It is 4 a.m. Saturday and Nordic people are having a party someplace near me on the second floor of the Marriott.
They are slamming their doors and saying "Jah" loudly.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Show and Steal
Two sessions at SFJ are public sharing of ideas. The number of ideas is overwhelming, with what felt like a hundred pdfs to look at.
Lisa Glowinski's organization, More Content Now of Downers Grove, IL, has provided a very nice survey in Dropbox. Here's that link:
Lisa Glowinski's organization, More Content Now of Downers Grove, IL, has provided a very nice survey in Dropbox. Here's that link:
Voice
Roy Peter Clark provided a simple way of explaining what is meant by the writer's "voice." It is not that all of our prose should be easy to read out loud, although this is increasingly a requirement among multimedia reporters.
A writer's authentic voice conveys the illusion of that writer speaking. It's not about aural performance, it's about personality that comes off the page — and it is assisted by the white space created by punctuation and paragraphing.
Right as he said this, I grabbed a pen and made a note on the back of a scrap of paper: "Tell Bobby Ampezzan to stop leaving his deletions in notes format while he's revising his stories."
Clark quoted someone named Don Frye <sp?>: Voice is the cumulative effects of all the moves that the writer uses to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader.
But "voice" is not about oral/aural performances, even though reading the sentences aloud can be a good tool for coaching a writer to recognize his awkward phrasing and lack of clarity — unless reporters insist upon reading their crap aloud in their very most pompous imitation Walter Cronkite.
Clark admitted that sometimes, as he is recording himself reading his books for their audiobook publication, he finds himself revising the syntax. Although his producers usually catch him, there are bits of his audiobooks that do not match the print product.
(Also, Eric Deggans told us that since he began doing his radio commentaries for NPR, he has been coached to drop apostrophe-type clauses and put all his sentences into a simpler noun-verb order.)
Oral performance requires a different cadence.
Thinking about this section of Clark's talk, I have decided that here is yet another reason we still need print: not merely for the experience of reading while holding paper or the convenience of its durability and persistence, but also because print allows a style of expression unavailable in the oral and even the digital formats.
White space reinforces cadence.
And layout conveys a mood. Even in handwritten forms.
A writer's authentic voice conveys the illusion of that writer speaking. It's not about aural performance, it's about personality that comes off the page — and it is assisted by the white space created by punctuation and paragraphing.
Right as he said this, I grabbed a pen and made a note on the back of a scrap of paper: "Tell Bobby Ampezzan to stop leaving his deletions in notes format while he's revising his stories."
Clark quoted someone named Don Frye <sp?>: Voice is the cumulative effects of all the moves that the writer uses to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader.
But "voice" is not about oral/aural performances, even though reading the sentences aloud can be a good tool for coaching a writer to recognize his awkward phrasing and lack of clarity — unless reporters insist upon reading their crap aloud in their very most pompous imitation Walter Cronkite.
Clark admitted that sometimes, as he is recording himself reading his books for their audiobook publication, he finds himself revising the syntax. Although his producers usually catch him, there are bits of his audiobooks that do not match the print product.
(Also, Eric Deggans told us that since he began doing his radio commentaries for NPR, he has been coached to drop apostrophe-type clauses and put all his sentences into a simpler noun-verb order.)
Oral performance requires a different cadence.
Thinking about this section of Clark's talk, I have decided that here is yet another reason we still need print: not merely for the experience of reading while holding paper or the convenience of its durability and persistence, but also because print allows a style of expression unavailable in the oral and even the digital formats.
White space reinforces cadence.
And layout conveys a mood. Even in handwritten forms.
$30 weekend
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| Jim Haag |
Virginian-Pilot was the source of several easy to pull-off ideas in the Show and Steal, and it's the employer of this utterly charming man, Jim Haag.
Jim is funny and willing and supportive of everyone, but if you really want to talk to him, find the smoking area and wait there.
Photo stories idea
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| This is from Sara Quinn's handout showing various ways to tell a story and amplify the telling using visual elements. |
Let Photo have a guaranteed quarter page routinely, to tell a story and be a bigger byline. Call it theirs. Let them own it.
They shoot a lot of potential stories they don't get to tell in print — printable stories that are latent in the online galleries they shoot already.
Writing tools
My introduction to Roy Peter Clark was so confusing at the conference's opening reception that I was dreading a bit the session he led for us on our last day.
And so I was wrong.
He's entertaining and he uses musical illustrations and his arguments involve a lot of synthesis and metaphor, but the info he laid out for us Saturday morning was clear and sure did look like a set of coaching tools we could use, to help our interns learn the difference between reports and stories.
He has a set of writing tools on iTunesU. These are podcasts.
Then he has four books, Writing Tools (2006, 10th printing, 100K in print), The Glamor of Grammar (11 chapters on punctuation, "and I don't apologize for that one bit"), Help for Writers was designed as mobile app ($1.99, parts of writing process as he understands them, 10 solutions to the main problems of each), How to Write Short.
He's under contract to Little Brown for Undressing Gatsby, what writers can learn from rereading the classics.
For instance, in weaker writing, the best part of the story often can be found hiding inside a sentence.
Find it, and rearrange the words to take advantage of the power of cadence to evoke importance (which he referred to as "heat").
"The Queen, my lord, is dead."
In his day, English allowed Shakespeare other options for the order of the words —
• The Queen is dead, my lord.
• My lord, the Queen is dead.
• Dead is the Queen, my lord. [I am supplying this one, he didn't.]
In our day, thanks to Star Wars, we can add
• Dead the Queen is, my lord.
In the version that Shakespeare chose, if you numbered the main words in their order of importance to the meaning, Queen=2, lord=3, dead=1
The most emphatic word is at the end, dead.
This is an ancient observation, he told us, citing as evidence a line he found in an essay by some Roman rhetorician from the age of Nero that Clark called "the Q man" (Quintilus? I have no idea ...), to wit: Sometimes orators find that they'll take a word or phrase that's imbedded in the meaning and lay it at the end.
And as in the common practice in humor, the punchline should come at the end.
So his point was, we could improve a lot of our prose at once simply by remembering that the punchline goes at the end of the sentence.
And so I was wrong.
He's entertaining and he uses musical illustrations and his arguments involve a lot of synthesis and metaphor, but the info he laid out for us Saturday morning was clear and sure did look like a set of coaching tools we could use, to help our interns learn the difference between reports and stories.
He has a set of writing tools on iTunesU. These are podcasts.
Then he has four books, Writing Tools (2006, 10th printing, 100K in print), The Glamor of Grammar (11 chapters on punctuation, "and I don't apologize for that one bit"), Help for Writers was designed as mobile app ($1.99, parts of writing process as he understands them, 10 solutions to the main problems of each), How to Write Short.
He's under contract to Little Brown for Undressing Gatsby, what writers can learn from rereading the classics.
For instance, in weaker writing, the best part of the story often can be found hiding inside a sentence.
Find it, and rearrange the words to take advantage of the power of cadence to evoke importance (which he referred to as "heat").
In explaining how to "order words for emphasis," he began by asking us to think about a line from MacBeth:
In his day, English allowed Shakespeare other options for the order of the words —
• The Queen is dead, my lord.
• My lord, the Queen is dead.
• Dead is the Queen, my lord. [I am supplying this one, he didn't.]
In our day, thanks to Star Wars, we can add
• Dead the Queen is, my lord.
In the version that Shakespeare chose, if you numbered the main words in their order of importance to the meaning, Queen=2, lord=3, dead=1
The most emphatic word is at the end, dead.
This is an ancient observation, he told us, citing as evidence a line he found in an essay by some Roman rhetorician from the age of Nero that Clark called "the Q man" (Quintilus? I have no idea ...), to wit: Sometimes orators find that they'll take a word or phrase that's imbedded in the meaning and lay it at the end.
And as in the common practice in humor, the punchline should come at the end.
So his point was, we could improve a lot of our prose at once simply by remembering that the punchline goes at the end of the sentence.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Ethics in a Digital Age
Kelly McBride, senior faculty at Poynter, is widely interviewed as an expert on ethics in media, and she and Tom Rosenstiel compiled an anthology I'd like to read: The New Ethics of Journalism. It proposes a new code for ethical journalists.
She predicts that journalism ethics will change in this age of [insert your favorite cliche about the wild west of digital communications].
In the past, the pillars of ethics for our business were basically Truth, Independence, Minimize Harm. We needed independence so we could create a mass audience, for our business model. Being independent meant people could trust us. And we vigorously guarded "the essential stewardship role a free press plays in our society." (That's from her handout, which I'll duplicate for you.)
But today, independence means almost nothing because our audience has seen totally too much failure from too many information providers. Totally.
Independence is an old value. Transparency is the new value.
We need to be transparent so people understand why they should trust us.
Trust still translates into revenue. What has changed is the quality that translates into trust. With so many sources of information coming at them from all sides, readers are no longer persuaded that we are independent and therefore trustworthy. They've seen us fail.
But when we are transparent we generate trust.
