Community

     I met with some folks who work in a variety of non-profit community organizations today, talking with them about getting publicity for their issues.

     Lots of good conversation, questions and (I hope) answers. We discussed both MSM and New Media like Twitter. (or should that be "Newer" Media?).
    Theses are especially hard times for people in their situation. The media has been downsized, so getting attention is more difficult, and at the same time, the Great Recession has created a greater need for non-profit services.
     Alabama Arise sponsored the meeting in Montgomery, and I thank them for the inviting me to take part..

Updated Death Toll

     The number of people killed in Wednesday's tornado outbreak has risen to 254, 249*  250** including increases in Tuscaloosa. Read the EMA news release here.
     I liked The President's comment Friday about not forgetting...even after the media have moved on...:

"We will not forget you. I am confident that all the resources of our country and your state will be brought to bear to help you," Obama said.

(*The EMA corrected the total downward by 5 this afternoon, **and it climed back up by one later in the afternoon.)

9,970 Years To Go

     The inmate serving the longest sentence imposed in American History turned 70 years old yesterday.
     He's in the St. Clair County Correctional facility here in Alabama, if you care to send a belated card.
     Dudley Wayne Kyzer was sentenced to 10,000 years in 1981 for a triple homicide after his original death penalty was overturned.
     He was up for parole last year. Not a prayer.
     But how can he be up for parole after serving just .00008% of his time?

125 Years Ago Today

Gone.

      From T-town in the West, to Pleasant Grove and Guntersville in the East, the familiar scenes of devastation have appeared this Spring, as regular as the arrival of bright green new leaves on the trees.
     There were more of them this time.
     And more people died.
     But tornadoes come to us here like the aging of our parents, inevitable, unavoidable and despicable.
     Perhaps Jerry Falwell will come and count the broken two-by-fours and examine the scraps of bright pink insulation hanging from the trees, determining what sins summoned the killing to each block, to each home.
     About 5:00 this morning, the official death count, always a feature of  the stories we journalists write, the quintessential measuring stick for disaster, skyrocketed from 62 to 128, more than doubling the number of souls lost in the swirls. Now it's headed for an almost inevitable 200+ as more bodies are found, as more searches for the missing are abandoned for grief.
     The West has it's earthquakes. The North it's blizzards. We in The South have these demons of nature, ferocious, indiscriminate, deadly and predictable only in the most general of ways.
     It's Spring. They will come.

Good stories never really die...

....so I've done old typewriter stories at least three times. Once at APT, once on the radio (WBHM Birmingham) and again, at CBS-8. That's despite the fact that I haven't actually used a typewriter in many. many years.

     So I was saddened to hear a report on the way in to work this morning on The BBC about the last typewriter manufacturing company in the world shutting its doors. Chief Executive Editor Jay (a typewriter kinda guy if ever I knew one) reminded me of the story with an email this afternoon. I think he somehow typed the email on an old  Blickensderfer.

     The PC killed typewriters a long time ago, but a factory in India was still cranking electrics out. No more.

     Why do we care? Did anyone mourn the closing of the last horseshoe factory? The last wagon wheel company? It is the romance of old typewriters that gives them special status? The image of the solitary writer pounding away on the Great American Novel?

     I'm willing to bet there will still be old heavy Remingtons being sold in yard sales for a long time to come. Sure, the keys break every now and then, but they're tough little machines. And when the power is out, and the last chapter of that GAN is screaming to get out....your PC will sit quietly in the corner gatering dust, while the manual will almost burn the words onto the pages, letting you rip them out to toss on the pile on your old wooden rolltop desk......

Fire-Waterproof-Ants

     Just in case you were watching the Spring rains and saying "well, at least this should kill those darn fire ants in the back 40"...not likley that you were thinking that, but just in case..no such luck.
     This morning's Washington Post includes a charming story about how those painful stinging critters work together in a flood to save themselves (Unlike us! We say every man for himself!).

MMMM # 141 -- Did a misspelling help start the Civil War?

     In the Electronic News Gathering class I teach, I tell the students that spelling is important, even in broadcast scripts that only the reporter or anchor generally see, because a) Closed Captioning duplicates the scripts (and the errors!), and b) mistakes in the spelling of names will sometimes end up being transferred to the graphics that visually identify people in clips (SOTS or Bites).
     I don't know if this is the first time this particular error has been caught in the 30 years since the historic marker was installed on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery by the Alabama Historical Association, but my sharp-eyed friend David in Florida caught it when I posted on the 150th anniversary of the start of The Civil War two weeks ago
    Note the word judgment in the last line. There's an extra "e".

     At first I wondered if perhaps the original telegram included the error, and the Association was being historically accurate, but you can read the actual wording in the Official War Records titled: The war of the rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies, on any number of web sites, including this one from Cornell University. And judgment is spelled correctly there.

    On the official website of the Alabama Historical Association, the wrong spelling is repeated.

    A quick disclaimer: I am a fairly miserable speller who constantly has to watch his own writing for errors...you can find any number of examples on the pages of this blog! But friend David sent me down the path of finding the origin of the mistake, and so it goes.

     Oh, and to make sure this horse is really DEAD DEAD DEAD, judgment is included on many lists of the most commonly misspelled words...including this posting at http://www.yourdictionary.com/

•judgment - Traditionally, the word has been spelled judgment in all forms of the English language. However, the spelling judgement (with e added) largely replaced judgment in the United Kingdom in a non-legal context. In the context of the law, however, judgment is preferred. This spelling change contrasts with other similar spelling changes made in American English, which were rejected in the UK. In the US at least, judgment is still preferred and judgement is considered incorrect by many American style guides.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog. Suggestions for topics are always welcomed!]

Sgt. Lennox

     My Paternal Grandfather died decades before I was born, in fact just months after my father was born. He was a New York City Police Officer, and he died when the police truck he was in ran off a road near a police camp in upstate New York in 1923.
     Back in the Summer of 2001, I started a campaign to have his name added to the NYPD Police Memorial, honoring officers who died in the line of duty.
     Then came 9/11, and the volunteer retired officer who handles the project had more deceased officers on his hands than could ever have been predicted.
     I let it go till last year, when I made contact again and emailed various documents about the accident and his service to the force.
     Yesterday I received word that his name is officially on the memorial now, and will be added to a national memorial in D.C.
     Thank you for your service, Sgt. Lennox.

Beer

     In my lifetime, I believe I have consumed less than the contents of a single six-pack of beer. And half of that was in Vietnam.
     It has never been my alcoholic beverage of choice.

     But I am interested in politics, and the way some small-government advocates are perfectly willing to go all big-government when it comes to liquor (and sex too).
      Especially when Big Business is hounding the politicians to use government powers to clamp down on competition.
     Read the Birmingham News story this morning regarding the call for a boycott of some brewers because they are making sure the competition remains handcuffed by arcane regulation.
     Rather than Free The Hops, they want to sentence them to life without parole.
     If someone wants to brew beer and the product isn't poisoning folks, I say let 'em go for it!

Red Light Cams

     They're all over in Montgomery, and Birmingham is considering installing them too.
     Red Light Cameras....with speed cameras to follow.
     They take pictures of cars that run red lights or speeding and mail the owners a ticket. Most of the money goes to the companies that provide the equipment, but the city gets a slice too.

    Now an interesting experiment in California calls into question just how fair the red light cameras are, when a 7/10 of a second adjustment in the length of the yellow signal can cause a 62% drop in the tickets the machines generate.

