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links / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Move fast, move slow, so long as you move
22
Apr 15

Move fast, move slow, so long as you move

When we did the half Ironman in Augusta last year I realized one place where those races do a disservice to the athletes. They shut down the relief area too early. That’s not a knock on the support staff there, some person has stretched or massaged 100s of sweaty people in an endurance sport of their own and probably wants to go home. But those people that come in slow, and late, they’ve been on the course for a long time, and they deserve that support too.

That’s about the third thing I thought of when I learned of Maickel Melamed, who knocked down the Boston Marathon over the course of 20 hours. Also, he has muscular dystrophy, and he was out to prove something about Boston, and also about his spirit:

So the rest of us really are running out of excuses, aren’t we?

If, like me, you’ve been feeling a bit older than normal later, let’s take one more item away. 76-year-old man running 8 marathons in 8 days across Alabama:

“You meet a bunch of interesting people and you see a bunch of interesting things,” he said. “That’s what keeps me doing it.”

I should really stop looking up excuse antidotes.

I’m going to spend the next little while thinking about creating a job like this:

What does your role as lead news editor for mobile entail? Are you in charge of news about mobile developments? Or are you responsible for news content delivered on mobile?

Banks: I was hired to help reporters and editors think about how they could create unique content for mobile and content that’s optimized for mobile. So no news about mobile, but rather creating and optimizing news delivered on mobile platforms. That includes everything from working with designers and developers to building new templates for content on mobile, then teaching editors how to use those templates, to working toward making sure, for example, graphics that we publish work on mobile. I also will jump in and pitch ideas aimed at mobile — like an interactive about smartphone ergonomics that readers access on their phone, and by playing a little game and performing tests in this interactive could determine whether their phone is too big or too small for their hand.

I could see that being a fun position for the right journalist. One of the really neat things about it would be that, in many newsrooms, the person in that position would be blazing their own trail.

More and more content is going that way, no matter how fast or slow the rest of us move.

history / photo / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on A quick run through the hodge podge
21
Apr 15

A quick run through the hodge podge

They built a time machine in Manhattan. And it is fantastic. Just fantastic.

We should see to it that every elevator has this technology.

Speaking of going back in time, journalist Ernie Pyle was killed this week in 1945. He was the kind of journalist I want to be when I grow up — the traveling all over the country and meeting people and writing about them part, not the war zone part. But Pyle could write about war. He could write about loss. He could write about minutiae in the face of tragedy. And he could write about regular people. He could write about anything.

I’d never heard this story about the piece that inspired a young Pyle:

If any one thing inspired him, during this period, it was Kirke Simpson’s news story on the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery. Simpson was an Associated Press reporter.

“I cried over that,” Pyle told friends later, “and I can quote the lead or almost any part of the piece.”

Kirke Simpson, as an old AP man, won the Pulitzer for the piece Pyle was talking about, the first wire service writer to win the Prize. And that piece is an incredible piece of literature and history. The lead Pyle mentions:

Under the wide and starry skies of his own homeland America’s unknown dead from France sleeps tonight, a soldier home from the wars.

Alone, he lies in the narrow cell of stone that guards his body; but his soul has entered into the spirit that is America. Wherever liberty is held close in men’s hearts, the honor and the glory and the pledge of high endeavor poured out over this nameless one of fame will be told and sung by Americans for all time.

Toward the end:

Through the religious services that followed, and prayers, the swelling crowd sat motionless until it rose to join in the old, consoling Rock of Ages, and the last rite for the dead was at hand. Lifted by his hero-bearers from the stage, the unknown was carried in his flag-wrapped, simple coffin out to the wide sweep of the terrace. The bearers laid the sleeper down above the crypt, on which had been placed a little soil of France. The dust his blood helped redeem from alien hands will mingle with his dust as time marches by.

The simple words of the burial ritual were said by Bishop Brent; flowers from war mothers of America and England were laid in place.

In between, and after, is a journalistic tour de force. They should read that at the tomb every Veteran’s Day.

There are photographs and more AP copy from the ceremonies here.

Something fun … this is at Birmingham’s WBRC. Mickey Ferguson is the weatherman. Swell guy, lots of fun. Wonderfully comical. And this other gentleman stole the show:

And also this, which brings two of my favorite themes together: the kids are alright and we live in the future:

Finally, spring at Samford is a wonderful time to be on campus. Here’s an example from earlier this afternoon:

spring

Not bad, huh? Hope it is a lovely spring wherever you are.

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.

