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Tuesday

Things to read

Where did you have breakfast this morning? Was it on a table like this?

It’s based on Microsoft’s Surface technology, modified by the R&D Lab to create a Times-oriented user experience that reimagines the old “around the breakfast table” reading of the paper. You’ll notice that, in the demo, news is both highly personal and highly social — and that the line between “consumer” and “news consumer” is a thin one. Ads look pretty much the way we’re used to them looking, but they’re also integrated into the tabletop flow of information.

And news itself, in the same way, collapses into the broader universe of information.

Who has time for reading with breakfast? I suspect the biggest opponent will be the television, which may be hard to uproot in the short term.

The ad integration is nice. The curation, either human or algorithm, is even more important in this model.

The first time Bill Gates demoed this premise it was incredible to conceive. Now the interface just looks more and more like an Apple screen. Odd how that happens.

You could be reading about a Twitter libel case on your breakfast infonewstainment table one day. They’re popping up. Be aware of what you say, and of how libel laws work.

Journalists who manage to get that addition to their breakfast nook may be spending a lot of bagel time over LinkedIn.

A new survey from Arketi Group found that the percent of journalists on LinkedIn has increased from 85 percent in 2009. Why?

LinkedIn provides an easy way for reporters to connect with sources.

“It comes as no surprise more BtoB journalists are participating in social media sites, especially LinkedIn,” Mike Neumeier, principal of Arketi Group, says, “LinkedIn provides an online outlet for them to connect with industry sources, find story leads and build their professional networks.”

While more journalists are on LinkedIn than any other social network, they have increased their presence on other networks, too. The survey found that 85 percent of journalists are on Facebook and 84 percent use Twitter. Only 55 percent of journalists used Facebook in 2009, and 24 percent were on Twitter.

Google+ should be included in there too, because it will work very well once it gets passed the early adoption stage. Also, as one commenter under that report notes, there is a difference between having an account and using it. I personally use LinkedIn only sparingly. And yet I get more mail from them than anyone.

Quick hits: Kentucky athletics cracks down on student reporters. (Now with an update.) There’s a bit of muscle flexing from the SIDs and a big reaction from the student-journalists (and the APSE and SPJ). The first in a big wave of 10th anniversary stories coming up, this one examining how we’ve changed since Sept. 11th. Answer: Far more than we’d like. One hundred story ideas, nice feature idea for when you’re reaching for copy. And Forbes personalizes the Washington Post’s infographics designer.

Finally, the Associated Collegiate Press’ multimedia story of the year finalists. All of them are worth checking out. Many are worth studying for inspiration. Great work by busy student-journalists in there.

journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
23
Aug 11

Things to read

How do you make a long-running feature into fresh news? Localize the focal point.

When Kathy Johnson was raising her rambunctious teen son just a few years ago, she never dreamed Sgt. William David Johnson would become the 571st soldier to have the honor.

Johnson, a 2006 graduate of Rehobeth High School, will make his last walk as a Tomb Sentinel on Sept. 9, in front of a proud family and grateful nation.

[…]

“The Walk” itself is one of the most celebrated and viewed ceremonies in the U.S. military. Sentinels, dressed in ceremonial blues, carry an M-14 rifle and walk in front of the tomb. He walks 21 steps in one direction in front of the tomb, then turns and faces the tomb for 21 seconds. Then, he turns to face back down the mat, changes his weapon to the outside shoulder, counts 21 seconds, then steps off for another 21-step walk down the mat. He faces the Tomb at each end of the 21 step walk for 21 seconds. The sentinel then repeats this over and over until he is relieved at the Guard Change.

Sentinels guard the tomb through all weather at all times. The ceremony is often witnessed by large crowds during good weather. Often, however, the sentinel guards the tomb alone.

They patrol through hurricanes, by the way.

Speaking of natural disasters, the 59. magnitude earthquake in Virginia. Arizona State’s Professor Thornton said “J-students: If tweets from people you follow didn’t include earthquake tweets, you need to follow more people, more news.” And that point is true, especially when Twitter was out in front of cable news in the first few minutes. One must also be tempered by the knowledge that there’s an echo chamber effect. Panic on Twitter gave way to business as usual shots from most places that felt the tremblor. As in all things in life, balance is the key.

Here’s the U.S. Geological Survey data, posted immediately after the quake. The intensity map and the shake map which is one of the first examples of online crowd sourcing? “Did you feel it? Tell us?” There’s an organic and realtime feel to that map. They also say “If you felt the 5.9 quake, let us know…help us improve the data.”

