as distinct from web publishing as web publishing is from web printing.

And it is happening fast, too, as expected. (For a few years now I’ve noted that the mobile move was one thing that was outpacing the web’s legendary rapid adaptability.)

Well now, CDC Director on Ebola: ‘The Only Thing Like This Has Been AIDS’.

And, to end on a happy note, this is a video package worth watching:

I had to look four different places to find an embeddable version of that story, but it was worth it.

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2
Oct 14

Sigoggling

Sometimes you spend all day in your office, doing office things. Sometimes you do office things and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve done office things. But, then, sometimes, you spend all day doing office things, questioning your progress on doing those things and then walk outside at just the right time.

And that, as they say, is its own reward.

My other reward was veggies.

Things to read … because reading makes us big and strong.

(That’s what you’ve been told your entire life, anyway.)

Help for victims of sex trafficking: priest Becca Stevens wants Birmingham to do more

This will stick with you, How to Spot a Trafficking Victim at an Airport

Here’s the trailer for American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper, detailing the nation’s best sniper. As movie trailers go, that’s incredibly intense.

This story never gets old, Sportsmanship allows middle school boy to live football dream:

Dalton, diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth, had just realized a long-time dream — playing football for his beloved Bears. Dalton had been hoping to dress with the team all season. Finally approved to participate, assistant Bears coach J.T. Lawrence and the other coaches had an idea.

“We thought it would be a great experience for Dalton and for the rest of our kids if he could get into a game and score,” Lawrence said. There was one problem. Dalton did not need to have any physical contact.

Lawrence talked to Prattville Christian athletic director Sam Peak and asked if his school would allow Dalton to go into the game and score a 2-point conversion if Billingsley scored a touchdown.

“That was an easy answer,” Peak said. “We coach our kids to be thankful for each opportunity to touch someone else’s life. This was an opportunity for us to do something good.”

A friend found the video:

UAB gets $47M grant for low-income education initiative

The Cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson

One System, Two Media: How China, Hong Kong Are Covering The Protests

The second half of this is great, Young Protesters in Hong Kong Have Found an Ingenious Way Around Cyber Censors

Occupy Hong Kong: Macro scale, micro-adaptations

Speaking of adaptations:

Could have told them that at the beginning … Facebook is more important to news distribution than you think, and journalists are freaked out:

At ONA, anxiety about Facebook’s increasing control over our traffic revealed itself in lots of questions: If I have 250,000 fans of my page, why don’t they all see everything I post? Why does my journalism seem to reach fewer people than it used to? Is Facebook trying to pressure my news organization to spend money to boost my posts or take out ads?

But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?

From the department of obvious things that could be understood but for interest, Editors who don’t use Twitter undercut their pleas to innovate.

If you’re from anywhere near where I’m from, this sounds a bit like home:

The sounds are the same, but those North Carolinians have their own unique vocabulary. You get the sense that even that language is falling away. Some of those words were things a parent said, some of them took some recollection. Good that it has been recorded in documentary form — and I want to see the full thing. How else would we have seemingly random blog post titles?

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25
Sep 14

What a picture

He’s judging you. The nose looks worn and with a sunburn that has been hard-earned. He’s trying to disarm you with a half smile, but he can’t fake it well enough.

He’s throwing that arm up on the car door, all casual, like he’s talking about the weather. But he’s showing you his watch. Time is short. He isn’t going to put a lot of his time into you disappointing him. You can see it in his hand. He’s already getting antsy.

She, on the other hand, is sending mixed messages. The classic closed-arm pose: she’s not interested, shining through his semitransparent arm. But also there’s that lovely and warm smile. She won’t put up with it, but she cares about you anyway.

That is Harmon and Grace Dobson. Harmon founded Whataburger. He married Grace in 1955, somewhere between store number five and 20. He died in a plane crash in the 60s. Grace ran the place until the early nineties. She passed it along to her son, who broke the 500-store mark. Grace died in 2005 after building an empire and raising three children. No wonder she could hit that pose.

I saw that last night and thought it was an interesting setting, even without any context. The young man and the older woman. It all makes sense now, except for Harmon’s see-through arm. I’ve seen a few photographs of him, and he has one of those mugs that just fits right into the time, whenever it is, 1950s, Somewhere, Texas. He’d been a bush pilot, a diamond courier, a car salesman and a wildcatter. No wonder he looks like he’s in a hurry. Just leaning here for a moment.

Whereas, Grace, even when she stepped down from the day-to-day was still seen with reverence. The company execs didn’t like to boast about what their success for fear of her hearing. Just leaning here for forever.

