Otterblog

We are covering an immense tragedy today, the death of four young people in a car wreck off of Yadkinville Road. If you go to the bottom of the story, you will find a running dialogue of comments that is startling. Boiled down, it is this: Some writers think the ethnicity of the victims explains the deaths. Others think that is beyond cruel. It is the megaphone and the microphone unleashed among the population.

Our policy on these sorts of comments is to tread lightly. Offensive is a difficult word to describe in a way that garners broad agreement. From time to time, we do remove comments. But generally, we don’t.

I find some of the comments offensive, but there is a conversation that nonetheless is worth having. I’m sure there are folks who think this isn’t really a conversation, but rather various anonymous folks talking and typing past each other. And that’s true to some extent. But the alternative is not to have them at all. And that’s a worse alternative. I’m interested in your thoughts on these online dialogues. They are a staple of online news stories now—everywhere. It’s the media, w/o the filter.

Today marks the end of a remarkable career at the Winston-Salem Journal. Terry Oberle, our sports editor, is retiring. His last official day is Monday, but it’s a holiday, and barring some unforeseen news this weekend, he’ll walk out the door today for the last time.

Terry has been sports editor here for 34 years. That’s a lifetime. And through that time, our sports staff has been known for its professionalism, its stability, its knowledge of teams and sports, and its flat-out hustle.

Winston-Salem is an incredibly difficult town to be sports editor. We have two major universities (WFU and WSSU) here and a third (ASU) in our circulation area. But many of our readers care less about these schools and want more coverage of the schools in the Triangle. There’s greater interest in pro sports for obvious reasons than there was 20 years ago, and we keep building new high schools. The result is a lot of competing agendas—for space, for reporters, for attention. Terry has juggled them all with a great deal of poise and grace for his time here. And honesty. If you ask him a question about why we didn’t cover something, he will give you an answer. It may not be the answer you want, but it will be based on thought rather than emotion.

Some message boards say we write too much about Carolina, proof that Terry is a Carolina grad acting as a homer for the school he loves. He isn’t. He is a Florida boy (just ask him ...) who went to Florida Southern.

We had a retirement party for him the other day, and one of the things I noted was Terry’s knowledge outside the world of sports. As befitting a top-notch journalist, he is interested in the world beyond his beats, and that knowledge has been incredibly helpful in covering stories from business to metro to features.

I wish him the best in the next stage of his life.

I’ve been getting barraged with emails the past few days about the Associated Press. The emails center around the conduct of Ron Fournier, who is the AP’s Washington bureau chief.

While many folks think that the NY Times is the most powerful news organization in America. It isn’t. AP is. The reason is simple. Most newspapers rely on AP for the meat and potatoes of their out-of-market coverage, nationally and internationally.

Here’s the start of one such letter:

I expected AP to be free from bias as it has always been fairly “middle of the road” in coverage of various issues over the years but I have to admit the new D.C. Bureau Chief Ron Fournier has shown a shocking lack of balance so far this election year!

What has the emailers all in a swivet is an analysis by Fournier on Sen. Barack Obama’s pick of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Led by Moveon.org, these folks allege that Fournier crossed over from analysis to opinion and that he unfairly slammed Obama. As proof of his bias, they note that Sen. John McCain at one point offered Fournier a communications job (which Fournier declined.).

I asked AP about the whole flap, and it’s their decision not to comment on Moveon.org’s allegations. But a spokesman noted that Fournier has solid credentials as a journalist known for fairness and shoeleather. The organization also notes:

“ The dual role of AP Washington Bureau Chief and political writer has long roots in AP history, as well as that of other Washington bureaus. Walter Mears, who won a Pulitzer for his 1976 presidential coverage, served in both capacities from 1977 to 1984. As bureau chief he continued to write news copy, usually analytical pieces. Likewise, other leading news organizations have often had their bureau chiefs serve in both capacities.”

For a not particularly flattering profile of Fournier, click here. I read the analysis, which was clearly marked as such. It seemed to me more of a column than an analysis to me. And in the important advice that it is often not what you say that matters but how you say it, the piece is very blunt, more blunt than most of the content on the wires. You can find the column at the bottom of this E&P story.

