This will seem like homerism, since I live in Florida and, in fact, own a Florida Gators hat. But this is ridiculous.
Hence the ridicule to follow.
An Arkansas radio station that bills itself "Hog Sports Radio" fired one of its reporters for wearing a Florida Gators cap to a news conference with Arkansas Razorbacks football coach Bobby Petrino.
Renee Gork is a University of Florida alumna. She says she grapped the Gators hat without thinking because it was raining outside. It wasn't a stunt, a protest, or an attempt to provoke Petrino.
No matter how rushed she was or how wet your hair might have gotten, this was extraordinarily poor judgment on Gork's part. First of all, any Florida-themed apparel gets buried at the bottom of the closet the second I move into my Arkansas abode. Second, wearing any university-logoed cap to a college football news conference, friend or foe, is entirely unprofessional.
However, her punishment should have ended with the embarrassment she must have felt when Petrino finished a reply to a question from Gork by saying, "and that will be the last question I answer with that hat on."
But fired? C'mon. This seems backwards even for Arkansas.
"This radio station is Hog Sports Radio," KAKS general manager Dan Storrs told The Associated Press. "We are very biased. We support the Razorbacks 100 percent."
And you take your support for a college football team far too seriously.
I get it. You make your living kissing up to the U of A. It doesn't help that cause if one of your employees wears an enemy's hat to cover a Razorbacks event. But there's loyalty and there's idiocy. This goes beyond even that. Storrs had turned what should have been a reprimand and a local chuckle into a national embarassment.
For him. As if people don't already think of Arkansans as intolerant rubes, this just reinforces it. Unbelievable.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Tampa TV Reporters Fired For YouTube Video
Fake newscasts and blooper reels are as old as TV news. Before YouTube, they were the products of harmless fun that only a few people would see. You edited them on tape, gathered the intended audience into an edit booth and showed off the results in person. Tapes were inconvenient to copy, at least compared to copying-and-pasting a bit of text, so you were relatively assured that your inside joke would stay inside the group with whom you shared it.
Now, editing happens on computers, and you get a video file that is all too easy to upload to the Universe. Once there, you lose any control over who sees it and shares it. If it goes "viral," it can cause a fatal illness to your job, if not your entire career.
That's why I feel bad for those who lost their jobs. They thought they were doing something funny for a friend. It's the brain surgeon who thought he or she had to share the video on Facebook and YouTube whose career ought to be kaput.
Firing seems excesssive punishment. The station's GM told the Times that the video could risk the station's credibility, which I understand to a point. But I saw the clip before it was removed from YouTube and if the only people still watching TV news are ones who couldn't immediately tell that this was a fake story, I'm not sure that the business has much credibility left, anyway.
Meanwhile, I remain grateful that the bulk of my broadcast career happened in the ante-YouTube era. My on-air mishaps haunt me enough in memories. I'd hate to think how I'd feel if they were conveniently available for anyone to view.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Sarasota Jungle Gardens
The words "Sarasota" and "jungle" don't often appear in the same sentence. Sarasota Jungle Gardens is a tourist attraction where I once shot a freelance story. In fact, here's the video:
I went back yesterday with a couple members of the local photo group to which I belong. No alligators bellowed. I see gators in the wild occasionally anyway so I focused on the parrots and flamingos.
There are more shots of parrots in from this shoot on my photo blog.
I went back yesterday with a couple members of the local photo group to which I belong. No alligators bellowed. I see gators in the wild occasionally anyway so I focused on the parrots and flamingos.
There are more shots of parrots in from this shoot on my photo blog.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Lowry Park Zoo Photos
I spent Friday getting rained on while feeding mosquitoes at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo. Also, I took some photographs. I was disappointed that the tigers and cheetahs got the day off. But, don't worry, I still got to pay the full admission price of $20.95
There are landscape (horizontally oriented) photos over on my photo blog, not here only because they won't fit. Be warned there is monkey porn.
There are landscape (horizontally oriented) photos over on my photo blog, not here only because they won't fit. Be warned there is monkey porn.
How VJs Are Changing TV News?
The money savings that one-person TV news crews promise is convincing more stations to use them. Instead of a reporter and a photographer, a one-man-band shoots and reports the story him or herself. These one-man-bands (OMBs) are variously called video journalists (or VJs) and multimedia journalists (MMJs), depending on whose pig the lipstick is being applied.
