video


26
Sep 12

Journalism, Avengers, something for everyone

Did you know that the history of video has recently been re-written?

British photographer Edward Raymond Turner patented color motion picture film in 1899, but the credit for the first fully functional system went to George Albert Smith’s Kinemacolor in 1906. Researchers at the National Media Museum recently discovered that Turner had in fact shot a few rolls of color film that were languishing in the museum’s archives and set out to see if they worked.

Edward Raymond Turner had no idea in 1899 that you would see this:

From the first parrot, the first people shot in color, to the biggest blockbuster of 2012, re-imagined by the people at Honest Trailers:

A friend had this to say about that trailer:

OK, as a Marvel pseudo-expert, allow me to punch some holes in this “honest” trailer. First, Bruce Banner has ALWAYS been able to turn into the Hulk, just not the other way around. He spends most of his life trying NOT to turn into the Hulk. If you want misunderstood character, see Edward Norton’s Hulk. Anger is what sets off the Hulk, not heart rate. However, in the very first Hulk comic, he changed whenever it turned night. Back stories change. But this one got it right.

Second, every true comic fan knows who Thanos is. If you don’t know who Thanos is, then you aren’t a fan, you are someone who went to see a movie. And that’s fine. But don’t hate because you like superheroes with S’s and bats on their chest so you know who to root for.

Third, Loki didn’t die at the end of Thor, he just let go. He’s a god. He’s immortal. He also has inter-dimensional teleportation capability, see character back story.

And that’s what happens when the comic book set chimes in.

Story about news of the day: Alex Green is the editor of the student newspaper at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn. One of his professors, he learned, was leaving school. Green started looking into into the public records and learned the professor was facing of “having attempted to meet with a minor child” at a gas station. He wrote a story. School president Dr. Stephen Livesay ordered it killed.

So he publised it himself, out of his own money. He also emailed a PDF version. As you might expect, all of this earned a big reaction.

All of that to get you to the latest, from Jim Romenesko:

This morning I talked to Bryan College Triangle adviser John Carpenter and asked: Are you aware that Alex Green called and asked me to remove the post?

The adviser said he was.

Did you or someone else at the college tell him to make that call? I asked.

“I can’t comment on that,” Carpenter said.

OK, that answers that question, I thought. (Someone else I talked to this morning believes the editor “has been guilted” by the college president to believe he did something wrong by publishing a story about a professor charged with trying to hook up with a minor. Green hasn’t returned a message that I left this morning.)

And that, friends, is a president big timing a student. (For even more, here are notes from a meeting the president had in the aftermath. He would not allow that meeting to be recorded because he can flex that particular puny muscle.)

Update: Now President Livesay says “In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.”

Yes sir. For all sorts of reasons. First, while The Triangle is a class project, and thus under the purview of the administration, Green published this of his own accord after you shut him down. Second, you overreached in your reaction with regard to the intrepid young report. Third, from the university’s PR perspective you’ve now made this much bigger for you than it had to be.

Sure, this is a private school, and we can talk all about the case law. But there should be more to the ethical and moral leadership of students than the case law. The good folks at Bryan, as Dr. Livesay said tried “doing the right thing to protect the privacy of a man charged, but not convicted, of a crime” briefly forgot about their other obligation. Seems that everything is being righted now.

By the way, the Student Press Law Center has a great guide for private school media.

Quick links: When the Tuscaloosa News won their Pulitzer last year for tornado coverage, an important part of that was how they used Twitter. But don’t tell the Associated Press, which is vowing to not break news on social media.

Moving away from their paywall, The Times and the Sunday Times will allow their stories to be indexed by Google, or at least the headlines and the lead. They’ll come around.

Facebook discovers re-targeting, which ad-sellers have been using for years.

From Neiman, something we’ve been saying for a while, too, students really need to know digital research. In some respects, this is a “Can you find it?” era.

On my Samford blog I wrote about perception and elisions as they pertain to quote accuracy.

A picture! On my Tumblr! And more things, of course, on Twitter.

And, now, for no reason whatsoever, a shot of the fountain in Ben Brown Plaza on the Samford University campus this afternoon:

fountain

I work in a beautiful place.


20
Sep 12

The evolving journalism pedagogy

“The ‘fundamentals’ of anything are challenging simply because so much else rests on their shoulders,” wrote professor Chris Arnold. It works nicely with the popular line “I don’t teach software, I teach skills.” Professor Mindy McAdams went a step further this week in a Nieman Lab essay, imploring readers to train young journalists to be lifelong learners:

Most of them chose journalism because they like to write. Anything that involves HTML, CSS, code, or programming makes many of them almost shut down, shrink away, move toward the door. We have all kinds of challenges in journalism education, but this one is front and center, right now. It’s not just students’ avoidance of things perceived to be somehow math-related. It’s also:

Reluctance to spend time exploring something that doesn’t have an explicit or immediate payoff

Skepticism or negative attitude toward any task that’s not spelled out in detail

The tendency to give up and say “I can’t” or “I don’t know how”

Preoccupation with a process, such as writing, instead of with stories

This applies to storytelling as much as to technology. Any time a student says “You didn’t tell us we had to do that” in a conversation about a poor grade on a story, you’re hearing evidence of this challenge. The more students insist on explicit instructions, the further they are from independence.

You could do something by rote requirement of a class, but there’s no critical thinking there.

