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Thursday

iPhone / overwriting / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Sep 11

Driving is a good thing

After a long day holed up in the office and a perfectly acceptable afternoon in the classroom, this was my first view of the evening.

That gave way to a little storm, which turned into the lightning cloud that managed to stay just off in the distance. As dusk turned to night the electrons lit up the clouds into eerily serene spectres of yellow. And when all of the light was gone from the sky the lightning stood out in pale white sheets in the far off clouds.

It was a terrific show, a starkly beautiful piece of nature that felt like it lasted forever.

When I finally stopped admiring it and decided I should try to capture this somehow, it was too late. I set up the camera to do a little video, but what I captured was a cloud that had all but exhausted its energy. So there’s not much to see, beyond the dying gasps of a ferocious energy.

So I won’t show it to you. The video isn’t very good, even though I want it to be.

Now I just have to find the right mixture of conditions. A storm off in the distance that I’m continually chasing. Lightning. The proper lighting conditions at just the right time of day. Who knows? All of these things may never happen with me behind them. And there’s the eternal question: will I have the wherewithal to record it if I am there?

Truly it was beautiful. Sometimes, there are things about your commute that are worth remembering.

journalism / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
15
Sep 11

Still busy

I didn’t even take a picture to serve as a placeholder today.

But I did teach a class. We talked online headlines and links and search engine optimization. Some people are really into this sort of thing, and some are not. I suspect that’s the way of it everywhere. One student stayed to talk about it after class, which is where, I think, teaching is most rewarding.

Tonight I watched a little football and did a little more work. Hopefully I’ll be in bed by a reasonable time for another busy day, tomorrow.

It was a day of working on conference papers. There are two of them due tomorrow. Teaser: tomorrow will be much like this paragraph.

journalism / links / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
8
Sep 11

Alternate headline: Zzzzz

“But this first night is always a long effort.”

I said last night, around 11 p.m. If I had known better I would have written it differently.

I would have written “It will be a long night.” The headline above this would have read “And by long night I meant …”

And the text would have simply said “5:30 a.m.”

Now, to be clear: I don’t mind. I’ve been tired all day, but that’s part of the job and I love the job. After a series of first-issue problems, trial and errors the new staff put to bed a nice first edition this morning. I wouldn’t have minded a few more hours of sleep before saying that, but that’s the price of education by experience some time.

So about two-and-a-half or three hours of sleep this morning. And then today was our high school journalism workshop.

We had two series of sessions this morning and then two more sets in the afternoon. More than 300 students from across the area joined us.

Southern Living’s Kim Cross discussed their commendable series, Lessons from the Storm as a study in the use of multimedia.

CBS-42 reporter and Samford grad Kaitlin McCulley talked about television packages:

The kids had a great day:

I had an afternoon session, where two of the staffers from The Samford Crimson joined me. You can tell by their reaction that I’d just made a profoundly important point:

Anyway. After the workshop was concluded I taught a class on leads. It is perhaps one of my better lectures, which works out well since it is the first thing you read and an important component of a news story. That’s the first thing the journalism professors read when their students have created another issue of the campus paper.

Speaking of the Crimson, this was a big day. Sure, it was the first issue of the year. And it was delayed because of the storms that caused a campus-wide power outage yesterday. But, the paper returned to a tab size this year.

And the issue looks nice, too.

Also, we re-launched a new version of the Crimson’s website, too. There’s a lot to come from this new design and the content management system behind it — we switched from College Publisher, which is somewhat limited, to WordPress.

Here’s a screen capture of the old version:

And here’s the new version:

In this first issue we already have five feature stories, represented in those thumbnails below the main photograph. Below the fold the stories fall into a neat structure. There’s better comment moderation strength, ease of publication, a system I can teach to new students in under an hour and a very clean look.

Now we just need to put ads on it.

journalism / links / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
1
Sep 11

Things to read

Who is a member of the media? Terry Heaton argues that an appeals court has set the parameters, in a case on witnesses with cameras:

The issue advanced significantly on Friday with a stunning Federal Appeals Court ruling affirming the First Amendment right of citizens to photograph or create videos of police while they’re on duty. Police agencies in some communities were using an odd interpretation of wiretap laws to confiscate the camera phones of bystanders, and the court rightly found that to be unconstitutional.

