Enjoy the Glomerata post I put up earlier today? Have you been checking out the Battle of the Bulge map posts? I’ve got about two more weeks of those, tracing my great-grandfather’s time in Europe.

I woke up this morning and did one of my favorite things, which is sit with breakfast, or tea or both, and read. I got a lot of reading in this morning and then we did some paperwork errands this afternoon.

I drove The Yankee to Target and she picked up two shirts. We walked down the street to a store called Ulta, which is not missing an R from the sign. I’m not sure I knew this store existed until this afternoon, but then I’m so rarely on the cosmetics market these days.

We picked up grain and sourdough bread at the grocery store. I remembered we needed some eggs, so I hustled to the back corner and got the six-pack container. The first one I opened had a busted egg, which reminded me of my best poultry story. I told it to my lovely wife and the cashier at the front of the store. One of them found it funnier than the other, but they both smiled politely.

We saw this car. Now, ordinarily, I’m not a fan of the reindeer antlers, but I’m willing to change this stance. The rule now is this: if you put those things in your windows, you must commit to the giant red nose on the hood of your car.

We had a dinner guest tonight, one of our sweet friends who brought a soup and stayed for brownies and a movie and uses the word “assuaged” correctly. It was a lovely evening.

Things to read …

I remember waking up on this December morning in a full sweat. It was unseasonably warm. That afternoon we watched the F-4 tornado ravage Tuscaloosa, just 35 miles away, on television. That night, up the road in Birmingham, I drove home under the largest snowflakes I’ve ever seen in the South. It was a tragic and weird day. Celebration Of A Life Saved

Many of your remember this remarkable photo by Michael E. Palmer that was in the Tuscaloosa News, the day after the December 16, 2000 EF-4 tornado that killed 11 people. Michael Harris carries an unconscious Whitney Crowder, 6, through debris in Bear Creek Trailer Park after the tornado passed through. Whitney’s father and 15-month-old brother were killed in the tornado.

That post is two years old, when young Whitney was graduating from high school. It was a nice bookend to that tale.

So these two guys are political activists. They represent different parties and they are brothers. They were on C-SPAN to promote this documentary about the weird dynamic all of that creates. They got into a political name-calling debate and then the show started taking phone calls. Then … well, just watch and see:

This is worth a read. Former AP Reporter: I Didn’t Leave Journalism, It Left Me

A journalist for more than 40 years, Mark Lavie was based in Jerusalem for most of them and then in Cairo for two – during the “Egyptian Revolution.”

Lavie is no longer a journalist.

But he didn’t leave the profession, “it left me,” Lavie says.

Now Lavie is speaking out in as many fora as possible. He seeks to alert the public about the dramatic difference between what journalism used to be – and still pretends to be – and what it actually is.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, Advertisers Will Pay Up To 40% More For TV Sponsorship Deals Linked To Social Media, Says TV4

“It means that we need to work with story-telling on digital platforms, and that we need to engage and potentially also reward our users,” she said. “This is obviously very interesting for us, both from our perspective, and also from a commercial perspective, in terms of what we can offer our advertisers on these platforms.”

Lundell said that TV4’s experiments with extending linear TV formats into the social media sphere had shown that “you need to pay more than for ordinary sponsorship – and advertisers are prepared to do that. So, yes, we’re making money.”

The first thing I thought when she said “work with story-telling on digital platforms” was wondering why plots of scripted shows aren’t continued on other platforms. You already see supplemental webisodes of some of your more engaged shows, why not story arcs on Instagram?

First there was ESPN, the movie channels, last month it was CBS and now … Up To Speed: NBC to jump into live-streaming

This is solid. 5 tips for streaming live video from a smartphone

Livestreaming video from a mobile phone is a way for journalists to get footage which may not be possible to film with more traditional broadcast equipment.

“There are sometimes these stories where you don’t want a big camera crew, you want to try and keep a relatively low profile, in riots, in public disorder, or in places where you need to be sensitive,” Sky News correspondent Nick Martin told Journalism.co.uk.

“You can use that technology which is smaller and more compact to still get what you want to, but not [have] all the big crew considerations that we have.”

Media organisations such as ABC News have also started looking at mobile livestreaming as a developing part of their video programming.

For journalists who want to incorporate video streaming into their work …

As I told a colleague this evening, within the next year or two we’ll likely say if you’re not doing video with almost everything, you’re going to find yourself behind.

That’s why I spent the better part of my Saturday night building up video templates for future projects.