Smoking Obit Date: 2020

     The CDC is predicting today that all states in the U.S. will ban smoking in public by 2020.
     The Legislature here in Alabama, where we Dare Defend Our Rights, is consideringjust such a ban in the current legislative session.
     I am an ex-smoker going on ten years, but I'm not a radical ex. It doesn't especially bother me to be in the presence of people smoking. But if I were to light one up myself, by that evening I would be back choking down two packs a day. Seriously.
    I talked with the House sponsor of the legislation this week, and asked why it is not considered child abuse for parents to smoke in a car or even at home when a child is present.
   Representative Mary Sue McClurkin told me she considered including a section allowing police to give tickets to smoking drivers with children in the vehicle as a secondary offense (you would have to have been stopped for something else.), but she decided not to.
     She's introduced the legislation for several sessions without any luck. Opponents are either smokers or "Big-Government" opponents, she said.
    I am not a rabid anti-smoker, but I do like consistency. If second hand smoke is in fact deadly to infants and pregnant women, then let's start throwing smoking parents in jail. Otherwise, how do you justify any restrictions at all?

3 Cups of Distrust

     Before Sunday's 60 Minutes report on the book, raising questions about the truth and financial dealings of the author, I had never heard of Three Cups of Tea. Or of Greg Mortenson.
     I don't get out much.
     But I love the CBS show and, frankly, like to see the high and mighty brought down to earth.
     Now the Washington Post is reporting that it is the U.S. Military that may have been damaged the worse by his simplistic message of how to transform Afghanistan. Just share tea with 'em. Right.

VOCAL

     Crosses fill the lawn in front of the Alabama Attorney General's Building on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery.
     When I spotted them, I wondered that we had not covered their placement on CBS 8. Then I saw a newspaper story and realized why.
     The ceremony by VOCAL was scheduled for last Friday night.
     Storm night.

   All hands were needed for coverage of the tornadoes threatening the state.

MMMM # 140 -- One Person Bands

      The hot new trend of recent years in TV News is hiring people who can and will interview, videotape, write and edit stories all by themselves. "One Man Bands" was the old name for them, sexist of course, but descriptive. Picture the literal one-man band. The guy with the cymbal attached to his elbow...like Goofy over there.
      In this economy, companies have increased that kind of money-saving hiring. Why hire a reporter AND a photographer/editor when you can hire one person to do it all? Hard to argue with the bottom-line justification.
     One of the interesting situations I've come across is at news events where there is no podium. Multiple reporters are standing up interviewing the same person. Suddenly the one-size-fits-all employee needs an extra hand to hold the microphone!
     I've been asked to be that extra hand by a station with ONLY a one-woman-band, and I had to force myself to do it. I don't want to be a jerk, but why should I make it easier for that station to get away with hiring a single person? Eventually, they'll develop a kind of boom mike fastened to a  metal cap with a chin strap that the "reporter" will wear. It will look foolish, but so what?


     Then there's the question of the quality of the journalism being practiced. While an individual can crank out stories that way, he or she can simply not do an equally good job on all of the  balls they are trying to juggle. How can you focus on what the interviewee is saying to your questions when you are focusing on focusing?


[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]

Alabama Suffrage

Little did we know that Alabama would be making some mini-history when the state replaced the statue of a long-forgotten Congressman with one of Helen Keller in Statuary Hall in The U.S. Capitol.

Congress voted in 2000 to let States change either or both of the statues they have in the collection (two each). Alabama is the only one of eleven States that have replaced statues that has replaced the statue of a man with the statue of a woman (even though she was an avowed socialist).

According to The Washington Post,  there are only a handful of women depicted in the statues on display...and in fact only 8 per cent of the statues on public property in the U.S. are of women.

Maybe American women have been too busy raising the men who would be honored with statues to pose for one?

And if THEY say it's complicated.....

      Turns out some of the money that was supposed to go to first-time homeowners as an economic stimulus ended up going to prison inmates, people under 18 years of age, and folks who weren't even first-time buyers...forty-seven thousand people in all.
      The total misused was in the range of  $513-Million

      USA Today has the story  which includes this line:

The IRS said it worked hard to enforce a complicated tax credit that provided more than $27 billion to almost 3.9 million taxpayers.