Things to read … because reading stays with you forever.

This guy is racing in Chattanooga this weekend, My Finish Line Road: Winning the Battle in Chattanooga:

Like so many others, I was hooked. I progressed to longer distances and in 2012, signed up to complete my first IRONMAN—IRONMAN Arizona. Training was going well and my wife and I welcomed our third child (our first girl) that July. Three weeks later, after a morning workout, I began having severe abdominal pain and was rushed to the hospital. Scar tissue from my previous surgery had wrapped around my small intestine and twisted it over on itself. I was rushed into emergency surgery. My IRONMAN dream was over—for a time.

Recovering from surgery brought some dark days. I had doubts about whether I could do an IRONMAN with this disease, and if I even wanted to try again. This was the first time I had ever truly felt beaten by the disease. As I was feeling sorry for myself, Hurricane Sandy threw me a curveball and forced me out of my funk. The building that housed my dental business was inundated with over eight feet of water. Everything was destroyed. The next few months were a blur as I healed from surgery while trying to rebuild my business. I had no time to feel sorry for myself.

You read those things and you realize how amazing people are, and how much of everything is just a mental exercise.

This is a personal story about a SR-71 coming apart at more than three times the speed of sound. I’m just going to excerpt one quote, because that should be enough to get you to read the whole thing, Bill Weaver Mach 3+ Blackbird Breakup:

I couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be to have survived one disaster only to be done in by the helicopter that had come to my rescue.

Talk about your bad days.

Starting to hear more about this now, Save the press from the White House censors:

So we were uneasy to learn that some reporters have been pressured to alter their reports by the publisher, aka the White House. While some of the emendations and deletions (a presidential aide’s swoon, a politically charged Obama joke) might seem frivolous, what’s at issue here is precedent. This represents the peak of a slippery slope we don’t want to go down. And that’s why we think it’s time to for the reporters to begin putting out their own pool reports.

The practice of the White House disseminating the reports dates back to the paper era, when reporters obtained poolers’ notes from copies that White House press assistants placed in bins in the White House press room. Today’s technology offers an opportunity to liberate the pool reports.

This is pretty interesting, but it makes you think “Southern” has changed. That’s good in a lot of ways, but it ain’t Ransom or Warren or Tate, The Southernness of being: Nationally recognized poet wrestled with the legacy of civil rights violence:

For the boy, the poetry first showed up in the trees behind his family’s home in Gadsden. The words came to him through the sunlight in the loblollies, with the swallowtails in the pines — in the Alabama he knew and loved on that Etowah-Calhoun county line.

For the man, the poems appeared in the names on a stone outside the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. These words came to him through the stories of 39 men, women and children, martyrs of the civil rights era — people Jake Adam York never knew, who died in an Alabama he didn’t understand.

“He used his poetry to take on the beauty and the responsibility of being Southern,” said his mother, Linda York.

Taken too soon, York died at 40 in 2012. He liked LL Cool J and Run DMC, it says. But who didn’t? Allen Tate would have loved LL.

Kidding. Tate wouldn’t have understood, or cared for LL Cool J at all. But he did, during his third marriage, have an affair with a student of his, a nun. Wikipedia says a citation is needed for that, but even if it is wrong that’s a story dying for a lyric …

His first, and second, wife, was novelist Caroline Gordon, who was a great Southern writer. She died in 1981 in Mexico. Maybe that means she passed through Texas. Maybe she enjoyed Whataburger.

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18
Sep 14

A game was played, we allegedly watched it

We had friends over to watch the game this evening. So it all felt like this:

I’m not sure I watched much more of the game than that, which is odd.

But, I’d wanted to see people last weekend and we managed to see almost no one, so having a house full of company for the first time in a long time was a nice thing. The conversations were pleasant. We brought in office chairs and camping chairs and had quite a few smart people — an Emmy winner, an art historian, a lawyer, an architect, a tech wizard and more — sitting around trying to not talk about work.

We had finger foods. And the parts of the game that we saw were often underwhelming.

Hey, no matter, the team you wanted to win went on the road and played a team of strong reputation and managed a win. My impression of the game was that it was a good game from which to be distracted. Looking at the stats was somehow more intriguing than watching snippets of the game without continuity.

I’m probably a terrible host. I’m too casual and we’re so very laid back about everything in general. We get by on our good humor and the forgiving nature of friends, I suppose. You may have a snack. You will laugh at my joke or at my expense. You’ll forget that you had to fight the cat away from the food, but you’ll remember I offered you your choice of ice.

