Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

‘Oh, I remember that’

Had dinner with my mom tonight. She was in town and this was the first time she’s had the opportunity to see my part of campus. We ate Italian and almost closed that place down, and then she got the nickel tour of my office and the newsroom and our department.

She got to meet most of the editorial staff and watched them wrestle with the thorny issue of the day for a tiny bit.

I walked her around and showed her our Wall of Fame and the old newspapers framed in the classrooms. She remembers this and that — and she’s welcome for my not tipping off her age by historical allusion.

She didn’t remember anything from the 1925 paper, of course.

Sadly I remember most of the front pages we display, too. Our students would remember one, but even that only vaguely.

I sat in one of our classrooms and we watched the beginning of the Arab Spring streamed from the BBC. Hard to put a web stream in a frame, unfortunately.

Things to read … because you could print these out and frame them, I guess.

She was from a locally prominent newspaper family and an accomplished writer, Elise Ayers Sanguinetti dies at 90

Here’s something she wrote decades ago, Elise Sanguinetti’s ode to the Kilby House:

Perhaps houses are like people, after all. They are born, pass through their youngling years, stand in middle age, receive the patina of age, and when it is willed, die – in spite of words like “best” and “progress,” the latter so often ill-defined.

Yesterday we walked through the grounds of the Kilby house on Woodstock Avenue. It was drizzling and in the distance the fine old Georgian house stood before us, its dark green shutters closed, the red brick veiled in mist. And like a trick of the mind it was only as if someone were merely away for a while. Soon there would be returnings; it would all be as it was before–twenty years and more.

The past is a still-life, a moment caught in time: We are 10, perhaps nine, a speck in a fading day. The high-back wicker chairs are on the terrace front. The men are talking. They are talking rather excitedly, it seems to us a child, of the Scouts, the price of cotton, unfair freight rates, political frailties. When will the South recover? They ask. How? When will it EVER recover? And over the pines there is red in the sky and we, a shadow, vaguely listen, for time stretched out forever then, and this was only an afternoon, one late afternoon in a series of noons and afternoons and nights, sitting and listening and watching the sky grow red above the pines.

She had a way about writing about being in a room without being too much in the room. That’s a great compliment for a writer.

Nothing about this story surprises anymore. Shame, that. New data show long wait times remain at many VA hospitals:

More than 600,000 veterans — 10% of all the Veterans Affairs patients — continue to wait a month or more for appointments at VA hospitals and clinics, according to data obtained by USA TODAY.

The VA has made some progress in dealing with the backlog of cases that forced former secretary Eric Shinseki to retire early this year. For instance, the VA substantially cut the overall number of worst-case scenarios for veterans — those who had waited more than four months for an appointment. That figure dropped from 120,000 in May to 23,000 in October. Much of that improvement occurred because patients received care from private providers.

The wave of the present, Publishers Sell Sponsored Content Made for Instagram, Snapchat:

Campaigns like those from Wired, InStyle and Teen Vogue are attractive to advertisers looking for new ways to connect with audiences, said Mr. Shlachter at DigitasLBi. “To breakthrough in the media ecosystem today requires a myriad of tactics,” he added.

But there are also risks involved. A tin-eared brand showing up in a publishers’ social feed might turn off followers. That’s why, for instance, Wired tapped influencers for the Victorinox campaign and InStyle enlists its own staff to create Instagram and Snapchat content for advertisers. “Above all, no matter what you’re doing, be authentic and true to your brand as well as the audience,” Mr. Shlachter said.

It isn’t every day I link to PR Newswire, but, USA TODAY Introduces First-Ever Customized Campus News App:

USA TODAY announces the launch of The Buzz, a mobile app that delivers customized news to the digital-first generation of students across the country. A first-of-its kind, The Buzz reinvents campus news by offering college students access to targeted and relevant information, incorporating national, world and personalized campus news into one, easy-to-use mobile interface. Content will be specifically gathered from USA TODAY and USA TODAY College, as well as individual college papers. Future product integration will include content from Gannett’s U.S. Community Publishing newspapers and user-generated content.

The Buzz is the mobile extension of USA TODAY’s celebrated Collegiate Readership Program — which originated at Penn State in 1997 and is now present at over 350 campuses — combining USA TODAY’s rich tradition of delivering news and information on the national and local level with the inclusion of a robust digital product. Designed and tailored specifically for each individual school, The Buzz app lets readers search their national, regional, and campus news – most of which is student written, tapping into more than 3,000 USA TODAY College contributors – by topic areas such as news, sports, tech and opinion.

And, finally, Getting a job in journalism code is a good Q&A from recent grads. That could be juxtaposed with What journalism students need to learn now. It is a sophisticated world out there.

New update to the Glomerata section below. More tomorrow.

Glomerata — 1 comment
18
Nov 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 1924 edition. If you click this book’s cover you can see the 1920 Glom.

It was only 94 years ago when this 1920 book was landing in students’ hands for the first time. Teddy Roosevelt was gone. Woodrow Wilson, himself ill, stepped down. World War I was still very much on the top of minds, even as the wartime economic boom evaporated. Treaties, the League of Nations, and non-intervention policies were the big national topics. The year previous there were widespread streaks in meatpacking and steel. Race riots in major cities and anarchist attacks in New York. Warren G. Harding would that fall be elected president. Thomas Kilby, a Tennessee boy, was a railroad agent and successful businessman who had made his living in Anniston. He became mayor, a state legislator and then the lieutenant governor. In 1919 he took the oath as governor of Alabama. The next year he ended the deadly 1920 coal strike. No one ever talks about that. It is easy to see why.