She sites as evidence of how the world has changed a photo shot by Chris Sweda for the Chicago Tribune during a lightning storm in 2010. The photo caught a simultaneous strike on the Sears and Trump towers. It was perceived as faked even though it was real.
These days, she says you have to show the audience why they should believe it.
And she thinks Storify is a good tool for that. Link to your sources. Lay them all out so the reader can follow your research.
Her talk was much too brief for me, but she did touch several topics. For instance, do we misread unreliable Internet sites and in our haste repeat false information from them because they seem to confirm our bad assumptions about our communities?
For instance, apparently, that Americans include a bunch of racists.
After the selection of Miss America, BuzzFeed printed some shockingly racist reactions from social media. In reality, only a teeny part of the responses on social media to the selection of an ethnically Indian woman as Miss America were ugly racist rants. But BuzzFeed highlighted a few nasty racist remarks about her, and 5 million people shared that item in a week — because they were appalled.
News media picked up the BuzzFeed angle, the one presuming racism. And by and large those media outlets didn't say where they got the idea that a bunch of racists were all over the Internet badmouthing Miss America. They were not transparent.
If they had been, their communities might have been able to put the bad information into proper perspective. Because users know that BuzzFeed does not aspire to truth. It aspires to be bizarre and entertaining. Truth is not part of the contract it makes with the audience.
After her talk I noticed a small display of transparency in the ladies room, one that instantly inspired trust:
Don't be annoyed by the vulgarity! This is really and truly a great application of authority amplified by transparency. Usually the stalls order us to behave this way. They almost never explain why.
She predicts that journalism ethics will change in this age of [insert your favorite cliche about the wild west of digital communications].
In the past, the pillars of ethics for our business were basically Truth, Independence, Minimize Harm. We needed independence so we could create a mass audience, for our business model. Being independent meant people could trust us. And we vigorously guarded "the essential stewardship role a free press plays in our society." (That's from her handout, which I'll duplicate for you.)But today, independence means almost nothing because our audience has seen totally too much failure from too many information providers. Totally.
Independence is an old value. Transparency is the new value.
We need to be transparent so people understand why they should trust us.
Trust still translates into revenue. What has changed is the quality that translates into trust. With so many sources of information coming at them from all sides, readers are no longer persuaded that we are independent and therefore trustworthy. They've seen us fail.
But when we are transparent we generate trust.
These days, she says you have to show the audience why they should believe it.
And she thinks Storify is a good tool for that. Link to your sources. Lay them all out so the reader can follow your research.
Her talk was much too brief for me, but she did touch several topics. For instance, do we misread unreliable Internet sites and in our haste repeat false information from them because they seem to confirm our bad assumptions about our communities?
For instance, apparently, that Americans include a bunch of racists.
 |
This is a screen grab from comments on cnn.com |
News media picked up the BuzzFeed angle, the one presuming racism. And by and large those media outlets didn't say where they got the idea that a bunch of racists were all over the Internet badmouthing Miss America. They were not transparent.
If they had been, their communities might have been able to put the bad information into proper perspective. Because users know that BuzzFeed does not aspire to truth. It aspires to be bizarre and entertaining. Truth is not part of the contract it makes with the audience.
BuzzFeed also is not transparent.
I hope I am doing a good job boiling down what McBride said.
If you want the audience to trust you, she says, don't trust an aggregator like Buzzfeed. If you want to talk about the social media on the Internet, look at the actual social media on the Internet.After her talk I noticed a small display of transparency in the ladies room, one that instantly inspired trust:
Don't be annoyed by the vulgarity! This is really and truly a great application of authority amplified by transparency. Usually the stalls order us to behave this way. They almost never explain why.
Street signs
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| THis church is across from what I began to think of as Druggie Park |
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| Security systems at work. |
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| Yeah, Jack, whoever you are. Get off! |
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| I walked across this five times before I noticed it. It's right inside a commercial building's drive entrance, near a seedy apartment building. |
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| The Post Office on 4th Street has its boxes outside on the street |
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| Wooden rectangles cover broken-out glass. |
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| Evidence! |
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| If your permit works, scram. |
Diane Cowen's churchy cookbook
Diane Cowen, Alec Harvey and Terry Scott Bertling are talking about book publications.
Diane's Sunday Dinners combines food and religion. It's a cookbook for religious people, and it is not her newspaper's product. She did it on her own.
Her market, Houston, includes a huge faith community with megachurches. She thought up the book while driving home, a 40-minute commute.
"You could pick people that nobody ever heard of, but I wanted people to have a reason to buy the book," she says, noting that a few of the pastors aren't well known.
Not all these people were good cooks. George Foreman's wife's bean recipe was "disgusting," Diane says, because they don't use any salt.
Not all these people were good cooks. George Foreman's wife's bean recipe was "disgusting," Diane says, because they don't use any salt.
She found an agent by asking friends who theirs were. One day she got a call from an independent publicist for a faith book she was doing a piece on. She asked that publicist for advice and got a referral to an agent. Got an email back from the agent the same day.
If you're looking for an agent look for acknowledgements in the books you read. Authors thank their agents, by name.
Getting a publisher took quite a while. Every Christian publisher said no. Either they weren't doing cookbooks or they weren't doing color, or they didn't publish books that include evangelicals or they only targeted evangelicals.
But almost as soon as they started sending queries to mainstream publishers, she got a contract with Andrews McMeel.
She just learned it's in a second printing, one month after publication.
Threads to pull
Sara Quinn mentioned Layar, an "augmented reality" phone app that picks up hidden code in media products so that the user simply holds the phone up to view videos, buy tickets, download a coupon ... She suggested that it also promises to use facial recognition tech, so that you could hold your phone up to a crowd and get the handles of whoever is tweeting, etc. Aim your phone at a crowd.
How does it work? I have no idea.
DOES it work? I have no idea.
https://www.layar.com/products/app/
Parallax scrolling is something beautiful being done using graphics software. Here are a few gee-wiz exemplars, which I suspect Phil Martin and the other of you hep cats on staff who read widely in the digital world are already well aware of. But I am not a person who reads widely in the digital world, so I would find a links collection like this useful, and thus, ta-da:
The New York Times
• "Tomato Can Blues," in which graphic novel illustrations shuttle themselves into a suggestion of 3-D as you scroll down the page, reading
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/tomato-can-blues/
• "Snow Fall," a lovely package about an avalanche, which even I have watched already, maybe because Kim told us about it. I forget.
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek
Sports Illustrated "The Ghost of Speedy Cannon" http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/longform/speedy/index.html
Pitchfork.com's "Machines for Life" http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/daft-punk/
Steve Martin's audiovisual album Let's Get Small which uses Spotify
The Washington Post: "Cycling's Road Forward"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2013/02/27/cyclings-road-forward/
How does it work? I have no idea.
DOES it work? I have no idea.
https://www.layar.com/products/app/
Parallax scrolling is something beautiful being done using graphics software. Here are a few gee-wiz exemplars, which I suspect Phil Martin and the other of you hep cats on staff who read widely in the digital world are already well aware of. But I am not a person who reads widely in the digital world, so I would find a links collection like this useful, and thus, ta-da:
The New York Times
• "Tomato Can Blues," in which graphic novel illustrations shuttle themselves into a suggestion of 3-D as you scroll down the page, reading
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/tomato-can-blues/
• "Snow Fall," a lovely package about an avalanche, which even I have watched already, maybe because Kim told us about it. I forget.
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek
Sports Illustrated "The Ghost of Speedy Cannon" http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/longform/speedy/index.html
Pitchfork.com's "Machines for Life" http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/daft-punk/
Steve Martin's audiovisual album Let's Get Small which uses Spotify
The Washington Post: "Cycling's Road Forward"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2013/02/27/cyclings-road-forward/
Do we have to?
Continuing coverage of Theresa Collington's session on "Making the Most of Your Digital Newsroom"
...
Theresa says that although in theory everybody in a newspaper staff ought to be linking to all the social media, in reality it's best if each person links to the site he enjoys. And the big two are Twitter and Facebook.
If you like Twitter but you can't stand Facebook, do the Twitter.
She says that in general
• Sports and weather guys like Twitter.
• News anchors like Facebook.
• News reporters like Twitter.
• Features writers like Facebook.
"We've got to make the leap at an executive level and give people a break," she says.
Pinterest and Instagram let the audience interact with you but won't make them look at your news. Still, all of us ought to figure out how to at least set up an account, in case market research suddenly inspires a mandate that you need to have 50 followers on Pinterest tomorrow.
Do such things happen at other newspapers?
...
Theresa says that although in theory everybody in a newspaper staff ought to be linking to all the social media, in reality it's best if each person links to the site he enjoys. And the big two are Twitter and Facebook.
If you like Twitter but you can't stand Facebook, do the Twitter.
She says that in general
• Sports and weather guys like Twitter.
• News anchors like Facebook.
• News reporters like Twitter.
• Features writers like Facebook.
"We've got to make the leap at an executive level and give people a break," she says.
Pinterest and Instagram let the audience interact with you but won't make them look at your news. Still, all of us ought to figure out how to at least set up an account, in case market research suddenly inspires a mandate that you need to have 50 followers on Pinterest tomorrow.