Sky News has done a great job with Alex Crawford in Libya, earning praise for the network while their BBC colleagues have been a bit behind.

She’s done a fine job throughout, and this piece is a bit more personal, with more personal pronouns than you might expect, but the tech they are using is ingenious. “Sky News sources told The Daily Telegraph that the astonishing footage from the streets of Tripoli was produced using an Apple Mac Pro laptop computer connected to a mini-satellite dish that was charged by a car cigarette lighter socket.”

I like to tell students that the world they work in will be different than the working world we know today. How you do the job by the time you’re getting ready for retirement could be almost unrecognizable. Consider, a woman working in a newsroom today, and what she had to work with when she started in the 1960s. But even before that, there’s a slightly more contemporary question. What devices will you carry in a decade?

Futurist and author Kevin Kelly posits that in 10 years time, each of us will carry 2 computing devices on us: “one general purpose combination device, and one specialized device (per your major interests and style).” He also predicts that we will wear on average 10 computing things: “We’ll have devices built into belts, wristbands, necklaces, clothes, or more immediately into glasses or worn on our ears, etc.”

The piece touches on form factors, but doesn’t mention motility, which will remain a pertinent point.

The comments are great, and even includes a few links of possibilities, like this one:

Still looking for a story idea? Alabama is one of just six states that have lost jobs within the last year. There are plenty of stories waiting for you to discover.

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16
Aug 11

The conflicting nature of the maple leaf

Maples turn early, the most skittish of the green leaves. But they don’t have to go this fast. Mid-August? This far south?

I enjoy the fall, but I also enjoy my summer, and so the transition is sometimes more welcome than others. This year, I’d be fine with more summer, really. In another six or seven weeks the rest of that leaf’s pals will start to yellow just a tinge. And then they’ll start to fall somewhere late in October. By November I’ll be raking and waiting for spring, which comes in for an early, sporadic start in February. And that’s not so bad; summer will be around again shortly thereafter. But that’s next summer. And I’d be happy for this summer to last a while. There’s more swimming to do, more sleeping to enjoy, more summer sunsets to appreciate. All those long summer evenings will fade away faster than I’d like.

But this is nothing to be melancholy about. Except for the raking. I hate the raking. If I typed about it more the inside of my thumb would develop a blister just out of habit.

I have delicate thumbs.

Fine day today. Twenty miles on the bike, painful as ever. I’ve developed this unwelcome system of getting my legs back and then skipping town for several days or being otherwise occupied for a week and thus whatever tiny gains I’ve made have all disappeared. So the 20 miles today, which felt barely like a ride in June, can sap me today. It’ll probably get worse before it gets better.

And by better I mean the temperature. We had two days a while back that were unseasonably cool and it felt like you could ride forever. August temperature has something to do with the rest of this, and while I’ll miss the summer, I won’t miss the constant 115-degree heat index days.

Changed a lot about my dissertation today. A lot. We’ve been mulling this over for a while and today I finally shifted directions, which I’d been dreading, but after the fact it feels like the right choice. So, while I’m trying to not be tedious about it here, this move feels very positive.

And if you are actually interested in that, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time to be tedious about it later.

Wrote an open letter today:

(W)e’re going to need to see that video a few dozen more times.

Despite everything else that swirled around the season, the narrative of those guys in blue is one of our best tales. It would have been compelling if it were just another team, but the entire story was so gratifying to think of Kodi Burns becoming the archetype of an Auburn man in a jersey, Cameron Newton discovering his redemption and an unsung defense living up to their potential. An undefeated season is always a great story, but the chilling story behind Zac Etheridge’s comeback, Wes Byrum being his implacable self and Mike Dyer taking Bo’s torch to threaten the entire conference lives on.

We could discuss each player and how their contributions and subplots filled such a tremendous narrative. But to put it simply, this team is a joy to watch.

Nothing earth-shattering about it. That’s just a great production and it is worth seeing again. Got a lot of nice comments at the bottom of the piece. It also earned a reply from the people that run the thing. Now we’ll have to see if they take my advice. (I give them unsolicited advice. I am batting .500 with them.)

So, if you’re in Auburn during the fall, I have a new Sunday tradition. “Several students, fans, and alumni have volunteered to help with the clean up.”

I’ve rolled the corner plenty of times, and haven’t done it in several years, though I always take guests who come to town for the games. For a long time it has felt more like a family and college kid event, but given the strain the trees have faced — the stupid fires, the intelligence-challenged drunk driver and, now, the guy who’s going to jail — I’ve been content to have had my share. I threw a roll after the SEC championship last year, when it just seemed so unbelievable that no one noticed the cold. And I threw a roll after the BCS win last January, when it seemed so cold that it was unbelievable those guys above had won a championship in the desert:

That’s enough. That’s more than I could ask for.

The city and the university have contracted out the cleaning to a firm from Montgomery. And the university, in questioning if the trees will last the year, has taken what is being interpreted as a “roll ’em if you got ’em” approach. The experts’ belief is that the toilet paper isn’t the problem, but the trees are more susceptible to the cleanup. That used to be done by a high water pressure system, but now it will be done by hand.

And this needs to be the next great tradition. So several of the locals have been plotting this out. We figure a Sunday-after-church cleanup could be as good as a pre-game tailgate. So we’ll see you at Toomer’s on Saturdays and Sundays.

Two more weeks until the opening game of the season. That’s not a bad part of fall, either. So maybe I don’t mind that maple leaf so much after all.

journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
16
Aug 11

Things to read

Make the authorities nervous, and they’ll cut your lines of communication. The British? Oh, no. This was in California. There was a shooting that led to chatter about protests, which made the locals overreact, killing cell service:

Since shutting down cell service on Thursday to try to quell rumored protests which never came to fruition, the Bay Area Transit Authority (BART) has had an interesting weekend and Monday.

Aside from getting investigated by the FCC as to whether it exceeded its authority in shutting off cellphones, the myBART website has been hacked by collective Anonymous on Sunday, with Anonymous claiming that the hack was motivated by the fact that BART’s actions were anti-free speech. The breech exposed identifiable contact information of over 2,000 employees and passengers.

While the original protests were planned in response to the shootings of Charles Hill and Oscar Grant by transit police, Anonymous also took their anti-BART campaign to real life by organizing more protests against the cell service disruption, starting today at San Francisco’s Civic Center station at 5pm. This resulted in a sort of dual protest, both for the cell service issue and the deaths.

According to local reports, the movement was at its height around 100 people, chanting slogans like “No justice, no peace, disband the BART police.” All in all four subway stations, Civic Center, Powell, Embarcadero and Montgomery were shut down and reopened within an hour’s period. Perhaps having learned its lesson the hard way, BART did not interfere with cell service this time, although it had threatened to.

That’s not about Anonymous, but about what might have been. Consider if there had been an emergency of any kind. Thankfully nothing of the sort seemed to happen, but had there been a need to make a phone call, everyone would have been helpless.

It is also about precedent, and the comfortability of doing such a thing again. This is a fair way down that argumentative slippery slope.

Does the Associated Press “get it”? You can pick up the new style book — the reporter’s Bible, as it were — for $13 on Amazon, or $20 on their own site. It’ll cost you $25 to get the iPhone app. I wish them well with that, but they’ve inverted their model.

One more time: you make the app once and you don’t have to bind it, run new editions or distribute it. (Well, you shouldn’t have to, but it seems they are pushing the app as a yearly thing, rather than simply updating the pre-existing app like every other offering in the app store.) So the overhead is gone. This is, then, a pure profit machine. Should people find it necessary to download one. But I doubt that is happening as much as they’d like. The stylebook itself (which does get updated every year in the dead tree edition) is a small enough (read, portable) piece that you can carry it anywhere. And if you’re going to have to pay for annual app updates you may as well just have the book.

Albert Brown survived the 65-mile Bataan Death March. He spent more than three years in captivity, contracting and fighting off so many diseases and ailments that, when he was liberated, doctors told him to not expect to see his 50th birthday:

But Brown soldiered on, moving to California, attending college again and renting out properties to the era’s biggest Hollywood stars, including Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland. He became friends with John Wayne and Roy Rogers, doing some screen tests along the way.

“I think he had seen so much horror that after the war, he was determined to enjoy his life,” Moore said.

He recently died at 105 years old. It is a great story that I commend to you. And there’s a timeless quote from his biographer: “The underlying message for today’s returning veterans is that there’s hope, not to give in no matter how bleak the moment may seem. You will persevere and can find the promise of a new tomorrow, much like (Brown) had found.”

