communication. community. cognition.
It’s great when you can grow a community online, share ideas, and even inspire.
Yet most online communities (and connections, for that matter) don’t grow beyond “Accept” and “Like.”
So why build an engine for action without giving it some traction? [Read more...]
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Times are tough for newspaper publishers, who are trying to sell their relevance to subscribers and potential advertisers. The temptation to drop standards is ratcheting up, and once standards are lower it’s hard to recover that blow to reputation. [Read more...]
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If you look at Birmingham as a metropolitan area, you find growth.
If you look at Birmingham as just the city proper, and you find a city that has been on the decline since the mid-1960s. Birmingham peaked at 340,000 and has “slimmed down” to under 240,000. Fewer people means fewer youngsters, fewer youngsters means fewer students, and fewer students means fewer schools. By the time I was reporting in Birmingham in the mid-1990s, there was an annual discussion and tension about closing schools and eliminating teachers.
Each year, the state takes in money for the Education Trust Fund (ETF), and allocates it to the systems based on enrollment. At that time, allotment was calculated by taking the average attendance for the first 40 days of class, and then each school gets funded proportionally from the ETF.
Birmingham’s problem was two-fold. There was the shrinking of the population, but also a cultural phenomenon where parents waited until after Labor Day to return their children to school, missing several weeks. [Read more...]
While I have been musing about what it would take to kick off an online news outlet in Birmingham featuring original reporting, someone else has gone and done it.
I had no idea Kyle had this cooking when I wrote my piece, “Is Birmingham Ready for an Online Newspaper.” I did know he had something in mind, while tweeting as @secondfront. The site appears to be running WordPress Multiuser, indicating there will be more specialized focus areas as it grows.
I spoke with him at length, and while I can’t share everything just yet, there are a couple of aspects of this venture that are intriguing to me.
Second Front it starting with the philosophy of building up from the bottom. Instead of trying to be a full-featured publication, it will take the interests, niches and experiences of its contributors and guide content that way. Don’t expect to get everything about everything. In fact, Second Front itself will be just about politics.
Kyle is an old-style boots-on-the-ground reporter, but he knows he can’t be everywhere at once. When he can’t be omnipresent, he’ll be aggregating various articles for background and weaving them into a textured analysis. In this piece on Bingo in Alabama, for example, he cites 11 individual links from four sources.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves. There are many other pieces to roll forward out of this puzzle. Let’s just say Kyle has started the engine on one of the many models for online journalism, and it ought to be fun to see if this ship can fly.
I talk too much.
Often, when I write, I short-circuit much discussion by telling you exactly what I think. The lack of ambiguity can be a wet blanket on comments and discussion.
So I’ll take a different approach here.
John Archibald recently wrote a solemn and respectful column about the latest round of buyouts at the Birmingham News. It was leaked to Facebook by Kyle Whitmire (@secondfront on Twitter) and I mirror it here for those with access issues. Read his piece, then tell me in the comments. Given:
I want you to help me answer the following questions:
The discussion is yours, Birmingham.
There. I said it.
This notion of “citizen journalism” and “conversations” and “participation” is history.
And here is the proof:
This is a “blog post” from Amos Doolittle, from the year 1813, called “Brother Johnathan Administering a Salutary Cordial to John Bull.”
In it, our protagonist (Brother Johnathan) is forcing foul swill down the mouth of one of her majesty’s finest Redcoats. Poor John Bull pleads for mercy (click on the picture for a closer look):
“Oh, don’t force me to take it, Brother Johnathan – Give me Holland Gin, French Brandy – anything but this D—-d Yankee Perry – it has already fuddled me!”
To which, Brother Johnathan replies in a manner only a noble American can (if that noble American is “The Rock,” and you can “smell what he is cooking.”):
“Take it Johnny, take it I say – why can’t you take it? It will mend your morals and your manners too, friend Johnny. – Plague on you, you shall swallow it!”
The play on words here regards a naval commander named Oliver Perry, as well as a reference to pear-based liqueurs that were known to cause digestive problems. (See, I told you it was like the WWE!)
I happened upon this piece at the Birmingham Museum of Art, which is currently showing “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” on loan from Yale through January 10, 2010. It has hundreds of pieces from the John Trumbull collection, and the fact that these pieces are on the road is a story in and of itself.
Trumbull was a great painter in his own right, and collected a lot a long the way. He willed it to Yale, with the provision that the collection must stay intact and on site, or else it automatically reverts to Harvard.
When Yale wanted to do massive renovations on the building housing the permanent collection, much of it needed to move. Lawyers from both schools reached an agreement that as long as the renovations were underway, that parts of the collection could travel without penalty.
As I am not as wealthy or well-traveled, I can’t say from personal experience – but the Birmingham Museum of Art has a reputation for taking great exhibits and making them even better. Most of the curators from traveling exhibits marvel at how much care Birmingham puts into the display – (that’s “plating” for you foodie-type Iron Chef fans.) They say their pieces have never looked as good as they do here. During my brief visit, we were told that word had gotten out in Arizona, and there were an extraordinarily high number of visitors from Tuscon who were frequenting the loaned display. Who knew?
While the exhibit is fascinating from an artistic perspective, there is much for the communicator to appreciate.
As much as we like to bemoan the state of our media, we’re pretty tame in our manipulation of images and events. The textbooks will tell you that the science of Public Relations began with Ivy Lee just a century ago, but that doesn’t explain the work of Paul Revere in “The Bloody Massacre.”
Historians will tell you that the firing-squad nature of the picture likely bore no resemblance to the reality of the Boston Massacre – but that fits right along with today’s “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” (Not to mention the white-washing of Crispus Attucks, who was black.)
Looking at pieces like these, you can’t help but think about the agitation caused by those ruffians, those partisan bloggers who skew reality to stir up trouble.
We’re in the midst of some fairly partisan times. Which is nothing new.
Our media is in a shambles. Again, this is nothing new.
What is new is the ability to reach around the world immediately, instead of with more deliberate pace. Or, as Peter Shankman puts it, the ability to be famous for being globally stupid in an instant.
If you’re within driving distance of Birmingham, come on in and see it before it gets crowded. The exhibit is fantastic, and loaded with history. Birmingham is notorious for being a walk-in-at-the-last-minute town, so avoid the crowds.
If you’re a professional communicator and you’re within driving distance, then you have no excuse. There is too much history to absorb, and it will snap you out of the rat-race social-media bubble, and put communications back into proper perspective.
And when you get here, go ahead and find James Madison in this classic portrait:
