Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Where I amend my reindeer antler policy

Enjoy the Glomerata post I put up earlier today? Have you been checking out the Battle of the Bulge map posts? I’ve got about two more weeks of those, tracing my great-grandfather’s time in Europe.

I woke up this morning and did one of my favorite things, which is sit with breakfast, or tea or both, and read. I got a lot of reading in this morning and then we did some paperwork errands this afternoon.

I drove The Yankee to Target and she picked up two shirts. We walked down the street to a store called Ulta, which is not missing an R from the sign. I’m not sure I knew this store existed until this afternoon, but then I’m so rarely on the cosmetics market these days.

We picked up grain and sourdough bread at the grocery store. I remembered we needed some eggs, so I hustled to the back corner and got the six-pack container. The first one I opened had a busted egg, which reminded me of my best poultry story. I told it to my lovely wife and the cashier at the front of the store. One of them found it funnier than the other, but they both smiled politely.

We saw this car. Now, ordinarily, I’m not a fan of the reindeer antlers, but I’m willing to change this stance. The rule now is this: if you put those things in your windows, you must commit to the giant red nose on the hood of your car.

We had a dinner guest tonight, one of our sweet friends who brought a soup and stayed for brownies and a movie and uses the word “assuaged” correctly. It was a lovely evening.

Things to read …

I remember waking up on this December morning in a full sweat. It was unseasonably warm. That afternoon we watched the F-4 tornado ravage Tuscaloosa, just 35 miles away, on television. That night, up the road in Birmingham, I drove home under the largest snowflakes I’ve ever seen in the South. It was a tragic and weird day. Celebration Of A Life Saved

Many of your remember this remarkable photo by Michael E. Palmer that was in the Tuscaloosa News, the day after the December 16, 2000 EF-4 tornado that killed 11 people. Michael Harris carries an unconscious Whitney Crowder, 6, through debris in Bear Creek Trailer Park after the tornado passed through. Whitney’s father and 15-month-old brother were killed in the tornado.

That post is two years old, when young Whitney was graduating from high school. It was a nice bookend to that tale.

So these two guys are political activists. They represent different parties and they are brothers. They were on C-SPAN to promote this documentary about the weird dynamic all of that creates. They got into a political name-calling debate and then the show started taking phone calls. Then … well, just watch and see:

This is worth a read. Former AP Reporter: I Didn’t Leave Journalism, It Left Me

A journalist for more than 40 years, Mark Lavie was based in Jerusalem for most of them and then in Cairo for two – during the “Egyptian Revolution.”

Lavie is no longer a journalist.

But he didn’t leave the profession, “it left me,” Lavie says.

Now Lavie is speaking out in as many fora as possible. He seeks to alert the public about the dramatic difference between what journalism used to be – and still pretends to be – and what it actually is.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, Advertisers Will Pay Up To 40% More For TV Sponsorship Deals Linked To Social Media, Says TV4

“It means that we need to work with story-telling on digital platforms, and that we need to engage and potentially also reward our users,” she said. “This is obviously very interesting for us, both from our perspective, and also from a commercial perspective, in terms of what we can offer our advertisers on these platforms.”

Lundell said that TV4’s experiments with extending linear TV formats into the social media sphere had shown that “you need to pay more than for ordinary sponsorship – and advertisers are prepared to do that. So, yes, we’re making money.”

The first thing I thought when she said “work with story-telling on digital platforms” was wondering why plots of scripted shows aren’t continued on other platforms. You already see supplemental webisodes of some of your more engaged shows, why not story arcs on Instagram?

First there was ESPN, the movie channels, last month it was CBS and now … Up To Speed: NBC to jump into live-streaming

This is solid. 5 tips for streaming live video from a smartphone

Livestreaming video from a mobile phone is a way for journalists to get footage which may not be possible to film with more traditional broadcast equipment.

“There are sometimes these stories where you don’t want a big camera crew, you want to try and keep a relatively low profile, in riots, in public disorder, or in places where you need to be sensitive,” Sky News correspondent Nick Martin told Journalism.co.uk.

“You can use that technology which is smaller and more compact to still get what you want to, but not [have] all the big crew considerations that we have.”

Media organisations such as ABC News have also started looking at mobile livestreaming as a developing part of their video programming.

For journalists who want to incorporate video streaming into their work …

As I told a colleague this evening, within the next year or two we’ll likely say if you’re not doing video with almost everything, you’re going to find yourself behind.

That’s why I spent the better part of my Saturday night building up video templates for future projects.

Glomerata — 1 comment
16
Dec 14

Glomeratas

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 1904 edition. If you click this book’s cover you can see the 1910 Glom.

It always amuses me to realize we’re looking at a book that was leafed through more than a century ago.

In 1910 William Howard Taft had settled into the White House and Teddy Roosevelt was just beginning to wonder what his old friend Taft was doing. Johnny Mercer was born in late 1909 and Guglielmo Marconi won the Nobel Prize. That set the stage for a swiftly moving 1910. The Ottomans were losing their grip on empire. The first horror movie, Frankenstein, was released. Halley’s Comet appeared for the first time in 76 years and the first dirigible flew in Germany. The students would have read the news of Mark Twain’s death, but they couldn’t know that Sarah and Harry’s new baby in New York City, Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, would move generations of music lovers. Years later they’d settle in, though, and listen to Artie Shaw playing over their new radio.

There were 92 million people in the U.S. in 1910, an increase of 21 percent over the 1900 census data — a decennial rate, according to Wikipedia, which hasn’t been matched since. There were 2.1 million people in Alabama. Braxton Bragg Comer was the governor. He reformed the railroad system, child labor laws, boosted schools for white students and helped move the needle on state literacy. He did little for black Alabamians. He presided over a big local and state push toward Prohibition. This was a period when it was not illegal to possess alcohol in Alabama, but you could not purchase it.

The main agricultural building at Auburn is named after Comer. It was built in 1909, and rebuilt after a fire in the 1920s. That building is said to have housed more departments and academic units over the years than any other building on campus except Samford Hall. It got its start in a tough time for Auburn, university officials had just beaten back an effort to move the university to Birmingham. President Thach, who has been discussed in this space before, was successful in securing much needed money for the university, and that irked the people across the state at Alabama. It got nasty. And you thought that rivalry was all about football …

family / history / maps — Comments Off
16
Dec 14

70th anniv – My great-grandfather’s war

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge and my great-grandfather was there, with the 137th Infantry Regiment. We don’t know which company, or even which battalion he was in, because he kept all of those experiences to himself, so this is only a regimental overview with some movements down to the company level. I pulled a few things together for his son, my grandfather, and the anniversary is a great time to revisit it.

So, then, for Dec. 16:

The 3rd Battalion again attacked the well-defended enemy positions in the forest and regained a portion of the lost ground. U.S. air support bombed and strafed Bliesmengen and the woods to the east of it. The 1st Battalion was protecting the Division’s left flank in Sarreguemines and along the Blies River pocket. The 2nd Battalion had Company G across the Blies protecting the rear flank of the 3rd Battalion, while E Company was aiding the 1st Battalion.

The 3rd Battalion launched its attack into the woods in the morning, meeting fierce resistance.

The 1st Battalion was relieved in the evening and the 2nd Battalion were at night.

View Tonice in the Bulge in a larger map
View Tonice in the Bulge in a larger map

This information is derived from the unit history, found here and here and from this unit overview. These markers are rough estimates and are meant only to be illustrative. Any errors are mine alone.

journalism / links / Monday / photo / running / things to read — Comments Off
15
Dec 14

Look up, it is easier to breathe in the sunset

Lovely warm day. I should have started my run a bit earlier. We are in a weather system that means the temperature drops 15 degrees as soon as three tree limbs conspire to block the sun. Before that, though, it was bright and surprising. Short-sleeve weather if you’ve ever needed it in December — and who doesn’t?

But I did my little neighborhood run late in the afternoon and into the early evening. It turned to a chill just as I wrapped up, but I had views like this:

And there is nothing wrong with views like that.

So another three miles down, after three miles yesterday and before a bunch more this week. I’m trying to make my run fast.

“Fast.”

There’s a word that mean a lot without any context. Let’s give it some: I look like a shuffler, I want to look like a runner. That, to me, would be fast at this point. In truth, I haven’t been fast in decades, and even then I was only faster than a person running slowly. I grew up around plenty of fast people.

I wonder if any of them had the chance to go for a run today, or got to see a sunset like that, wherever they are.

Things to read … because this stuff is good no matter where you are.

A nice example of dogged persistence, Meet the reporter who broke Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture story—two years ago:

Two years ago, an investigative reporter named Isaiah Thompson exposed the massive and troubling scale of “civil asset forfeiture” in Philadelphia—that is, how law enforcement exploited its authority to seize cash and personal property suspected to be connected to a crime. The idea is to take ill-gotten gains from drug dealers or other criminals, but Thompson showed that Philly authorities routinely claimed property in cases where the owners were not convicted—and in some instances, not even charged.

[…]

“It shows there’s no substitute for true reporting,” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with IJ. “He’s not just reading the law and talking to a couple people. He went to the courtroom over and over and over, and really explored what happened.”

