Good Advice

Back when ULM was still Northeast, the PR director, Bob Carroll, once told me you've got to stop operating that camera if you want them to take you seriously. This was when I was a GA, shooting all the film (that's dating) for football. It proved to be a position that opened a lot of doors, and because I was so good at it -- and also the only person with the skill set needed -- the department was very accommodating. That special knowledge was both power and security. Of course, what Bob inferred was the ubiquitous "they" won't recognize your talents and ability to take on larger tasks because they'll always just see you as a worker and/or specialist.

Over time, Bob was right.

More Mobile Evidence

Nielsen Wire brings this summary of a Council for Research Excellence (now there's a Keilloresque National Association of Associations moniker if there ever was one) about who watches what where via television. No big surprise, the younger the demo, the more mobile the user. For those of us here in college athletics, the secondary finding is more significant.

Of those watching TV away from home, the younger cohort is more apt to watch sports; the older news.

Fire up those apps, people.

Travel Quote of the Day

Lost in the past two years' assignments here is the "road" half of the blog; quite fully atrophied by circumstance. Here's a wonderful offering to momentarily revive the wanderlust part, taken from a must read piece by Tom Swick

Soak this in:

How else to explain the decline of the travel book in the age of globalization? True, there has been a concurrent rise in travel blogs, but these seem to be, for the most part, cyberspace’s version of the vacation slides people used to inflict on friends.

Ah. Yes. My own little boring slide show for you, the handful of readers. That's a delicious little self-schadenfreud.

To read the entire piece, jump here. It was found off the RSS feed of Arts and Letters which is a fantastic sorbet to the usual grind of the prespiring arts.

And now, back to the strum-und-drang of current media.

Double Note

We've mentioned that TMZ.com is getting more aggressive in the sports area, and bears your watching. The recent Oklahoma men's basketball events get more interesting as TMZ spent a little time digging through the Twitter accounts of the players. They add a story to their original on the wire payments with this. Very likely it could be coincidental, but just another reason for your own monitoring.

Dolphin Update

Realize during today's snowstorm that I had a Curious George of my own. My wife has this brass double-dolphin that was a special object from her birth mother, Pat. It sits on a bistro table on the deck outside our bedroom here in Fayetteville. Since it's perfectly exposed -- along with the deck railing -- to the elements, it makes for a super simple snow measure.

In the past snow days, I'd taken pictures of the dolphins as a measure. Now, friends on Facebook have made fun (and snarky) comments about the Dolphin Update.

Well, today, I'm forecasting a total eclipse of the dolphins. The noon photo, and the real measurements around the yard are at 10 inches.

Simple, Brilliant, Social

Anyone who follows SEC women's basketball contact Tammy Wilson's Facebook page knows about her mini Curious George stuffed animal. She takes pics of George meeting famous SEC athletes, in famous places, at major SEC events.

For some time, I've thought it was cute. Then at the SEC women's tournament, Tammy told me, as Paul would say, the rest of the story.

Single but with a job that takes her lots of places, Tammy said the reason she started taking pictures of George in the places she traveled to was because it seemed a little awkward, or self-centered, to put pictures up on her Facebook of herself at these places. But, she wanted to have a way to put them on-line and talk about them.

Thus, George becomes Tammy.

Like many an 0n-line phenom, George gets his own comments, has some of his own followers and those that keep up with Tammy wonder what will happen to George next.

George is brilliant.

If you want to look into George's Great Adventures, jump here.

Streaming Media Events

Few notes for friends and other schools on our recent upgrades at media conferences. A steady stream of comments and complaints -- inside and outside -- were to continue to improve the audio of the media questions. We added a hand microphone at our recent football event, and several media members were uncomfortable with it.

The last two media events, we had run a second camera that was turned back on the media crowd to show our fans and followers the crowd. Still, the hand mike -- changing from shotguns or just riding the levels on the other ambient microphones -- got their attention. Among the comments:

Don't you need our permission to do this?

We don't want to be a part of your website.

I can't appear on anyone else's pay website.

Good questions, but I didn't pick the model out of thin air. The White House and other governments -- including our own Fayetteville City Council -- have turned the cameras around so everyone gets to see. As a public event, that the media themselves are taping and posting whole on their websites, I'm not sure about the appearance concerns.

We feed the audio for the questions into the mult-box for the media, who are also taping the event. So, for those who were already running the whole press conferences on their websites, these media members were appearing in audio form on competitor websites (unless they were actively editing out the questions).

My goal was to improve the quality, and to keep up with the media organizations. For some time, many of them were taking the audio or video from these events and playing it unedited on their broadcasts and websites. We have the advantage of a TriCaster that allows us to both create a nice quality encode and switch the second camera. Why not?

As a technical matter, the hand-offs were slow with the hand microphone, so we'll try to use two at future events, or we may spend the extra money to add more crowd mikes to pick up the audio without the hand microphone.

Still, this is the standard at the NCAA post games. We're not charging for fans (and other media, I might add) to watch the events. And again, news reporters and political beat reporters experience this every day, most visibly from WhiteHouse.gov.

