Journalism, journalism, journalism. My day was just eaten up with the stuff.
All of the Sandy material in the world, it must be read, if not looked at. I find it harder and harder to look at hurricane damage. Tornado damage isn’t easy, but hurricanes, I’d rather just look away, if only I was allowed. Sometimes the work supersedes the want. Tornado damage, though, has a different scope. Devastating, sure, but to fewer people. The volume of a hurricane’s destruction is hard to comprehend and that can be a lot to bear.
Tornadoes? Not quite as bad. Or at least that’s what I thought until the giant tornado carved a path between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham last year. I’ve watched a lot of tornadoes. Chased a few, even. Seeing that monster on television was hard to watch, though. This one, from the ground during the same storm, I’ll never forget. The rotation is just behind the mall and you can tell from the shot how hard they were fighting against the wind. Those are just tornadoes, though, right?
The humanistic response outweighs the journalistic impulse and I think I’d be happy never to cover a hurricane, thanks. Just look at the scale:
Showed that in class today. And then we did Associated Press style for the rest of the afternoon. Then I had to give an interview to a student who is working on a project about the phone hacking scandal in London. She was a freshman, but she’s clearly done a lot of research and put a lot of thought into the project. It was a pleasant surprise. I figured we’d talk about ethics and process. Behave better, this is how this is supposed to work. She wanted to talk about organization. OK then, there were many corrupted people acting unscrupulously, and it seems to go all the way to the top.
From time to time someone wants to come and interview me about how some aspect of the working media operates. That’s wonderful and we should have more of that. This young lady pulled out her digital recorder and her pages of notes and I knew I was going to be talking for a while. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully I gave her something useful. And so we did.
Then, of course, tonight is the night the student-journalists put out their paper, too. So I stuck around for that so I could answer important stylistic questions like “Do you like this? Or that?”
There’s also reading things like:
Lance Armstrong shows why the disruption in journalism matters
Journalism ethics in a digital age
And my favorite, Drone journalism set for takeoff – once they’re permitted to use our airspace
I want one:
And here’s an entry-level, legal in the U.S. model, the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 It has limited range and altitude, of course, but it also has two cameras on it.
Here’s a video from a slightly more expensive make, shooting footage over Detroit:
Clearly you could get some great storm damage footage this way.
