And, ladies, wear your swim caps. I love the coloring on that sign, which probably was installed and hasn’t been reconsidered in years. I love the way the light falls across it and the tile behind it. The building was built in 1961, so the sign went in sometime since then.
There are going to be some thorny ethical issues here. I refer you to item five under the “Rights” section of Instagram’s terms of service, “You will not remove, alter or conceal any copyright, trademark, service mark or other proprietary rights notices incorporated in or accompanying the Instagram Content and you will not reproduce, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works based on, perform, display, publish, distribute, transmit, broadcast, sell, license or otherwise exploit the Instagram Content.” There’s also a “We will not rent or sell your information to third parties outside Instagram” passage elsewhere in their terms.
Here, then, is a recent eyetracking study that says “Study participants were able to tell whether a photograph was made by a professional or an amateur 90 percent of the time.” The findings there also suggest professional photographs were twice as likely as user-generated photographs to be shared, that more time was spent with professionally generated photographs than with user-generated images and respondents rated shots for their memorability, the top 20 were done by pros.
So go on with Instagram, newsrooms.
I’m a fan of user generated content. I have a presentation on just this topic in a few weeks at the Alabama Press Association. UGC now has a valuable and, at times, vital role in the work of a news outlet. There are caveats and concerns: quality, accessibility, accuracy and, as above, issues of legality. Once you get beyond all of that — and that will take some doing — you get down to today’s example. Used in bulk like the Times did above it comes across as either a novelty (“We’re hip”) or a concession (“We couldn’t get our light painters outside to shoot the snow”).
We haven’t enjoyed the Things to Read section here in several days, which means I have a backlog of links for you to enjoy. This works well for content today, which has otherwise been spent almost entirely doing necessary but generally uninteresting things. I’ve got about two dozen more interesting items to share, promise.
(If you’re here for the sappy stuff, there first installment is next. There’s another great one at the end of the post.)
First, the Lauren Hill video package by Tom Rinaldi:
(T)hroughout the game, televised live by FoxSports Ohio, she never seemed to stop smiling. She had a noticeable glow and bounce in her step while on the court.
During an in-game interview on FoxSports, she quickly corrected a broadcaster who referred to the game as her last, saying it was her first college game. Hill told reporters after the game she hoped to be well enough to try to play again.
Hays and Koskinen said they found Hill genuinely inspiring and not a subject of pity.
“She is just the most upbeat person despite what she’s going through,” Koskinen said. “Her smile lights up a room. She wants to hug you every chance she gets. You can’t help but want to hug her back and smile. She’s someone I will truly admire the rest of my life.”
The teams dined together Saturday night at the Firehouse Grill in Cincinnati, and the Terriers were nervous about meeting Hill.
“What do we say to her?” Hiram players asked their coach.
Before long, the teams were laughing together, crying, and laughing some more.
Breakfast, shower, shave, mirror. Almost a year. He is 56 now. He looks at the scars across his face, around his ear, along his upper chest and right arm. He gets dressed and goes outside to his truck, and there’s the fence that he somehow managed to climb even though he was bleeding, and there’s the field he staggered across to a rutted road where he was found.
This is how most days begin for Creigh Deeds, a father who had a son with mental illness, who struggled to understand him, tried to get help for him, and was ultimately left alone to deal with him, and who now looks over at the barn where he had so suddenly dropped the feed bucket.
“I lost a tooth over there somewhere, a gold tooth,” he says, shaking his head a little, and then he goes to work.
An armed security guard who was on an elevator with President Obama had not been convicted of a felony, as previously reported, according to two people briefed on the incident.
The man, who worked for a private security contractor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was removed from the president’s elevator during his Sept. 16 visit to Atlanta. The man was questioned by Secret Service agents after he did not comply with a request from agents that he stop recording images of the president with a camera.
Agents became concerned that the private contractor might be a risk to the president because of his behavior; others who later ran a background check on the guard discovered some prior arrests in his history.