Do such things happen at other newspapers?
This is responsive design
Observation: Blooddirtangels doesn't fit on the screen of my iphone.
Sara Quinn noted that devices are all different and more new ones are on the way. Right now, some papers are struggling to create sites that will work across platforms. Instead of offering several apps, she said, it's smarter to create a site that works for anything.
So here is a term we should know: responsive design.
That happens when a website is able to shrink to fit the device using it. Here is an example: http://www.poynterproduction.org
Try dragging the size of the screen you're looking at so it gets narrow. Notice what happens to the content.
Sara Quinn noted that devices are all different and more new ones are on the way. Right now, some papers are struggling to create sites that will work across platforms. Instead of offering several apps, she said, it's smarter to create a site that works for anything.
So here is a term we should know: responsive design.
That happens when a website is able to shrink to fit the device using it. Here is an example: http://www.poynterproduction.org
Try dragging the size of the screen you're looking at so it gets narrow. Notice what happens to the content.
Not my job
So this is a weird thing to be learning, how to get an aggregator to link to you.
Theresa is walking us through buzzfeed.com's help. Reddit, Drudge ...
No, wait, she's talking about something we actually might do — share the links to our work. She says consider the interconnections you need to help advance the story when you set up the share link on Facebook or whatever, and use the keywords in your comment: Don't say, "Here's a great story I wrote" instead say "I spent two weeks immersed in oil with oil drillers drilling oil."
Theresa is walking us through buzzfeed.com's help. Reddit, Drudge ...
No, wait, she's talking about something we actually might do — share the links to our work. She says consider the interconnections you need to help advance the story when you set up the share link on Facebook or whatever, and use the keywords in your comment: Don't say, "Here's a great story I wrote" instead say "I spent two weeks immersed in oil with oil drillers drilling oil."
Third slide ... ahh ... no typo ... #relief
Still in Theresa's session on how to be an Online Rock Star, and we're on Slide 3.
3. Check your story on your site.
The solution to problems with a website from our end is to focus on the story, make it good. Look at how it's displayed and offer to add value, like a better hed or cutline.
• "Asking television journalists to write well is like asking them to jump out of a plane," and she imagines it's the same for us with shooting video.
4. Embrace a little HTML.
Shorter works better.
• TV news shows are working toward losing the desk. And TVcasters are terrified by that. "We're trying to ditch that," but they don't know how. "If you see a ficus and a desk, think twice."
3. Check your story on your site.
The solution to problems with a website from our end is to focus on the story, make it good. Look at how it's displayed and offer to add value, like a better hed or cutline.
• "Asking television journalists to write well is like asking them to jump out of a plane," and she imagines it's the same for us with shooting video.
4. Embrace a little HTML.
Shorter works better.
• TV news shows are working toward losing the desk. And TVcasters are terrified by that. "We're trying to ditch that," but they don't know how. "If you see a ficus and a desk, think twice."
First two slides
"Making the Most of Your Digital Newsroom"
Theresa Collington, director of digital content an operations at WTSP-TV (Gannett) and Poynter's EP online. She is a TV person, and her duties include reporting but also marketing, advertising, social media.
So she's talking about how to become a digital rock star, by which, she says, she means becoming a trained introspectionist in your web use and use that in your daily workflow.
1. Don't hate on your website.
They are all, in our business, cluttered and poky Frankensites.
2. Why are these sites so bad?
Because of the Sarbanes-Oxley auditing requirements and because our collectively produced content has to be scalable, portable and monetized and that's complicated to pull off. (Meanwhile, she has a typo on "its" in her slide. "Its all part of being part of a big company or a network, that serves ads ..." #distracted)
So when we produce a story we need to think about what we are giving the online readers to click on. Every time somebody clicks, we make money, in theory.
"Portability" relates to the site's appearance on portable devices.
Working through bugs does not mean you don't know computers. Bugs are a way of life. In other words, our newspaper geeks might very well be very, very good.
I am drifting .... drifting ...
I look around the room, and other people are checking their email.
Bottom line: The online paper is still a collective and companies need employees to suggest improvements.
• "Metrics" are "granular."
Theresa Collington, director of digital content an operations at WTSP-TV (Gannett) and Poynter's EP online. She is a TV person, and her duties include reporting but also marketing, advertising, social media.
So she's talking about how to become a digital rock star, by which, she says, she means becoming a trained introspectionist in your web use and use that in your daily workflow.
1. Don't hate on your website.
They are all, in our business, cluttered and poky Frankensites.
2. Why are these sites so bad?
Because of the Sarbanes-Oxley auditing requirements and because our collectively produced content has to be scalable, portable and monetized and that's complicated to pull off. (Meanwhile, she has a typo on "its" in her slide. "Its all part of being part of a big company or a network, that serves ads ..." #distracted)
So when we produce a story we need to think about what we are giving the online readers to click on. Every time somebody clicks, we make money, in theory.
"Portability" relates to the site's appearance on portable devices.
Working through bugs does not mean you don't know computers. Bugs are a way of life. In other words, our newspaper geeks might very well be very, very good.
I am drifting .... drifting ...
I look around the room, and other people are checking their email.
Bottom line: The online paper is still a collective and companies need employees to suggest improvements.
• "Metrics" are "granular."
Same but different
Susan Ladd at Greensboro News & Record also does a hiking feature, occasionally, but she's been doing two a month this summer. She pretty much just hikes on the 90-mile civilized trails in that community.Her columns are featured in a larger format than we use, inside on the Sunday spread.
https://www.facebook.com/susankladd
Susan's husband once upon a time applied to work at the Arkansas Gazette but went someplace else instead. Then he went back to school and became an IT specialist, and now he works for a university (I hope I am remembering this correctly).
They own eight computers.
Share and Steal 2
• Virginian Pilot: Year-end quiz, multiple choice about local things that happened that year, included Sports input.
• For Super Bowl, an edible stadium, with guacamole as the playing field.
• Food: One Valentine's Day recipe written like a trashy novel. Times Union, Tracy Ormsbee. Tracy's smart, and this thing was hilarious.
• Baltimore restaurant critic did a cover that annotated a relationship using the best restaurants for milestone meals: first date, big romance night, meeting the parents, breakup, lonely night solo, reunion, marriage feast, baby friendly restaurant, 10 year anniversary.
• Story about someone's menorah collection. In photos all the menorahs are alight.
• Christmas jobs cover: interview people who work at a wrapping counter, gift kiosk, tree farm, as santa's elf. And have someone take on one of these jobs and write about the ordeal. They picked a columnist who is "very confident of his appearance in the newspaper."
• Premium day: KC Star has a once a year tab on food with lots of photos and recipes: the paper costs $1 more for that one day, and it's not done in the racks. McClatchy does a puzzles book for their premium day. Betsy says they didn't sell any advertising, it was purely "upcharging" the subscribers. They included two or three pages of kids stuff. They got the puzzles from syndicate.
• Jim says Virginian-Pilot now charges $2 a week for the TV book — it has subscribers.
• Diane says Houston does an annual Best Dressed Woman in Houston luncheon. They make money for March of Dimes.
• Baltimore does an annual garden contest, the judges include extension agent.
• Anne Tallent says they are using Olapic UGC as an online tool for readers to upload their own photos, for instance for Cutest Pets feature.
• Baltimore did a Peeps COOKING contest.
• Albany Times arts explainer series "Why you already like..." that had professionals in opera, dance, symphony and so forth explain why readers are geared to enjoy their work (all opinions valid, pop culture references, something to talk about ... )
• For Super Bowl, an edible stadium, with guacamole as the playing field.
• Food: One Valentine's Day recipe written like a trashy novel. Times Union, Tracy Ormsbee. Tracy's smart, and this thing was hilarious.
• Baltimore restaurant critic did a cover that annotated a relationship using the best restaurants for milestone meals: first date, big romance night, meeting the parents, breakup, lonely night solo, reunion, marriage feast, baby friendly restaurant, 10 year anniversary.
• Story about someone's menorah collection. In photos all the menorahs are alight.
• Christmas jobs cover: interview people who work at a wrapping counter, gift kiosk, tree farm, as santa's elf. And have someone take on one of these jobs and write about the ordeal. They picked a columnist who is "very confident of his appearance in the newspaper."
• Premium day: KC Star has a once a year tab on food with lots of photos and recipes: the paper costs $1 more for that one day, and it's not done in the racks. McClatchy does a puzzles book for their premium day. Betsy says they didn't sell any advertising, it was purely "upcharging" the subscribers. They included two or three pages of kids stuff. They got the puzzles from syndicate.
• Jim says Virginian-Pilot now charges $2 a week for the TV book — it has subscribers.
• Diane says Houston does an annual Best Dressed Woman in Houston luncheon. They make money for March of Dimes.
• Baltimore does an annual garden contest, the judges include extension agent.
• Anne Tallent says they are using Olapic UGC as an online tool for readers to upload their own photos, for instance for Cutest Pets feature.
• Baltimore did a Peeps COOKING contest.
