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Football. Meh.

CBS fills their studio time discussing Penn State. They wrap it up with

Aaron Taylor — of Notre Dame and the Packers and Chargers — compares Joe Paterno’s legacy to a goal line fumble. It was a properly tortured analogy concluded with a somber note by his studio colleague Adam Zucker, “And he’d never fumbled before.”

Except the LAST TWO DECADES.

So there was the Georgia game. And that was bad. Just in case no one paid attention to that game, which started with a bad call and was punctuated throughout with poor play with only one exception. Selected tweets, from a :

That first down was brought to you by Georgia math.

Hey a legitimate UGa first down. Congratulations to the referee who did not have to compromise his ethics or vision plan to make it happen.

Referees 7, UGa 0, Auburn, 0. Thanks for that first down spot, fellas.

TOUCHDOWN AUBURN! C.J. Uzomah to @LUTZenkirchen! 7-7, still in the first.

Bulldog to helmet. I suspect whining to begin any moment now.

I’d like to point out we have an All-American caliber running back on the roster … and he has one total yard thus far.

Pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass. Third and long? Let’s run a draw!

So about that bye week …

Remember when Malzahn described the offense as a play action down field rushing attack? Good times.

Alright, the first time they ran the backdoor pass it was nice. That’s just … not good.

This game is where even the generally fair-minded are questioning Ted Roof. There’s enough of that for most everyone just now.

So let’s see: Youth, Murray, play calling, defensive schemes … anybody else want to contribute?

Was that four go routes and O-Mac underneath? Is that as good as it gets now?

Defensively that’s an unforced fumble, a punt and a drive stopped by a clock. (Let’s not acknowledge the five TDs.) War Adjustments.

89 net yards for AU in the first half. Four yds for Dyer. 10:53 TOP. 2/7 on third down conversions. UGA? 318 yards, 7/8 3rd downs.

Not interested in demanding firings, but 89 yards against the SEC’s #4 defense should earn a partial $1.3 million refund.

Between @WBE_Jerry, 14-year vet @HABOTN and the boards, everyone has decided that was the worst half of Auburn football maybe ever.

Of course that’s a modern conceit. Some folks do recall the Barfield years. But most recent comparisons are … comparable.

I would say the 2008 and 2001 Iron Bowls are as close a 21st century similarity as you could get people to consider.

Mark Richt, most impressed by a spear. Yeah, that’s about right.

Auburn has played five top-15 teams on the road this year. That never ceases to impress.

What in this game has impressed upon the coaching staff that the screen pass is there? What?

Tough setback for T’Sharvan Bell. Depth in the secondary now beyond being an issue.

On air with @IngramSmith, and considering the enigma that is/was UGa, I thought it would be a close game, pending ball bounces. Oops.

Youth was on display, and that was one part of why this game was so bad. They’ll get better in due time, but the Tigers will get even younger with T’Sharvan Bell’s knee injury. It didn’t look like the news was good on the sideline, and so the shaky secondary becomes a bit less stable. Two games to go, homecoming next weekend against Samford and then Alabama brings the nation’s best defense into Jordan-Hare to finish the season. No biggie.

Otherwise Alabama won. UAB won, improving to 2-8 on the year with the biggest comeback in school history. Samford also won with a late comeback.

Samford lost in the first round of the soccer playoffs, ending a terrific season. But Auburn won, and advances to second round playoff action.

journalism / links / Monday / photo / site / things to read / Twitter — Comments Off
29
Aug 11

Things to read

It was vital before the weekend, even as it is dated now, but here’s a bit of specialty reporting worth your attention. What do you do with prisoners during a hurricane? Nothing, apparently, if you’re New York City:

“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference this afternoon. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with more than a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.

New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.

Speaking of the storm, FEMA asked people to use Twitter and Facebook during the bad weather, for fear of otherwise overloading the cell phone system. How many stories are in that sentence, do you think? Meanwhile, the New York Times says Twitter was a playground.

Was Irene much ado about nothing? As of this writing there are 24 deaths and a great deal of flooding, but was the media too panicked? Did the system get too much hype? You could argue both sides. On one hand you never know about hurricanes until they make landfall, and by then it is too late for the media and government to caution and evacuate people. On the other hand, there’s Howard Kurtz:

Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.

[…]

But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was to risk driving viewers elsewhere. Websites, too, were running dramatic headlines even as it became apparent that the storm wasn’t as powerful as advertised.

Copy editing extends to television graphics. Look at what Irene did to some of our nation’s finest cities:

That’s from MSNBC, and probably a layer or software glitch. “That’s live television” some may say, but remember, in times of crisis it is information people need. Be sure you have it right.

Quick hits: We are all members of the media now. I’ve been saying it in classes and presentations for years now. Some of our peers disagree, but the New York Times sees it. How can Google+ be used in journalism education? Here’s a primer from Bryan Murley. Half of U.S. adults use social media, says a new Pew study. The publishing end run on Apple. Publishers want their control, but Apple’s closed model insists they have control; publishers were only going to give for so long.