[…]
The guard was terminated the day of the presidential visit to the CDC — when his supervisor at the security contracting firm arrived to find agents questioning the guard, he told him to turn over his gun on the spot.
The Obama administration’s Syria strategy suffered a major setback Sunday after fighters linked to al-Qaeda routed U.S.-backed rebels from their main northern strongholds, capturing significant quantities of weaponry, triggering widespread defections and ending hopes that Washington will readily find Syrian partners in its war against the Islamic State.
Moderate rebels who had been armed and trained by the United States either surrendered or defected to the extremists as the Jabhat al-Nusra group, affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through the towns and villages the moderates controlled in the northern province of Idlib, in what appeared to be a concerted push to vanquish the moderate Free Syrian Army, according to rebel commanders, activists and analysts.
Other moderate fighters were on the run, headed for the Turkish border as the extremists closed in, heralding a significant defeat for the rebel forces Washington had been counting on as a bulwark against the Islamic State.
The head of naval intelligence has not been able to view classified information for an entire year.
Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the director of naval intelligence, had his security clearance suspended in November 2013 after being investigated for possible misconduct. In the year since, no charges have been filed and there is no sense of when they might be, leaving the Navy in an untenable situation.
If classified information is being discussed at a meeting, the director of naval intelligence has to leave the room.
If Branch drops by a subordinate’s office, the space must be sanitized of any secrets before he enters.
CNN, covering the pressing Internet “news,” Internet lusts after new mugshot guy. If we get to a point where we call this news, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Better than calling content like that “culture.” Already it is filed under “living,” which should always be noted with something just above derision.
It’s Election Day in America. What with candidates vying for control and issues that need deciding, voters may find themselves confused about where they stand. Thankfully, some very savvy media designers have come up with delightful tools for understanding the election and its outcomes.
I love campaign tic tocks. This is the first one I’ve found from the midterms, there are some very interesting presidential critiques in there as well, the sort of thing you don’t often see about a sitting president. Battle for the Senate: How the GOP did it defies excerpting, but check it out if you’re interested in campaign news.
Which is as decent a transition as any toward the more media-based material. This video is titled College journalist disarms police confrontation and is worth watching:
Rice University launched a free Advanced Placement biology course Monday on a Web site overseen by two other elite schools, a potentially significant milestone for a movement that aims to bring college-level courses to high school students.
[…]
Sometimes students pay to take AP classes from online providers. Advertised tuition for such classes ranges from $75 to more than $500.
“Our program you can take for free,” said Reid Whitaker, executive director of the Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship at Rice. “This is a comprehensive program. Free resources. That’s a game changer.”
You’d think that has to impact the AP business model.
YouTube’s challenge is to replicate this fandom offline, beyond the teens and tweens who roved the halls of VidCon. The site is already rolling out billboard and video advertising campaigns to expand their stars’ reach, and to make them more than just Internet famous.
When I wandered just a few steps outside and spoke to food vendors or hotel employees, I found no one had heard of stars like Meghan Tonjes or Tyler Oakley—the kind who drew crowds inside the convention center.
For VidCon attendees who grew up with YouTube, the distinction between “YouTube famous” and “famous famous” may be meaningless.
No one ever said “Ed Sullivan famous.” The modifier is merely a diminishing agent. Ultimately you don’t see that person at the airport and say “Oh, she’s only YouTube famous never mind.” You know of her or don’t. You can see that entire thread here.
Wondering why you’re not finding great success with your alumni social media marketing? Well, wonder no more because we’ve done some digging, and figured out just how you can revamp your social media behavior for the betterment of all. In this blog, we’ve broken down your alumni into three groups based on age and interest because a variety of alumni means a variety of tactics for social media inclusion. The results may not be what you would expect (and if they are, Bravo!). Take what we have to show you today and stop wasting your time. Start creating impactful relationships with your alumni via social media.
Every few minutes, a new buzzword rips through the business world, skids, gets a few quick books written on it, and ends up in a pile of tired terms next to “synergy.” Today, one of the biggest corporate buzzwords is “storytelling.” Marketers are obsessed with storytelling, and conference panels on the subject lately have fewer empty seats than a Bieber concert.