• Albany Times arts explainer series "Why you already like..." that had professionals in opera, dance, symphony and so forth explain why readers are geared to enjoy their work (all opinions valid, pop culture references, something to talk about ... )
SFJ budget report
9 a.m. Friday
merilee gave a quick budget report. Financial situation has stabilized, at a lower level, after declines that track with newspaper decline.
SFJ has 3 streams of revenue:
• contest: up $5K this year, despite 50 fewer submissions, 750 entries; higher fees didn't discourage too many; costs down because of digital submissions. Meanwhile operating costs are stable: merilee's salary same, no rent, just phone and data charges, shipping and an hourly student worker. might need to buy a computer next year.
• conference: maybe up, she hasn't tallied yet, but silent auction almost doubled last year's donations, and is tentatively $5,500.
• membership, down, by about 1K from earlier decade. Actual number of members is up over 180, but they cycled memberships to be due end of year, so many fees for people who joined this year were prorated.
merilee gave a quick budget report. Financial situation has stabilized, at a lower level, after declines that track with newspaper decline.
SFJ has 3 streams of revenue:
• contest: up $5K this year, despite 50 fewer submissions, 750 entries; higher fees didn't discourage too many; costs down because of digital submissions. Meanwhile operating costs are stable: merilee's salary same, no rent, just phone and data charges, shipping and an hourly student worker. might need to buy a computer next year.
• conference: maybe up, she hasn't tallied yet, but silent auction almost doubled last year's donations, and is tentatively $5,500.
• membership, down, by about 1K from earlier decade. Actual number of members is up over 180, but they cycled memberships to be due end of year, so many fees for people who joined this year were prorated.
Silent auction
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| Our staff donated this ceramic tray depicting a dinosaur reading a newspaper comics section created by Yours Truly on your behalf. |
I got a nice bathrobe for $35. I needed a bathrobe, because the shoulder pads in my 30-year-old pink chenille are wearing thin.
But I was informed last night that shoulder pads are coming back in. In another month, expect a sudden shift in my daily wardrobe toward newly hip retro business suits.
Afterward, we piled into Diane Cowen's car and went to La V, a Vietnamese fusion place where all the prices end in 40 cents. I learned that "Shrimp Crush" is shrimp that have been pounded flat, breaded and fried.
But I liked the chopsticks.
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| This, Oh Wary Traveler, is Shrimp Crush |
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| Anne Tallent of Baltimore Sun is one of my favorite conference people. |
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| Disturbing sign on trashcan in ladies room at La V |
Tablet storytelling
Sara Quinn, a visual journalism teacher at Poynter, gave another really engaging talk, this one about how her research using eye-track devices could inform the design of tablet news sites.
Recently she's researching touch tech. Does it help the reader understand and remember better?
Here's a link that might make more sense:
http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/visual-voice/191875/new-poynter-eyetrack-research-reveals-how-people-read-news-on-tablets/
• People enter a site or a page through the dominant element. The inverted Z is invalid. Whatever is biggest on the page, people look at that first. People look at faces when there is no obvious dominant element.
• Moving graphics in ads annoy and distract people because human peripheral vision is pretty good.
Assessing how users approached the three basic layouts (look at the screen grab at left), the researchers learned that people fixated on 18 things before they chose what to read. Those "fixations" were too quick for the reader to be aware. Older people tended to fixate methodically, younger people hopped all around, looking at display elements. Both groups, once they committed to a story, really read methodically.
• Do not let anyone tell you young people don't read, she said. They merely choose what they will read differently.
• Also, there is plenty of reading happening online. Digital readers read more than print readers.
People who pick a story but drop out partway through tend to drop out about 80 seconds in. People read about 250 words a minute, so right about 400 words in is where people bail.
So that's a good point for designers to place a "gold coin," a summary sidebar, another option to engage, a pullout quote, animated graphics, a photo.
Another observation, even when there are navigation tools, people use the browser's native back and forward page arrows to navigate stories. So maybe designers should make the nav tools look like back and forward arrows.
ALSO — 61 percent of readers keep touching the screen as they read. Some use their fingers like a teleprompter. They're looking for focus.
All of this talk simply won't make sense if you don't own a tablet, haven't ever read the paper on a tablet, have no input into how your paper (our paper) displays our work for tablets, have no role in that process, are not even being allowed to try to learn how to help.She talked about about a decade of eye-tracking research she's been part of that seeks to see how people choose what they read, and once they choose, how they read it and for how long.
But now I am ranting.
Recently she's researching touch tech. Does it help the reader understand and remember better?
Here's a link that might make more sense:
http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/visual-voice/191875/new-poynter-eyetrack-research-reveals-how-people-read-news-on-tablets/
• People enter a site or a page through the dominant element. The inverted Z is invalid. Whatever is biggest on the page, people look at that first. People look at faces when there is no obvious dominant element.
• Moving graphics in ads annoy and distract people because human peripheral vision is pretty good.
• Do not let anyone tell you young people don't read, she said. They merely choose what they will read differently.
• Also, there is plenty of reading happening online. Digital readers read more than print readers.
So that's a good point for designers to place a "gold coin," a summary sidebar, another option to engage, a pullout quote, animated graphics, a photo.
Another observation, even when there are navigation tools, people use the browser's native back and forward page arrows to navigate stories. So maybe designers should make the nav tools look like back and forward arrows.
ALSO — 61 percent of readers keep touching the screen as they read. Some use their fingers like a teleprompter. They're looking for focus.
Summary:
- Tablet users have a high number of fixations before selecting what to read, especially young users.
- Make it a satisfying choice — not too hard to find the right entry point for the main story.
- You want to provide lively design with lots to look at (tiles are too simple) but don't overwhelm the page.
- 80-90 seconds is a bailout point (1:10 in videos). Reward the reader right about 400 words, to keep him engaged.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Ideas from Show and Steal
• It's time to start planning for holiday lights.
• Girls shop for prom dresses in January.
Here's something we ought to do: LA Times Show Tracker. Various staffers who are obsessed with TV shows are allowed to write about the shoes they're watching — overnight reaction to shows. This is a web-only feature, and the staffers aren't paid to do it. Actually popular with the unpaid staff.
• In South Carolina you can only do things outside in April or October.
• Baltimore and Pittsburgh pick out a belle of the ball at their society soirees and photograph her in her gown, with a cutline that details the labels she's wearing.
• nola.com asked nutritionists what they snack on for a package on healthy snacks.
• San Antonio Express News moved its weekend section to Friday trying to regain movie ads, but the name of the thing is also the name of their website AND the name of another section, too. My idea: Never kill MovieStyle.
• One of the Pittsburgh papers had their photogs do a series of beautiful profiles of bridges in the city, with some history of each structure.
• Very sad, don't let's do this: Seattle Times did a large series of covers during their state parks centennial, one for each of the parks.
• San Antonio did a cute quiz about food in the city — who serves what where.
• Alice Short of LA Times says they DID have big problems with editing the food pieces written by popular chefs in the city.
• Looking at someone's food section featuring zucchini, I thought what if we did a bizarro story on ideas for things to do with zucchini?
• This is different: Colonoscopy, the game. Full page graphic. Times Union in Albany.
• Florida Today has readers sending in pictures of their meals and describing them and where they ate them.
• Houston Chronicle's Health Zone is a once a month 12-page editorial section that this year accepted only ads from hospitals; full page ad costs $35K. Made $1.5 million in the year. Diane Cowan, the editor, says the paper has three medical beat writers, but the section's contributors are the full newsroom, and there's no extra pay for those people, who, she says, are delighted to have their bylines in a publication that made money. Most stories are 20-25 inches, 40-inch cover tends to focus on medical science and research, not personal health.
Hospital communications departments do try to control access. The private doctors, though, will talk directly with the paper.
Big problem she has is hospital comm departments expect to be getting lots of fawning coverage for their money, and she's trying to produce an editorial product, not advertorial.
Starting now the section is opening ads to other businesses, CVS, for instance.
• Times Union in Albany has a social media editor who compiles the Kristi's List feature about what people in the area were talking about on social media using analytics.
• Virgina Pilot: How to make your own snow globe. 12 days of holiday craft, one for each holiday.
• Roanoke got the photo department to try out cellphone camera apps and review them.
• When a cover fell through, Virginia Pilot did a full-page menu pronunciation guide and glossary, and repeated it inside as a "pocket size" version.
• Girls shop for prom dresses in January.
Here's something we ought to do: LA Times Show Tracker. Various staffers who are obsessed with TV shows are allowed to write about the shoes they're watching — overnight reaction to shows. This is a web-only feature, and the staffers aren't paid to do it. Actually popular with the unpaid staff.
• In South Carolina you can only do things outside in April or October.
• Baltimore and Pittsburgh pick out a belle of the ball at their society soirees and photograph her in her gown, with a cutline that details the labels she's wearing.
• nola.com asked nutritionists what they snack on for a package on healthy snacks.
• San Antonio Express News moved its weekend section to Friday trying to regain movie ads, but the name of the thing is also the name of their website AND the name of another section, too. My idea: Never kill MovieStyle.