There’s a saying in broadcasting that every mic is a hot mic, which means be careful what you say around every microphone, because you might be broadcasting without realizing it. ESPN is telling their employees to consider Twitter a hot mic. Agree or disagree? Internet use is on the rise for farmers. The 9/11 archives, raw footage from a wide variety of TV stations and networks during 9/11/01, and the days that followed, is now online.

Finally, typos are bad (says the guy who leaves a lot of them on his own site). Big typos on signs at school, signos, are embarrassing.

journalism / links / things to read / Twitter / video — Comments Off
22
Aug 11

Things to read

We’re spending a lot of time lately talking about curation. No one is better than Andy Carvin, who’s told us all about the Arab Spring from his home. This piece is aimed at higher ed, but it is a valuable read for journalists, journalism students and social media dabblers.

Amid the political upheaval in the Middle East over the past several weeks, a dependable source of information has been Andy Carvin (@acarvin), NPR’s senior social media strategist. But he’s not reporting out of Tripoli or Cairo. Rather, he’s tweeting from his Maryland home, often while his kids watch TV in the background and cats vie for attention at his feet.

Carvin, whom one Metafilter thread dubbed “Curator of the Revolution,” has been tweeting updates from sources who are on the ground in the various countries—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere—that have seen uprisings as of late. In doing so, he’s become something of a poster child for content curation.

The Atlantic hailed Carvin as an example of how curation is the new journalism. Carvin told the magazine, “Curation itself isn’t new; it’s just the way that some of us are doing it online that’s fairly new. The tools have evolved, but the goal of capturing a story and turning people’s attention to it isn’t.”

During the deadly April tornadoes in Alabama someone erroneously called me the Andy Carvin of the storm. That was too much flattery, but the effort and purpose were the same. Here’s an archive of I wrote during the twisters.

How does one calculate and measure all of the things we do online? This is an evolving science. It wasn’t long ago that we were quantifying what had happened on the site the day before or a few hours ago. Now the phrase you’ll need to know is big data …

The next wave of tools claim to use a crystal ball of website data and patterns to see the future. And they promise to help news publishers squeeze more money out of the content they already produce.

One of these is Visual Revenue, a product launched this year that gives an editor “a new best friend sitting across the table,” according to founder and CEO Dennis Mortensen.

“We created this model where I can take any piece of content created over the last day or two days … and model how well that’s going to perform in any given position … about 15 minutes into the future.” Mortensen said. “And since we know how well the future is going to play out, we can come up with a set of very specific recommendations about what to put where, for how long.”

[…]

Another new product is called JumpTime Traffic Valuator, founded by people with backgrounds at major media companies such as Yahoo and MTV. It focuses on the revenue potential of each page on a site, showing a publisher how much money each article and each piece of page real estate is generating.

And so on.

There’s going to be a great use of such predictive metrics. What will human hands be motivated by when influenced by this software? An algorithm that tells them how and what to publish? An algorithm that tells editors what will make money? These become thorny issues to contemplate in a new digital ethic.

Mobile ads may not be the hit marketers expected:

Only one in five mobile ad campaigns used targeting by location in the second quarter of this year, according to a report from the Millenial Media ad network.

Almost as many ad campaigns (19 percent) used demographic targeting (by age and gender of the user, for example). A smaller share (6 percent) used behavioral targeting. A majority (55 percent) were not targeted and simply sought to raise broad awareness of the advertiser — commonly thought of as “branding” campaigns.

On the consumer side, only 14 percent of mobile device users favor receiving promotions based on their current location, according to a survey of 2,000 American adults using cellphones by mobile marketing firm Upstream.

This doesn’t surprise me much. First, there are actually times when you don’t want text messages or push notifications. And there are moments when we are not actually staring into our phone. What’s more, according to my entirely unscientific study, none of my college students like the implications of mobile advertising. They find it a little icky. (Technical term.)

Pedagogy: Using a blog as an independent study. Great idea, and the execution of it should be rigorous.

And that leads us into the last few items, all of which work together, after a time.

When the news comes to you, as a journalist:

Does it matter where a story comes from, as long as it makes the news? Apparently it doesn’t matter at all, to many of the latest crop of journalism students who believe their smart phones hold the keys to truth.

[…]

Today’s journalism students are like no other, in that they were born with a smartphone in one hand and ear pods in the other. The world comes to them, not the other way around. I did not expect that this would have a profound effect on their approach to newsgathering — after all, writing the news is simply the act of telling a story objectively and very well — but it has.

[…]

At first I was horrified. Then I realized they never have known a time when information was not immediate and in their face, screaming for attention. When there is so much of it, a person begins to believe it’s real, no matter where it comes from. But that doesn’t make it accurate.

