it’s all about newsrooms with innovative teams / news products collaborating with the ad side in a meaningful way. we’re all in the stream, man! 

“What we hear from clients all the time is, The New York Times tells complicated stories better than anyone else,” says Todd Haskell, group advertising vp at the paper. “Marketers were coming to us saying, ‘Our story is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Can you help us figure it out?’”

It’s something forward-thinking digital journos have been doing for years — even before the social and mobile fast trains left the station. (IE Blogs are not newspaper stories). Even way before the design realities and technical underpinnings of Responsive or Adaptive Web Design were our buzzwords. Adaptive Journalism is what I would call the ultimate in delivering, to the greatest of our technical and journalistic abilities, the best storytelling for the user at that moment, given how much we can presuppose about their time/space continuum, as it were. It’s like ‘day parting’ by platform — bringing us to a ‘content parting’ place, really. On your couch watching the Presidential inauguration on TV and pulling up a newspaper site live blog on your phone? Then that newspaper site should give you live blog headlines and some version of a curated social conversation that’s happening as well. Pulling up that same live blog on desktop? Then we should serve you the live streamed video on top. Because chances are you’re not sitting in front of your television. But perhaps if it were in the evening and it were a Presidential debate then it might be different. Because perhaps you want to second-screen with your netbook and you yourself wanted to live blog it? This is where storytelling-by-platform, responsive and adaptive design and good ‘ole programming / day-parting can truly be effective at getting users the best information that is fitted to their environment (time of day, platform, location, etc.). Doing adaptive journalism is truly part of the new journalism. The Post recently worked on a project that served live game updates and social content around a baseball game — but only if you were coming to the sports section via mobile web and only if you were . .  ..  in the stadium! It’s a limited case but it’s pushing the medium and storytelling by location, situation, platform forward in a huge way. This is adaptive journalism I am talking about.

These platforms are emerging in a way that is truly letting us meet users where they are. It’s sort of awesome and it’s sort of awesome that our job as digital journalists is to enterprise on it.

Lou Ellen lived the kind of life that when told from some distance, or to a stranger, would sound rather glamorous. Glossy magazine material.

Always in gold, perhaps lamé; diamonds and pearls; polished nails and hair ever-fluffed; married to a goodtimes jazz musician; could be spotted in her looooong, white cadillac outfitted with her engraved nameplate on the dash… .. she was a sight.

The first time I ever saw, much less held, a one hundred dollar bill was on the glorious beaches of the San Jacinto River. The Nile of oil refinery Houston. A place where, from my perspective as a small child, Lou was absolutely the queen. She’d taken my brothers and me to Banana Bend Beach and we’d played all day in the brownish waters. I’d gotten thirsty and Momma Lou, as the grandchildren called her, pulled a fresh starched Benjamin from her eel skin wallet and told me to bring her the change.

That was the longest walk to the snack bar in the history of snack bar walking. Cory Ellen had a hundred dollars for nine minutes.

My grandmother was a maven!

I was the luckiest granddaughter in all of Texas. And as far as that mattered, the world.

Momma Lou was not afraid. In a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ era, she made choices that were right for her family but were not socially easy. There were no ‘blended families’ on television in the 1950s. But there were a few in America. Lou and Al Pyle were one of them. Together they made a commitment to raising their children. Dixie, Roxy and Cheryl were a family thanks to that commitment.

When I moved across the country for the first time with my husband and two children, Momma Lou sent me a newspaper clipping of a local politician making a decision to run for something new; he was totally changing his course and starting a new path. When speaking to his choice for going for something different, he said, ‘You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t go anywhere.’ She circled that line for me and sent it in the mail with a card and of course some sweet words in her famously handsome handwriting.

Ills of the world would likely be cured if we were able to add up and extract all the loving sentiment she sent through the mail over the years. The United States Postal service halting Saturday delivery can be correlated to this moment in time.

The headline:

Lou Pyle, mother, messenger, dies; Post office grieves, ends weekend delivery

Afterall, this is a woman who wrote thank you cards to the thank you cards she received. She was a never-ending loop of graciousness.  

There are so many things to celebrate and so many things to miss about our Momma Lou:

• The color blue
• Tacos al Carbon, the only thing I’d ever known her to order at a Mexican restaurant
• Iced tea, no sugar, ‘extree lemon,’ as said in that mild Southern voice
• The slowest eating in America — everyone was on thirds, had moved on to dessert, and Lou was just getting to her Thanksgiving dressing, generally the delicate serving size of a child
• Wheel of Fortune
• Crossword Puzzles
• Parasailing
• Suitcases dedicated to only shoes, purses and belts
• Roller coaster rides with the grandchildren
• Historian. She snapped a lot of photos. She created a lot of photo albums. She hung pictures all over her house. No one processed more film than Momma Lou.
• Boat rides on the river
• Dr. Peppers for breakfast

A friend’s mother once remarked that my grandmother was the busiest person she’d ever met. A classic Southern compliment as this was her way of saying that she actually made the rest of us look pretty lazy. Lou Pyle never really did sit down. And when she did she was thinking about what she needed to get up and do. As a kid I remember her pulling that loooong, white Cadillac into our driveway on a Saturday afternoon. She’d stopped in to fold our clothes. In the only way I could imagine the world at the time, this was what her trips were for. My mother, Dixie, Lou’s daughter, had three children. We were all close in age and Dixie washed a lot of clothes. The folding portion, at times left for me to do, and which I mostly avoided, was handled efficiently by the professional services of Lou Pyle. It was not apparent to me then, but is a lauded act in my mind now, that Lou sat on the floor, in some version of a half bent leg and half ballerina position, and folded our shirts and shorts and matched our socks (did I hate matching the socks). It was not insignificant. Floor-sitting in that way at age 70 was remarkable. The fact that she rode motorcyles with us, too, seems actually less preposterous.

Live your life in a way that makes you happy. This is one of the things she told me in the last year that really stuck. It’s a simple sentiment. She’s said versions of this to me and to others her entire life. But this time it resonated much differently. I took out my little iPhone and jotted it down with my thumbs as if it was a real clue to living. Cory Ellen, don’t forget this, you must live your life in a way that makes you happy! Lou’s mother, Ellen Irene, was perhaps remembered most for entering a room and calling an audience by asking, somewhat rhetorically, ‘Everybody happy?’ The fabric of Lou’s life was rich and interlocked and deeply woven across so many people, places and things. I’ll not go through them all, those of you that are here know them, you’ve come from them, you are them. Women’s business clubs, church bible studies, music halls, family reunions, international travel, beauty parlors. Momma Lou stitched a happiness through the whole of it and one could say, I will say, that her love for life, graciousness, her HAPPINESS through it all, will be her most remembered sentiment.

I will miss my Momma Lou.

Because of her I will not be afraid, I will sit on the floor when I am seventy and I will live my life in a way that makes me happy. I will wear diamonds to the grocery store. And I hope to give my grandchildren their first one hundred dollar bill.