There’s an accidental insight here, I think: A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link:

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent.

That’s not the problem it used to be, unfortunately, even for the Times. I think I liked it better when that would have been the cause for some consternation.

We’re starting to see this sentiment in more and more think pieces, Defining quality in news has to value the user experience:

You could frame the big challenge for the next few years of digital news this way: How can we create a news user experience that’s as easy and friction-free as Facebook — but as good as the best a dedicated news power user could assemble?

[…]

“Quality” isn’t just about how many foreign bureaus you have or how long your big features can run. It’s about every step of the process that moves from a reporter’s idea to a reader’s eyes. Too many news outlets make too many of those steps frustrating — and frustrated readers are all too happy to go back to playing Candy Crush.

That conversation is a good and needed one. It signals a maturation of the medium. And what the author, Joshua Benton, is saying ultimately leads to an effort to create a variety of interfaces for a spectrum of users. Not every story must be print, or video, no. And not every example in this enterprise need to be the TV attempt at multimedia: the broadcast package over the text of the story. There comes a time where we ask consumers to choose what they want, and we shunt them into not only the stories they want and the format they want (and the advertising they’re looking for) but also give them control of those capsules. We build it, they select how they want these stories and where. We get it there. They move back and forth through the media.

They’re doing that already, just not under one shingle.

And here’s another way the audience is doing it, How Wearable Technology Will Impact Web Design:

A lot of naysayers are quick to write off wearable technology as a fad, but a recent report from Pew Research Center Internet Project indicates that 83% of industry experts believe that wearable technology will see huge growth within the next 10 years. By 2025, we’ll be fully immersed in the Internet of Things (IoT). This means that users will be accessing websites from various platforms, not just desktops and mobile devices.

As technology expands and more users embrace wearables, more of your clients will want to their sites to be accessible. If you’re unprepared for such requests, clients will search elsewhere to fit their needs.

Although wearable technology is in its infancy now, it’s rapidly growing. Expect it to develop like a kid in puberty– overnight.

Slowly, and then all at once.

My friend Ike Pigott wrote this fine piece, The Mammals of Journalism:

A weekly newspaper, serving three cities with a combined population of less than 40,000 people… has a TV studio.

The ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing
The great disruption has happened. It didn’t smack the Earth with a blinding blast; rather, it carried its impact more slowly over decades. The internet, and mobile technology, and codecs, and smaller gear that people can afford, and the ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing… blame them all.

A weekly newspaper has a website, and now it has a TV studio.

The Tribune’s publisher, Scott Buttram, likes to say that the very technologies that have disrupted network television and movie studios and large daily newspapers have also empowered his end of the food chain. The small can feast on the big, because the rules of our media world favor the nimble and the swift.

Flexibility, low inertia, is a terrific attribute these days.

A great show, A&E’s highest rated show, was canceled. But along came Netflix: ‘Longmire’ Season 4 News: Why Cancellation Might Have Actually Helped The Series. These are truly strange times in the entertainment business.

Tomorrow, we run errands! And probably some more fun stuff, too.

family / history / maps — Comments Off
15
Dec 14

70th anniv – My great-grandfather’s war

Come along as we revisit Tonice’s time in Europe. He was a combat medic in the 137th Infantry Regiment, but we don’t know which company, or even which battalion. He never really told his family about his experiences so this is only a regimental overview with a glimpse into what his time there was like.

So, then, for Dec. 15:

The enemy opposing the 3rd Battalion continued to hang on bitterly to the Breiterwald Woods on December 15, despite P-47’s bombing and strafing their positions.

After reorganizing its forces, the 3rd Battalion launched another attack on the Breiterwald Woods. Supported by armor, Companies I and K reached the center of the woods, meeting fanatical German resistance all the way from Nazi armor to infantry. Shortly before dark, the two 3rd Battalion units were counterattacked. During the night they were very heavily shelled by enemy artillery and mortar fire.

The 1st Battalion protected the north flank with Company E remained south of the Blies River and assisted the 1st Battalion. Company G, attached to the 3rd Battalion, operated on its left flank for protection while Company F remained in reserve in Frauenberg. The 2nd Battalion was to be committed the following morning with the mission of capturing Bliesmengen and Bliesbalchen.

This day’s casualties were the heaviest of any day since the Regiment started its Saar River operation.

View Tonice in the Bulge in a larger map
View Tonice in the Bulge in a larger map

This information is derived from the unit history, found here and here and from this unit overview. These markers are rough estimates and are meant only to be illustrative. Any errors are mine alone.