[…]

This is where I deliver the bad news: It doesn’t matter how fancy the video is, how glossy the pictures are, how compelling the mystery voices in the background may be. Be very, very careful. Step back and think about it. Your temptation is nothing new, I confess, it’s been mine, too.

I refer you back to the Carvin feature at the top of the post. How, though, does one be very, very careful? Being skeptical is a natural skill for some, but others have to learn.

Kansas State professor Michael Welsh, on critical thinking and going beyond, from knowledgeable to knowledge-able:

If you like that topic by Welsh run right out and search for more of his material. It is fascinating, direct and applicable material.

Quick hits: Understanding the psychology of Twitter, by way of infographic. How do you write about the death of an important man few have heard of? A rock ‘n’ roll obituary. Finding the emotional photograph. Local television is expanding once again. Though not to pre-cut levels.

journalism / links / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off
7
Jul 11

Here’s my hypothesis

And believe me, I have plenty of them …

But this one is basic, straightforward and a bit important: Those who can’t understand Twitter, should reconsider basic communication skills.

Consider these anecdotes, though any you may find will do:

President Obama’s social media gabfest, which swamped the Twitterverse with thousands of responses yesterday, was touted as a rare chance for any citizen to put questions to the Leader of the Free World — but turned out to be just another high-tech, tightly controlled campaign stunt, experts said yesterday.

Or:

Brand new format, same old answers. Reams of hype, most of it delivered in 140-character chunks, couldn’t make President Obama’s Twitter town hall on Wednesday as exciting as promised.

The hour-long event proved to be even less interesting than the average town hall.

Further:

Associated Press journalists have tweeted opinions about the Casey Anthony trial and the New York Senate vote on gay marriage, says Tom Kent, AP Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Production. “These [two] posts undermine the credibility of our colleagues who have been working so hard to assure balanced and unbiased coverage of these issues,” he writes in a memo. “AP staffers should not make postings there that amount to personal opinions on contentious public issues.”

These are two varied issues, to be sure, but the hypothesis applies. Understanding Twitter includes understanding the strengths and weaknesses. A 140-character format isn’t the place for diffuse, verbose language, like a candidate desperate to hit his campaign points. One must be brief, concise. (All of the things this place isn’t, come to think of it.)

Most importantly, however, one must know that Twitter is simply a conversation.

Which brings us to that last anecdote. Niki Doyle, the social media editor at The Huntsville Times, asked what I thought about the Associated Press memo. They’re chided their employees from voice opinions in social media, saying “anyone who works for AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP’s reputation as an unbiased source of news.”

Assume, for this conversation, that you find the vast Associated Press unbiased in their coverage. Perhaps you do, perhaps you don’t. But assume.

This policy doesn’t think you can differentiate between human and AP, and not transpose an individual’s opinion to the entire organization. And the policy, while admittedly starting from a difficult spot, demonstrates they don’t yet understand social media (including Twitter). This is a conversation.

The memo demonstrates they don’t trust their people. Most importantly, it suggests they don’t trust their audience to understand the human/reporter conversation-opinion/journalism dynamic.

These two just happened to come along within a few moments of one another today. As I said, find your anecdote; consider the implications. This isn’t the largest issue the White House or the Associated Press (or any other organization) has to deal with, but it is an important one.

Linky things: Atlantis, from the pad. Robert Pearlman, who took that photo, runs collectSPACE which boasts both an unfortunate caps lock issue, but great space content. Do check him out.

Speaking of space, sometimes you see the heavens just a bit differently from somewhere on our pleasant little rock. This time lapse may do it for you. It won the STARMUS astro-photography competition.

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

Breathtaking.

Just like tomorrow’s launch, I’m sure.

adventures / iPhone / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off
30
Jun 11

We’re catsitting

Strange to see two black cats in one house. Imagine how it must be for them. Our guest resembles Allie, who lets us hoomans live with her. The new guy is still technically a kitten, but bigger than the feline that runs the joint.

From the Twitter updates:

Between his whining and our cat’s growl it sounds like we have puppies. Will provide updates.

Allie, our cat, is occupying the high ground.

If cats had a vocabulary, the word our cat and the visitor learned this afternoon would have been “pensive.”

There was a harsh staredown between the cats. No accident that the toy dynamite stick was between them …

Honest: They stared. Played The Good, The Bad and the Ugly theme. Our cat won!

There was just a yelp like a high-pitched air drill. Cat territory is thus sharply defined.

Allie is eating the visiting cat’s food, which is kitten junk food. Also she constantly knows the intruder’s whereabouts.

More on this tense situation as the story develops …

It is fine, for the most part. Our visitor is inquisitive, but congenial. Jumps on everything. Allie wants nothing to do with him, though. And for the most part he’s willing to stare at her, be startled and then go run and hide. Still a kitten. They’ll work it out, though. He’ll look back upon those few days he spent that one summer with that older cat.

She’ll hate us for days.