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Wednesday

Remembering Ottawa

Five years ago we were in Ottawa at a conference. It was a low key trip in a busy time. The conference only allowed for one paper each, so The Yankee and I got to be tourists. We took a walking tour of Ottawa one day, and it was lovely. The sky was overcast and chilly. We got snow flurries and red poppies for Veteran’s Day. We met exceedingly nice people at every turn. We walked through incredibly moving memorials and beautiful gothic revival architecture. It was, I said on Twitter today, a wonderful place to visit as an American. Some things I wrote that day:

We toured Parliament. I gave security fits. It seems the metal detectors there are set to the highest sensitivity. Wrists make them beep. Not watches, but the bones in your body. The security officers were very patient and polite, almost apologetic. But, then, everyone we’ve met in Ottawa has been unfailingly nice.

When we finally made it in we sat through a few minutes of the House of Commons, including their regular question period. We made our way up to the Peace Tower and Memorial Chamber. The Memorial Chamber is a very solemn, quiet place. So much so that I didn’t even take any photographs there. Everywhere else, yes, and they’ll eventually make it into the November gallery when I get that section of the site back up to speed.

The picture above is from the gift shop in the parliament building. The kids working the cash register were not prepared for my line of questions about the Speaker’s Selection syrup. Peter Milliken has been the speaker for forever, they said (since 2001) and so this has likely been the syrup since he took office.

How did he decide on this particular syrup?

“I think it was a blind taste test,” one young lady offered.

But surely not. Milliken is from Ontario, but imagine if he’d chosen a syrup from British Columbia in a blind test. That’d be a bit embarrassing. No, he probably brought his favorite from home. Surely this producer is among his constituency.

Unfortunately I couldn’t bring some home with us. The humorless TSA would not allow it. Perhaps I can order some online.

We visited a fancy mall while looking for hats. Turns out this was the coldest day of the season so far. It was 30 degrees with the occasional flurry and we were out taking pictures all day. The guy working the desk at our hotel directed us to the mall, telling us “You can’t get more Canadian than Roots.” He told us to look for a toque.

This was the sort of mall that made you feel poor just by walking inside. “Authentic Canadian” must mean fooling the Americans. Before we found Roots we found Old Navy. Figuring they would be cheaper we steered that way. Right next to Old Navy was a store called Buck or Two.

Why not? We walked in, found hats right up front and bought two of them. Four bucks.

We found Roots, found the toques. Twenty-six dollars, each.

On our way out of the mall I noted my hat couldn’t get any more American: Made in China.

Take that, desk clerk! You will not be getting any kickbacks tonight!

Sure, we’re staying at the downtown Radisson, but we booked through an online discount site. We = Cheap.

We met some striking museum curators — a noun and modifier that could lend itself to a great band name or a magazine layout. These nice, freezing folks were trying to get better wages and less contract labor in their field. Museum curators are important; these are being replaced, the woman said, by non-experts at a lower wage.

Not Canadian, but what can we do? They urged us to drop this note of protest in the mail to our representatives. My guy wasn’t on the mailing list, what with him living in a different country, but I picked a good sturdy English name from a place I’d like to visit and dropped him a note in the local postal system.

We also saw the Notre Dame Basilica. It is across the street from the art museum — we didn’t go — with the giant spider on the corner. If they make a Night at the Museum III they should start with that. Creepy.We saw black squirrels, the famous canal from which all of Ottawa sprang, Quebec on the other side of the river and some very nice, funky shops.

And, sadly, today all of that was locked down after a shooting at Parliament. It seems the Sergeant-at-Arms put a stop to the chaos. More details will emerge, but at this point one victim, a reservist, and the shooter are dead. The soldier was killed at the national war memorial. The shooter somewhere inside Parliament itself.

A writer wrote that this wasn’t supposed to happen in Canada. We can all sympathize; this sort of thing shouldn’t happen anywhere. Parliament member John Williamson wrote “Parliament Hill is never going to be the same.”

