The nice people at Verge Pipe Media asked me to visit with them today to talk about storytelling and multimedia tools. I had a nice time. I hope they did.
I’d built an entire slideshow presentation, complete with silly and memorable clip art. Didn’t use it. Did talk about finding the real story in the story and the value of knowing which tool to use to tell the story. We talked about writing and, for the interns, the skill set that the job market is looking for today.
I was asked about the need for quality, which was a great topic in the slideshow that we didn’t get to. I used this example:
No video so far of tonight’s 8:30p CT bright fireball/meteor that streaked over the southern sky. Hundreds of reports from 5 states
Those two words “so far” are an important illustration of where we are. We have gone from “Oh wow, there’s video!?” to “Of course there’s video” in just a few years.
I used my wild west metaphor. I used the industry standards example. I was able to quote author Rick Atkinson’s great analytical line about “a great sorting out.” (Only he was discussing World War II in North Africa.) That let me suggest that we are in, or are approaching, the end of the beginning. And to stand out, the quality now matters because the expectation is that it will exist. Most everything is documented in some way these days. “Good enough” is close to becoming outmoded. How we tell stories now makes all the difference.
The owner gave me some very nice compliments.
Great day @VergePipe_Media started with @kennysmith speaking to the team. Made me miss Lewis Grizzard. That's the best compliment I have.
Physical therapy after that. The therapist got almost all of the problems out of the right shoulder, which were really about my neck. We did the suddenly familiar exercises for the left side to deal with the actual and persistent problem.
You know how the Internet has given us the movie re-cut art form? We can close the genre:
Returned to see the new orthopedic surgeon today after our first meeting two weeks ago and the bone scan last week. The first good news remains that I did not grow wings or a third eye or gain a mutant power from the radiology. Not that I expected I would. The radiologist said that rarely happens. One assumes that we’re in the clear there, especially since it didn’t come up when the doctor today discussed the results of the scan.
So he’s looking at the collarbone area, the purpose of the scan being to rule out any bone problems. He said there are none. He probably said some other things, but I stopped listening. It is one thing to see your own bones. It is another to see your own skull.
At the end of the day we can say the bone is fine. And your own skull is creepy.
Now we’ve ruled out nerves, rotator cuff and the bones. We’re down to the hardware and muscular problems. The hardware is an issue, but as I told the doctor, if your magic wand only works once I’d say let’s use it on the shoulder.
So he’s sending me to more physical therapy, a different set of therapists. The phrase I get to use now is scapular stabilization dysfunction. The doctor keeps saying that an accident such as mine involved a great deal of physical trauma.
Because, 14 months later, you want more therapy and a three-word title attached to your problem. (I don’t mean to complain, but … ) We agreed that my shoulder and its recovery have not reached their optimal condition. The good news is that, being muscular, there is improvement to be had. So we’re pleased with that.
Conveniently the new therapy center is close by the doctor’s office, so we set that up. I get to start next week.
Alabama’s 2013 summer went into the books as one of the coolest summers in the 131-year record, with an average high temperature that was almost 2° cooler than seasonal norms.
How cool was it?
For the three months of “meteorological” summer no station in Alabama hit 100 degrees. If that holds up (we won’t have all of the temperature data for a few days and the folks at the Southeastern Regional Climate Center are keeping an eye out), this summer will be only the fourth time that has happened since 1883. The others were 1965, 1994 and 2001.
Three times in the last 20 years. Most unusual.
And now, all you need to know about foreign policy as it relates to Syria in four videos:
He didn’t …
Except when he did …
The guy that works for him says so …
And this, the most egregious of it all:
Someone approached our top diplomat and said “We’ll pay for it.” And he said, “OK.”
As opposed to kicking them out of the room or hanging up on them or pointing out that this would make us mercenaries.
Shameful.
Oh, and it sounds less and less like that piece of adventurism would simply be cruise missiles from the sea:
Securing Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles and the facilities that produced them would likely require the U.S. to send more than 75,000 ground troops into the Middle Eastern country, MailOnline learned Wednesday.
That estimate comes from a secret memorandum the U.S. Department of Defense prepared for President Obama in early 2012.
U.S. Central Command arrived at the figure of 75,000 ground troops as part of a written series of military options for dealing with Bashar al-Assad more than 18 months ago, long before the U.S. confirmed internally that the Syrian dictator was using the weapons against rebel factions within his borders.
Tim Siedell has the final word:
Scarlett Johansson is engaged. And just like that I'm fine with bombing Syria. Bomb everywhere. I don't care anymore.
