Today’s podcast featured an interesting talk about the design of the bicycle. And I got to do it with someone who rides bikes and designs things and teaches design for a living. It’s a delightful example of a person explaining things in an approachable way, and me asking questions about it.
And the news crew was back in the studio tonight. Here’s what they did:
I tried a new shade of tie today. It got several nice compliments.
Maybe people just know I’m not naturally a purple?
I don’t know how your day was, or how her day was, but sometimes you just need to cuddle with someone while they hold your head:
I recorded a podcast today with Dominick Jean, who is a news editor of the Indiana Daily Student. I’m pretty confident in my thinking that I couldn’t have done this when I was his age:
Speaking of cool things our students are doing … IUSTV is launching a new show, the second of the semester. First they rolled out a weekly late night kind of show. It’s fun and fairly clever. And now, here’s the first scripted drama they’ve done in a few years, it will be full of location and field shoots, I’m told. If you’re in town and fit any of these demos, come on and take on a role:
Calling all actors, actresses, and anyone with experience in film production. IUSTV's Lucidious is having an open casting call on March 6th from 7-9PM in Franklin Hall Room 114 pic.twitter.com/SQwksp8f39
Isn’t that cool? Students have an idea for a program and they can pitch it to the student television station and then they all go out and produce the thing. Lucidious makes the fifth new series they’ve rolled out since I’ve been here. What a wonderful and unique opportunity.
Talked a little tackle football on the podcast today. There’s a bill pending in Sacramento, California that would ban a tackle version of the sport before high school. That’s the story sports researcher Jimmy Sanderson brought to us today. Pretty interesting stuff.
In the evening, we were in the television studio. The students were making news shows. And Zoe was giving us our weather forecast:
There were other things, but they were mostly as exciting as email. It was one of those days when you just spent most of your time hacking away at a thicket of emails and attachments and replies and drafts and they never seem to thin out. Sometimes the studio is easy to get to, other days you really must work at it.
One of the things I get to do is teach students how to use new equipment. And one of the areas that has become partly mine are the audio production booths. Can’t imagine why.
Anyway, WIUX, the campus radio station, which is very large, probably has a new group every other week that I get to show how to do this or that, and then we book them to do this or that in one of our production studios. I also get to tell them they can do these same things in their own studios, but that doesn’t offer a solution they like, somehow.
I get it, the production facilities on campus are nice. But if we knew what podcasts were back in my college radio days, I would have never let the booths in the station. Which, come to think of it, I spent an awful lot of time in those production booths anyway. And most of the gear here is much, much nicer than what I learned on. Part of that is the endless march of technology, and also the esteem of things. Indiana has put so much into the student experience and their production opportunities in The Media School that most places just can’t measure up. And I get to work there and learn all of the gadgets and play with them and teach them to others. So I get it. We have some super nice setups.
I was in one of those booths today with five students and I ended up having to pass out a few business cards. So I reached into my pocket and pulled out my business card holder:
One of the guys said “Whoever made that for you is a true friend.”
Well, I made it myself, so here’s to hoping!
It was a weekend project. I made three of them one evening. Different cuts, different stain patterns, and I rotate through them. Everyone thinks they are great, but they are a bit on the thick side and they could probably use a better finish. But they keep my cards from being bent.
I might try some more out of different materials, because there will, hopefully, be another evening that needs a project.
Today’s podcast was about a column about men’s basketball in Colorado. The program at Colorado State is a mess and a writer there has an interesting idea of how to get things cleaned up. At first, the story sounds exactly just like that. But the more you get into it, the more interesting it becomes, and the more interest this episode generated.
The analytics tell me that this little podcast is now truly global. Australia, Canada and Georgia (the country in Eurasia, not the 13th state) all registered downloads this week. I don’t know what the people in Georgia like the most about the program so far, but if they’ve found their way here, I’d just like to say this: I’ve listened to your anthem, Tavisupleba, and it is quite stirring.
If you haven’t had enough talking yet, here’s a show my sports crew produced for last weekend. It’s still steamy and the takes are still hot, as they say, so check it out:
What? That’s not how they say that? Maybe it should be. Have you thought of that?
We turned our eyes north, to Wisconsin, to talk with Green Bay Press-Gazette reporter Jonathan Anderson today. He joined the program to talk about a brand new ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It has to do with unions and votes and public records, and it could have some long reaching implications.
Yesterday’s story was about a man, his mop and criminal intent. The one before that was about iPhones, and before that we talked gerrymandering. The variety is such a neat thing, I think. Also, these shows are short. The idea is you can listen to this while you’re running an errand. You don’t have to be running a marathon.
This morning Dan Wakefield visited the television studio. We recorded a brief interview with him. Here’s a man who covered the Emmett Till murder trial, had a full journalism career, then wrote two best sellers and then had both of those books turned into movies. How do you get that down into a seven-minute conversation?
Wakefield is one of those journalists you study in school. He always gets asked, and is forever reciting, the lead to one of his stories for the magazine “The Nation.”
The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it. Citizens who drink from the “Whites Only’ fountain in the courthouse breathe much easier now that the two fair-skinned half brothers, ages twenty-four and thirty-six, have been acquitted of the murder of a fourteen-year-old Negro boy. The streets are quiet, Chicago is once more a mythical name, and everyone here “knows his place.”
We should probably send the same amount of time on the themes of insularity, maintaining the status quo, parachute journalism, long memory, the other Others, and irony, which are all found in the last three paragraphs of his story:
It took the twelve jurors an hour and seven minutes to return the verdict that would evidently help close the gap between the white and colored races in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Tradition, honor, God, and country were preserved in a package deal with the lives of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam.
Reporters climbed tables and chairs to get a glimpse of the acquitted defendants, and the newspaper, magazine, and television cameras were aimed at the smiles of their wives and families in a flashing, buzzing finale. Then the agents of the outside world disappeared in a rush to make their deadlines and the stale, cluttered courtroom was finally empty of everything but mashed-out cigarettes, crushed paper cups, and a few of the canvas spectator chairs that the American Legion had sold across the street for two dollars each.
The trial week won’t be forgotten here soon, and glimpses of the “foreign” Negroes who don’t till cottonfields but hold positions as lawyers, doctors, and Congressmen have surely left a deep and uncomfortable mark on the whites of the Delta. But at least for the present, life is good again. Funds are being raised for separate-and-equal school facilities in Tallahatchie County and on Wednesdays at lunchtime four of the five defense attorneys join with the other Rotarians of Sumner in a club song about the glad day “When men are one.”
Wakefield’s interview will be a part of a program next week. I watched two other shows being produced this evening. They’ll make it online at some point this week, I’m sure.