Sad to think of that.

Things to read … because there’s always something to think of.

One more note from Canada, these are the running announcements from the Ottawa police.

We see people starting to talk about this subject. I’ve mentioned it and linked to some essays here. Today is a good reminder that it is a conversation worth having. There are plenty of great points here. User Generated Content: time to consider the ethical conundrums as well as the opportunities:

Steve Herrmann says verification is the main challenge when dealing with user-generated content.

“The biggest challenge of all is establishing something is true and retaining peoples’ trust at a time when information is moving so fast it can be very, very hard to check.”

He says that although the speed of the news cycle makes verification difficult, newsrooms need to make sure it’s correct before publishing or broadcasting.

“Or at least if you’re not quite sure, you need to be very clear [about that]”

However, Claire Wardle says the phrase ‘we cannot independently verify this’ is doing a disservice to the audience.

“Until we sort that out, we’ll have content being run too quickly with these caveats, and this isn’t transparent,” she says, indicating that there needs to be more transparency when dealing with UGC.

It is booming. Inside Bloomberg Media’s digital video business:

Bloomberg.com’s desktop site racked up over 5.3 million unique video viewers in September, more than triple the amount it ran a year earlier, according to comScore. Making that more impressive, overall unique visitors to Bloomberg.com declined slightly during that period, from 8.7 million to 8.2 million. That’s important, considering Bloomberg fetches $75 CPMs for its video ads, according to Marcum.

“The world leaders in business are tremendously appealing to advertisers, and we have them,” he said.

These are ambitious numbers, and even if they are close to accurate … Worldwide Subscription Video-On-Demand To Grow Nearly 30% In Revenue In 2014:

Information research company Gartner expects consumer spending on SVOD services to grow 28.1% in 2014 and 18.2% in 2015. Gartner says spending on SVOD services in North America is on pace to improve 28.5% in 2014 and 18.6% in Western Europe. Emerging territories will see a 53% growth rate in 2014.

What Journalists Worry About in the Middle of the Night: I find items 10, 9 and then, ultimately, 2 particularly worrisome.

Thursday update: A cartoon from Halifax’s Chronicle Herald by Bruce MacKinnon, with proceeds from the reprints going to the family of the fallen soldier:

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15
Oct 14

The things that stick us

I’ve been wearing these for a while:

I’ve been wearing them for me, but hadn’t thought about what I would say if someone asked why I am wearing a pin. Why would anyone ask? Who would care?

I got pins for my mom and my cousin.

My lovely wife gets the idea, even if I’ve only just figured out why I got them.

My grandmother loved hummingbirds. And I am still not ready to think about this in the past tense.

My grandmother’s chair sits right beside the large picture window in her house. And outside, on the long porch, there are several hummingbird feeders. She could sit and watch them hover and fight all day long.

Her oldest friend laughed and told me how my grandmother was, every year, in a competition to get the first hummingbird visit. She delighted in calling and bragging about her hummingbird feeders because they brought the first birds and the biggest and the most colorful. And it was all, no doubt, owing to some secret ingredient (four times the recommended sugar, perhaps) that she put in the syrup.

So there was a hummingbird this and a hummingbird that at the funeral. I was looking for something to hang on to and got a pin for my mom and cousin and, ultimately, me. So I rotate through these four lapel pins. One day a student asked why I was wearing one and I struggled with that. The classroom isn’t the place for all that, after all. On Friday a coworker asked about it, and then that led to a conversation about her grandmother, which was nice.

Later that day, though, I figured all of this out.

It has been a few months — I can’t bear to count the days — but I miss her dearly and completely and in all things. These are the standard laments about time and things to be said and learned and easing the hurt of others close to her. Meanwhile the world moves and I feel stuck. It was days before this and weeks before that and now I’m at a couple of months of random emotional moments.

My mother-in-law said perhaps the most purposeful and explanatory thing on all of this, that the grandparent-grandchild bond is a strong and unique one. Every memory is a bird’s wing, every memory is a prompt and every prompt is a catch in the throat and a watery eye. There is always fluttering to do.

