This looks like a great classroom exercise. I’ve been compiling the chronology of events worth pointing out to young scribes.
There are no winners there, no successes or celebrations. Just a few giant errors and important lessons.
I have a note out for Devon Edwards, the profoundly upset former managing editor of OnwardState, a student-run news outlet. (Read his Twitter account and you can’t help but feel for the guy. I’ve also written Adam Jacobi, the CBS writer who passed along what OnwardState reported. Hopefully they’ll reply to add a bit more perspective and give some insight into what went wrong and what can be learned from the experience.
I noted on Twitter that it should be no surprise that a soap called “Dancing Waters” from Bath & Body Works doesn’t remove chain grease. Someone observed that is “kind of like saying the aromatherapy candles don’t get rid of the exhaust smell from your Harley.”
Controversial legislation that the co-founder of Google has warned “would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world” has received virtually no coverage from major American television news outlets during their evening newscasts and opinion programming. The parent companies of most of these networks, as well as two of the networks themselves, are listed as official “supporters” of this legislation on the U.S. House of Representatives’ website.
As the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) makes its way through Congress, most major television news outlets — MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC — have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it.
I get it. They have corporate bosses who have bosses who have properties that think this will protect them. Also, broadcasters aren’t carrying a torch for online entities — since they are so often being torched by online entities. (Though Poynter is finally telling journalists they should be concerned about all this. How any advocate of the First Amendment could read this legislation and not be troubled is beyond me.) We’re moving a significant way down the slippery slope.
God bless America, we need the help.
Speaking of politics, Dale Peterson is back. Remember this guy?
His wife is now running for office. Or, as he says, is “after the republican nomination …”
It isn’t the rifle, or even the pace of the thing, but the air quotes. They’re just reaching out of your monitor, trying to drag you to your polling place … it is an unsettling gesture. If you must do air quotes on video, do them parallel to your ears.
I feel disconnected here, because my computer time is drastically cut short compared to work and home. That’s fine, and as it should be, but this makes news junkies twitchy.
There might be news! Someone could write a compelling essay and link to it on Twitter! What if I miss a really great joke? Or what if there’s a brand new meme!?
Life is hard, I know.
I read the local paper this afternoon. The Times Daily‘s lead story today has to do with a lack of funding for the local landfill:
With a depleted Solid Waste Fund temporarily carrying the load for garbage disposal, the City Council must find another source of money to meet state and federal requirements for the eventual closing and monitoring of its landfill.
Dan Barger, city treasurer/chief accountant, told the council Tuesday that more than $2 million is needed to satisfy requirements for landfill closure. He said it probably will have to come from the General Fund.
The Environmental Protection Agency requires owners and operators of municipal solid waste landfills to show proof they have adequate funds earmarked for closure costs and monitoring the landfill for 30 years after closure, Barger said.
Because the Solid Waste Fund has operated with losses of more than 5 percent the past two years, he said that fund no longer satisfies the financial tests necessary to guarantee closure operations.
The print version had to do with only two weeks worth of space remaining in the current landfill cell. The council has been split for some times, it seems, along a 3-3 vote, on whether to add to the existing space or ship off trash to a third-party site. The mayor, the story said, had had enough and last night started naming names.
My grandparents have taken to watching the city council meetings on television. They don’t even live within the city limits. That’s how entertaining these meetings can be. And you’ve been shirking your civic duty.
Also watched the local 5 p.m. news. The lead story on the B-block was the traditional Better Business Bureau story warning you of e-card scams. Someone had to write a tease for that piece. But it was a relatively slow news day. There was a fatal car accident and two men were caught in a check stealing scheme.
Shame they didn’t have this footage of a dog terrorizing the local stuffed citizenry:
Finished the Christmas shopping today with a whimper. The last thing I picked up was a gift card.
He was president of Samford University, some 143 years ago, two campuses and one name ago, when the place was still known as Howard College. The statue, seven feet tall and tipping the scales at a metric tonne, was delivered to Samford two years ago after a long tour in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.
He was replaced there by Helen Keller, and so now he’s back on campus. Not that he’d know this place. Birmingham wasn’t even a town then.
Curry, was a Mexican War veteran, Alabama lawyer and member of the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, the Confederate Congress and an officer in the Confederate Army. Later he would become a Baptist preacher.
He was also a Horace Mann universal education disciple. Booker T. Washington proclaimed “There was no man in the country more deeply interested in the higher welfare of the Negro than Dr. Curry.”
Curry was appointed president of Howard College in 1865, where he served for three years. Later he was an ambassador to Spain.
The sculpture had been stained by tobacco smoke and marked by generations of U.S. Capitol visitors with pens, proving people are stupid. But he was cleaned for his return to Samford, where he is on display in the Beeson University Center. He has a (presumably) unauthorized and sadly dormant Twitter account. And, now, is wearing what is presumably a university sanctioned Christmas hat.
Had a nice conversation with the fiancee of a former student today. (She is designing at Oxmoor House here in town.) He is a storyteller. Check out some of his recent work.
Among other things, he’s also working as a research assistant on the first authorized biography on Jerry Lee Lewis. Those will be interesting interviews.
That would be the tale you told at every gathering, if it happened to you. It was just another day in Jerry Lee’s world.
Just another fine day on campus for me as well. I taught about broadcast writing today, and focused on radio scripts. We’ll do television next week.
So I did the spiel, told some of my own war stories and showed written examples. We talked about the active voice and visual structure and actualities.
I gave them two stories from the paper to re-write as an exercise. “This one,” I said, “is probably a 30 second story. This one is probably 45 or 50 seconds. Write them out and read and time them.”
I wrote a version of the longer story. It was 42 seconds.
It has been almost eight years, but I’ve still got that clock in my head.
Had something of a panic today. I am not prone to such things, thankfully. And, furthermore, this was a bit of anxiety after the fact. But it was warranted. I just threw everything into Storify (which wasn’t behaving properly when I built this one, so it might not be the normal perfect presentation), because it needs to be remembered for a while. First there was the storm. I got an alert on my phone via Twitter. I texted my wife, telling her to hide as there was a tornado warning and the radar did not look good.
And that was when the sirens over her, the location of the storm, were finally activated. This is problematic. A few minutes later the tornado touches down. She was safe, her office is in the basement of a building built in 1940, so that’s a pretty safe bet. I’d called around the neighborhood and found where it was good and bad. And some places were fine, in the way that often marks a tornado’s appearance. Other places had plenty of damage. In the end, all of the places were familiar. Some were close to home. Some, very close.
The damage was just a half-mile away. Fortunately property damage and minor injuries were the extent of it. The biggest loss seems to be a horse that I wrote about at the end of the evening. There was a collective sigh of relief. A supposed EF1 or EF2 just appeared overhead, whipped up some trees and pulled apart some signage and then moved on. But what might have been.
Elsewhere: I’ve been saying this for years: if cities cared about the environment and their community, they would synch intersections better. One of the Birmingham suburbs is listening:
Drivers along a stretch of Allison-Bonnett Memorial Drive in Hueytown may notice improved traffic flow following a project to synchronize the traffic lights at 10 intersections.
[…]
Baumann said the upgrades to the traffic signals will have an impact on driver’s wallets and the environment. Better traffic flow will lead to lower fuel emissions and a reduction in air pollution, he said. The mayor said synchronizing the lights will save an estimated $45,000 a month in gas as drivers cut down the time their cars are stopped at the traffic lights.
As the second comment notes, the rest of the metro is on the opposite, anti-synchronized, plan. Because, well, because they are.