Fred Stobaugh, whose wife Lorraine died in April, has no previous musical experience and wrote the song on a whim for a competition.
He submitted his handwritten lyrics by post and, although the contest was online-only, the organisers were so moved they put the words to music.
Oh Sweet Lorraine is number seven on US iTunes and has 1.9m YouTube views.
Billboard magazine said the song had sold 6,000 copies so far, placing it at number 49 in its rock digital songs sales chart.
The track is also in the iTunes charts for Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg.
There’s a short film about it. If you read the above, at least watch the second half:
He’s not a songwriter, or a musician, or a singer. So when the studio brought him the song he was hearing it for the first time. You almost feel like you can see it all, almost 75 years, right there in his eyes.
Are there covers? Can we turn this unexpected hit and lovely story into another installment of YouTube Cover Theater? There are covers.
And that’s enough to get us off to the weekend. Hope yours is great!
One of the first emails I received this morning was the first I’ve received on the Affordable Health Care Act. It included this line: “Unfortunately, we do not have details on the exchange coverage or the rates to share with you at this time.”
And this starts in October.
Though, right off the top, there are $65 in fees, and “we do not yet know what the rate increase will be.”
Thanks, Congress.
So I wrote our hard working and now long suffering HR director and asked a few specific questions. You can imagine the stress that gentleman is under.
In the evening I received this tweet:
Was so scared to drive within 20 ft of a biker today in fear that it was @kennysmith because MY GRADE IS IN HIS HANDS. #heholdsgrudges
I tell my students “One of the perks of being in the front of the class is having your pet issues. Here’s mine. Be careful of cyclists. Move over three feet,” and so on. Be careful when you pass them, I say, because you never know when it will be me and I get to grade you.
This joke always does pretty well. And she laughed at it, too.
Someone asked me on Facebook one day how to pass a cyclist. I got it down to five hints:
First: Wait. Just a second. Let a little road get out in front of him or her. She has the same rights the car does, etc.
Second: Know that waiting for 15 seconds until oncoming traffic doesn’t exist isn’t going to make you late.
Third: Just ease over to your left and pass, when clear. Some cities have a three-foot law. Think of that: that’s an arm length, but do err on the side of wider berths when you can. (Not everyone is a champion bike handler.)
Fourth: You don’t have to honk your horn. Unless you are driving an electric, I can hear you.
The programming director at Shoals Radio Group said he is puzzled how a promotional for a local radio station managed to excite many students and parents into believing bombs would be exploding today at area schools.
Rumors of school safety being in jeopardy have steadily increased since promotionals began Monday to bring attention to a format change at Star 94.9. The rumors prompted some parents to keep their children at home today instead of having them attend class as usual. Police and school officials also increased patrols in some schools in an effort to ease fears.
[…]
The promotional, which will continue until Friday when the format change is officially announced, is built around the thought that aliens have taken over the radio station and are trying to figure out what type music appeals to humans.
You can hear the promos here. How people got worked up about them remains a mystery. “Aliens with perfect diction!”
Every now and thenSpencer Hall feels the need to prove he’s a better writer than the rest of us. Give the guy a good story and watch him work. Read this (too long) excerpt and you’ll need to know the rest:
Kurt Vonnegut said that his chief objection to life in general was that it was “too easy, when alive, to make horrible mistakes.” This is what offensive line coaches live with: the notion that for every five simple circles drawn on a board, there are a nearly infinite number of possible threats looming out in the theoretical white space. Offensive plays give skill players arrows. Those arrows point down the field toward an endzone, a stopping point, a celebration. Those five simple circles stay on the board in the same place, and are on duty forever.
They are rough men in the business of protection.
Herb Hand is an offensive line coach at Vanderbilt University, where he might not even be were it not for a long line of random events. Hand got a job at Glenville State under Rich Rodriguez in 1994, a team whose base offense–the spread option that redefined modern football–depended on a play that in itself was the result of an accident, the zone read. A quarterback simply pulled the handoff from the running back, read the defensive end, and turned a mistake into deliberate and deadly strategy. Other coaches might have dismissed it entirely. Rodriguez did not, and now it is run at every level of the game from Pop Warner to the NFL.
Hand would work under Rodriguez at Clemson, and then followed him to West Virginia when Rodriguez was hired to replace Don Nehlen. Hand would recruit, coach tight ends, and recruit, and do all of that in exactly that order, because recruiting is an important activity that sometimes is interrupted by bouts of college football. One of the places Hand recruited was the talent-glutted state of Florida, including Orlando, where on April 27th, 2006 something would hit him in the back of the head with an axe.