My personal framework is pretty basic: If I did this, would my mother approve? Would my grandmother? Maybe that’s silly, but it always served me well when I abided by it, the opinions of people that matter are important and formative and lasting.

Because of that, whether I was at her home, or living two or four or six hours away, my grandmother was always in my day, always helping or laughing or talking or fussing, always present.

Those little pins are a way of keeping her there.

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8
Oct 14

Oh, this is awkward, but deliberately so

In class today we talked about different story forms. I got to discuss the circle lead, one of the best tricks in a writer’s quiver. I’d use them all the time if I could, but if you don’t get it just right that arrow in your quiver becomes a whacky splinter, spinning out of control.

They have to be done well. There is an art to them. You see these often — the ending in some way refers back to the beginning, with a phrase or a callback so that your news story comes full circle — and some are definitely better than others.

(Watch, I’ll do a bad one below.)

There was a story in the Crimson about another awareness month — October is just full of them for some reason. Only in this particular one, nothing seems to be happening. But you are aware! There is a feature on Yik Yak. Our features editor interviewed the CEO. Turns out they know some of the same people. There was also a column comparing cats and engagement rings.

You can find them all, and more, on the site, which is due a relaunch here in the next few weeks. Looking forward to that.

Things to read … because I always look forward to reading.

We saw this in recruitment two years ago, but now it is “official.” Not sure if that’s because an investment firm did some research or that the research got written about in a paper, Teens are officially over Facebook

Somehow, I doubt this particular gentleman’s unfortunate story is far from over, Ebola patient in Dallas hospital dies

Meanwhile, Conn. Health Commissioner Granted Quarantine Power

And locally, CDC Sets Up Mock Ebola Ward Set Up In Alabama:

Time to put on the protective suits. The students use a buddy system to check each other as they pull on each piece of gear – boots, a jumpsuit, surgical gloves, head covering, facemask, apron. Heather Bedlion is a registered nurse and has worked in a disaster zone, but she’s never put on this amount of protection.

It sounds like protocol will mean everything.

Predictable, perhaps unavoidable, and sad, Turkey Refusing to Fight ISIS Right on Its Border

Don’t forget about these folks, South, North Korea ships fire shots at disputed sea border

And, here at home, Jimmy Carter unhappy with Obama’s policies in Middle East:

Carter said it was hard to figure out exactly what President Obama’s policy is in the Middle East.

“It changes from time to time,” Carter said. “I noticed that two of his secretaries of defense, after they got out of office, were very critical of the lack of positive action on the part of the president.”

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was the most recent to criticize Obama, in remarks he made to USA Today while promoting his new book, “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace.”

Carter acknowledged that the ISIS situation is complicated and he thinks the United States waited too long to respond.

“First of all, we waited too long. We let the Islamic state build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” he said. “Then when [ISIS] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.”

Carter is just stating facts, and the facts as he sees them. He’s always just a moment or two away from returning to that most annoying of political institutions, the critical ex-president.

Long has there been a tradition of great men — and even the lesser men that have held the office — of retiring and holding their tongues. Some people just can’t help themselves, though. Jimmy Carter can be one of those guys. Harry Truman was the same. And that’s, perhaps, the most Trumanesque thing he can muster. We’d perhaps all be better off if he simply returned to the great post-presidency work he’s done. That’s the strongest arrow in his quiver.

(See?)

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1
Oct 14

The unknown stories of things

We hope you enjoyed Catember. Allie enjoyed being famous on the Internet. It was another successful month of showing off, cat hijinx and being cute. Life is hard for a black cat.

She’s curled up sleeping somewhere as I write this.

What do you suppose this is?

I caught the quickest glimpse of it on the freeway. The left lane is closed for repaving. The big orange barrels that come with road work are jutting out into the newly redone right line far enough that you’re driving at least halfway onto the shoulder. Fortunately, that was recently paved as well. At least the traffic is moving through the area, and the work is high quality. It is one of three or four stretches of road construction between here and there on that interstate.