You can run away from this robot, if you can run 6.9 miles an hour. Also, it has knees. There’s a video, which can’t be embedded (sure, there’s a running robot, but you can’t embed this clip … ) and it is clear, the Cylons are here.

If you’ll recall, this spring was when Skynet was supposed to take over. I’m no Luddite, but they can’t take over if we don’t invent them. Just remember that when the mechanical reckoning comes.

I’ve covered a lot of horrible stories of death, murder, callous views of humanity and all manner of nearly unspeakable horrors. (There’s a reason I left hard news.) This one is just about the worst story I’ve ever read.

errands / movies / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Aug 11

There is a quiz at the bottom of this post

Visited the financial adviser. She advised that I should have more money. This must become a repetitive part of her day. But, then, the degree of serious intonation could change on grave market days. Now you really need more money.

I am reminded of the line from the country song, some one told the narrator that Wall Street fell, but, he said, he was so poor that he could not discern the problem or understand, really, the implications as it directly related to his hard scrabble lifestyle.

Instead, his father went to work for Roosevelt, moved, and bought appliances. And the middle of the century was born.

Where can people move today? The moon. What a great concept this would be. Now all we need is a catchy name and acronym. Lunar Citizen Division. When they get up there they can build the solar system’s largest LCD screen, which would be perfect. On those clear nights you could watch reruns of Seinfeld, and forget about all of your problems down here. “Sure, the financial adviser said I needed to think about my medium term investments, but Jerry’s date has man hands! No soup for her!”

Our friend the financial adviser is very nice, happy, laughs a lot and complimentary and optimistic. I suppose they all have to be at this point, right? Besides, she works on the second floor of a two-story building. Not a lot of options there like you read about from the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties gave way to the Howlin’, Splattin’ Thirties. No one speaks of these things if they don’t have to. (And, of course, no one wants to see that happen today for a variety of reasons. I only mention it to say the following.) We leave such heavy lifting to Jean Claude Van Damme.

What a terrible movie. But the most recent quote on YouTube is great: “Man, 2004 is going to awesome!”

I suspect that it will, young man, I suspect that it will. Someone else, meanwhile, commented about a plot hole in a Van Damme film. And that’s why you should never read YouTube comments.

He’s still working, by the way. Four movies this year and three next year, so good for him. You’ll see none of them, and they’ll all have a fighting chance of being better than Time Cop.

Mowed the lawn. Specifically the back of the property. The front and sides were shown who is the landscaping boss around here at an earlier date. I was drenched, not from exertion so much as humidity. We will soon need new ways to define area stickiness. Gross, hardened syrup sometimes just doesn’t cover it as a descriptor.

Also cleaned one gutter, pulling some 38 pounds of leaves and sediment from the aluminium tray. This is good news: they are well mounted. If that had been shoddy craftmanship they’d have landed on the ground long ago.

This was the first real exercise of our new ladder. It is one of those folding, finger-pinching modular jobs. One ladder which can take on 35 shapes. You must make your own transformer noises, but I spend a considerable part of my youth in the 1980s, so this is not a problem.

I’m not sure how many of the positions the ladder creates will actually be useful, only that we can reach our largest ceiling, and yet the thing is light enough to be carried by one person and can be stowed without drastically changing any current storage plans. I meticulously work on storage plans, carefully arranging the stacking and order of things on the likelihood that they will be needed in any emergent scenario. Occasionally I realize I’ve mis-prioritized, or worse, mis-judged the odds of a scenario and must reshape the attic, or the garage or some other small area. It doesn’t keep me up nights, but I have had moments of clarity about these things in that fugue before you open your eyes in the morning.

So the ladder fits in the scheme of things nicely. Until it bites off an index finger. And you could see that happening.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the coupler for the washing machine. That’s an inconvenience. And I have some words on slides. Now I am memorizing the things I want to say around them. It is an unfortunate waste of your morning to see someone read word-for-word, from a screen. I give one lecture in one class where I do that. And that is the first one. I put up lots of words, speak slowly and repeat them. This is crucial information for that class that should stick with the students for years. And, then, I tell them never to do that in a presentation. But be sure you got the completeness of my very important message.

After that my presentations are usually one or three words each. I have not yet reached that higher level of existences where my PowerPoint presentations are nothing but bad clip art. Perchance to dream.

Today’s pop quiz: What does this butter and the United States economy have in common?

The answer is not: neither one should be left on the counter.