What I would advise fellow schools is to give your media earlier notice if you plan to make a similar change. My mistake was assuming our media had noticed the additional cameras and shotgun microphones pointed at them the past couple of events.

Somewhere Orsen Wells Smiles

The east European state of Georgia was put into a panic by a political spoof by one of the Georgian pro-government TV stations. Apparently Russia's Interfax agency missed the disclaimer that their own troops were rolling into Tbilisi and the Georgian president was dead.

Looks like the "old" media is just as prone these days to going with a rumor as those pesky internets.

Read more from Reuters.

I've Been Everywhere, Man

Driving away from the back of the Country Music Hall of Fame, I felt like that old Johnny Cash song.

To Duluth, which is Atlanta and hang a right for another hour.

Back to Fayetteville for 48 hours

To as far as I could drive last night -- oops, two days ago now -- in Brinkley

Up early to finish out in Nashville. Blog one game. Tape one press conference. Upload.

Drive back to Fayetteville in time for gymnastics meet.

Internet Rising

A quick note before repacking my bags for the next SEC tournament. Pew Internet and American Life survey shows that "the internet" has moved to third among the sources for most Americans for news.

Let me repeat. That's local TV news, first.

National TV news, second.

Those darn internets, third.

Radio is next, then newspapers.

What's even more remarkable are the actual numbers. The internet at 61% is a full 10 points ahead of newspapers at 50%.

More people used their cell phones -- 26% -- than read national newspaper dailies -- 17%.

That means the future is brighter for iHog than USATODAY.

Let me preach here for a minute: CoSIDA members, your own websites are increasingly becoming the primary news conduit to your fan base. Even more proof that "sport contacts" must evolve into "sport content producers."

The main story is here.

And now, back to packing

Cowgirl!

Ashley Fae, my rising eighth grader, just survived the tryouts and cut to make the Woodland Junior High basketball eight grade team.

I only wish they'd listened to have junior high boys soccer here when Will came through -- pretty confident he'd have made that team, but we were stuck in rec play before a knee injury screwed up his chances at high school.

Whew!

I've never been so happy to see the first stat post on monitors than today's games so far. A monster series of setbacks finally bring us to tonight's session with all our stat toys running. Name it -- it happened: burned out VGA splitter on the first setup, no connection for the initial test, mysterious computer fails, hardware conflicts, software surprises (has anyone else actually seen StatCrew eat its own files? They haven't either -- email me if you have).

Actually, we missed the all-time winner. Back early in the stat monitor days when CRT's ruled the world and only a handful of people invested in these things called ROBOX converters to run VGA monitors at long distances, we rolled our gear into the Roundhouse at UTC.

Learned a lot one night about arena's with mixed power circuits. As in the half of the arena had its grounds lifted on the house AC to knock down ground loop hums for TV trucks. And what happens if you mix grounded and ungrounded monitors with a replacement VGA cable that doesn't have it's ground lifted too.

"Hey Don, why's this power light glowing so bright . . . . "

In one hand, ROBOX with the little red LED blooming like a prize rose. In the other hand, the power adapter plug. In between, the realization that if I don't have the power plugged in for this unit, but it's suddenly powering up, DROP THE BOX NOW.

Across the floor, tiny little Hiroshima clouds, plumes of the exploding capacitors and that unmistakable electronic fire smell emanating from the now fried monitors as AC power sought to find its ground, right through the VGA ports.

Nothing a soldering gun and a REALLY good electrical supply house couldn't fix as we were literally rebuilding ROBOX with new IC chips and other parts.

Ah yes, good times.

Yesterday came close. Things are far more virtual, but the software explosions reminded me very much of those burning chips. I think I could even still smell that acrid odor during the peak of the fun.

But we survived because we've got a very, very, very good stat crew team, some solid tech support behind us from back home and determination that eventually we could overcome. Little I did, much more done by this whole team.

Here's to praying we're done with surprises from Duluth.

Road Trip Hiatus

Good news followers -- road trip ensues to the SEC Women's and Men's tournaments. Bad news -- unless terribly, terribly surprised by the pace of things; this space will be on about a 10 day break. Will return when I can, but don't forget the Twitter feed.

History Begins with TR

I tell my students at NWACC each year this story from my master's degree days at Northeast Louisiana. Two polar opposites fenced with each other over the nature of History. Dr. England (ironically, the staff UK expert) was a medievalist, and would scoff at Dr. Haynes, the head of the department and the 20th century America lead.

There's not enough time and perspective to consider anything in history in the 20th century. Dr. England's claim was "anything after Theodore Roosevelt was just journalism." Haynes would retort that American history began with TR and anything before him "was simply archeology." It was a collegial battle, but not too serious.

Apparently, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction may agree with Haynes in an extreme degree. It's been all over the internet as the new proposal to change American history instruction in NC high schools to put the emphasis on what we'd call US II -- everything from 1877 to the present.

The educationists say not to worry, all the history before 1877 for high school juniors would be taken care of in the earlier grades.

Um. Let me see if I get that. The fine points of the Constitutional period. The rise of Jacksonian Democracy. The Dred Scott ruling, the 1850s and the Civil War. Not really sure that's appropriate material to be soaked in by 7th graders, and retained in the way necessary to give the type of perspective needed for juniors to reflect.

To my ear, it seems like some serious capital-H History is underway. The difference between history and History is the interpreter's perspective; often inflicted upon the details of the past to change a history into something much more palatable to the present.

Seems the Tar Heels got turned around for now. For now. The Department of Instruction says the change "will not be a part of that second draft" of the plan.

Here's to hoping it won't be in the final plan, either.

A nice editorial that covers the points from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, but it is behind the pay wall.

What Does New Media Look Like?

Quick snapshot between races today to provide a flavor of the real-time reporting:

Baseball is underway with Troy at Baum Stadium. There is an audio stream for RazorVision members via RSP's headquarters in Auburn, a video stream for RazorVision (with audio track from RSP) that is going out via the website for members. We have the usual live stats streaming from Baum also, plus one of our New Media students in the press box providing a pair of Twitter feeds.

From @ArkRazorbacks, we only give the inning scoring updates. For home events, those who want to get the play-by-play, that comes out through @RazorbackRoad.

I'm next door at the Randal Tyson Track Center today, doing the same type of feeds. Every race result goes out on @RazorbackRoad, but with the hash tag #SECIndoor, to allow folks to pick up the results. When a Razorback wins or has an impact performance, that doubles over to @ArkRazorbacks.

Our New Media Video Production team is here in Tyson to provide a free live feed of the event. By the way, when you are deciding the "value" of doing Olympic sports, keep this stat in mind. For the past five years, we have our highest traffic days for SEC and NCAA track meets.

In addition, we've got video coming in from our AMR staffers at softball (already transcoded and posted in Flash) and basketball. There's a live audio stream from women's basketball plus those stats streaming over from Georgia.

And that's before we pack up the show and head east to Duluth for the SEC this week.

The Shame of CoSIDA Continues

The Chronicle of Higher Education issues its annual median salaries of college administrators, and once again, sports information directors are on average the lowest paid athletics administrators -- better than $10,000 less than the next administrator group.

In the survey, only six other administrative positions in academia paid less; only two of them weren't assistant or associate positions to a head administrator.

$46,965 is the all-division median; $59,258 for doctoral, $45,423 for master's degree institutions and $41,672 for BA-granting schools.

The six below: director of Greek life, assistant/associate women's center director, asst. director of student activities, asst. director campus intermurals, housing officer/residence life and assistant registrar.

I guess we can be happy that last year there were only four positions as the SIDs have passed the assistant intermural directors and the women's center directors.

Says more about those jobs than the jump up from $46,020. You can read my longer rant on same survey from 2009 by jumping here.

Greenberg Redeux

A 2009 column gets updated last week by Paul Greenberg, and it bears review. The original column, The Vanishing Newspaper, can be read at this syndicater outside the ADG pay wall.

The gist of the column is newspapers die regularly, the technologies have a life cycle ("hot lead gave way to cold type, and typewriters to word processors") and the industry has faced these events before (radio would kill papers; then TV would kill papers; now the internet will kill papers

I've noted Greenberg's column before, but what struck me this read in Feb. 2010 versus last year was this:

The technology of daily journalism may change, but not the essence of the project. . . . Whenever a daily newspaper is shuttered, free weeklies, community bulletins, and counter-cultural broadsides begin filling in the gap. Like grass after a forest fire.

On-Line Brand Management

The WOMMA Word provides today's blog fodder with a link to an article at the Wall Street Journal about brand image by Mahesh Murthy.

The takeaway quote on how to take action with your social media problems:

Then intervene in conversations and respond to complaints, visibly, with your own Twitter account or some other way of interacting. It's important that on-lookers see your response to a complaint in the open so they know that you can take care of theirs too, if they ever have one. This is where your real brand is built.

Indeed.

CoSIDA Orlando Vets Remember

This tidbit from UA colleague Jeri Thorpe. Everyone who was at the 1999 CoSIDA convention remembers the incident where a man climbed into the orca pool at SeaWorld and became a rag toy for one of the killer whales. Well, same whale has killed again.

The Coldest Hotel in the World

While my new job doesn't present as much travel, working out the kinks of a new scanner has brought back some old Kodachrome. To many new followers of this blog, the whole "Road Scholar" thing is lost without the hints for side trips and road food.

Here's a golden oldie -- from the Lady Indians/Indians great Utah tournament DH. Women's team at Provo the same weekend the men were in Salt Lake. This picture is the scene of the coldest hotel in history. Part of the deal with BYU was a set of hotel rooms; typical of the day. Unfortunately, a large part of the Provo Inn had been winterized. Surprise, you've got more guests than rooms AND a foot of fresh snow overnight.

Literally no heat in the rooms, so we slept in our clothes and shivered.