Students can thrive from learning how to evaluate which skills are best for any given story. (I’ve yet to have a sophomore intuitively understand how they might leverage the huge strength of their Facebook account for their journalism, for example.) They need to be encouraged to experiment with new tools. They must learn to overcome the fear of ruining sites or databases or equipment. (You aren’t inclined to tinker if tech intimidates you.) They have to learn how to discern which medium, methods and tools are the best for their particular story. When they do, you get independent thought and critical thinking.

None of these things involve just showing them what is useful here or there. Far better to help students realize those things themselves because a successful career requires a healthy curiosity to stay in the curve. The newsrooms from which they retire in 40 years won’t be anything like the first ones they’ll enter today, after all.

McAdams also mentions Ira Glass, who has some points worth digesting:

I try to encourage enthusiasm among students because it can carry over into their studies and work. Real education comes from understanding the joy of learning.

That’s pretty fundamental.

In other news I’m fighting muscle spasms around my shoulder again. I’ll be fully recovered in another month. And the pain will go away by Christmas, he said. I should have thought to ask the surgeon how long the spasms will last.

If you spend enough time on a heating pad you don’t have much to write about here. Go figure.

So this, a helpful cross section of the people representing us at the presidential conventions.

Clearly video and poking fun at them is the proper way to tell this story. Have a lovely evening.


13
Sep 12

High School Journalism Workshop

Each fall we host several hundred students from across the region for a day on the Samford campus. We bring in industry leaders, mix them with our faculty and try to give the high school students a day of fun and a little learning.

Here are a few pictures.

Dr. Dennis Jones talks about newspaper design:

workshop

Samford alumnae, and CBS 42 reporter, Kaitlin McCulley leads a large session on broadcast reporting:

workshop

Kyle Whitmire, who recently joined The Birmingham News and al.com, talks about online journalism to this group:

workshop

Samford’s senior photographer, Caroline Summers talks about digital photojournalism. (Naturally I take a shaky picture of this.)

workshop

Buddy Roberts of The Leeds News & St. Clair News-Aegis has a full house for his sports reporting session.

workshop

Birmingham News business reporter Marty Swant discusses intermediate reporting.

workshop

Finally, and joined in progress, here is Dr. Julie Williams, who leads a session on beginning writing. She illustrates her first point by making peanut butter sandwiches. The people in the session have to help her.

What you don’t see is their order to open the bread. She grabs the back and rips it apart, flinging the bread everywhere. They tell her to tear off a paper towel, and she pinches off a corner of one sheet.

I edited that on my phone, while walking from one building to the next. This technology still amazes me.

There were other sessions, but they were all opposite mine, so I could not visit them. I talked about building an organization, staffing the newsroom and the various challenges and successes you have in school newsrooms. It was so gripped my room stayed three extra minutes.


11
Sep 12

How turtles talk

I taught a class on Associated Press style and on visual journalism this afternoon. I showed the students this video:

I use it a lot. It is very touching and incredibly moving. It is relatable. It has a lot of great production elements, video and photographs. Color and black and white. It tells a story from beginning to end. There is music, which I see as a mileage may vary kind of thing. I don’t think it is really necessary, but it is clear where they are going with it.

The best parts are where the producers interject in the story and where they are smart enough to stay out of the way. There’s an art to that.

We watched this unembeddable slideshow from NPR, too. In it we meet Steve Campbell and his Iraqi bride as they negotiate the day to day struggle to make a life for themselves in Missouri. Natural sound, coordination of the audio and the visual, and the everydayness just make an interesting story.

We tend to overlook those sometimes.

Therapy this evening, pushing small weights up and down, or left and right as the circumstance required. Rode a bit on a bike. Cleaned up, had dinner, went back into the office.

Tonight the student-journalists at the Crimson are putting their first paper of the year to bed. We start the school year a bit later than most, and we’re a weekly, so it feels like a late beginning, but we’ve used most of the time well.

There is a lot to learn, we have a young staff this year, but they are all eager to do good work, and that’s the key. Also, having fun. They introduced me to mershed perderders which, approaching midnight, was funnier than it should have been. I did not know turtles have such poor diction.

Tomorrow the students get to see the fruits of their labors. Just as exciting as the first night of layout is the unheralded first critique of the year.


6
Sep 12

What do drills, churches and ice chests have in common?

Sounds you don’t want to hear at your surgeon’s office: an electric drill.

Not just a drill powering a bit pushing a screw through wood, but that screeching screw in a knot and the drill doesn’t have enough mustard to force it through sound of shrillness.

That was late today. One of the ortho’s assistants was impressed to note I was not in a brace, but it has been a while. She didn’t know the case. She did tell me to be careful climbing onto the examination bed, so maybe she did know the case.

Anyway, took another X-ray. The doctor asked me to raise my hand over my head, I can. He asked me to put my hand behind my head. I can. He said he was pleased with my progress and that I was making an excellent recovery.

I told him I’ve felt pretty good the last few days, at least when I don’t overdo it. I’m having muscle spasms, but we think that might be the driving.

He told me the pain will go away by Christmas.

In happier news, I work on a beautiful campus:

ReidChapel

That’s A. Hamilton Reid Chapel, which I’ve posted here a few times before. It was built in the image of the first Baptist church built in the Americas which was, apparently, in Rhode Island. You can see the resemblance.

The coolest science video you’ll see today, where a Stanford scientist explains how his team’s research is besting steroid-enhanced performance.

“What we can do” he says in the video, “by extracting heat from one hand, is we can dramatically improve performance.”

So we’re all re-purposing our ice chests this weekend, right?