Former CBS News reporter Deborah Potter writes on newslab.org that one-man-bands are changing not only how news is gathered but how it looks on the air.
Potter cites an unpublished dissertation by Kutztown University's Mary Angela Bock which reports that the challenge of shooting and reporting one's own work often forces OMBs to go for the easiest stories to turn, rather than those most interesting to viewers. "Because they work alone, VJs will be more apt to look for quick and easy access to story elements," Potter quotes Bock as writing.
Another problem with OMB work, Potter notes, is the physical demands of the job. Even common doorways can prove formidable obstacles to the lonely journalist larded with equipment.
Seriously. Those are the two salient points in the article, which seemed a veiled argument against OMBs. I hope that the 500 pages that Bock says her treatise spans includes more compelling information because the items cited do not detail accurately how increased use of solo news crews affects the news you see on TV.
First, OMBs are not the only ones who go for the low hanging fruit under the ever-increasing pressure of producing news for broadcast at 11 and for the web right now. It's not because they work alone that they pursue easy elements; it's because they have deadlines that come sooner than they once did. So do two-person crews and they're just as guilty of the "one-stop shopping" syndrome.
You can make a better argument claiming that former photographers new to reporting either seek or are assigned features because they lack either the confidence in themselves or the trust of management to tackle meatier stories.
And as someone who has shot plenty of my own stories (the homepage of my website, JohnMcQuiston.com, features a story I shot myself), I have never found a doorway that was a serious impediment. The physical strain argument overlooks the fact that the major station groups — including Gannett, Hearst and Scripps Howard — that have adopted OMBs to some degree have all bought small and relatively cheap cameras for them to use.
Their physical load is less than that of a traditional photographer.
Potter notes that Bock "reports that the National Union of Journalists in England is starting to hear health complaints–such as exhaustion or back problems–from VJs who have been on the job a few years."
I hope Bock also reports what percentage of VJs make such complaints, how many traditional news photographers make similar complaints, and whether the National Union of Journalists opposes the use of VJs. That would added needed perspective.
If you want to argue against OMBs, here it is: When one person does the jobs that used to belong to two, it's not going to be done as well. Looking for shots is a different pursuit than digging for facts and when you have to do both, they're going to suffer for it.
That's it. The rest is like the mumbo-jumbo of the Atkins diet when the bottom line is that you lose weight because you consume fewer calories. Conversely, the advantage of using OMBs is that they cost about half of two-person crews. Anything more is just the aforementioned porcine lipstick.
The most obvious thing you see with OMB work right now is that it's new (or so old as to seem new) to many of the people doing it. You have life-long photographers suddenly trying to write and read narration for a news story. Reporters get two days of training with their new camera and out they go to turn a story with it.
Of course it looks like left-handed writing by right-handed people.
This will change as aspiring reporters learn that shooting their stories is not just something they will have to do in college or in their first job out of school. Stations won't be trying to teach people to write with their other hand. They'll arrive already ambidextrous.
Will they produce work as much or as good as two-person crews do now? Almost certainly not. Would it be ideal to have teams of two collaborating on a story? Almost certainly yes.
But OMBs didn't cause the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. And they're not going away. An article about how to do better work under the circumstances would do much more good than one apparently wishing the circumstances where different.
Former CBS News reporter Deborah Potter writes on newslab.org that one-man-bands are changing not only how news is gathered but how it looks on the air.
Potter cites an unpublished dissertation by Kutztown University's Mary Angela Bock which reports that the challenge of shooting and reporting one's own work often forces OMBs to go for the easiest stories to turn, rather than those most interesting to viewers. "Because they work alone, VJs will be more apt to look for quick and easy access to story elements," Potter quotes Bock as writing.
Another problem with OMB work, Potter notes, is the physical demands of the job. Even common doorways can prove formidable obstacles to the lonely journalist larded with equipment.
Seriously. Those are the two salient points in the article, which seemed a veiled argument against OMBs. I hope that the 500 pages that Bock says her treatise spans includes more compelling information because the items cited do not detail accurately how increased use of solo news crews affects the news you see on TV.
First, OMBs are not the only ones who go for the low hanging fruit under the ever-increasing pressure of producing news for broadcast at 11 and for the web right now. It's not because they work alone that they pursue easy elements; it's because they have deadlines that come sooner than they once did. So do two-person crews and they're just as guilty of the "one-stop shopping" syndrome.
You can make a better argument claiming that former photographers new to reporting either seek or are assigned features because they lack either the confidence in themselves or the trust of management to tackle meatier stories.
And as someone who has shot plenty of my own stories (the homepage of my website, JohnMcQuiston.com, features a story I shot myself), I have never found a doorway that was a serious impediment. The physical strain argument overlooks the fact that the major station groups — including Gannett, Hearst and Scripps Howard — that have adopted OMBs to some degree have all bought small and relatively cheap cameras for them to use.
Their physical load is less than that of a traditional photographer.
Potter notes that Bock "reports that the National Union of Journalists in England is starting to hear health complaints–such as exhaustion or back problems–from VJs who have been on the job a few years."
I hope Bock also reports what percentage of VJs make such complaints, how many traditional news photographers make similar complaints, and whether the National Union of Journalists opposes the use of VJs. That would added needed perspective.
If you want to argue against OMBs, here it is: When one person does the jobs that used to belong to two, it's not going to be done as well. Looking for shots is a different pursuit than digging for facts and when you have to do both, they're going to suffer for it.
That's it. The rest is like the mumbo-jumbo of the Atkins diet when the bottom line is that you lose weight because you consume fewer calories. Conversely, the advantage of using OMBs is that they cost about half of two-person crews. Anything more is just the aforementioned porcine lipstick.
The most obvious thing you see with OMB work right now is that it's new (or so old as to seem new) to many of the people doing it. You have life-long photographers suddenly trying to write and read narration for a news story. Reporters get two days of training with their new camera and out they go to turn a story with it.
Of course it looks like left-handed writing by right-handed people.
This will change as aspiring reporters learn that shooting their stories is not just something they will have to do in college or in their first job out of school. Stations won't be trying to teach people to write with their other hand. They'll arrive already ambidextrous.
Will they produce work as much or as good as two-person crews do now? Almost certainly not. Would it be ideal to have teams of two collaborating on a story? Almost certainly yes.
But OMBs didn't cause the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. And they're not going away. An article about how to do better work under the circumstances would do much more good than one apparently wishing the circumstances where different.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Conversation With the Cat
Said I: "Annie, you have to eat your food. If you don't eat it, it's not food. It's just stuff that somebody bought for no reason."
Said the cat:
Annie continues to be a finicky eater, which is not good when a supercharged metabolism caused by a hyperactive thyroid is literally starving her to death. Yet she often insists that I feed the food (even the gooey canned food) to her by hand.
Yes, there is medicine for the thyroid but it takes several weeks to have an effect. Meantime, I cannot afford to get into a contest of wills with the cat. Nor, apparently, can I engage her in a contest of wits, as I try to tell her that it's not cat food if the cat doesn't eat it.
She seems unswayed. She will eat with enthusiasm if I hold the food in my hand. Unfortunately, I sometimes go out of the house, leaving the cat to feed herself from the bowl, which seems to be anathema to her now. I don't know how she's lasting.
Said the cat:
Annie continues to be a finicky eater, which is not good when a supercharged metabolism caused by a hyperactive thyroid is literally starving her to death. Yet she often insists that I feed the food (even the gooey canned food) to her by hand.
Yes, there is medicine for the thyroid but it takes several weeks to have an effect. Meantime, I cannot afford to get into a contest of wills with the cat. Nor, apparently, can I engage her in a contest of wits, as I try to tell her that it's not cat food if the cat doesn't eat it.
She seems unswayed. She will eat with enthusiasm if I hold the food in my hand. Unfortunately, I sometimes go out of the house, leaving the cat to feed herself from the bowl, which seems to be anathema to her now. I don't know how she's lasting.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Massive Mix Six
So titled because there were five previous versions. However, if I rework the song I'll probably keep the title.
The drums and vocal sounds come from samples. I played the rest of the sounds on either my synthesizer or guitar and mixed them all together using free Sony's Acid Express program.
The drums and vocal sounds come from samples. I played the rest of the sounds on either my synthesizer or guitar and mixed them all together using free Sony's Acid Express program.
Monday, July 05, 2010
The Movie "Airplane!" is 30
"I speak jive."
The idea behind that came from the movie "Shaft." Airplane's creators (three self-described "Jewish boys from Milwaukee") had seen it but did not understand the dialogue.
The idea behind that came from the movie "Shaft." Airplane's creators (three self-described "Jewish boys from Milwaukee") had seen it but did not understand the dialogue.
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