Numismatic trivia: Kilby was put on the Alabama centennial half dollar in 1921, making him the first living person to appear on a U.S. coin.

Across the state, lawmakers and the University of Alabama were playing political games that would cripple Auburn for years. It hampered and highlighted the administration of the university president, Charles C. Thach. He served as president from 1902 until 1919. When he started the university’s only income was from a fertilizer tax. An illuminating oil tax and a barely upheld contribution from the state legislature helped. A little. Also, in the teens:

Not long after the Carnegie Foundation report appeared in print, an employee of the Montgomery Advertiser forwarded to API a draft article President Denny had submitted for publication in that paper. The informant believed the article contained thinly veiled attacks on API. Among other things, Denny wrote that the “choice young men and women” of the state wanted to attend the University of Alabama because it was known throughout the country, not within the “narrow confines” of a single state. He charged that some of the “so-called colleges” had been accepting students without adequate high school preparation. Shortly thereafter, API began to require the standard fourteen units of high school work for unconditional admission. Under President Thach’s calm and cool leadership, Alabama Polytechnic Institute weathered the storm of criticism with dignity.

By the time of the 1915 quadrennial session, API still had not received the $200,000 approved by the legislature in 1911.

And that’s the way it went for Thach. When he stepped down for health reasons at the end of 1919, and died the next year, that state money was apparently still out there, somewhere. It was all just the opening act for what would be a tumultuous decade in the 1920s.

In the fall of 1919 the first Army transcontinental motor convoy, an expedition across America, reached San Francisco. A young unknown lieutenant colonel, Dwight Eisenhower, was a part of the 3,251 mile, 62 days journey. Chicago had its Black Sox scandal. The Spanish flu petered out. Andy Rooney, Jackie Robinson, Pete Seeger and George Wallace were born in 1919. In the first half of 1920 API students heard about the New York Yankees acquiring that guy, Babe Ruth from Boston. Prohibition began. That June, The United States Post Office Department ruled that children could not be sent via parcel post. Apparently that happened, and it is important that you know it. James Doohan and Jack Webb were born in 1920, as was Karol Józef Wojtyła, who you would know as Pope John Paul II.

Anyway, you can walk through all the covers if you start here. For a detailed look at selected volumes, you might enjoy this link. Here is the university’s official collection.

Monday / photo — Comments Off
17
Nov 14

An actual Monday

My first job out of college was traffic reporting. I think I did that four about four months before finally landing in news. One guy there once reported a car fire on the freeway as a carbecue. It sounded clever but I found it mean-spirited. Here was someone having probably one of the worst days of their year, losing who knows what and, for an encore, having to deal with insurance people. Making jokes just seemed like piling on.

I think of that every time I see a car fire, like I saw today.

And then, some time later, I changed lanes, topped a little rise in the road and found myself parked on the interstate. Three lanes going nowhere, for about an hour.

Turns out, just up the road, a dump truck lost its load.

As I told a colleague, even if I’d wanted to make up a reason to not be in the office I wouldn’t have thought of that. Who’s ever heard of a dump truck throwing dirt and gravel all over the pavement as the poor guy is driving from A to B?

In one of those philosophical cases of one-never-knows it is entirely possible, I suppose, that had someone’s car fire not slowed traffic down back there I could have had dirt poured all over my car further up the road. Sitting on top of the overpass and feeling it wave and whomp whomp with traffic coming from the other direction doesn’t seem so bad in comparison.

Rather than worry about a Monday — hey, the guy in the car fire wasn’t hurt and there didn’t seem to be any ambulances at the inadvertent dump site — let’s look at some pictures.

Here’s a mini-essay on tree doughnuts:

More tomorrow, on what will not be a Monday.

photo / weekend — Comments Off
16
Nov 14

Catching up

The post with extra pictures, things that didn’t fit elsewhere or are just looking for a good home. You know the type, and you know the post. On with it, then.

We took a little hike, and I saw this young oak tree:

Sometimes the little things jump out at you. Sometimes you don’t even realize it until you get back home. That was the case with this one, I was shooting color, but now I see the edges:

Should I really be walking on something made by a company called Biltolast?

Only kidding. A small, local company. They’ve got about 80 employees and pedestrian bridges in Alabama, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, Connecticut, all over.

We went to see a play today:

And here’s the cool part, we discussed the show with the editor this evening. How often do you get to do that? I asked questions about the lighting and the sound, the deliberate anachronisms and the symbolism. He may never again tell us when he is directing.

football / video / weekend — Comments Off
15
Nov 14

South! Alabama

You can’t get tired of these stories, I won’t let you get tired of these kinds of stories. This one has a cute addition to it. South Alabama’s football team signed a kid, Colby Sawyer, and name dropped Alabama and Auburn.

When you’re out-recruiting the Tide and Tigers, good things happen. As you’ll see in this video, the Jaguars are bowl eligible:

South Alabama is bowl eligible for the first time in just their second year in Division I. Some bowl better pick up this program.

Update: How awesome is this? They named Sawyer player of the week.

Pardon me, I have to go put on my Jags shirt.