• One of the Pittsburgh papers had their photogs do a series of beautiful profiles of bridges in the city, with some history of each structure.
• Very sad, don't let's do this: Seattle Times did a large series of covers during their state parks centennial, one for each of the parks.
• San Antonio did a cute quiz about food in the city — who serves what where.
• Alice Short of LA Times says they DID have big problems with editing the food pieces written by popular chefs in the city.
• Looking at someone's food section featuring zucchini, I thought what if we did a bizarro story on ideas for things to do with zucchini?
• This is different: Colonoscopy, the game. Full page graphic. Times Union in Albany.
• Florida Today has readers sending in pictures of their meals and describing them and where they ate them.
• Houston Chronicle's Health Zone is a once a month 12-page editorial section that this year accepted only ads from hospitals; full page ad costs $35K. Made $1.5 million in the year. Diane Cowan, the editor, says the paper has three medical beat writers, but the section's contributors are the full newsroom, and there's no extra pay for those people, who, she says, are delighted to have their bylines in a publication that made money. Most stories are 20-25 inches, 40-inch cover tends to focus on medical science and research, not personal health.
Hospital communications departments do try to control access. The private doctors, though, will talk directly with the paper.
Big problem she has is hospital comm departments expect to be getting lots of fawning coverage for their money, and she's trying to produce an editorial product, not advertorial.
Starting now the section is opening ads to other businesses, CVS, for instance.
• Times Union in Albany has a social media editor who compiles the Kristi's List feature about what people in the area were talking about on social media using analytics.
• Virgina Pilot: How to make your own snow globe. 12 days of holiday craft, one for each holiday.
• Roanoke got the photo department to try out cellphone camera apps and review them.
• When a cover fell through, Virginia Pilot did a full-page menu pronunciation guide and glossary, and repeated it inside as a "pocket size" version.
Facial recognition can work for you
1. Using Google+ new Find My Face feature, you can look up all the photos posted of you on the Internet.2. The website tineye.com allows you to drag and drop a photo into its database, and the site then ID's the person for you.
Can I get a "Yikes"?
Forthcoming and federal
Another site from Al: govpulse.us. It's watching the Federal Register, and you can search it for rules that are about to take effect.Supposedly you can also search for rules affecting your area, but I was unable to work that tool.
Unwinding the grapevine
Al Tompkins showed us the geofeedia site, http://corp.geofeedia.com. This costs money. But it mines social media (Facebook and Twitter) in real time and allows you to search for people posting in a specific geographic area.
Click on the icon that represents each poster and you see his handle.
The GPS locations can be slightly off.
But imagine if there was a huge crowd gathering on 12th street, angry, and ready to throw cans at the police because someone had posted into the unseen but very real newsfeed in Little Rock that the police had just gunned down a 9-year-old boy.
Not hard to imagine, right?
Typically, news reporters would use a tool like geofeedia to locate some active witnesses and use that contact info to get them to comment to us.
But I wonder if Features could use it to locate the headspring of that local, citizen-band newsfeed, the one with the potentially very bad info, that is obviously a real force in our area?
And could we thus not be out of the loop?
Al suggests that we request the free demo, then as we create the account, say that we learned about it from him at Poynter. He says he's hearing that people who ring that bell are being allowed to keep the demo going longer.
And, yes, I realize that several of you already know all about this. But we have not used the tool in this manner.
Click on the icon that represents each poster and you see his handle.
The GPS locations can be slightly off.
But imagine if there was a huge crowd gathering on 12th street, angry, and ready to throw cans at the police because someone had posted into the unseen but very real newsfeed in Little Rock that the police had just gunned down a 9-year-old boy.
Not hard to imagine, right?
Typically, news reporters would use a tool like geofeedia to locate some active witnesses and use that contact info to get them to comment to us.
But I wonder if Features could use it to locate the headspring of that local, citizen-band newsfeed, the one with the potentially very bad info, that is obviously a real force in our area?
And could we thus not be out of the loop?
Al suggests that we request the free demo, then as we create the account, say that we learned about it from him at Poynter. He says he's hearing that people who ring that bell are being allowed to keep the demo going longer.
And, yes, I realize that several of you already know all about this. But we have not used the tool in this manner.
Cool wind map
This is neat little visual using data from the National Digital Forecast Database, by a private web developer. Look at the gallery, too.http://hint.fm/wind/
Information is Beautiful
Sara is talking about David McCandless' site Information is Beautiful: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/mountains-out-of-molehills/
He compiled Google Trends data into a deeply interactive chart to explore what people were most afraid of at particular times of the year over the past 11 years.
He compiled Google Trends data into a deeply interactive chart to explore what people were most afraid of at particular times of the year over the past 11 years.
5Ks by season
For my section, I could get Gary Ballard of Arkansasrunner.com to give me access to his archival records of the numbers of 5Ks per month for the past decade, and we could chart that.
Why do it? So race organizers would understand their market.
So readers would understand why we don't cover every 5K.
Why do it? So race organizers would understand their market.
So readers would understand why we don't cover every 5K.
Yardsticks
Sara Quinn, "Visual Thinking From Big Data to Simple Idea":
This is not what Sara is describing, I just got an idea.
Take the physical newspaper around and measure public spaces with it. When we're trying to translate numbers into relatable terms for a graphic, the length or width of the newspaper could be a unit of measure. For example, a stadium seat in Verizon Arena — how many newspapers wide?
This is not what Sara is describing, I just got an idea.
Take the physical newspaper around and measure public spaces with it. When we're trying to translate numbers into relatable terms for a graphic, the length or width of the newspaper could be a unit of measure. For example, a stadium seat in Verizon Arena — how many newspapers wide?
Race is not always a crisis
Eric Deggans, author of Race Baiter, spoke this morning, first thing, and he totally changed how I felt coming into this conference.
Based on the amusing but ultimately confusing talk at last night's reception, I was steeled for a day of fill-the-page-quick "ideas" about a list inspired by readers' online submissions of their childhood memories of the first day of school, that sort of thing.
But Deggans has been through a refining fire since I first met him many years ago at TCA. Back then, he was the guy in the auditorium who had counted the black characters in the new shows and wanted to know why the networks had invested in so narrow a representation of the cultural diversity of our great nation. He had a point, every time. And it was the same point, every time.
In 2008, Bill O'Reilly called him the biggest race-baiter in the country. I imagine that being singled out as anything untoward by someone like O'Reilly must be like surviving an infestation of bedbugs. You'd learn a lot. Deggans has become a relaxed and formidable advocate, and his talk this morning was smart, funny and persuasive.
For example, "We tend to cover subjects like race and poverty the way we cover disasters," he said. But race is often a real part of the everyday, not-disaster stories we cover. Deggans says we should put the racial element in the story in an everyday manner. Could be easy, if all it requires is calling up some other member of the crowd who isn't white, or with more difficulty — noting the racial profile of a neighborhood in a noncrime report.
For instance, I wondered, a restaurant review? And then I realized that Jenn and Eric have dealt with that very issue, and done it gracefully, only I didn't pay attention because I didn't think it was significant.
Egad. My shallowness just never ends.
Would adding observations about racial context be race baiting? Deggans says no.
Would readers see it as race baiting? He says yes they would.
He also empathized with newsrooms that can't very well hire for diversity when they're busy firing the staff. But it's worth noting that I, for example, sit in a mostly white and English-only newsroom in a state with a rapidly growing Hispanic population.
At the very least, if I am ever able to acquire a masters degree, it ought to be in Spanish language.
Based on the amusing but ultimately confusing talk at last night's reception, I was steeled for a day of fill-the-page-quick "ideas" about a list inspired by readers' online submissions of their childhood memories of the first day of school, that sort of thing.
But Deggans has been through a refining fire since I first met him many years ago at TCA. Back then, he was the guy in the auditorium who had counted the black characters in the new shows and wanted to know why the networks had invested in so narrow a representation of the cultural diversity of our great nation. He had a point, every time. And it was the same point, every time.In 2008, Bill O'Reilly called him the biggest race-baiter in the country. I imagine that being singled out as anything untoward by someone like O'Reilly must be like surviving an infestation of bedbugs. You'd learn a lot. Deggans has become a relaxed and formidable advocate, and his talk this morning was smart, funny and persuasive.
For example, "We tend to cover subjects like race and poverty the way we cover disasters," he said. But race is often a real part of the everyday, not-disaster stories we cover. Deggans says we should put the racial element in the story in an everyday manner. Could be easy, if all it requires is calling up some other member of the crowd who isn't white, or with more difficulty — noting the racial profile of a neighborhood in a noncrime report.
For instance, I wondered, a restaurant review? And then I realized that Jenn and Eric have dealt with that very issue, and done it gracefully, only I didn't pay attention because I didn't think it was significant.
Egad. My shallowness just never ends.
Would adding observations about racial context be race baiting? Deggans says no.
Would readers see it as race baiting? He says yes they would.
He also empathized with newsrooms that can't very well hire for diversity when they're busy firing the staff. But it's worth noting that I, for example, sit in a mostly white and English-only newsroom in a state with a rapidly growing Hispanic population.
At the very least, if I am ever able to acquire a masters degree, it ought to be in Spanish language.
Beware of Twitter
From Al Joyner's session "How to Become a Story Idea Machine":
A few wicked little websites allow electronic pranksters to fake tweet as someone else. One is lemmetweetthatforyou.com, but there are others.
It is possible to fake the time stamp, too.
He says fake tweeting is rampant during breaking news stories. So there are strategies for assessing whether you're looking at an actual celebrity tweet: For instance, you can look someone up on the site http://foller.me. If you're wondering if this is a real celebrity tweeting this stuff stuff, see who the actual person follows and what sort of tweets he usually makes.
If you're trying to select a tweeting witness — say, you're applying geofeedia.com's map to the area around a news story in a search for social media witnesses, and you see some twittering going on there but you're not sure who's for real and who's a fake — look up that person and assess who is following him and who he follows. Fakers tend to follow fakers.
A few wicked little websites allow electronic pranksters to fake tweet as someone else. One is lemmetweetthatforyou.com, but there are others.
It is possible to fake the time stamp, too.
He says fake tweeting is rampant during breaking news stories. So there are strategies for assessing whether you're looking at an actual celebrity tweet: For instance, you can look someone up on the site http://foller.me. If you're wondering if this is a real celebrity tweeting this stuff stuff, see who the actual person follows and what sort of tweets he usually makes.
If you're trying to select a tweeting witness — say, you're applying geofeedia.com's map to the area around a news story in a search for social media witnesses, and you see some twittering going on there but you're not sure who's for real and who's a fake — look up that person and assess who is following him and who he follows. Fakers tend to follow fakers.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Reception
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| Kathy standing, Lindsey seated |
Here is a photo of them for you to admire.
I met other people as well, including Tony Huang from Dallas Morning News, who knows Jerry Bokamper, and Terry Bertling from San Antonio who remembered Cathy Frye and Rick McFarland but had not heard about their ordeal. John Kappes from Cleveland Plain Dealer is in an awfully interesting situation right now, with their restructuring. I'll do a separate post for you on that. But it is 11 p.m. and I promised I would try to get up and run with the women who plan to run at 6:15 tomorrow, so straight to the chase:
Roy Peter Clark came around with a handout. He was wearing a blue Polo-type shirt with the word Poynter embroidered where a polo icon would go, so I asked if he was Mr. Poynter and shook his hand, as I knew you would want me to do.
He spoke for about 20 minutes on a topic apparently further explained in his new book How to Write Short.
He led off with Mr. Higgs (the elderly scientist who just won a Nobel Prize for his work on that physics theory, the one about the particle people are pretending they totally understand) and also Billy Joel, who recently came to St. Petersburg. (I wanted to raise my hand and ask if that was why there was a Piano Man Building down the street, but I did not. Which is good, because later, Michael looked it up on Google and learned that the Piano Man used to be a piano store; it was donated to the university.)
Clark played some chords on a piano, to illustrate his inclusion of Billy Joel. Clark had heard a talk Joel gave in which he complained that a music transcription company had printed his chords incorrectly. Changing one note just a little switches a major chord to minor, thus changing the world evoked by the chords.
Then Clark said he had been wondering if there might be a verbal equivalent of the Higgs-Boson, so compressed and meaningful that we could just use it to evoke meaning, thus saying all that needed to be said without saying so much. (I do believe I am saying this more clearly than he did.)
Then he gave us four examples:
• Jesus wept.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Tonio Kroger
• Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
A great deal of information is packed into these short phrases because they make opposites collide.
Got that?
Me neither, but the title of the talk was "When Words Collide" not "News You Can Use."
Now, once upon a time, I did my junior research project on the under appreciated genius of Alexander Pope, and I remember that among the glossary of 18th-century rhetorical tricks used with wit to convey the illusion of succinctness there is one in which the two parts of a couplet express contrasting qualities, opposites. For the life of me, I cannot recall that term. All I can drag from the cluttered closet of memory is the term periphrasis.
But, actually, I think periphrasis is exactly the right word for Clark's talk.
Walking to Poynter
Everyone tells me there is evil crime in the world and it's hot, but then they tell me Poynter is "within walking distance" of the hotel. So I decided to walk the eight blocks to Poynter, to see what I could see.
• The streets are wide.
• There are numbered streets and numbered avenues; they use the same numbers, and they intersect. For example, Fourth Street crosses Fourth Avenue.
Also, there is North Fourth, South Fourth. East Fourth, West Fourth ...
To reach Third Street, you have to pass Eighth Avenue (I think).
• The streets have bike lanes, but the bikes ride on the sidewalks.
I passed some beautiful facades, Mission-looking buildings with Art Deco-type detailing and shabby people sitting on worn stoops. I couldn't tell if the shabby people were poor or merely dressed for the climate, which seems warm but very comfortable to me.
I saw banyan trees, including this one in a park that belongs to the University of South Florida along Third Street and Dali Boulevard not far from Poynter.
I saw another, bigger banyan tree on a corner marked with a crudely hand drawn "boundary" post. And I THINK this was on the corner of property that well might be the headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey.
While I was taking a photo of the gate there (for Michael's benefit), a truck drove up. The driver looked at me oddly, and it flashed into mind that there was still a federal shutdown. So I tried to explain about all the dear apostrophes that USGS removed from geographic sites and how that became a Neverending Wrong and how that annoyed Griffin and that was why I was taking a photo of this sign for my husband's benefit and ...
I saw the Piano Man Building. That's where I crossed over to the lefthand side of the Third Street, because the two people I stopped to ask directions to Poynter told me it would be on the left. I didn't see Poynter over there; it all appeared to be various parts of University of South Florida St. Petersburg, but while I was realizing that and carefully denying awareness of the sweat beginning to seep into my least out of date jacket, I spotted a sign with a map and building names.
This was on the corner across from the Piano Man Building. The sign spelled Piano Man as one word — Pianoman — directly across the street from that building, which has its name on the front, in very large letters.
Also, Poynter is on the righthand side of the street.
I finally learned that by walking around the USFSP structure and, after discovering I was on a marina, by asking directions of a third person who was not even staring at all the sailboats floating around in the large body of water beyond the big field on the lefthand side of the street directly across from Poynter.
Poynter also has its name across its front. I walked under a vine-oppressed portico through a stone courtyard and up some wide and welcoming steps to a bank of doors that clearly were intended by the architect of the building as its front entrance. But the doors were locked and a sign on the glass directed me to the "south" entrance. South?
It was so shady in the courtyard I wasn't sure where the sun was, so I wandered back toward the vines.
A man was outside of Poynter, near its windows but on the other side of a moat of landscaping, and he was smoking. He must have just walked out a side door. I waved and caught his attention so I could ask if I was walking in the right direction to find the south entrance. In a heavy Nordic accent he said something like "huh?" And then he said "parking lot."
Was I headed the right way? He said yes, I was, or I could go the other direction too. So I kept walking, walking north or northerly, as it turns out, and then east, and then south — until I was all the way around the building and looking at a parking lot ... behind very tall green fencing.
There was only one way into the parking lot, and it was on the other side — the side I'd started from.
Briefly I considered squeezing through a gap, but some people with name badges were standing on a sidewalk in there, speaking English in Nordic accents. I imagined trying to explain to David Bailey why photos of me trapped with my least out of date jacket snagged on chainlink fencing were making the rounds of Nordic blogsites.
So I walked back the way I'd come, noting the deliveries entrance and nearly circumnavigating the Poynter Institute. But I did enter the building eventually, which was more or less empty except for Steve, the laconic, lanky guard, who unwound himself like a cartoon of a basketball player to stand and walk me to where to find the water fountain.
And so, success! I am arrived.
• The streets are wide.
• There are numbered streets and numbered avenues; they use the same numbers, and they intersect. For example, Fourth Street crosses Fourth Avenue.
Also, there is North Fourth, South Fourth. East Fourth, West Fourth ...
To reach Third Street, you have to pass Eighth Avenue (I think).
 |
| Evidence |
• The streets have bike lanes, but the bikes ride on the sidewalks.
I passed some beautiful facades, Mission-looking buildings with Art Deco-type detailing and shabby people sitting on worn stoops. I couldn't tell if the shabby people were poor or merely dressed for the climate, which seems warm but very comfortable to me.
I saw another, bigger banyan tree on a corner marked with a crudely hand drawn "boundary" post. And I THINK this was on the corner of property that well might be the headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey.
I saw the Piano Man Building. That's where I crossed over to the lefthand side of the Third Street, because the two people I stopped to ask directions to Poynter told me it would be on the left. I didn't see Poynter over there; it all appeared to be various parts of University of South Florida St. Petersburg, but while I was realizing that and carefully denying awareness of the sweat beginning to seep into my least out of date jacket, I spotted a sign with a map and building names.
This was on the corner across from the Piano Man Building. The sign spelled Piano Man as one word — Pianoman — directly across the street from that building, which has its name on the front, in very large letters.
Also, Poynter is on the righthand side of the street.