....and if there's anyone who knows complicated tax wording.......

DOC's Repeat Customers

     According to a new report from The Pew Center For The States, Alabama's recidivism rate is actually not that high.
    Yes, a little over a third (35.1%) of the state's prisoners end up back behind bars, but that's certainly lower than that of the half-dozen states with a rate above fifty percent (including California's 57.8%!).
    Alabama also spends less money per-prisoner than any other state in the union, so perhaps our rate is lower because our accommodations are less comfortable?    

MMMM #150* --- an electronic media order: You May Start The War

     I've produced a story for CBS-8 that will air this morning on CBS-8 This Morning between 6:00 and 7:00am, with a repeat tonight in the CBS-8 News at Six.

     Today is the 150th anniversary of the day the Confederate Secretary of War in Montgomery sent a message to his commander in South Carolina, giving him permission to fire on the Federal Ft. Sumter.

     He used a brand new high tech method to send his message: a telegram, the first electronic communication method in the world.
     The wording of the telegram sounds so quaint and archaic:

     Early the next morning the first shot was fired and Fort Sumter fell to the Confederacy. The American Civil War was underway.
     As I've written about on this blog before, Alabama and others Southern States have walked on eggshells trying to determine how to recognize the 150th anniversary without celebrating the war and slavery. More Americans died in the four year war than any other conflict in our history, before or since.
    The telegram was sent from a spot steps from a Montgomery slave market, and no one denies slavery was at the very least a partial cause of the war, if not the cause.   

    In the report on CBS-8, we talk with an archivist who has connections here in Alabama and there in South Carolina at Ft. Sumter too. And we were given a tour by one of the owners of the building on Montgomery's Dexter Avenue from which the telegram was sent. 

    The Winter building is up for sale now, and there are some exciting plans for a development in the coming months.

                                                                  

                                                                              (right) Owner John Bowman and Archivist Bob Bradley

(left) From inside the Winter Building.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog, usually about more modern media. I numbered this morning's MMMM #150 in honor of the anniversary, though it is the 140th I've written in the years I've been  posting them here.]

(The anniversary is the subject of lots of news magazine stories this week)

Yard Snake

Chief Executive Blog Editor and Photo Selecting Person Jay spotted this this during a hour house tour and couldn't wait to share it with me, knowing my snakophobic nature....

....are they trying to scare the little kids to keep 'em off the slide????

WORST Parking of 2011 Award

It goes to this driver at a drug store in Montgomery today, who has managed to not only span two spaces front to back, but also encroach so far into the lane next to it that nobody can use  those spots either, Thanks for your courtesy!

Quote of the Day --UPDATED

"I've never seen anything like this. It's like something in the United States."

 A fireman in Rio de Janeiro who arrived just after a 24 year old former student opened fire with two handguns and killed some 20 eleven children between the ages of 11 and 13. He left a note, contents so far undisclosed.


And on Saturday, from the Nethelands, where another 24 year old opened fire with a machine gun in a shopping mall:

You hear about this sort of thing happening at American schools and you think that's a long way away," said Rob Kuipers, 50, a project manager. "Now it's happened here in the Netherlands."

In both incidents, the gunmen killed themselves as police arrived.

Veterans Day

     The Birmingham News reports this morning about the potential end of the Birmingham Veterans Day Parade..the oldest and biggest such event in the country.
     Blame the declining number of WWII Vets, suggests the story.
     Perhaps WWII was a unique event in American history, a war for such "honest" purposes that it produced VFW like groups to continue the bonds that were created during it? The "Good War", it's sometimes called, without making the ones that followed bad. Just murkier.
    WWII included an easily hated enemy, the almost complete support of those not serving in the military, and a hard-fought easily defined victory.

  Has that combination appeared anytime recently?

A Virtual Choir

     One of the many interesting things I came across this past week was a story on NPR about a virtual choir...thousands of individuals from around the globe singing a part, and then having those parts edited into a performance. Amazing.