None of which explains what that device does. I think it might perhaps have something to do with lane marking, but you can’t see a paint container there.

Things to read … because … we have to fill our own paint containers?

How media outlets are ‘gamifying’ the news:

News organizations are increasingly turning to video games to attract online readers, especially younger ones. The games hold promise — not just in terms of generating more readers and traffic hits, but in terms of helping people understand and consume news in different ways.

[…]

“It’s important for us and our journalists to not allow a medium to develop that we’re not going to at least explore,” Anthony DeBarros, director of interactive applications at Gannett Digital, said in a Digiday story this week. “It’s important to understand how we can be a part of an emerging medium.”

There are several great examples of emerging ideas in that story, including work from the European Journalism Centre and Al Jazeera.

How newsrooms can make the most of their archives:

In 1950 William Faulkner wrote “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” in his novel Requium for a Nun. However, the quote gained renewed attention in 2008 when then-candidate Obama gave a major speech on race in America. Obama was tapping into the archives of American culture to add context to the news of the day and connect that moment to the long and troubled history of race in America.

The Internet has made this idea of the past living alongside – and interwoven with – the present more true now than ever. Today, even relatively new newsrooms have vast and quickly growing archives of work to tap into and build upon. These archives hold huge potential to add context to current events, fuel community engagement and even serve as a new revenue stream.

Tablet Magazines Are Lousy, But J-Schools Can Make Them Better:

Though Apple claims it has sold more than 200 million iPads since 2010, not many of those users subscribe to magazines. Replica digital magazines accounted for only 3.8 percent of total paid circulation in the first half of 2014, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. To put this in perspective: National Geographic won the National Magazine Award for best tablet magazine this year. The Geographic’s paid print circulation is 3.5 million. Circulation for the tablet edition: 164,408. The “best” the industry has to offer amounts to less than 5 percent of paid circulation. (Blame the AAM, in part, for the industry’s reliance on tedious replica apps; they are the only versions counted in a publication’s rate base, which help determine its ad rates.)

While magazines are still producing tablet issues, they haven’t saved the industry like we hoped. But that doesn’t stop journalism schools from making them a focal point in the curriculum.

The White House Wants to Reveal Where Government Drones Fly:

The White House is getting ready to send out an order to make agencies open up data on where they fly drones and what happens to all of the data they collect.

Right now, only the government is actually allowed to fly drones legally. Commercial drone use is banned by the FAA, although it gave out several permits to movie and television production companies to let them use drones, and gave unique permission to a company in Texas to let it use drones in a search and rescue mission.

The new executive order would specifically tell federal agencies to open up data on its drone fleets that it has kept secret for years. Although the new rules would cover all federal agencies, the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have the largest fleets and would be most affected by the disclosure rules.

We talked about this today in a Crimson meeting. I am no expert on the extent of this issue, but it is an interesting topic that comes to light from time to time, and should be held up for examination more frequently, Reports on college crime are deceptively inaccurate:

The crime statistics being released by colleges nationwide on Wednesday are so misleading that they give students and parents a false sense of security.

Even the U.S. Department of Education official who oversees compliance with a federal law requiring that the statistics be posted on Oct. 1 each year admits that they are inaccurate. Jim Moore said that a vast majority of schools comply with the law but some purposely underreport crimes to protect their images; others have made honest mistakes in attempting to comply.

In addition, weaknesses in the law allow for thousands of off-campus crimes involving students to go unreported, and the Education Department does little to monitor or enforce compliance with the law — even when colleges report numbers that seem questionable.

Here are Samford’s published data covering 2011 through 2013 and for September 2014. I wonder if there is a story there …

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24
Sep 14

A good man, a good plan and a good brand

I never met Mr. Davis, but I worked with his daughter, Tiffany. She was fresh out of college and I was about two years removed. She was smart and talented and charming. She was friendly and amusing. She learned a lot and worked hard and got better. She was a lot of the things that we probably all hope we are. She talked about her father an awful lot. They always sounded like a devoted family. He sounded like a good man.