[…]
Good stories surprise us. They have compelling characters. They make us think, make us feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that numbers and text on a slide with a bar graph don’t.
I saw this elderly gentleman dining by himself, with an old picture of a lady in front of him. I though maybe I could brighten his day by talking to him.
As I had assumed, she was his wife. But I didn’t expect such an interesting story. They met when they were both 17. They dated briefly, then lost contact when he went to war and her family moved. But he said he thought about her the entire war. After his return, he decided to look for her. He searched for her for 10 years and never dated anyone. People told him he was crazy, to which he replied “I am. Crazy in love”. On a trip to California, he went to a barber shop. He told the barber how he had been searching for a girl for ten years. The barber went to his phone and called his daughter in. It was her! She had also been searching for him and never dated either.
I don’t read a lot of FAQ pages, but maybe I should start. The random question can be the best. You’ll see why below.
I left campus at 7:30 tonight. I had a meeting until about 7 p.m. with students. Students gathered until 7 p.m. on a Friday night. They did this after working late into the evening last night o put their paper to bed. And then they sat around in the earliest part of their weekend and talked with me about their work. Their dedication to their craft is so very admirable.
And then, at home tonight, I learned that our postal crew understands humor. Specifically, irony, a bend across the link of the envelope, right on the stamp that says “Do Not Bend.”
Fortunately, they also understand unwanted mail. I must get this same envelope every other month. I open it, remove the return envelope, skim the contents and practice my best wrist-rotating exercises 16 times. Sometimes I get another rip and tear in there. Sometimes the tension of the paper is too much and I think back to that year we managed to get a huge stack of unnecessary phone books. YouTube was just becoming a fixture. I found videos teaching me how to rip phone books. I managed to perfect the technique, at least one svelte editions of the phone books. Now, I’m destroying junk mail. It has much greater tensile strength.
If they’re going to bend it — it is more malleable than a phone book — the mail carrier may as well just keep the thing themselves, right?
Things to read … because when you see good things, you shouldn’t keep it to yourself.
“We just felt like it would be more of a keepsake for our fans to take pictures and pass them around on social media,” Donabella said.
It has never occurred to me to get the autograph of a college athlete. I’ve covered a lot of them, and I’ve watched and cheered for many, many more, but autographs, no. I once sat on a sofa and talked dry cleaning with the fastest man in NCAA track and field. But it never occurred to me to take a photograph with him. (“Back in my day … “)
I have a few autographs of a few others — my first one, I think, is a now faded slip of paper with Kenny Stabler’s name scrawled on it. Later I managed to get a few photographs with famous people. I prefer the photos. Though the Stabler story is pretty good.
When Twitter first started testing these suggested tweets a few months ago, it didn’t explain the change very well to users, most of whom were confused and even angry when they started seeing content in their stream from people they didn’t follow. Twitter often experiments with new features without adding much of an explanation early on.
Thursday’s blog post is Twitter’s attempt to quell those concerns and offer some insight into the company’s strategy.
They are doing it to frustrate me. If I wanted those extra tweets they’d be in my feed. So you’re offering me discovery by way of people I follow. They have a way to share information with me already, using the retweet button. When you add the favorite button to all of that, well you’re just making buttons redundant, you’re messing up the temporal flow of things and just being tedious, all based on an algorithm.
I have a lot of thoughts on this subject. It all boils down to humanism.
You don’t see the word “seethe” in headlines very often.
Finally, we’re going to the race at Talladega this weekend. We’re trying to figure out how much time to allow for traffic. I’m reading Yelp reviews and random things people have written on various sites (“Leave home: August | Leave the race: After the national anthem.”)
Couples wishing to exchange vows on speedway property may do so within the confines of their spot in one of the parks. Weddings are not allowed on speedway property that is used for competition during race weekends.
We got married in lovely and historic downtown Savannah, Georgia. I am now kicking myself I didn’t think of the race track.
