Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

photo / weekend — Comments Off
05
Oct 14

Catching up

The post of the week that is nothing but pictures. (Other days with a lot of pictures don’t count.) These pictures haven’t landed on the site, they’re holdovers, orphans, random things or whatever you like. They just need to go somewhere, and this is where they are going.

Farming, you’re doing it wrong. This was somewhere in central Georgia:

A Coke ghost sign in Augusta, Georgia:

An old distribution center on Reynolds in Augusta, Georgia. There was no signage, but there’s some yard behind it, a berm and then the river. Maybe it once was a shipping stop:

Also back at the race last weekend, there was a sign by a good-natured heckler:

And another message on a van in the parking deck:

Hard to call this one a ghost sign, it is holding up well, but this is also from Augusta:

How this Augusta street sign doesn’t get stolen every Thursday night is beyond me:

A flower on the Auburn campus:

A bee, also on the Auburn campus:

I donned the good luck sweatshirt, circa 1995, for the game yesterday:

The gameday button:

Finally, a sign taped to the wall in the restroom:

Auburn / football / photo / weekend — Comments Off
04
Oct 14

LSU at Auburn

The Yankee, playing cornhole at the tailgate. I don’t think she’s ever played before. Of course she won.

What follows are just fan pictures. Scroll through and enjoy. It will only take a second:

This first batch are all at the tailgate, of course:

Some people just drink too much …

The hostess of the best tailgate in town:

Her shirt stands for “What Would Bo Jackson Do?” Behind her, he was receiving the Walter Gilbert Award, sort of a lifetime achievement honor. All of this was awesome:

We’d said something to her like “We have guests here and we have to show off. You’re going to be loud, right?” She took this as a personal challenge.

This is what happens when you use one shaker for 11 seasons:

This jacket, you know you want it:

Photobombed!

cycling / Friday / friends / Samford — Comments Off
03
Oct 14

A tired Friday title

I taught a class, which is to say I returned papers and discussed some of the most pressing items contained there in. We talked about that story I mentioned earlier this week. We touched on story organization, construction and source blocking.

I made an acrostic. It was a terrible acrostic, but I repeat myself. I hated it. But it let me use a cool blocks illustration and gave me the chance to talk about the elements of a story you can move around.

I graded stuff. I left campus.

Made it home in time to visit a store and pick up some flowers. I thought we might brighten the living room with a big yellow clutch of stems and petals in a glass vase of water resting on furniture above eye level.

It works almost as well as the overhead light or the nearby torch lamp.

I took a brief ride, through the neighborhood, up one of the timed courses and then back down it. I rode one half of the time trial and then came up the double hill that ultimately brings everything me back around to the other side of the neighborhood. My times were slow. I haven’t been on my pedals in five days, I would expect nothing less. Or is it nothing more? I could expect nothing more than going slow. I could expect less. My legs could be sodden stacks of newspaper, uncooperative piles of leaves, giant petrified chunks of wood that can’t turn a gear, but bleed when I fell over after I lost balance speed.

I can’t expect anything from my front derailleur just now. I can’t shift from the big gear to the smaller, which would be helpful as I labor over a little climb. There is a trip to the bike shop in my near future.

In my immediate future, though, there is company. Friends from Indiana have come down for the weekend. The plan is to show off tailgating and football.

And also dinner. Late into the night we sat around and talked about places abroad we’d all visited and genealogy and regionalism. It was pleasant and nerdy late into the night. And I am very sleepy.

food / iPhone / journalism / links / movies / Samford / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
02
Oct 14

Sigoggling

Sometimes you spend all day in your office, doing office things. Sometimes you do office things and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve done office things. But, then, sometimes, you spend all day doing office things, questioning your progress on doing those things and then walk outside at just the right time.

And that, as they say, is its own reward.

My other reward was veggies.

Things to read … because reading makes us big and strong.

(That’s what you’ve been told your entire life, anyway.)

Help for victims of sex trafficking: priest Becca Stevens wants Birmingham to do more

This will stick with you, How to Spot a Trafficking Victim at an Airport

Here’s the trailer for American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper, detailing the nation’s best sniper. As movie trailers go, that’s incredibly intense.

This story never gets old, Sportsmanship allows middle school boy to live football dream:

Dalton, diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth, had just realized a long-time dream — playing football for his beloved Bears. Dalton had been hoping to dress with the team all season. Finally approved to participate, assistant Bears coach J.T. Lawrence and the other coaches had an idea.

“We thought it would be a great experience for Dalton and for the rest of our kids if he could get into a game and score,” Lawrence said. There was one problem. Dalton did not need to have any physical contact.

Lawrence talked to Prattville Christian athletic director Sam Peak and asked if his school would allow Dalton to go into the game and score a 2-point conversion if Billingsley scored a touchdown.

“That was an easy answer,” Peak said. “We coach our kids to be thankful for each opportunity to touch someone else’s life. This was an opportunity for us to do something good.”

A friend found the video:

UAB gets $47M grant for low-income education initiative

The Cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson

One System, Two Media: How China, Hong Kong Are Covering The Protests

The second half of this is great, Young Protesters in Hong Kong Have Found an Ingenious Way Around Cyber Censors

Occupy Hong Kong: Macro scale, micro-adaptations

Speaking of adaptations:

Could have told them that at the beginning … Facebook is more important to news distribution than you think, and journalists are freaked out:

At ONA, anxiety about Facebook’s increasing control over our traffic revealed itself in lots of questions: If I have 250,000 fans of my page, why don’t they all see everything I post? Why does my journalism seem to reach fewer people than it used to? Is Facebook trying to pressure my news organization to spend money to boost my posts or take out ads?

But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?

From the department of obvious things that could be understood but for interest, Editors who don’t use Twitter undercut their pleas to innovate.

If you’re from anywhere near where I’m from, this sounds a bit like home:

The sounds are the same, but those North Carolinians have their own unique vocabulary. You get the sense that even that language is falling away. Some of those words were things a parent said, some of them took some recollection. Good that it has been recorded in documentary form — and I want to see the full thing. How else would we have seemingly random blog post titles?

iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
01
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 …