She still is all of those things, by the way. She’s moved out west, but we’re still friends online. I imagine her brother is all of those things too, but we’ve never met. You’ve probably seen him on television, where he comes off as an incredibly likable man who works hard and knows his craft.

It seems to me that to have raised two children like his, you must be some kind of lucky and some kind of parent. Mr. Davis just recently passed away. Rece wrote about his dad, a wonderful and intimate remembrance proving the kind of man he was.

Those are my favorite verses, too.

Spent the afternoon counting things. I do this every year, taking stock of the department. Demographics are important, and one must always know how many of these and those there are, to say nothing of the thoses and thises. I do this every year and this is still the best method I have thought up:

You don’t change the classics. What you can change is the spreadsheet which holds the data and digests it into simple charts and graphs. There are pages and pages of data, and I get it down to one page of information, all thanks to the humble and inconsistent tally marks.

Things to read … because reading leads to pages and pages of information.

First, the quick list of journalism links:

How social media is reshaping news

Harnessing the power of immersive, interactive storytelling

The secret to BuzzFeed’s video success: Data

New York Times is retiring the Managing Editor title in favor of four deputy executive editors

Forest Service says media needs photography permit in wilderness areas, alarming First Amendment advocates

How TV Everywhere strategy is evolving in the world of cable news

Advice for real-time reporting from BBC, Guardian, Telegraph

Tool Called Dataminr Hunts for News in the Din of Twitter

And now for something delicious, The Creation Myth of Chocolate-Chip Cookies:

What’s less certain is why, exactly, Wakefield put the chopped-up chocolate into her cookies to begin with. A few versions of the story have her creating the recipe accidentally—she was out of nuts, she thought the chocolate would melt into the batter, the chips fell into the bowl by accident. Wyman, in her book, argues that Wakefield was too much of a perfectionist to have come upon the recipe so haphazardly. In support of her argument, she cites a few accounts from the 1970s in which Wakefield tells reporters that she’d been planning experiments with chocolate chunks.

And, of course, she had no idea what it would all become. It says she gave permission to Nestle to reprint her recipe. It does not say what she got in the deal. There’s also a link to the original cookie, if you’d like to try it.

Websites Are Wary of Facebook Tracking Software:

Online retailers and publishers are pushing back against Facebook Inc.’s efforts to track users across the Internet, fearing that the data it vacuums up to target ads will give the social network too much of an edge.

Web traffic experts say there is less data flowing from some sites to Facebook, suggesting they have been reprogrammed to hold back information.

Because they figured out what they were giving away, that they weren’t a partner with Facebook, just a vehicle for it.

Snapchat and your higher ed social media strategy:

When this social media tool first came out, many people were worried that certain *ahem* risque behaviour would take place at a much higher rate. However, since its launch in late 2011, it’s became pretty clear that college kids mainly use Snapchat for selfies, pictures of their pets and photos/videos of the events they attend. And seeing as a new study by Mashable reveals 77 percent of college students check their Snapchats daily, it’s definitely an outlet not to be overlooked when planning your higher ed social media strategy.

We’ve considered that, put it on the back burner and considered it again. I’m sure it will ultimately happen. We do like stories, after all.

This I want to see: Coca-Cola vintage ad will be unveiled at Opelika’s Smith T Building Supply:

Opelika-area residents and Coca-Cola enthusiasts are invited to the unveiling of one of the oldest untouched Coca-Cola painted wall advertisements in existence.

The unveiling event will be held on Oct. 9 at 4 p.m., at Smith T Building Supply in downtown Opelika. Historians from The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta and community leaders will be in attendance. Vintage bottles of Coke will be given away while supplies last.

The experts think the sign was painted in 1907 or 1908. The ad is being seen for the first time in more than a century. How about that?