I’m sure someone wants to marry during a yellow. Someone else wants to marry and cause a yellow. I wonder if the minister says something like “If anyone has any reason why these two should not be wed or why Jeff Gordon shouldn’t be put into the wall in turn four, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
And, of course, the F in FAQ stands for “Frequently.” If it means anything, it wasn’t the last one on the list, either.
I don’t know if you have heard about The Snappening yet, where thousands of Snapchat user accounts hacked or otherwise violated, but this could be a big story. And that led to, perhaps, the most insightful thing I said today:
Who really needs to invest greatly in PR, preventative and crisis comm: Anyone working in cloud storage.
Not to make this a culinary thing, but after several Fridays of bad examples, I am disappointed to have to say that the new cafeteria vendor has ruined fried chicken. It seemed to me that they deserved a few weeks under the Benefit of the Doubt accords, and I gave them that. There are a lot of carbs on a daily basis, and the basic foodstuffs seem to rotate on something close to a monthly schedule theme — so we’ve heard. But, and this is important, Friday is fried chicken day. And they’ve missed on all of them so far, in my humble and hungry opinion. Today I noticed the menu and knew it would be no better.
Protip: There is no other fried chicken. Any attempt at making fried chicken in any way not like a grandparent does is an abject failure and poultry abuse.
I apologize for that outburst.
OK, one more food related note, Five Dairy Queen locations in Alabama fall victim to data breach. Thankfully I am not impacted. Hopefully it doesn’t effect you. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I dined at Dairy Queen. I recall the last time I ate at a restaurant that used to be a Dairy Queen. It is a barbecue place now, most remarkable for the way they cut their fries.
That former Dairy Queen is the same place where once, many years ago now, the young lady working said that they had no ice cream for their blizzards. This was in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. I always thought she should have locked the door and called it a day. No one is going for the chicken fingers in July, right?
Back to the point, with every passing data breach story I read I am more and more convinced we’ll be returning to a more cash-based exchange, soon. Customers assume a lot of risk, and they assume those retailers have their networks under control, and, sadly, that isn’t hasn’t always proved to be the case.
Sorry for all of this food talk. In a few minutes we are going to a dinner party. I’m taking my appetite.
Things to read … to whet your appetite.
Couldn’t hurt, but it isn’t a 100 percent requirement, Should all journalists be on Twitter? Think of it this way: there are plenty of community papers out there with a minimal online component, if that. They still cover their market. They are still journalists. Now, you’ll find that some topics demand Twitter or other online tools, of course. Others, the online tools could serve as a great compliment. This is the point the piece tries to dance around in a snarky fashion.
Have you ever wondered which buildings near you are listed on the National Register of Historic Places? If you’ve ever tried to look this up, you probably had trouble finding what you were looking for because until the summer of 2014, there really was no user-friendly way to browse map-integrated National Register listings. Now, thanks to the Wikipedia Summer of Monuments campaign, there is a free, simple, and interactive map that shows all places listed on the National Register.
An Alaska couple knocked on the door of their son’s long-time girlfriend Thursday, intending to inform her that he’d been killed in a car accident.
Karen and Jay Priest instead were stunned when the son, 29-year-old Justin Priest, answered the door. They had mistakenly been told by Juneau police that he’d been killed in the crash.
Karen Priest said her husband started sobbing, and she was in shock.
“They told me she drew something that resembled a gun,” said Rebecca. “According to them she pointed a crayon at another student and said, ‘pew pew,” said Rebecca.
She said her child was given a questionnaire to evaluate her for suicidal thoughts.
“[They] Asked her if she was depressed now,” said Rebecca.
Without her permission, Rebecca said her child was given the Mobile County Public School Safety Contract to sign stating she wouldn’t kill herself or others.
“While I was in the lobby waiting they had my 5-year-old sign a contract about suicide and homicide,” said Rebecca.
It takes a village. And that’s part of the problem, wouldn’t you agree?
Honestly, this is just about the stupidest thing you could conceive. And it is happening here, which is mind-boggling.
