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Twitter / weekend — Comments Off on Write this down; I had it first
2
May 15

Write this down; I had it first

You are going to read, by tomorrow or the middle of next week at the latest, an awful lot about Meerkat and Periscope and the big fight. Just remember: I told you first. Premium broadcast disruption is finally here in a big, big way. It will be a Sisyphean task to get that genie back in the bottle.

(Google says no one has ever written that sentence before. I pecked it out, thought it so terrible and cliched that there had to be at least 64,000 returns. I searched it. No one. This is remarkable.)

Anyway.

The user experience varied. I watched the entire fight, every second of Floyd Mayweather doing just enough to disappoint the boxing audience while collecting a monumental paycheck, in good-enough quality over three or four streams. Barrier to entry: Nothing. Money saved: $99 and a lot of agita, had I spent a hundred bucks on something as silly as a boxing match.

And then I started scoring the protracted, pretend provocation of the paladins of pugilism.

(Yeesh.)

history / links / Samford / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on The little things
28
Apr 15

The little things

You wonder what things people take from their young adult years, what stories they carry into their hopefully long and prosperous lives. Someone will tell a few of these stories for a good long while, for sure. These celebrations are in the cafeteria:

Pretty cool, huh? One of the tennis players has been in two of my classes. One of the track athletes has been in my class and he’ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he’s getting his first ring, as a freshman. All of that is nice, but I just thought it was a nice touch how the folks in the athletic department took steps to point out their team’s success.

Paper tonight, and a run today and a lot of time in the office working on class things. Sometimes it feels as if the grading will never stop.

You might have heard of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. Sad story:

“I’ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I’ve never seen a situation come up so fast,” he said.

And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.

“He’s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,” Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.

Creekmore described Beall as “very passionate about sailing.”

I was downtown tonight, for pizza, and so this was a good night to also see this story, which has probably never happened here before:

As cities around the country look for ways to go green, a recent report shows Birmingham to be leading the way in terms of air quality.

Ozone and fine particulate concentrations in the Birmingham area are at their lowest-ever recorded levels, according to the Jefferson County Department of Public Health.

You don’t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.

The air has been getting progressively better over the years. You can even see the skyline for miles. I remember days as a kid when you couldn’t say that.

This gentleman is believed to be the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders in Alabama:

“My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was — we were surrounded there — can they keep us with enough ammunition?” the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.

“We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,” he said.

Kinney, who had suffered two hits from shrapnel and a bullet across his helmet during the fighting, recalled the Nhpum Ga battle came to a halt on Easter Sunday morning in 1944 with a victory over Japanese soldiers. It was the latest of several hard-fought battles for the Marauders, named after their commander, Gen. Frank D. Merrill, but it wasn’t their last.

“When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,” said Kinney.

Nothing little about that.

I tell students that obituaries aren’t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here’s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, who then lived for a century:

Ione’s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, “She wanted perfection.”

Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, “If you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.”

Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.

She drove a Buick. Whoever writes mine, a long, long time from now, I hope they remember to get in a lot of small details like that. In any kind of stories, I think, those small details are the one that make the imagery sing.

The little details make the big picture.

Instagram / movies / Thursday / Twitter / video / Vine — 1 Comment
16
Apr 15

I’ve just invented the teaser-teaser

Millions of views for the teaser trailer — which was an event itself today, because modern society is a quirky place. Millions of views. And most people were probably pleased:

And why not? That’s pretty intriguing.

There’s a subset of Star Wars fans who, for years and years, have been re-cutting even the original films and making their own stories. Some of them are supposedly big departures and markedly better than Lucas’ 1970s vision — where Greedo shot second. I am not one of those people. I don’t even own any version of the movies. But, like you, I probably know them all too well in general. So while I don’t cut video, I did see one thing above that I would do differently. But then I had this sudden realization.

Sure, that’s getting millions of views. It is a 1:45 tour de promotion. Culture phenomenon behind it, Disney’s marketing monster behind that. No record is safe. And YouTube is very pleased with the commercials they’ll have floating around that commercial — because modern society is a quirky place and, if you are smart, you can make money advertising off of someone else’s commercial. The Star Wars people are happy, too, particularly if they have entered into any promotional-financial deal with YouTube.

But, in our modern media world, shouldn’t we think beyond the traditional big screen presentation? Shouldn’t we think beyond the video hosting format? That link is getting passed around like a water bucket at a town hall fire today, but that’s just the link. Why wouldn’t you want to promote your product in other ways in other places?