Majority Minority

     The population in ten states has now now changed to the point that white children are a minority. And although Alabama is not one of them, three of the four states bordering Alabama are, according to a CNN report. Much of the change comes because of increases in the Hispanic population. 

MMMM #140: The Double Edged Sword of YouMedia

     When the story of a U.N. compound in Afghanistan being attacked and at least twenty staff members killed last week because a "pastor" in Florida had burned a Koran broke, I wondered  how I had missed the initial burning story?
     I remembered last year's reports about his threats to do so, and the intervention of high-level U.S. government officials that resulted in him backing down. But how did I miss the latest chapter?
     Turns out it was reported in just a tiny handful of the media. Terry Jones performed his provocative act on March 20th. And then he became his own media and posted a video of it on his website.
    Two days later it was noticed by some Middle-Eastern sites.  But it was not till this past week that the story exploded online and enraged Muslims worldwide, peaking with the attack on the U.N. compound (The U.N. being the closed thing to Americans the mob could find.)
     I suspect those members of the mainstream media who came across a story about the March 20th burning on a barbecue grill, shrugged their collective shoulders and ignored it.
     Been there, done that.
     But the net allowed the good pastor to create his own media storm, with the expected results.
     The same Internet that allows a little girl to raise money for her mother's cancer treatment also allows a small-time religious nut in Florida to provoke Muslims in Afghanistan into killing innocent people.

ALSO: the mainstream media...at least the CNN part of it...has now officially become part of what used to be called the "tabloid press". CNN's online headline for a story about Sarah Palin saying she is no longer going to whine about the MSM? Palin Says She's Through!!.

Brings me back to the days of the National Enquirer headlines like or Three Headed Baby Born!! (a snake, of course) or  Obama's Friendship with Terrorist! (When it comes to President Obama, even the thinnest link to the truth is sufficient. And that's not just in the tabloids!)

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog]

About Those Film Incentives...

     Today's Anniston Star includes an editorial that does a nice job arguing for the state providing more incentives for the movie and TV industries, to attract them to come shoot episides and movies here in Alabama.
     It's a nice flip-side to the post in which I argued against the incentives.

Post Disaster

     It's bad enough when a house or an apartment building is destroyed...a least then the occupants have some time to go through the mess to salvage what they can.
     But the L.A. Times has a story about the enormous challenge ahead for Japan after the earthquake and tsunami. I've never been through a calamity like it, so I hadn't given much thought to it. But just what do you do with hundreds of  tons of trash that used to be a person's home and possessions?

[ALSO: The AP reports this Sunday morning that at least some of that debris will end up on the beaches of the U.S. West Coast...disaster flotsom, But the experts quoted in the article say it will be a year or more before it arrives.]

Causes of The War

     As the 150th anniversary of the start of the U.S. Civil War is commemorated, the argument continues over just what caused it. Slavery? Northern tariffs? State's rights? Sociologist James W. Loewen has written a

column in The Washington Post that debunks, he says, some of the myths. 

    Certainly a topic of interest here in the first Capitol of The Confederacy.

     I've always wondered why states rights is mentioned so frequently, since The Confederate Constitution didn't grant the states any more rights than the U.S. Constitution.

     Also today, The Associated Press is out with a lengthy story about this year's Civil War Anniversary, but Alabama is mentioned only once, in reference to the states a vacationing family has been to during their personal Civil War Trail journey.

Hidden History

     This Sunday on CBS-8 in Montgomery, an exclusive report on the historic treasures that have been uncovered in the old Municipal Auditorium inside City Hall.

       The space had been used as a records storage room for decades, but is now being renovated into an active meeting space for the City Council.
      Veteran Civil Rights attorney Fred Gray talks with us about the discovery, and Mayor Strange discussed an appropriate display. 5:30 and 10:00pm Sunday, only on CBS-8.