Football was played and new friends were made and plans were laid to see them again, so a good evening all around.

Thursday night football is a strange thing, but it is a fine excuse to see people during the week. Sometimes you need the excuse, I suppose. Sometimes you need only the snippets of a game to go with it.

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11
Sep 14

A sign teaches us the history of veganism

Enjoying Catember? A photo of the cat every day, what a great gimmick, eh? Today’s features a recent night where she judged me worthy of a lap visit. I reached for my phone to try to take a picture and she leaned right in. She has never been phased by my DSLR. Point the phone at her, though, and she protests, moves or leaves. Or bonks the phone, ruining the shot. She’s uncanny that way.

And she’s as feisty as ever, too.

I did not realize we had such a think in the 1940s.

You would think our old family members, in the peak of life, would have thought “The war is over and I am alive. I am eating a steak. Later, I’ll have a pork chop, and possibly a meat soup. Tomorrow we’ll try that new Milo’s place.”

Actually, a 2008 Time article says the word was coined in 1944. Wikipedia says Englishman Donald Watson came up with it in Leicester. They were bombed in the Blitz in 1940 and more than 100 were killed, hundreds more injured and more than 250 homes destroyed, but they weren’t in the front lines otherwise and was considered something of a sanctuary for around 30,000 people. The area was important for air training and uniform production and, later holding Axis POWs. And, less famous for the man that was inspired by his time on the farm to become an animal rights activist.

Did you know there is a World Vegan Day? November first. Steak? Pork chop? Or meat soup?

I kid, I kid. I eat less meat than I used to, most of the time. But, occasionally you just need to use your canines.

Things to read … because reading puts meat on your bones.

Zach Brown is a former student of mine. He was the editor of The Samford Crimson. Now he’s a Fulbright scholar traveling in far-flung regions of the world bring English and pop culture coolness to people in different, dusty places. This is part of his journey: Mountain passes to Gharm, Khujand, and Panjakent.

Elsewhere in the wide world … The ongoing Damage to the Venezuelan Economy:

Venezuela’s annual inflation rate has risen to 63.4%, the highest in Latin America, according to official figures published on Tuesday.

The figures are the first released by the central bank since May, which has led critics to accuse the government of withholding data for political reasons.

This is going to be important, and I don’t want you to be caught unawares.

Also important … Ebola is ‘devouring everything in its path.’ Could it lead to Liberia’s collapse?

Here is a collection of Sept. 12, 2001 newspaper front pages. The thing I find interesting is how they are all different. With so many hub-and-spoke operations in place today that wouldn’t be the case with a huge national story today. There would be a great deal more homogeny.

Closer to home … Professional football returning to Birmingham:

The new North American Football League says the Birmingham Freedom will begin play next spring, along with franchises in Columbus (Flight), Hartford (Merchantmen), Kentucky (Thoroughbreds), Memphis (Kings), North Carolina (Redwolves), Orlando (Sentinels) and Virginia (Crusaders).

We’re number five! We’re number five! Alabama ranks as one of the most tax-friendly states in the U.S.

And now for some quick links on various media subjects of the day:

Is Virtual Reality The Future Of Journalism?
5 charts: The shifting landscape of digital video consumption
Seeking to bolster websites, TV stations hire newspaper journalists
Looking for new photo, video, audio, multimedia or FTP apps?
How to Setup the NPR App Template for You and Your News Org

Finally, there is this piece, which is pretty great … ESPN3 grows its offerings with student productions:

On Saturday, the Mercer Bears from Macon, Georgia, will play their first Southern Conference football game against Furman. Fans can watch it on the ESPN3 Web stream, even though the Bears football program is only one year old. Mercer decided to take advantage of an ESPN3 initiative that allows schools to join the network.

“We’re one of the first in football to pick that up and run with it and self-produce an event for ESPN,” said Mercer Athletic director Jim Cole.

It took an investment of $150,000 to upgrade the university’s TV production studio, get some high-grade cameras and pull fiber cable throughout campus. But, Cole says, joining the ESPN network is money well spent — even if it’s only their Web stream.

“I’m looking for name ID for Mercer,” Cole said, to showcase Mercer to potential students around the country. “Kids understand what ESPN means, so we view this as a recruiting advantage as well,” he said.

ESPN gets inexpensive programming, students get experience and exposure, teams get airtime, schools can use it to recruit. There’s a lot of win-win in that setup. I wonder about the details behind the line, “ESPN3 has different deals with each school,” but if that works out for a Mercer or whomever, more the better.