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Had a meeting and a few things to take care of on campus today.
The landscaping is still lovely as ever:
And those banners will probably fly for a long time, too. Deservedly so. Top-ranked school in the state is no small thing. Go Bulldogs.
Pretty campus we have there, no?
Thomas Carvel was a Greek immigrant. The story goes he wanted to make his customers smile and bought an ice cream truck. Somehow a flat tire figures into the legend because he built his first ice cream store where the truck broke down.
Now, 81 years and countless stores later, here I am, learning about clown cakes.
Seems that Wednesdays are also buy one sundae get another one at a pl;easing consumer price point. So that’s what we did.
Good promotion. There was a line out of the door at one point while we were there. But no one was buying clown cakes.
Two classes today. Stayed late to go over some things with a small handful of students before their final. Drove off to get the sandwiches I always buy at the end of the year: Roly Poly. Got stuck in traffic and when I got back on campus the end-of-the-year party was already underway.
We had two staffs in there this year, the outgoing and part of the incoming. It was a lively, chatty, fun affair. The has-beens told the up-and-comers secrets about the job. Some of them lingered and told stories about what it meant to them, which was lovely.
I walked them all to the door, and gave each one a little letter. Each one was different, but each said how thankful I was of the effort they’ve put in, how proud I was of the work they’ve done. I hope they are proud too.
And then there were just a few of us. And I realized that, with Sydney graduating, our newsroom lost its institutional memory of Purvis, the rock:
The short version: On our way to a conference last year, Clayton, the then-sports editor, was reading interesting facts about every town in Mississippi we passed. Our favorite was Purvis, basically because of everything he read aloud from Wikipedia.
So on the way back from Purvis, and getting a bit punchy, we stopped there for this picture, Sydney, then-news editor, Zach, then-editor-in-chief and Clayton, who was the sports editor. Because we were punchy we dug up that chunk of asphalt from off the side of the road. Clayton or Sydney one named it Purvis. It now sits in a place of honor in the Crimson newsroom.
And now they’re all off into the great wide world.
A little bit later Sydney walked out of the door. She was in the hallway looking in and three members of next year’s staff were in the newsroom were looking out. There was a joke or two and a bye and then she walked down the hall, through the fire door, down the steps and she was gone.
I closed the newsroom door. Emily, the new editor-in-chief who served so ably as the news editor this year, looked at me and we both took half-a-moment to compose ourselves.
And I thought, you get into all of this — the late nights, the too-cold office, dealing with people who don’t understand what you’re trying to do, thanking people who do understand, the good leads, bad headlines, working through stories you don’t care about, wondering each week what they left uncovered — you do all of this because you figure that you have something to offer students. It is something important, you figure, just as it was important when you learned the same things when you were in their place. It is important because the work they’ll one day do with it is important and civic and useful. And so, then, you are useful and maybe formative. And that is worth every 2 a.m. that you find yourself still in a cold office, because you are there for them. Only when you watch them go do you really realize what they did for you.
All of that was in my head as I cleared my eyes and watched Emily clear her eyes and then launched into the first meeting with the new staff.
I’ve taken to looking at this newsroom as both a laboratory and, these last two years, as a spectrum. Sydney and Zach and Katie before them started something these people will continue and improve upon. I have high hopes for that because here’s another group of young people who are sitting in the newsroom at 7 p.m. on the Wednesday of the last week of class.
That’s passion.
Today’s front page also celebrates the two conference winners:
In the fall we also saw the women’s volleyball team win a conference championship. There are rings all over the place.
Two classes today. In one we discussed television broadcast scripts. In another we discussed commercials. I have students writing a commercial of their own creation. Any existing product, any living people, any music they wanted, any theme or catchphrases they wanted.
So today I heard a bit about the commercials. And they sound really good. You’d want to watch two or three of them attentively, and how often do you say that about commercials?
We had the penultimate critique meeting tonight. Next week the students will produce their last Crimson of the year. I think after that we’ll just have a big party. Or at least some finger foods and bad jokes.
Then, next week, there’s the big picnic, the last paper and the beginning of the year’s goodbyes.
A handful of people will be leaving as seniors, people I’ve known since they were freshmen.
You have fun watching them grow. You enjoy watching them go. You wish it wasn’t so long between sending them off and hearing about their successes.
We do like hearing those success stories.
[Insert half an hour of looking through people’s LinkedIn profiles … ]
I’m going to have to write about some people’s success stories soon.
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.