It was a good run, but common sense appears to be losing out.
One of my favorite memories of journalism classes as an undergrad was watching the story ideas form. I wasn’t a natural. I think some people are, and others can be taught. Some people have the ideas spring forth, but others have to work on it. Until I learned to come up with a reliable story idea process, I was enthralled by listening to others just riff off ideas.
That’s not right. I’m still impressed listening to really talented, curious, passionate people spit out story ideas.
So this is, perhaps, my favorite part of the semester. We’ve been discussing this in class. Today I broke them all up into groups and requested, nay, demanded story ideas. And once we got just around the corner from the traditional campus issues of parking and tuition, they had some good ones.
Next I’m going to make them put them into practice.
One of the ideas was the new cafeteria vendors. Things have changed. Some people find the food tastier. Others have pointed out there is an awful lot more pasta. To me, the food varies from decent to bland, with fewer options — once you remove the bushels of pasta. And there seems to be more chaos in the food serving area.
Also, this:
Surely we can do better than that.
I swam again today, about three-quarters of a mile, or 1,300 yards. My flip turns, new yesterday, looked basically the same today. Off-kilter, untargeted and more power than grace. But, hey, it seems to get me back down the lane a bit faster.
Also they are slow. And I forget to look for my knees, which probably explains a lot of the above. But, on those flip turns when I go down more than out I must also come up, which, I think, has the look a whale breach. That amuses me.
I hope no one else is looking.
This evening there were Crimson meetings, where we discussed the story they had on the changes in the cafeteria. It is a popular topic. Today’s was the first issue of the year, and in their critiques I got to brag on them a great deal. The paper looks pretty great for a first effort. There are some things they’ll work on, but there are always things to work on. I’m very pleased, I told them, about where they are starting. They have great potential for the year ahead — and so now I will challenge them.
Anyway, we did not discuss the sign above, but the pasta did come up.
The vendor, Sodexo, says they surveyed students on the campus where they have contracts and found that students wanted more of the stuff, so we have tons of carbs. There’s a lot of pasta in the cafeteria.
Things to read … which is as easy to boil up as spaghetti.
Man, I need a good drone. This was shot by my friend and a Samford grad, soaring high above campus. (He appears several times as the drone does flybys.) It is pretty awesome:
The couple have seen the doctor several times since the incident, and he always told the doctor how much he appreciated what he did, Andrea said.
“God and Dr. Hyrnkiw gave us an extra six months,” said Andrea Robinson. “And I can see why God gave me those extra six months.”
Did you watch anything from the Apple event? Interested in the mobile payments that were discussed. It is a game changer, as Alan Mutter explained years ago … Get ready for mobile payments
At a financial conference on Wednesday in New York, the CFO provided some hints about the feature roadmap that new head of product Daniel Graf — who came to Twitter from Google in April — has in mind for the service, a list that includes better search and a move into group chat. But he also suggested that the traditional reverse-chronological user stream could become a thing of the past, as the company tries to improve its relevance.
[…]
The most recent example of how stark the differences can be between a filtered feed and an unfiltered one was the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. and how that showed up so dramatically on Twitter but was barely present for most users of Facebook. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted, that kind of filtering has social consequences — and journalism professor Emily Bell pointed out that doing this makes Facebook and Twitter into information gatekeepers in much the same way newspapers used to be.
The impetus for Twitter to filter is obvious: the service needs to show growth in both number of users and engagement in order to satisfy investors, and finding relevant content as a new user can be a challenge, which is why the company recently updated its so-called “on-boarding” process.
I’d hope there would be a classic version. I count myself in the group of users who have spent a fair amount of time developing a well-curated Twitter stream, and now they’ll turn it into Facebook. And, you’ll see in other stories, let you buy stuff directly from your feed. The ultimate impulse purchase!
The only thing I’d want would be to purchase the original Twitter format, chronological and curated by humans, me.
But that’s a complaint for a different day. Today I can only complain about my flip turns. And the pasta.