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This is across the street from Poynter. |
Poynter also has its name across its front. I walked under a vine-oppressed portico through a stone courtyard and up some wide and welcoming steps to a bank of doors that clearly were intended by the architect of the building as its front entrance. But the doors were locked and a sign on the glass directed me to the "south" entrance. South?
It was so shady in the courtyard I wasn't sure where the sun was, so I wandered back toward the vines.
A man was outside of Poynter, near its windows but on the other side of a moat of landscaping, and he was smoking. He must have just walked out a side door. I waved and caught his attention so I could ask if I was walking in the right direction to find the south entrance. In a heavy Nordic accent he said something like "huh?" And then he said "parking lot."
Was I headed the right way? He said yes, I was, or I could go the other direction too. So I kept walking, walking north or northerly, as it turns out, and then east, and then south — until I was all the way around the building and looking at a parking lot ... behind very tall green fencing.
There was only one way into the parking lot, and it was on the other side — the side I'd started from.
Briefly I considered squeezing through a gap, but some people with name badges were standing on a sidewalk in there, speaking English in Nordic accents. I imagined trying to explain to David Bailey why photos of me trapped with my least out of date jacket snagged on chainlink fencing were making the rounds of Nordic blogsites.
So I walked back the way I'd come, noting the deliveries entrance and nearly circumnavigating the Poynter Institute. But I did enter the building eventually, which was more or less empty except for Steve, the laconic, lanky guard, who unwound himself like a cartoon of a basketball player to stand and walk me to where to find the water fountain.
And so, success! I am arrived.
The Ego Has Landed
The Courtyard by Marriott in St. Petersburg, Fla., is the smallest Marriott I've stayed at in years. It's making the palm trees outside my second floor window look tall.
But you don't care about palm trees — or about the landscaping plants that caught my eye during the rather lengthy shuttle ride from the airport, so let me hurry up and report that I have been networking on your behalf already.
I have learned there are 25 Features staff members on the Kansas City Star and they produce several weekly sections, three of which are general features. Their Sunday section is mostly arts, with an art columnist; they have a home and garden section and a weekend section on Thursdays. They have a popular books page, not much travel. Recently they have been handed responsibility for Ink, a 60-page tab aimed at young professionals that used to have a staff of 9. Now it has one editor and access to the Features department.
And they have a new Features AME, Kathy Lu — as of last week. Lu came from The Roanoke Times. She was surprised that her staff editors all gather their own wire fillers and run their own sections. She was surprised that some of us are also shooting photos and video.
She was in my shuttle from the airport.
You're welcome.
But you don't care about palm trees — or about the landscaping plants that caught my eye during the rather lengthy shuttle ride from the airport, so let me hurry up and report that I have been networking on your behalf already.
I have learned there are 25 Features staff members on the Kansas City Star and they produce several weekly sections, three of which are general features. Their Sunday section is mostly arts, with an art columnist; they have a home and garden section and a weekend section on Thursdays. They have a popular books page, not much travel. Recently they have been handed responsibility for Ink, a 60-page tab aimed at young professionals that used to have a staff of 9. Now it has one editor and access to the Features department.
And they have a new Features AME, Kathy Lu — as of last week. Lu came from The Roanoke Times. She was surprised that her staff editors all gather their own wire fillers and run their own sections. She was surprised that some of us are also shooting photos and video.
She was in my shuttle from the airport.
You're welcome.
Monday, October 7, 2013
Sick and not sick
One of my daily chores is scanning the newspaper's wire service feeds for stories written by other publications that are on topic for my section of the newspaper and not so badly written, so lazy, so gullible or sloppily researched that ... wait. I should start over.
One of my daily tasks is scanning the wire for potential filler stories that I think our readers would enjoy reading. Reading the wire takes time away from looking for real news in my immediate vicinity, but my section often needs a few fillers. And we pay substantial, big, some might say huge fees to the wire services for the privilege of picking up these articles for use in our pages.
Today the wire included an intriguing piece about a website called sickweather.com. The reporter explained that this website purports to be able to track the incidence of contagious diseases based upon comments made in social media including Twitter and Facebook.
Furthermore, the reporter stated, "Now, Sickweather is introducing a new smartphone app in six to eight
weeks that will alert users every time they are in the vicinity of a
sick person." It would be called "geosensing" them.
My first thought: Wow, ambitious.
Second thought: Wait. Would I want to know that info?
Third thought: How exactly are they snooping through my Facebook and Twitter comments?
But it's the fourth thought that counts, and here was mine: How well does his site work now?
So I clicked over to sickweather. I called up its map of Arkansas and began trying to figure out how it represents the diseases it says it tracks.
The default setting appears to be "flu," and the site showed an orange line, which I took to be representations of flulike complaints in social media near Fort Smith. It's not flu season, so just a little bit of orange seemed plausible.
But I live in Little Rock. There was no flu orange in Little Rock, even when I set the zoom as close as it would go.
Again, not flu season. So I looked up some other diseases. For instance, the toggle list offered something called "man flu." Was any of that showing up as orange in my area? No.
How about nasal congestion? No. None, not even in the vicinity of Arkansas Children's Hospital.
My nose was really congested last week. And a bunch of people I know complain about their noses on a daily basis. So now I was a little skeptical.
But before I allowed myself to decide that this website was overselling its abilities, I looked up one more ailment, the sort of thing my Facebook friends who have children would most assuredly post and Tweet about: pink eye. I looked for pink eye in the vicinity of Arkansas Children's Hospital, surely a hotbed.
Nothing.
Given this experiment and its results, I am suspending for now any further thoughts I might be tempted to think about the idea of being able to "geosense" sick people using an app on my cellphone.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Dead baby cupcakes
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| Sacred Heart Catholic Church Crystal City, Texas |
I understand now that my religious education was not standard issue Catholic. I could be grateful for that, despite the many years of confusion it caused.
My parents were more and less devout, and as soon as we moved to a place with Catholic day schools, Little Rock, I very much wanted to attend the high school for girls and wear a uniform. MSM was expensive, but my dad made that happen for me.
Apart from being the new girl and out of the loop in a population full of lifelong friendships and animosities, and also apart from being a self-important, bossy, would-be tomboy, I was poorly prepared to blend in. I had never been made to memorize the longer prayers and I didn't know it was rude to say "Yes, M'am" to a nun. (The address is "Sister.")
I remember the first time I realized many of the other students were actively engaged in anti-abortion crusading through their various parishes. They appeared to be delighted to be heckling women they saw coming and going from a place they called "the abortion clinic," a place that I knew by a different name because of my father's work in the War on Poverty. Planned Parenthood was not a Satanic mill in the world I'd known before. It was a place where poor women could see a doctor for all kinds of reasons.
How did these teens know which women were going for abortions? How did they know what was going on in the hearts of strangers? I might have asked such questions out loud or I might not, I can't remember. Whether I did or not, I know for a fact that I did not listen for answers to such questions. Craven fear of losing respectability and an overly acute awareness of the ease with which sticking out transmogrifies into ostracism were dominant themes in my teen years. All I knew for sure was that everything was all about me, and I wanted to be admired, I needed to be right, and my being right was for my own protection.
I must have been awful to be around.
Anyway, all that to say this:
October is, yet again, the 40 Days for Life campaign in the church my mother attends (and so I attend on Sundays). Basically this means that middle-aged and elderly people who are well past the age where childbearing issues are marginally relevant in their daily decisions will have the supposed epidemic of abortion thrust in their faces in a tone that suggests they are, right this minute, contemplating killing their unborn babies.
If this marketing approach were, in fact, confined to 40 days, it could be justifiable based upon the church's dogma against abortion. But the truth is the campaign sprawls across the calendar. Appeals for money from Birthright arrive in my mother's mail more often than once a year, and she tends to send $75 any time she writes a check, to anybody. And yet she has to sit in Mass and be lectured by a deacon for supposedly turning a blind eye to crimes being committed against the unborn?
Sitting beside her (while she sleeps peacefully) in the pew, I have gathered that some people there believe every woman they see is just about to go abort a baby.
It's tempting to say they're obsessed, but I don't know other people's hearts. Maybe they fear losing respectability. Or maybe they are the church militant, called by God. I don't know.
Sunday after Mass — a deeply interesting Mass in which the very entertaining pastor spoke about that interview given recently by Pope Francis — we were greeted on the church steps by earnest, grim teenagers holding black plates loaded with brilliantly colored cupcakes. Each pretty cupcake held one candle.
They expected us to take a cupcake, eat it and in so doing say a silent prayer for all the aborted fetuses who would never get to experience the delicious joy of a first birthday.
Yes, dead baby cupcakes.
If anyone reading this can articulate exactly why this was a misguided use of young people's idealism — and also why it would not have improved the world to have lectured them about how silly their protest or demonstration or marketing pitch was — I would be glad to read your words. Mine fail.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Origin Story
National Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day has been an annual observance publicized by the International Mountain Biking Association (IMBA) since 2004, when congressional supporters passed a resolution "expressing the sense of Congress" to honor the spirit of Jacob Mock Doub on the first Saturday in October.
That's how national observances become national observances.
