Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

Teeming Tuesday

I’d like to try putting a few more things into a Tuesday, just to see if it is possible. Tuesdays are the fullest of days. Met with the boss. Tried, and failed, to install a new printer on my new iMac.

Called the tech guy who, happily, could not install it the first time. If it takes him two attempts I don’t feel so bad.

Had lunch. Met with the WVSU news director. We talked about Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, who is on campus this week. She’s been in classes and student meetings and will deliver a big lecture tomorrow night. She’s got such a great story, really. But more on that tomorrow.

Tried to meet with a student, but missed. Made copies of everything for my class. Held class, delivering a spelling test, talking about news leads and doing wholesale news rewrites.

We made fun of typos. There were two on the most recent cover of Soap Opera Digest. I can’t find a link and can’t bring myself to upload it here, but the designer has forgotten their rules on apostrophes.

And then there was the paper. The students have worked on it all night. I get a question here, make a joke there and listen and tell stories. Now, around midnight, they’ve announced they’re going it alone. I offer to copy edit the first few editions with them, but they rightly want to remove me from that process. This is the moment where they pedal away, around the block and you’re just so proud to see them go.

Tomorrow they make it back from their circuit around the block. We’ll critique the whole paper. We’ll talk about how to improve their technique, steady lines, standing, brakes and falling. Hey, I might keep this bike metaphor. You’re just so proud.

I decorated a wall in my office.

Those are Stars and Stripes announcing the end of World War II. The one on the right is the Paris Edition announcing the Germany surrender. I found that paper purely by accident at a place called The Deal in an artsy Louisville, Ky. That was the same day, incidentally, when I decided to build the half-hearted black and white section of the site.

It was a nice day. I’d spent a long weekend visiting the folks. They took me to a local funky, artisan restaurant and just down the road we found that store. It doesn’t deal in antiques. Or in things that feel like antiques. Everything is from that frozen moment when your grandparents stopped trying to be contemporary. Much of it was familiar, but vague. You could understand the function of all the merchandise, but if you weren’t from the period the why could be lost on you.

We ate at that restaurant and used bookstores and a record store and that shop. It was a great day.

They were stored in a desk pretty close together, the pictures and the newspaper, and they might have once belonged to the same family. There was also a Red Cross map of Paris. The woman sold it all to me for next to nothing, just glad to get it out of her way. She’d much rather sell mid-century modern furniture and clothes.

My step-father bought me a little bookholder there, too. It is sitting on top of one of my bookshelves and holds Winston Churchill’s history of the war. A friend sold me all six volumes for $20. He bought them from a library and realized he’d never read them. I Hope to one day. Maybe I’ll bring that newspaper home next summer and read the books underneath the authentic newsprint.

The paper announcing the Japanese surrender is also from Stars and Stripes, the Mediterranean edition of the military paper. It is a bracing headline, but that too will be a teaching moment. What is contemporary and acceptable today might not be a name that people approve of years from now.

I don’t have a great story for that paper, though. I bought it from e-bay. I wish I’d asked the seller to try and explain that particular issue’s history. Someone thought enough to bring it home from Italy, or thereabouts, but now we’ll never know the details.

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14
Sep 10

John Mayer quit Twitter

That was on a quiz I gave today. Students get the occasional pop quiz on current events. I’d love to ask 10 serious news questions — and a few students, I think, would do well. My news tastes aren’t all of the news, though, so I ask a sports question and an entertainment question and so on.

And since we established that John Mayer quit we’ll just have to see if Twitter can keep moving on Bieber power.

Anyway. Met with the boss and got my class assignments for next semester.

I taught class. We discussed punctuation and edited a few sample pieces. I showed off the regrettable cover Newsweek recently published. I asked them to find the typo. They stared down every word, reassuring themselves that coddling was spelled correctly. Until, finally they found it.

Met with a student. Had a sales meeting. Turned over a big stack of phone numbers and business cards as leads. (Anyone around Lakeshore or Greensprings or Homewood looking to advertise? Never hurts to ask.)

Had a talk with the sports editor. Our paper’s style calls for student-athletes to have their position on the team, their year in school and their major. It is a challenge to get it all in, but keep the story moving. The staff is picking up the touch quickly, though.

It adds up to the better part of a day, somehow. The rest of the evening has been spent on the newspaper.

Had Milo’s for dinner. The tea was not good. This is an insignificant observation to most people who might ever stumble across this post, but those familiar with the chain are right now recoiling in horror. This is a hamburger chain that is really centered around a drink. McDonald’s doesn’t distribute their beverages in stores around the region. Milo’s does. And, tonight, at one of the restaurants, the tea was off.

Journalism links: Apparently we still need to discuss the potential non-dangerous of SEO for journalism. Having actually gone through this in the halcyon days of 2007 I’d just assumed everyone had figured this out. It is a nice piece, though, and the comments, as always, are instructive.

How are you getting your news? And how much time are you doing it? Pew knows. The graphic, and this paragraph have a big hint:

In short, instead of replacing traditional news platforms, Americans are increasingly integrating new technologies into their news consumption habits. More than a third (36%) of Americans say they got news from both digital and traditional sources yesterday, just shy of the number who relied solely on traditional sources (39%). Only 9% of Americans got news through the internet and mobile technology without also using traditional sources.

Plenty of more great details can be found in the bullets at the bottom of that page.

And now, for a random link, the $6 million man will be from SMU:

(A) $5.6-mil Neurophotonics Research Center (will) develop prosthetic limbs using fiber optics that actually feel things like pressure and temperature. Says SMU: “Lightning-fast connections between robotic limbs and the human brain may be within reach for injured soldiers and other amputees.”
[…]

(I)f all goes according to plan, SMU’s researchers will also use the DOD’s dough to fashion “brain implants for the control of tremors, neuro-modulators for chronic pain management and implants for patients with spinal cord injuries.”

Science fiction is science now.

Back in a bit with today’s black and whites.

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7
Sep 10

Teaching grammar is fun, making newspapers is more funner

Kidnappers are dumb. Seems to be a universal thing, as Japanese reporter Kosuke Tsuneoka can attest:

A Japanese journalist held hostage in Afghanistan for five months managed to send out a message via Twitter that he was alive when his captors asked him how to use a cell phone.

Just days before he was freed, Kosuke Tsuneoka said one of the militants brought him his new cell phone and asked the prisoner to set it up.

The younger militants were more interested in accessing Al-Jazeera on the phone, but Tsuneoka managed to shift their attention to Twitter, successfully getting them to ask him to demonstrate how it worked.

“That’s how I got the message out,” Tsuneoka told a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, a day after he arrived safely back in Japan. “I’m sure they never thought they were tricked.”

Then you must also question the sanity of some reporters, as well. Tsuneoka was also kidnapped in Georgia (the country) in 2001.

Oh we all want to be war reporters, but you don’t think about the possibility of being kidnapped or the even more attractive things like dysentery and getting shot at. War reporting sounds like so much fun.

Taught 90 minutes on grammar today. I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing the lecture yesterday. It isn’t the most fun class the students have, but it is necessary. They were patient, though, and laughed at all the right places. Next week I’ll change things up and we’ll discuss … punctuation!

Meanwhile, the editorial staff was spending the night putting together their first newspaper of the new school year. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow. I looked over their shoulders a bit. It should be a nice start for an almost entirely new staff.

If they can ever get finished. This is usually a late-night-early-morning process. The beginning of the year even more so since there are the inevitable software struggles and design difficulties.

It’s a long day, but a rewarding.

I wrote something on Auburn’s season opener for al.com today. (They didn’t link to me, unfortunately, so I’m not going to waste a lot of time on it.)

My inbox has been full of the comments that came in under that contribution, though. Most of it from Alabama fans. Using the prevailing logic they must be very concerned about Cameron Newton. I don’t blame them. The guy is terrifying.

Tomorrow, newspaper, meetings, studying, the 1939 World’s Fair and probably more.

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31
Aug 10

What has happened to our conviction?

First class of the semester. For the professor in me, at least. Samford gets the benefit of a later start. Classes began yesterday, mine kicked off this afternoon. I’m teaching editing to a class full of eager young student journalists. I’ve had some of these students in previous classes.

We did the standard fare introductory stuff and then I gave a quiz. Now I’m that professor.

I showed them this video:

The point of the video being to speak and write with conviction and purpose. Seemed appropriate for an editing class. Took them a while, but they got into it by the end.

Should be a good class, if the professor does a good job with his part.

Had a meeting with the boss. Had a meeting with our new sales manager. We brain stormed ideas and then a few more and then one or two more besides. Now she just has to go out and spread the good word. Had a third meeting.

And then I read a lot.

My reading

That’s for class on Thursday.

The black and whites will be up shortly, but that’s it for the day. Tomorrow will be more workshop stuff, more studying, more work. More more more. (And another new, September long feature.)

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24
Aug 10

Sales meeting, and also, Ted Turner

Getting to be that time of year again:

Samford fanfest

Incidentally, that white vehicle on the left margin? That’s an armored truck absolutely running through a stone cold red light. Almost whacked that car, which was turning under a supposedly protected green arrow. I hope the money made it to wherever 45 seconds earlier than necessary. But I digress.

I stopped by an outdoors store — where they pay a guy to ride a forklift, full time, moving giant gun safes back and forth across the parking lot. It is a curious activity. Anyway, I’d stopped there because I have this old knife:

USMC knife

My great-grandfather gave it to me, years ago. It is a Marine Corps knife, though my grandfather was in the army. (You can read a bit more about the knife here and here.) He was a medic in Europe, earned a silver star and a purple heart. After the war he came home, never talked about it, raised his family and farmed his land. I think, if I remember correctly, he found this on the side of the road and gave it to my mother to give to me when I became old and smart enough to not cut off my hand.

Not that there’s any danger of that right now. The blade needs sharpening. But, otherwise, it is in great shape, except that the one tang has the point snapped off. The blades need a good deal of cleaning. I know a little about knives, enough to know you can damage them if you clean them incorrectly. So I’ve been hoping, for a while, to find a knife expert. Hence the outdoor store.

Find the knife counter, they had a knife counter, and the guy working there interrupts his conversation with another man who was Ted Turner.

Or his twin.

And, yes, you’d think he would have been taller. In the South the man is as big as life itself. In person, this gentleman was about five-foot-four.

The guy behind the counter says he can show me what I need. He leads me away. I apologize to Mr. Turner, who says “A great-grandfather’s knife is far more important than I am.”

Which is how I realized that the man I met wasn’t Ted Turner. There’s no way that guy is as cool as this guy.

The stuff I need, is a product called Flitz. Wash the blades with a mild dish soap, he said. Dry it. And then go to work on it with Flitz. It will take elbow grease, but it will shine the blades up nicely, he said.

I’ll let you know how the project turns out.

Met the new sales manager today. She’s a nice young lady. I try not to overload them with too much material all at once, but sometimes there is just a lot to be shared. We talked for about an hour about rate cards and sales approaches and this and that. I think she’ll do a very nice job.

I’m going to sit down with the Samford Crimson staff next week and talk about goals and achievements and try to start them out with a good, passionate first step. The are a little young, this year, but there’s a lot of potential in the group and I expect they’ll take some great strides and be doing great things before the year is out.

No pressure.

At the gym I had a monster workout. Basically doubled the reps on squats and lunges. I did way too many trapezoid curls. I did abs. I rode 30 miles. All together it was a two-hour endorphin ride. That ended before I even made it to the shower, unfortunately. But! But. If I could work out for two hours on a regular basis I’d be very pleased with myself.

If only.

Tomorrow: I work the phones. I read. And the 1939 World’s Fair will make a comeback.