Auburn / photo / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Wednesdays move swiftly
15
Apr 15

Wednesdays move swiftly

Another Wednesday, another full day. Class stuff in the morning, lunch, and then a class, which is immediately followed by another class. And then advertising phone calls and emails and faxes. (That’s how we upload.)

Then comes a few minutes to catch up on news and then student meetings. That’s followed closely by the newspaper critique, pictured below:

critique

critique

They are a swell group. Sharp, engaging, witheringly funny. They’re doing good journalism, too. If you need some promising young reporters, it turns out I know a few.

I saw this late last night and wanted to share it here today. If you’re an Auburn person, or a sports fan, you likely knew that Philip Lutzenkirchen died last year. I met him three or four times. (I don’t hang out with those guys or chase them down, but small town, BMOC and all that.) He was smart, handsome, talented, a nice fellow, well liked, respected by his peers and his fans. I wrote one of the first things about him, along those lines, after he died.

His profs liked him too, as a person and a student. (One of The Yankee’s colleagues wrote a nice piece about him, too.) Lutzie was coaching at a high school and looking forward to his next chapter when he died. A stupid, dumb tragedy that killed two boys, one a promising young man in college at Georgia and his friend, a guy just out of Auburn and a kid himself.

From that, though, comes this, which is one of the more courageous things I can imagine. His father spoke at that first hometown memorial. And he’s taken this on as a mission. Within just a few weeks of losing his oldest kid he was in locker rooms talking to high schoolers and college students. I saw him pick a kid out of the crowd, talk to him for a few moments and then send him out of the room. “And just like that, he can be gone.” Mike Lutzenkirchen sharing a raw, real, candid kind of message because, he figures, he’s filling the hole.

So here he’s talking to a room of high school athletes this week. It’s beautiful and hard and real. And kids should hear it, bad as it is for anyone to have to speak it from their own terrible personal experience.

And far be for it me to tell Mr. Lutzenkirchen how to tell his family’s story, he mentions the prom example in that speech, but he undersold it. From the Department of The Kids are Alright, comes perhaps the sweetest story you’ll find today.

And since we are at the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, check out this cool slideshow from CNN.

I do not know what is happening. / music / photo / Samford / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Notes from the third floor
14
Apr 15

Notes from the third floor

The work on the campus cafeteria continues. The short version is they are renovating. And part of that renovation has involved gutting the center of the large room. So they had to erect an interior room, keeping the dust in and the food out. They built a dirty room, basically. They put in plexiglass windows so you can peer in and check out their work. I’m not sure if I’ve seen a lot of students doing that, but it is interesting to see what is happening inside on a weekly basis or so. On the outside, murals and other sanctioned graffiti are going up. Here’s some Seuss:

Seuss

I didn’t know there was such a thing as a drywall truck, but it makes sense if you think about it. Problem is, I never have. Nevertheless, here you go:

truck

Work, work, work. But it never seems enough, or finished. Hopefully it is good, at least.

I got in a fast 2,000 yards at the pool. Fast for me, that is. I was very pleased with myself because it took much less time in the aggregate. Let’s call that progress.

Pizza for dinner, a nice story involving a police officer around midday:

“I immediately started ripping apart the sink and the pipes. If you can only imagine losing your wedding ring – you can do anything with the adrenalin going through your body.”

The next thing she knew, other restaurant patrons joined her in the restroom. At one point, at least six people were in the bathroom trying to find the ring – in addition to those who just had to answer nature’s call.

They not only drew a crowd, they caught the attention of Hendrix who works an extra job at Al’s. Someone asked the kitchen staff for a long utensil, and Hendrix got curious. “The cop was like, ‘What the heck is going on?” Shannon said.

[…]

Hendrix may have sent Shannon on her way, but he certainly didn’t give up. He, along with the restaurant manager, called someone they thought could help. It was a small miracle, Hendrix said, when the trio heard the ring jingling somewhere deep down in the pipes.

But the officer’s work had only just begun. He didn’t know Shannon’s name, or the names of her friends. That’s when the detective work started.

One last thing, the man was an Alabama-native and a legend, and I thought he might live forever (mostly because, in my mind, he’s been about 70 for 25 years). But Percy Sledge’s passing should prompt you to check out at least a few of his live performances. The man was an incredible performer:

I saw him at a festival years ago, mostly because I remember a high school teacher of mine told me about the time she saw him in a blues bar in Mobile. He was singing that signature song, she said, and he did the chorus, “When a man loves a woman” 56 times. Always wanted to see something like that.

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