But that said, I don’t believe the AP is out to get Barack Obama. Generally speaking, I think the coverage is even-handed. And I’ve heard some folks in the news biz grouse that the AP’s daily coverage on the campaign trail is too Obama-centric.

What seems pretty clear in all of this is that the media is finding itself under intense scrutiny for every sentence in this election year.

Update: Follow this link to a memo from AP about the Fournier flap. I’m not sure it addresses the central question of whether that analysis was analysis or opinion, but it’s a good primer on the interconnectedness of Washington media circles. 

Some of you may remember a young woman named Chelsey Powers. She was shot to death a little more than a year ago. Our most recent story was in late May. She was a freshman at Reynolds High School.

This past weekend, we covered another high-school tragedy, that of a young man named Matt Gfeller, who died while playing football. He was a sophomore at Reynolds. We remade our front page for Sunday, and followed up with another story today, and my guess is that there is further coverage to come.

Two kids. Two tragic deaths. Two very different levels of coverage. Why? It is a difficult question. There are a couple of reasons, to my mind. First, Matt’s death happened in front of several thousand people at a game. Chelsey was killed in front of her home at 2 a.m. Second—and unfortunately—children dying playing football is rarer than children being shot to death. Third, the community responded in different and more public ways that made this past weekend’s events a larger story.

Certainly, there are socioeconomic factors as well. The Gfellers are wealthier and better-connected than the Powerses, but I think that’s secondary to what made us react the way we did. To me, the main thing was the public nature of the event and the grieving.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect story than the piece we ran Thursday on the Wilkes County man who caught a state-record catfish on his granddaughter’s Barbie fishing pole after she ducked out for a few minutes to—as he says—“go potty.”

In the news biz, this is called a “talker,” and it’s the sort of story that quickly finds a home at the bottom of page 1. It has all the elements: quirkiness, family love; struggle and happy ending.

We ignore these stories at our own risk. Yes, there is a lot of serious news in the world. Some of it is incredibly sobering and painful and distressing. The Arctic ice is melting. South Ossetia, a place that many of us didn’t know existed, is the latest flash point in the world. People are excited about gas at $3.50 a gallon. On and on.

As I’ve said before, the goal is balance. I love serious and important news. But a Barbie rod and a 21 pound catfish. It is a story that everybody can relate to. If you do a Google search for Barbie and fishing, you get 4 million hits. Now, not all of them are our story. But you’d be surprised—or maybe not—how many times this story has traveled electronically around the world.

More naming issues: This is a follow up from an earlier post about what to call things. As we’ve reported, the NC School of the Arts is now UNC School of the Arts. That’s a mouthful. And it doesn’t exactly fit in a headline. So, one shorthand is its initials UNCSA. But saying U-N-C-S-A takes too long. So the acronym we use is Uncsa, pronounced UNK-sa. And my guess is that despite many people’s efforts to the contrary, that is going to become how it is known. 

With all the attention focused on the race for president, it’s easy to forget that we’re also choosing a governor this year. Last night was the first live televised debate between Lt. Gov. Beverly Eaves Perdue and Mayor Patrick Lloyd McCrory of Charlotte.

Those are their full names. There’s a bit of a controversy over their political names. McCrory goes by Pat. Perdue goes by Bev, or at least she wants to, but most of the media won’t let her. The AP refers to her as Beverly Perdue. So do most of the state’s major newspapers. After some discussions last week, the Journal is calling her Bev, a change from how we used to do it.

Why the change? Journal style used to be that we always called people by their full name. The exceptions were for celebrities. The idea was that the full name minimized confusion. But over the years, it’s been relaxed. There are a lot of reasons behind it. For politicians, this has always been tricky territory. We were sticklers about calling Jim Hunt James B. Hunt Jr. and Jim Martin James G. Martin, but we have no problem calling Michael F. Easley Mike Easley.

The rule—if there is one—is that within reason, people ought to be named in the manner in which they refer to themselves doesn’t lead to confusion. Bev is a reasonable and accepted nickname for Beverly, no different than Mike or Jim or Fred. I suspect the reluctance for most of the media to use Bev Perdue is a matter of consistency. Mike Easley has always been Mike Easley. It’s not clear when Beverly became Bev on political documents, but you can see the change on ballots. Click here for the 2004 election, and here for the 2008 candidates list.

I’m not sure of the reason behind the switch, if Beverly has always called herself Bev or if there’s a political angle, i.e. to appear more approachable, but again, within the realm of generally calling people what they want to be called, it’s a fair and reasonable use.

If you haven’t already, you need to check out our story and multimedia on John Dell’s day as a WSSU football player. It is great stuff. A highly enjoyable story told well. As I’ve noted before, John is a first-class reporter who is equally at home writing player profiles and exposes of financial irregularities. And if there’s anybody on our staff who could pull off an afternoon running sprints with young men half his age, it is John.

Here’s the link. Enjoy.

As John wrote, there’s a long and distinguished list of journalists putting on somebody else’s pants for a day/week/season to write about the experience. George Plimpton made a career out of it, most notably with Paper Lion. And that thread continues with the Dirty Jobs show on Discovery. Successful versions of this genre do several things well: First, find the right job. Second, make appropriate fun of your limitations. Third, respect the people whose jobs these are when the camera/notebook is turned away. Fourth: Find the larger story. Fifth, let the story tell itself. Trying too hard creates disaster or treacle.

Update: John’s account of his life with the Rams is the subject of a very interesting message board on SportsJournalist.com. Click here to read.

We are still getting emails about the John Edwards story. The refrains are: We should have run something sooner. Who cares about this? Why was there no followup story in Sunday or Monday about it.

Between chores and projects, I spent a good deal of time thinking about this during the weekend. What we should have done differently. Could have done differently. Quick answer. I don’t know. One journalist friend of mine spent a week in California trying to confirm the meeting that the Enquirer wrote about. He was unable to. It seems to me that the press gets criticized on the one hand for having no standards and on the other for having too high standards. From what I can gather, the Enquirer got half the story right, that Edwards had an affair. But the child isn’t his. Of course, there’s a chance he’s lying about that. My guess is that the paternity will eventually come out one way or another. At some point, the child is going to drop his pacifier and somebody will pick it up and do a DNA test on it…

On the same day that Edwards fessed up, a not-so-tidy war erupted in Georgia, between the former Soviet Republic and Russia over a dissident province. Tanks rolling from Russia are not the sort of footage you liked to see. The last time I saw them was in Afghanistan, and that was a disaster on too many levels to repeat. Edwards was our big story. The Russia-Georgia war ran across the bottom of Pg1. In another part of the country, perhaps the Russian tanks got a higher spot in the paper. Not here. A former N.C. senator’s confession of an affair during his run for the president is big news, regardless of how the story finally made it into print. That said, the Russia-Georgia story has legs. And it isn’t going away.

It is a measure of John Edwards’ considerable fall from grace and place that the story faded so quickly. The spigot of coverage was open wide on Friday. Saturday, it was reduced to a stream of sidebars. Sunday, it became a trickle. The last gasps are reports from Newsweek and the LA Times about their reporters’ bizarre encounters with Rielle Hunter years ago. As I said a week or so back, the mainstream media—despite what conservative commentators may think—has never been in love with John Edwards. With his candidacy dead and the fact that he was never under serious consideration for a VP slot, they were more than happy to give up their first inclination to bury him and to just do something even crueler: ignore him and move on.

Update: Here is a nice discussion that includes Rick Thames, the editor of The Charlotte Observer, discussing his paper’s coverage of the Edwards story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather and about the precision with which we write about the weather. In one sense, hot is hot. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether it is 98 or 101. But one number is a story, and the other is a standalone picture. The way we decide that is by finding out the exact temperature. Thermometers are like clocks. There are good ones and bad ones, and even the good ones don’t always agree with each other.

Most weather stories have two parts. The first is what happened. Did it snow. How hot was it. How much rain fell? etc. The second is trickier. It is the forecast. What’s it going to be like tomorrow, this weekend?

How weather gets collected and collated and communicated is sort of a tricky business—and it is a business. The Journal essentially has three providers of weather information. Our weather page is produced by Accuweather, which bills itself as the largest private weather service in the world. They’re out of State College, Pa. But there’s also a local insert from Fox8, the television station in High Point that we have a news-sharing agreement with. The third entity is the National Weather Service. They are the collector of much of the raw data that feeds all these other sources. Typically, everybody is in pretty strong agreement about what happened, mainly because they’re all pulling from the same pot of info, even if they don’t always attribute the data to the NWS. The forecast gets a little trickier. It’s sort of like doctoring a recipe. The National Weather Service puts out a perfectly good forecast. What the private weather services do—and often do pretty well—is interpret the forecasts based on local knowledge. It’s very rare that they say black when the NWS says white. What happens more often is that they say it’s going to be a darker shade of gray than the NWS forecasts.

We ran into a problem the other day when trying to produce a graphic on what the weather would be like for Tuesday. The problem was that we got the information for the forecast from the NWS. It conflicted slightly with what Accuweather and Fox8 were predicting. Our graphics editor asked whether we in essence wanted to have what amounted to two different forecasts in the paper, even if they only disagreed by a degree or two. So, we pulled it at the last minute.

I’ll be honest. I understand the need to know what the weather might do, but there’s something magical about waking up to a snowstorm that you didn’t know 5 days out as going to arrive.

Water, water everywhere: I took part today in a blind taste test of bottled and tap water to see if we could taste the difference between all the stuff being hawked and guzzled out there. Surprising results. Look for the story in our living section in the next week or so…

I was involved in a thoughtful email exchange last week with a Realtor upset with our coverage concerning real-estate prices, locally and nationally. Her take was that this coverage is self-fulfilling, that negative stories destroys consumer confidence, reducing demand and reducing price, thus reducing consumer confidence ....

Here’s part of my response:

Yes, we run a fair number of stories from New York or elsewhere about the national housing scene, but we also run a great deal of local stories about our housing market. Typically, we take stock of the market here once a month. Normally, the figures we use are Triad-wide, furnished by the N.C. Association of Realtors.  That makes sense, as we circulate beyond Forsyth County.
It’s pretty clear from the figures that the local market is struggling. Perhaps not California struggling, but struggling nonetheless.
The unasked question is this: Why does the Journal bother running stories out of New York on the national real-estate market. The answer is two-fold. First, it’s news. Second, as I’m sure you know, the national economy feeds into the local economy. Not just psychologically, but financially. We have banks, retailers, garage-door manufacturers, mortgage insurers etc. that are based here but do business all across the country. The cough in California becomes a cold here.
That said, we will work harder at providing context to the intricacies and subtleties of the real-estate market, locally and nationally.
Finally, I want to address your opening paragraph about our news coverage “delivering the wrong message to our local economy.” It seems illogical, but the newsroom’s job isn’t to sell ads. It’s to write, report and publish credible and factually accurate news and information. I would like to think that people buy our newspaper because the news there is honest and objective, rather than skewed to help a particular industry or person. It’s that credibility that makes the newspaper such a great place to put an ad to sell a house.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not wishing a collapse in home prices. I’m a home owner, too, and when the time comes for me to sell, I want prices to be moving nicely upwards, but once we start making news decisions based on what’s best for selling ads, the whole thing falls apart.

That’s one view of the newspaper’s role in the housing market. The economic news these days seems to come in three varieties: poor, bad and worse. There are small bright spots, to be sure. But despite the best efforts of the Fed and the Treasury and everybody else, the economy has cycles, and we’re at the low end right now. NW NC is in much better shape than other parts of the country, but that is little consolation if you are looking for a job or trying to sell your house.

Sin Tour: Our story on Saturday about the resurrection of Schlitz beer got some of us thinking about the old days in W-S, when a savvy traveler could hit the factory tour at Whitaker Park, get some smokes, and then head down 52 to the Schlitz brewery and grab a beer or two. Unfortunately, factory tours have pretty much become a thing of the past. That’s one of the great things about being a reporter, you can still take factory tours. Over the years, I have been able to get inside factories that made newsprint, orange juice, cigarettes, blenders, toasters, ball bearings, armored vehicles, furniture, thread, chicken breasts, mobile homes, cooked shrimp, tires, chemicals, crackers, T-shirts, sweatshirts, denim, fans, springs, ice cream sandwiches, turbine blades and .... kitty litter.