This requires a few obvious changes. First, since your audience is here, there and everywhere, you need to be everywhere. The problem is every platform supports different sizes, run times, loops, etc. So, for a case like a movie promo, you’ll have to change your editorial stride. You have to get the pertinent information out there and, of course, making viewers want to show up to see your finished product.

(What follows is intended purely as a Fair Use educational exercise.)

Let me give it a try. Twitter these days supports a 30-second video embedded right in the tweet. So here you have the luxury of a lot of time in our hyper-mediated world:

After the obvious and necessary trimming required for this marketing/storytelling/promotional exercise, I made one obvious change to the cut. (Personal preference.) I’ll only do it one more time, in a smaller way oriented more toward production than editorializing.

Now, Twitter is generous and gives you 30 seconds, but Instagram only gives you 15. Also, the square format would require some changes on the production end. That, right away, makes Instagram’s video feature outdated in my book. Anyway, here’s the necessarily shorter demonstration promo:

A video posted by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

Finally, we come to Vine. The famous six-second video and the urgency of now, now. And don’t forget, it loops. Now I got lucky. Just watching that teaser with the idea of looking for a quick glimpse-clip you realize you’ve got a ton of iconic choices. A Vine ad might work better for this film rather than next month’s Aloha, a romantic comedy or June’s Big Game, an action film starring Samuel L. Jackson. But for this project, for this movie, this clip works well.

Yes, I know there’s a music mixing issue here. I’m only working with the produced material, of course. (And with hasty editing.)

The one thing missing is the MPAA announcement. But otherwise, this is an idea with legs; an idea whose time has come.

You have some audience overlap, sure, but you have different people on these different platforms throughout the day. And they consume products differently in each format. We must prepare our products accordingly, which is to say differently in each. Do it well then you can use social media’s true muscle, passing along information at the speed of light. Keep dropping in those links to the home-base trailer. Drive the audience to YouTube or Hulu. Watch people come in from Twitter and Instagram and Vine or wherever they were. It doesn’t matter where they were before. Now they’re watching a ship speed across the desert, an X-wing fighter skimming the water, that one guy who we don’t know yet, explosions, light sabers … and I’ve just invented the teaser-teaser.

journalism / links / Monday / things to read / Twitter — Comments Off on Things to read
6
Apr 15

Things to read

Since it is Monday, and since this is the new gimmick for the day, you can find a ton of links in this post. But first, one of the best stories I read all last week: Anthony Ray Hinton free after nearly 30 years on Alabama Death Row:

After nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row, Hinton this morning walked out of prison a free man and into the arms of his sisters and friends.

He was freed when prosecutors dismissed the charges for his re-trial in the 1985 deaths of two fast-food manager after new testing on Hinton’s gun couldn’t prove the crime scene bullets were fired from the weapons.

“The sun does shine,” Hinton said as he was released.

“I want you to know there is a God. He sits high but he looks low. He will destroy but yet he will defend and he defended me,” Hinton said.

He said he wanted to say to the victims families that it was a “miscarriage ” of justice for them too.

Bad prosecution and bad evidence made for a bad conviction. I was in elementary school, but I remember the story of those murders. Something about how the shooter put the victims in the walk-in cooler before killing them really stuck with me.

Hinton, now out of prison, said he was going to find a buffet. That seems like a reasonable enough short-term plan for a guy who has been on death row for decades.

This is a terrific collection of presidential first pitches. I pretty much love everything about that series of photographs. How could you not?

Since this is, in part, the point of the day’s post …

A batch of journalism links:

DHS journalists recognized for spurring school board to action on MPR
A coast-to-coast newspaper shuffle is taking shape
Seymour Hersh on My Lai and the state of investigative journalism

And now a section on the Rolling Stone journalism review:

That last one might be hard to prove in legal proceedings, but it doesn’t mitigate the problems Rolling Stone has just now.

A batch of digital media links:

Meerkat and Periscope are fun apps but beware the sting in the tail
Here’s proof people are cutting the cord on cable TV
Twitter Publicly Launches Curator, Real-Time Search And Filtering Tool
Snapchat cuts off third-party apps, releases its first transparency report
‘News doesn’t belong on paper anymore’
Let’s talk about user-generated data
Augmented, Virtual Reality To Hit $150B, Disrupting Mobile By 2020
10 trusty digital tools journalists should try right now
In a bid for modern coverage, student paper tries a new Medium
The app Fradio allows you to create your own radio station

That last one is about a custom music show, but wait until the tech builds out to a Talk format.

And two quick advertising links:

The Economist’s Tom Standage on digital strategy and the limits of a model based on advertising

Digital Advertisers Focus on Holistic Customer Experience

And, if you’ve read this far, here’s the oral history of Max Headroom. Sadly, none of my students know who that is.

I do not know what is happening. / photo / running / Samford / swimming / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on All of these things are worth remembering
31
Mar 15

All of these things are worth remembering

I follow exactly one comedy writer on Twitter. And tonight he linked to this essay written, he said, by a friend of his. That guy worked on the Letterman show, and he’s dishing the anecdotes. There’s a lot of fun in these stories:

Bill Clinton was hanging out near my wife, which is something no husband wants. My wife also worked at the show, and the former president was backstage watching the Top 10 List while awaiting his guest segment. I had a joke in the Top 10 that mentioned Chewbacca. The joke got a pretty big laugh backstage, but Clinton seemed confused. He turned and with a quizzical look asked, “Who’s Chewbacca?”

First off, I have to admit that having written something that prompted Bill Clinton to say the word Chewbacca stands as the proudest achievement of my life. (I’m the father of two.) My next goal is getting Pope Francis to say “Wu-Tang Clan.” But the more I thought about it, the madder I got. Yes, Bill Clinton’s a world leader with lots of important things on his mind. We get it. But when Star Wars came out in 1977, Clinton wasn’t the president. He was a regular guy. Heck, his nickname was “Bubba.” A guy named “Bubba” can’t pretend he’s too important to know who Chewbacca is. And also, isn’t Clinton always claiming to be a New York Times crossword-puzzle expert? Chewbacca is exactly the kind of random reference any decent crossword-puzzler would be aware of.

I really hoped there would be a YouTube video of Clinton and Chewie together. Get on that, Internet.

Here at home, Tom Cosby is busy finding a silver lining in the things that are going on at UAB with the athletic department. I haven’t said a whole lot about the UAB story, but I like Cosby’s point of view:

But despite these disappointing aspects, here’s the good thing, no the GREAT thing, that’s come out of all this. This brouhaha has accelerated a rekindling of Birmingham’s civic pride along with a fierce embrace of UAB. Our civic pride was already surging before this debacle but its now quadrupled since December 2 and you see it growing every day.

When has this city ever united like this behind UAB? For that matter, when have you ever seen this level of civic passion in anything? And unlike earlier generations of Birminghamians who years ago let out of state corporations call the shots here, these citizens are letting the UA Trustees know their outrage. And they are making it clear that they believe killing football has the real potential to damage both UAB and our city’s future.

Take all the victories you can.

Time for the weekly update of the work in the cafeteria. They are expanding the center of the space, which has clogged the flow around the main food-substitute procurement area and jammed up the dining area. They say they have the same amount of tables, but they are all in less space because this first phase of the renovation required the building of a dust wall. One must keep the dust out of the food.

They’ve put fiberglass windows in the dust walls, so you can check out the work. This is what I saw at lunch today:

The larger portion of the work has been up in the ceiling and, thus, out of view from this position. I look in every day and the equipment is moving around. The guys working there seem to spend more time doing stuff than standing around watching one guy do stuff. They say they’ll be done with their work by the first part of the summer. I suppose it all depends what they find as they poke around in the ceiling.

Ancient chicken wings from lunches gone by, no doubt.

I had contemporary chicken for dinner tonight, visiting the Chick-fil-A that I visit too much. Even the guys in the back know my name now.

Also swam and ran today. Got in about 2,200 yards in the pool and then two miles of running. It always feels weird to say after the fact, but I got to the end of that second mile and my body and my energy levels agreed: we’ve done enough.

It was that feeling you can’t really describe, or maybe even remember clearly later. The one beyond rubbery fatigue, but down around emptiness. The one where another step was foolish because you were no longer running along on the ground, but rather about 18 inches below it.

Now, having had dinner and sitting in a chair, the inability to run another mile or so doesn’t seem so bad. It is a kindness that the mind sometimes gives us, being able to forget about some of the painful things.

I wonder, if they find something curious in the ceiling, if it is remembered by whoever put it there years ago.

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