The decision has far-reaching implications that go beyond the mere taking of pictures at crime, disturbance and accident scenes. By granting everyone this “right,” this ruling redefines “the press” in this country by shattering the myth of privilege associated with working for a so-called “legitimate” news organization. Some will cry that it opens Pandora’s Box, because a clearly defined “press” helps the machine of modernity function. This decision is potential chaotic, for example, to those cultural institutions who have a vested interest in keeping their “news” in the hands of a professional class (that can be manipulated). Think of an agency holding a press conference, for example. If press freedom applies to everybody, then that agency cannot restrict access to only those who work for a news organization.

The decision should make anybody in a traditional newsroom shutter. As we’ve been saying for years, the personal media revolution — what Jay Rosen calls “the Great Horizontal” — IS the second Gutenberg moment in Western civilization.

The full piece is worth a read.

Meanwhile, there’s great empirical evidence that public relations is doing more than coming of age. A New York Times reporter is quoted there, saying “the muscles of public relations are bulking up—as if they were on steroids.”

One of the buzzwords in the business is engagement. Old fashioned engagement still works, as this Canadian example demonstrates:

Not long ago, the Winnipeg Free Press’s social media editor hosted an online chat from her desk at the paper’s downtown news cafe. She had done it many times in recent months but something unexpected happened.

People had taken up the paper’s social media invitation to “join us” in a chat about Google+ with guests including GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram. But audience members started showing up at the cafe in person saying, “I’m here for the chat!”

“I looked at them and thought, ‘Oh…okay. That’s my mistake there. I didn’t promote this the right way,’ said Lindsey Wiebe. “But that’s also a good sign,” she added. “They’re thinking of this cafe as a hub where our events are held.”

Two speeches: This one by a Cronkite School of Journalism professor and news veteran, Tim McGuire, to the Society of Features Editors. He’s calling for a change of mindset in the industry. Baltimore Sun editor and Loyola professor discusses his first day of class speech. It’s a great read.

The Washington Post is closing all but two of their local bureaus. This is almost always a series of unfortunate events. Less coverage is never a good thing. The reasons why might surprise you.

family / history / photo / Thursday — 1 Comment
25
Aug 11

Family pictures

Had the chance for a quick family trip and, amidst the visiting, I got a few old pictures.

This is my mother’s father. He died just after I was born, and so I know him through stories and pictures. Hard to imagine your grandfather ever looked like this, isn’t it?

Here is his father, W.K., on the far left:

Now I have a picture (or a scan of a picture) of my great-grandfather as a child. The man next to W.K. is his father, W.J. , my great-great-grandfather.

W.J. was born in 1860 and died in 1948. He might have had memories of the Civil War, definitely Reconstruction and probably read all about World War II in his local paper. Based on W.K.’s birthday, you can put that photograph as circa 1910.

The above dates are from Tidwell’s The Frank and Jesse James Saga. The book changes the family narrative somewhat. Prior to researching that text for this post, the thought was that there was an adoptive relationship. But, the book has a written family history that indicates that W.J., the older man in the above picture, was a cousin of the James boys. W.J. was orphaned as an infant (his father died in a Civil War prison camp and his mother died soon after) and adopted by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Joshua James, was the uncle of Frank and Jesse James.

Moving a generation or two into the future, here’s a picture I’ve had for some time:

That very tall man young man in the background is my grandfather. The woman to his left is my grandmother. Their kids, my mother and uncle, are in the front center. The older couple are my mother’s father’s parents, my great-grandparents. My great-grandmother, on the far right, looked that way until the day she died four decades later. In 1995, she became the oldest ever graduate from the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters was the youngest graduate, in the 1960s.) My great-grandfather, the oldest gentleman in the picture above, is the kid on the far left of the previous, ancient picture.

On the other side of the family, here’s a picture of my maternal grandmother’s father:

That’s me on the right, and my cousin on the left. She’s all grown up, and has three kids who are now older than she is in that picture. I doubt she remembers him at all.

That building is still standing at my grandparent’s home. I have two or three scant memories of this great-grandfather, his home and the stories about others’ memories. Research on this side of the family isn’t as well developed, but can be traced back to a few family names I’ve never heard of elsewhere. Alas, there are no ties to outlaw folk heroes.

I love old pictures and the stories they whisper.