You can look up the speeches that supported the resolution in the archives of the Congressional Record. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2004-10-05/html/CREC-2004-10-05-pt1-PgH8063-3.htm
I looked them up after reading at the bottom of a press release touting local observances that the day was meant to honor the memory of a boy who died of complications from a mountain biking accident.
And I thought, What the ...? Take a kid mountain biking because some kid died mountain biking??
But it turns out the story is deeper than that, and the memorial appropriate.
According to an account published in the Winston-Salem Journal in 2004, “Jack” Doub was a champion teenage mountain bike racer from North Carolina who died in 2002, four months after cutting his leg on a stump while jumping a big rock. The day before this relatively minor accident, he had placed second in a national competition.
The newspaper reported that the 17-year-old was so cheerful and plucky his family didn't realize an infection from the wound was spreading through his body, just that he didn't feel up to being so active. According to his obituary published on ancestry.com, at the time he died he had recently taken up photography. So basically, he was young and strong and somehow able to keep total sepsis at bay for months. But then, the week before he died, he went mountain biking again with friends and had a great time jumping things.
But afterward, at home, he complained of the flu. Emergency room physicians found no evidence of flu. His family found him dead on the floor of his room a few days later.
His father told the newspaper he didn't blame mountain biking for the accident. That Jack was very active with several sports and often injured. That he could have sustained the infection that killed him doing anything.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
So that explains it
Michael and I watch a steamy costume drama on Starz, The White Queen. It's about the War of the Roses, and the beautiful actors all appear to be playing historic figures. Of course I have no idea why who hates whom. So last week during a break in the action (Michael begged permission to wash the dinner dishes), I hopped around Google looking up bios on some of the principal players in the story.
I was surprised to learn how young they all were when, for instance, they were married for the first time (3 years old? Really?) or how many spouses they ran through.
Today, Slate moved a fascinating article by Laura Helmuth about longevity. In the course of supporting her argument that older people have a moderating impact on society, she points to the 14th century as a fer instance.
Calling it "one of the worst centuries in recorded Western history," she explains that the bubonic plague and famine killed vast numbers of Europeans. She quotes historian Barbara Tuchman's observation that the Black Death cut through the complete cross-section of societies, removing anyone, including kings and established leaders.
These older people were then replaced by kids — teens or younger. As Helmuth puts it, these inexperienced, hormone-addled leaders "promptly did stupid, aggressive, frontal-lobe-deficient teen-age nonsense like invading neighboring countries."
No wonder the 100 Years War dragged on and on.
I was surprised to learn how young they all were when, for instance, they were married for the first time (3 years old? Really?) or how many spouses they ran through.
Today, Slate moved a fascinating article by Laura Helmuth about longevity. In the course of supporting her argument that older people have a moderating impact on society, she points to the 14th century as a fer instance.
Calling it "one of the worst centuries in recorded Western history," she explains that the bubonic plague and famine killed vast numbers of Europeans. She quotes historian Barbara Tuchman's observation that the Black Death cut through the complete cross-section of societies, removing anyone, including kings and established leaders.
These older people were then replaced by kids — teens or younger. As Helmuth puts it, these inexperienced, hormone-addled leaders "promptly did stupid, aggressive, frontal-lobe-deficient teen-age nonsense like invading neighboring countries."
No wonder the 100 Years War dragged on and on.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Lost weekend
Arkansas Rep's new production of an old flop, Pal Joey, struggles to overcome its inherent oldness about a half-hour longer than I was able to sustain any interest in its success.
After the first plodding, billowy ballad sung by Mrs. Milkmoney, the story bogs down. My 89-year-old mother, an easily confused person who likes sleeping through live theatrical productions, began asking when we could leave. After every number, "Is it time to go now?"
Sister-in-law Kathy and I have been trying to figure out what went wrong. Why is a show with such a beautiful set, such talented singers and dancers, so very dull?
Sometimes the fast pace of dancing and singing placed almost too big a burden on the ridiculously gifted leading man, and his sweating and huffing and puffing were distracting. We couldn't buy into his supposedly irresistible charm.
Be we think the main problem is pacing in general. The time spent serving Mrs. Milkmoney, sharpening her little corner of the love quadrilateral, is time wasted. She delivers all of her character-revealing songs while lounging — on a sofa, in her bed. And she has an old-fashioned voice that I'm sure is meant to imply quality and power but that just lacks excitement.
No movement, and the plot doesn't advance.
If she absolutely has to sing so often, why not let her be a self-deluded aspiring thespian? It would make her falling for a con job more credible, and she could at least do a little soft shoe.
Also, the final movement in the story has Linda, the good-hearted waitress and pretty bad portrait painter taking back the rotten rat Joey. Presumably they will live happily ever after. That's just wrong. He has not been redeemed, merely disenfranchised.
A much better ending would have Linda, Teddy and Mrs. Milkmoney gotten together to sing a big happy number about how they see through him now.
After the first plodding, billowy ballad sung by Mrs. Milkmoney, the story bogs down. My 89-year-old mother, an easily confused person who likes sleeping through live theatrical productions, began asking when we could leave. After every number, "Is it time to go now?"
Sister-in-law Kathy and I have been trying to figure out what went wrong. Why is a show with such a beautiful set, such talented singers and dancers, so very dull?
Sometimes the fast pace of dancing and singing placed almost too big a burden on the ridiculously gifted leading man, and his sweating and huffing and puffing were distracting. We couldn't buy into his supposedly irresistible charm.
Be we think the main problem is pacing in general. The time spent serving Mrs. Milkmoney, sharpening her little corner of the love quadrilateral, is time wasted. She delivers all of her character-revealing songs while lounging — on a sofa, in her bed. And she has an old-fashioned voice that I'm sure is meant to imply quality and power but that just lacks excitement.
No movement, and the plot doesn't advance.
If she absolutely has to sing so often, why not let her be a self-deluded aspiring thespian? It would make her falling for a con job more credible, and she could at least do a little soft shoe.
Also, the final movement in the story has Linda, the good-hearted waitress and pretty bad portrait painter taking back the rotten rat Joey. Presumably they will live happily ever after. That's just wrong. He has not been redeemed, merely disenfranchised.
A much better ending would have Linda, Teddy and Mrs. Milkmoney gotten together to sing a big happy number about how they see through him now.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Laboring away
There's nothing wrong with working on Labor Day. All the cool kids are doing it today.
Writing for Time magazine online, Christopher Matthews reported Aug. 30 that Bloomberg BNA data suggest 39 percent of employers intend to keep their doors open today, requiring at least some of their employees to come in.
Most of the newspaper staff is off today, but I am subbing in for a fellow Features editor who's on the road, and his section normally would move most of its copy today. My co-workers stood on their heads to get things done early, but there were a few latecomers that couldn't be helped.
And besides, I like working on holidays.
I like the sense that I don't have to be here.
That it's my choice.
I like how quiet the office is.
I like the feeling of suspended deadlines.
Sean Clancy just left. Laura Brown will be in on copydesk. And Phil and Karen Martin are also here, with their little dog Audi.
Writing for Time magazine online, Christopher Matthews reported Aug. 30 that Bloomberg BNA data suggest 39 percent of employers intend to keep their doors open today, requiring at least some of their employees to come in.
Most of the newspaper staff is off today, but I am subbing in for a fellow Features editor who's on the road, and his section normally would move most of its copy today. My co-workers stood on their heads to get things done early, but there were a few latecomers that couldn't be helped.And besides, I like working on holidays.
I like the sense that I don't have to be here.
That it's my choice.
I like how quiet the office is.
I like the feeling of suspended deadlines.
Sean Clancy just left. Laura Brown will be in on copydesk. And Phil and Karen Martin are also here, with their little dog Audi.
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Myope, c'est moi
Fact-checking an article posted on the newspaper's entertainment/lifestyle wire by some MCT member called MarketWatch, I have learned that I am a myope.
"Myope" is what eyeball scientists call people with myopia.
I like the way these people talk. They adore syllables. Check out the heightened syllabic incidence per unit of meaning in this snippet from a study of myope-related matters I found filed on PubMed:
"Myope" is what eyeball scientists call people with myopia.
I like the way these people talk. They adore syllables. Check out the heightened syllabic incidence per unit of meaning in this snippet from a study of myope-related matters I found filed on PubMed:
Blur sensitivity in myopes.
PURPOSE:
This study compared the ability of myopes and emmetropes to detect subjectively the presence of retinal defocus.
METHODS:
Subjects (12 myopes, 12 emmetropes) were cyclopleged and monocularly viewed a bipartite target through an appropriate near addition lens via a 2-mm artificial pupil. One-half of the target remained fixed while the other half was alternatively moved forward or backward until subjects first reported a difference in clarity between the two halves of the target.
Coincidentally, this study appears to relate to something my boss Kim was told by the opthalmologist she visited last year soon after she noticed her vision was a little blurry: People who have not worn spectacles much of their lives are much less tolerant of blurry vision than people who have.
From which I extrapolate that being a lifelong myope results in a brain that doesn't panic when the information brought in by the eyes obviously can't be trusted.
I wonder if that also means that myopes navigate better in total darkness?
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