A former general manager of mine at a TV station in South Carolina always said, “Weather is reasons one through 17 why people watch local news.” In Greece, local weather is sexed up a few notches. This was hands down my favorite diversion on Greek TV. Watch for yourself:
Home
Back from two weeks in what I’ll call an alternate reality – something like my real life, only way better. A four-day wedding extravaganza that was really more like being on vacation with thirty people we love the most, followed by basking in the sun and exploring the caves on Greece’s largest island. Aside from a rocky donkey ride and one of my bridesmaids accidentally getting her luggage sent home to Austin, NEVADA, everything went flawlessly. Travelogue is to come.
The Manliest Bridal Shower Brunch
Manly, or the manliest? Male-maid-of-honor/man of honor Sudeep teamed up with my most-together friend, Melissa, to throw a bridal shower brunch at a hot dog place. (The other selections were Taco Cabana and Lambert’s, a barbecue place). As Sudeep once joked – this will appeal to your very masculine side (is there any other?)
Melissa added girly touches, like a lace runner along the table, adorable favors in cloth baggies with pink flowers on them, and Chinese cherry candies. We drank pear mimosas and ate chicken and waffles (leg and thigh – gotta go with the dark meat), shrimp and grits and hash brown casserole, among other selections. My friend Mon-Pon got me a gift that included a Woman’s Day Magazine — but it was “The Man Issue”.
A huge thank you to the brilliant and beautiful people who took part. A delightful brunch before the frenzy of next week gets underway.
Close Call?
Our longtime friend Sudeep came to visit this weekend, and from the sound of it, he almost didn’t make it home:
I made it home alive despite the praying 70-year-old woman next to me who kept saying “I have an awful feeling about this flight. Something just doesn’t seem right.” QUIET DOWN FREAKWOMAN is what I was thinking. “That attitude may not make this much easier on you” is what I said to her. During an hour of turbulence she gasped repeatedly, I laughed. We all survived.
Lawfully Wedded
Travis County District Judge Charlie Baird wedged in our legal marriage proceedings behind four folks on the criminal docket and before jury selection on some aggravated assault trial. Our closest friends in Austin, many who have small babies or large mortgages and cannot make it to Amsterdam, squeezed into the judge’s chambers with us for a quickie legal ceremony on Monday morning. I vaguely remember some sort of vows we had to repeat. But it felt like a strangely out of body experience once things got rolling. Stiles felt his knees locking so he obviously wasn’t more lucid than I was.
One of the women I asked to be a bridesmaid, Virginia, found out she was having a baby that would arrive one month before the wedding in Amsterdam (and boy is baby girl Cass a cutie). She won’t be coming overseas, but is a fantastic bridesmaid anyway. She hosted a classy, gorgeous engagement party at her house for us and guided me along on all things girly. (She also made a makeshift floral arrangement for me for the legal ceremony on Monday with the random fresh flowers she had around her house. Like I said, Virginia rocks.) So we picked her to be our witness, and she got all teary-eyed upon getting the assignment.
Afterwards, the group celebrated with chili cheese dogs (my favorite food). Matrimony Monday couldn’t have gone any better.
Our Dutch Wedding Planner: Reality TV Star
It’s not just American TV programming that’s drowning in shows about rich people. Our Amsterdam wedding planner, Tim Laan, appears in a Dutch reality show about a bunch of rich girls. I can’t understand the language but Tim explained the premise: One of the rich gals needs a planner for a wedding on the Spanish island of Majorca. From what I can tell, the show is ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ meets ‘Cribs’ with a dash of ‘My Super Sweet Sixteen’. In the clip, the girls are interviewing potential planners, and Tim’s brought in to make a quick proposal. It’s all Dutch to me…
Fitz Happens
You may recall my cat Fitz from my earlier blogs. Friggin’ Fitz. He’s my orange tabby who likes living on the edge. Most cats live one of two ways: domestically, in which they stay inside or occassionally go outside and stay in the general home area. Or they’re feral, in which nature is their home. My cat Fitz lives in the area in between. He “runs away” for a year or so, and then surprises us by wandering back into the house through the dog door.
He’s back, for now. Last time he was home was spring 2009, if you don’t count the time he popped into the backyard to say hi real quick on Thanksgiving day.
In 2008, he came home on Iowa caucus night bleeding from his neck. It sounds bad, but since I was too busy watching the Iowa caucuses and Fitz is perpetually getting into trouble, I just locked him in my room until all the precincts came in. Fitz has almost died numerous times. He’s on his 18th life or so. The last time I did a count of the numerous times he almost died was early ’08, and since then I’ve stopped counting.
9th life: Being born onto the streets of South Dallas. We’re talking the Oak Cliff area. Somehow finding his way to “safety” on the infamous grassy knoll, which happens to be at the mouth of a major interstate. (Hence the name “Fitz”, short for John Fitzgerald Kennedy Hu-St!les)
8th life: Getting taken into the Spartanburg Humane Society, which has one of the highest animal euthanasia rates in the country. He was miraculously rescued because the same day he was brought in, my friend Myra was outside doing a live report. She saw him and had to take him home with her… which is how I wound up with him.
7th life: Accidentally eating ibuprofen. It looks like he took in at least two Advil liquigels, which is toxic to cats. Almost died, stayed in the Emergency Clinic overnight with an IV in his little arm. Had to shoot him with some sort of subcutaneous fluids for two weeks.
6th life: Running away for two weeks. To this day we don’t know where Fitz was during the last half of September, 2007. We thought he was a goner, fer sho. But then he just came strolling back in when October came around.
5th life: Dog bite. How he got away after a dog got him by the neck is still a mystery to me.
I stopped counting, but I can say without question that the vet fees have cost more than my own healthcare.
#newsfuture
Stiles, Reeve and I went with boss Evan to Texas Tech University in flat, windy Lubbock this week for the first stop in the Texas Tribune College Tour. The day included a civic engagement fair, a debate between two statewide candidates (who traveled to Lubbock together, actually), and an afternoon session on the future of journalism featuring us reporters. It reminded me that I forgot to post my notes from a much meatier future of journalism panel, the one at SXSW in Austin last month. So, to recap:
THE PANEL:
Andrew Huff, editor of Gapers Block, a digglike, crowd-sourced zine in Chicago
Jeff Jarvis, media futurist, professor, blogger at BuzzMachine.com and author, “What Would Google Do?”
Brad Flora, WindyCitizen.com
Jeremy Zilar, blog specialist at the NYTimes
Adrian Holovaty, web developer, WashingtonPost.com, co-developer of web programming language Django (which we use for the TT) and creator of EveryBlock.com.
BIGGEST CHALLENGES AHEAD
Jarvis: Biggest challenge is getting ourselves out of old models – the page based, product based world. Because we’re now in a screen based, process based world. Content curation is as important as content creation.
Engagement is a challenge (the belief that if news is that important, it will find me), efficiency is a challenge (we’re still way over bloated).
In an ecosystem of overabundant creation you need more help finding stuff. Everything should get turned on its head. Don’t operate under “old industrial age assumptions”. Turn those upside down to rethink what we do, how we do, how we communicate and collaborate.
Flora: Staying above, rising above the noise floor has value for future. We aren’t there yet in the physics of how the internet works right now such that the re-writer (content farms) get much more SEO than a curator who provides links. Challenge for news organizations is to keep staying ahead of content farms “stealing” search results while still providing original information is tricky. Newspapers will likely fall back on personalities – people who are able to bring a cult of personality to work are getting more attention, visibility.
Holovaty: Biggest challenge is the business model. But another issue is our current/traditional reporting process. Journalists gather all kinds of information that they just “throw away.” All the data, all the input collected during the reporting of an issue is typically just compressed into one big blob of text, when we simply write a story about it. It’s rarely “how can I take this data and do cool things with it”?
“I’m really interested in journalists who are actually taking all this data we mine and treating it with respect,” Holovaty said. He wants to see more publicly accessible databases. and more people taking the data, and then doing a story based on the data.
“We struggle with how to teach data as news. Should journalists learn computer programming? Not necessarily. But journalists should know how to communicate with developers just as they know how to communicate with photographers. There’s a wealth of stuff there, we’ve got to get at it, plumb it better, help audience get at it,” said Holovaty.
HOW TO RISE ABOVE WHEN AUDIENCES ARE DROWNING IN NEWS?
Pull it together, piece it together in an interesting way that can convey information to citizens. Windy Citizen is essentially just a front page for Chicago that can point people to the good stuff. Crowd power is used to recommend good bits of information to others. Readers/consumers are smart. Give people a way to leverage that knowledge and contribute back, weigh in on things. How can we encourage the community to better create, and get them to curate… Top stories and who’s linking to them, such that evetything’s really related.
Other suggestions: Crowdsourced wikis, wiki-based reporting structure, rethinking how we use data to create millions of watchdogs.
“We aren’t storytellers anymore,” said Jarvis. “That’s a one-way perspective to look at things. It’s not my story to tell you… we are story enablers.”
The panel argued collaborative forms are better. While many of us can be gatherers of information, editors, and marketers/distributors, the place journalists add value where distribution’s going on already is by adding deeper reporting, context and vetting.
BUSINESS MODEL FUTURE
JARVIS: The NY Times won’t die, but Boston Globe might. Newspapers should just move into the future. Newspapers are being replaced by an ecosystem, not a single company. News will become the providence of many different players who are supported by many different business models. “One becomes many,” Jarvis said. Bloggers can and have been making revenue. Optimize that by saving money, improve what you’re selling to advertisers and creating networks. Hyper local advertising is a building block. Jarvis envisions some measure of publicly-supported journalism that the market won’t meet, “the broccoli journalism”. He projects that a hypothetical market for journalism in the future, which will be a mix of publicly-supported, commercial and individual models, is an ecosystem worth about $45 million annually. “We will have an equivalent number of journalists, who are more answerable to the community, closer to community,” Jarvis said. ” The amount of waste in the current structure still gargantuan.”
Build networks. The marginal cost of news online is zero. Journalists should add unique value. We need to ask ourselves – how do you combine people who create good content/stories with people who can sell?
The Dutch Dude Deejaying from Austin Mystery
This post is a little late cause I just found the video. Alas. We spent New Year’s Eve in Holland with my mom. Part of the experience was feeling like we were in a war zone, because as it turned out, there were no restrictions on setting off fireworks from your home. I was scared for the ducks.
On New Year’s Eve, it appeared there was a massive party on the beach in the port city of Rotterdam that we watched on TV. Seemed pretty standard fare – bad pop acts, drunken people dancing in a crowd, DJ deejaying via satellite from Austin, TX… WHY WAS A DUTCH DJ DEEJAYING NEW YEAR’S EVE FROM AUSTIN, TEXAS?
Yo Ladies
So, back when Kim Daniels and I were both at Belo, she at corporate, overseeing blog products and more, me at the TV station, we were both frustrated by fighting inertia to move news delivery into Web 2.0. Now we’re both getting to do all online products, me at The Texas Tribune and she over at Yo Ladies, a female-centric web source she started not-too-long ago.
Kim actually remembered me (probably cause I was calling her all the time to make little fixes to my CSS on my old blog, Political Junkie), and did a quick interview for her Yo Ladies feature this week.
I love how she promotes it with a shout out to NASCAR. Word!