The axe blow to the back of the head was a different kind of pain than normal.
And then you finish that story and you think: Great, that’s how we start football season. With teary eyes.
Which is fine, I guess, because we have football. You know, I’ve waited almost my entire life to enjoy picture-in-picture. The technology was rolled out in 1983. I’ve had two televisions that had the tech, but never had the necessary cable setup. Now, on this second television to feature PIP we finally have the opportunity to use it — and during football season! — and I can only manage to watch the same game twice.
But Gatorade ads look great when you see them in double vision!
So picture in picture is, so far, disappointing. And the New Directv setup lasted seven quarters of football, watching and switching between channels, before quitting. So there was a call to tech support. They flipped the magic switch and unkinked the hose on their end. A reset and a reboot later and it works again. Hope we’re not doing that all fall.
Even if we are they’re already proving more competent than Charter ever was.
We’ve been watching the last quarter of the 2010 football season on DVD as a way of preparing for the college football season, which opens tomorrow night. Last night we saw the SEC championship game, which I think I only saw the one time, live. It was an emotional thing, that day. Still fairly stirring.
Tonight we watch the national championship against Oregon. It has its drama, but it isn’t terribly exciting in some respects. Knowing the outcome is, of course, anticlimactic in a small way. The win was the thing, but that SEC championship game was the most complete effort of that amazing season. And knowing what it meant, and knowing it came at Darth Spurrier’s expense made it all the better.
All of which is to say nothing new, except this. It was this video that really made me look forward to this season.
Ronnie Brown is a bad man. (Hard to believe it has been nine years since some of that footage was shot.) The New York Restoration Choir sounds great. Bring on the football.
Would you like a bit of history? NPR has a great piece on what was one of the rhetorical inspirations for Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. You can hear it! I knew the provenance of the imagery, but I’d never heard the original speech before. It is fascinating in every way, though that’s not really the voice I imagined Pastor Archibald Carey Jr. having. Give it a listen.
NASA is looking for a rock. It’s got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can’t be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can’t be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can’t be a speed demon. And it shouldn’t be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile.
The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA’s human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people.
It just doesn’t sound like the same agency in some ways, but there is some boldness in the plan, if you read on.
Here’s a conversation that delves into the origins of online scholastic journalism. Before WordPress, before a lot of tools, you had to hand-code everything. Now, not so much:
Yet there persists an odd notion that a newspaper staff is more deserving of awards for its online journalism and that its online work is more authentic if they built their website or even their WordPress theme themselves. There’s a confusion in this logic –– a failure to distinguish the tool from the content; we only tend to see this confusion when working with newer tools. No one would question the value of using a word processing tool and writing on a computer over using a typewriter. No one would question the value of using desktop publishing software and new printing technology over hand-set type. No one would question the value of a photo taken with a digital camera over one taken with a film camera and printed in a darkroom. That’s because we’ve recognized that Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs, InDesign, PhotoShop, and digital SLR cameras are tools that allow our students to do better work.
We now need to make that same recognition with our understanding of WordPress and its templates. Buying a good WordPress template is the same as buying Adobe CS7 or buying a new digital SLR camera. CS7 won’t create your design for you, a camera won’t take its own pictures, and a WordPress template won’t write and publish stories, photos, and videos in a timely and relevant manner. New tools create new efficiencies and new opportunities –– they allow us to report better, write better, design better, and connect with our audiences better, and our national contest and critique standards need to evolve to reflect the new realities of the tools used for web publishing.
I bolded my favorite part. This debate isn’t restricted to online tools designed for efficiency versus the most laborious method possible. Value the journalism over the tool, or the medium for that matter.
One more PBS thing, a series of serious and concerted thoughts on a digital curriculum from Dr. Cindy Royal:
what I am proposing is curriculum in which digital is the foundation, and the basic skills of writing, reporting and editing are injected into digitally focused courses, as opposed to inserting a digital lesson or two into traditional classes.
Most programs have courses at their core that introduce basic skills, things like Media Writing, Media Law and Introduction to Mass Communication. Other programs also require courses in Media History or Mass Media and Society. I propose we flip and reconfigure these courses with a digital emphasis.
That’s worth a read if you’re interested in journalism or pedagogy.
Did I mention I renamed my work blog? I renamed my work blog. Made it a little more inclusive, avoids any university branding concerns and just sounds more vaguely fun. So check out the creatively titled Multimedia Links. Several new posts this week as we’ve gotten back to the classroom:
