Otterblog

As you might imagine, we spend a lot of time around here thinking about the future of news in general and newspapers in particular. There are lots of experts out there—real and imagined, helpful and adversarial—with all sorts of perspectives, but the real truth is that nobody is quite sure what the future holds for what is politely called “content.”

Here’s one view, from Richard Posner, a retired federal judge and well-known big thinker. Also on the same blog is a shorter post about the social costs of the decline by Posner’s blogging partner, economist Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate, big thinker and devotee of the power of markets.

Their basic points are this: 1) information, like people, wants to be free. 2) behavior changes over time. It’s not clear that reading, buying and advertising habits are going to just spring back to pre-recession levels with newspapers or other media. People adjust/adapt/etc. Sort of like switching from Post raisin bran to the store brand cereal to save money. Maybe when you’re flush again, you stick with the discount brand and its lower raisin count. Or you just keep eating toast.

The questions as always are these: How will the next generation of news be delivered, and how will it be supported.

Have a safe Fourth of July.

One of the abbreviations that has sprouted up in newsrooms in recent users is UGC. It means user-generated content. Essentially, it’s all the stuff on Web sites (and in print) that isn’t created by quote unquote professional journalists. It’s the letters to the editor, the comments on stories, the recipe swaps, milestones etc. There’s a lot of it out there.

And there are lots of ways to look at it and what it means. The cynic’s view (and I from time to time fall into that camp) says that cash-strapped newspapers are finding ways to get content for free to replace all the content they’ve lost through cutbacks. An honest appraisal would find some truth in that camp. But there’s more to it than that. There’s a sense of engagement and inclusion that is pretty powerful and important as institutional/mainstream media look for new ways to create stronger/better ties with readers. Technology has certainly pushed this along, as it’s incredibly easy for content to move from user to producer.

And in addition and quite honestly, some of this UGC is pretty good. It’s not filler. A case in point was our Sunday travel photo show on the Smokies and the 75th anniversary of Great Smoky National Park. Rather than using so-so art from the wire services to accompany the piece, we sent out a solicitation to readers for their photos. And they responded with some exceptional photos. You can see them all here. The one of the waterfalls near Gatlinburg is my favorite.

Speaking of the park, I just finished Serena, by Ron Rash, a North Carolina author and professor at Western Carolina. It’s Macbeth in the mountains, with timber barons battling the preservationists during the creation of GSNP. Very good.

Other books on the OTTERBLOG summer reading list: The Gulag Archipelago, probably more relevant today than ever, and the the Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, which I’m about a third through and is sort of a combination of Huckleberry Finn and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

Finally, a note of recognition. At 5 p.m. on Saturday, while most of us were winding up our chores or hanging out in the air-conditioned splendor of inside, a hundred or so folks were at Hanes Park for the Ultimate Runner competition. It consists of five races: a 100m, 400m, 800m, 1 mile and 5,000m race. It tires me just to type that out. Three Journal staffers were among the competitors: James Romoser, Dan Galindo and John Dell. Impressive performances by all.

Now that I have your attention ...

Tonight on the Oxygen channel is what I guess passes for a TV documentary on the murder of Brent Poole by his wife, Renee and her lover, John Frazier, at Myrtle Beach. It happened in June 1998 and she was convicted a year later. Although love triangles are as old as the Bible, this one was more than your garden variety boy meets girl, girl meets other boy, boy-girl kill first boy. Ms. Poole had worked as a stripper, and the killing took place after a romantic interlude on the beach. It attracted national coverage. If you watch it, look for Chris Quinn, the Journal reporter who covered much of the trial. Here’s the court’s ruling on Poole’s writ of habeas corpus.

What’s amazing is that this was 10 years ago. Where did the time go?

There is criticism in some quarters about our decision to write about the divorce case involving Andrew and Veronica Filipowski, which ran on our front page on Sunday. Essentially, the complaint is that people’s private lives are their private lives and newspapers or other media should back off.

As my high school physics teacher said, “Yeahbut ...”

Initially, I sided with that group. But I changed my mind the more I thought about this case. My reasoning was two-fold. First, this divorce case is tied in part to the baseball stadium deal and the city’s need to provide more funding. As taxpayers, we don’t have a stake in the outcome, but the events that led to this filing have impacted us all. Second, and more important, a judge closed the courtroom. We spend a lot of time fighting for access—to records, to open government. And we shouldn’t just sit on our hands when a judge closes a courtroom for murky reasons.

It’s not about embarassing either side. You’ll note from our story that we devoted almost no ink to the reasons for the divorce filing.

Many moons ago, on my first day at the Journal, I ate dinner with a young reporter named Dan Froomkin (We went to Mr. BBQ; I had the Miss Fried Chicken…). He was a piece of work. Skinny. Tall. Big mop of curly hair. Smart and very full of himself. Initially, I wasn’t sure if I liked him, but he was definitely entertaining. He eventually left the Journal, moved out West, got involved early in online and ended up at the Washington Post, first in management and eventually writing a blog/column called White House Watch. His contract got terminated yesterday, and it has set off a firestorm of protest in the circles of people who read political blogs and look for meaning in all sorts of actions from the Post, the Times and other big media.  Dan was/is a v. good blogger. He was sharp in his analysis, wide-reaching in his aggregation of material, and unafraid to criciticize. Don’t know what his future will be, but my guess is that he will get picked up by somebody

Back after a few days away ... It’s always wild to read several days of papers at the same time. Invariably, you get out of order and wonder what’s going on. The baseball stadium deal has rightfully dominated our coverage, online and in print. As it should be. I wasn’t surprised that the vote was delayed for two days. I am v. interested in the oversight committee that the city wants to create. This is fairly unusual to do, and the devil is in the details.

My questions about the formation of this committee, from a journalism standpoint, would be:
1) Are their meetings public?
2) Are their records, both generated and requested, public?
3) Are their reports public?
4) Does the committee report to the council or the city manager?

Newspapers spend a lot of time and money battling agencies over public records. And very often we’re seen as obstructionists and pains in the rear. Despite what our critics say, we simply want to know so we can tell readers. But when an issue comes along that everybody wants the records for, suddenly these laws have more meaning. So, we’ll be watching—and reporting—on the scope of this committee and what its definition of oversight is.

For years, I’ve seen this elderly woman at the Harris Teeter where I shop. She’s always there on Saturday mornings, in a wheel chair near the front. She’s smiling, and I try to say hello to her as I push my cart past. But I didn’t know her story.

Now I do. Edna and Leroy Stanley were on the front page yesterday in a beautifully written and photographed package by Scott Sexton and Walt Unks. I am not the world’s most sentimental person, but It’s hard not to read this story without getting a tear in your eye.

But what I also liked about this story was that for me, personally, it was revelatory. Perhaps not revelatory in the way that our other A1 Sunday story on the battle over a bill to make school board elections here nonpartisan was, but revelatory nonetheless. That’s the goal, and that it happened on a sweet and touching story made it that much more important.

For some technological reason, I am unable to post my own comment to respond, but it seems to me ironic that you are criticizing us for a lack of good news in the paper on a post that is about an A1 story that is nothing but good news and sweetness.

If you read JournalNow or any other online news site, you’ve probably read the online comments that accompany many articles. As I’ve noted before, the commentosphere is a harsh and unforgiving planet. And there is often a shortage of manners. On the one hand, it is the mob, plain and simple. On the other hand, it is little-D democracy, a marketplace of ideas where attempts to moderate the discussion seem counter-productive.

Our site is policed in two ways. First there is a filter that catches George Carlin-esque words of posts before posting But of course there are plenty of clever ways to get around that through spelling and ch@r@ct3r substitution. The second way is from the online community itself, including our staff. If someone tells us about a comment that is insulting, we’ll take a look and remove the offending comment. Obviously, some of this is subjective. What I find offensive may not be what you find offensive.

I think one of the things that contributes to the harshness of the debate at times is the anonymity afforded by the Web. If you write a letter to the editor, we publish your name and the town where you live and we will call you to make sure that John Smith is John Smith. On the Web, you can just be JohnS or Hammerhead or Hatesotterblog or whatever. Most online sites have accepted that anonymity as the price of traffic and encouraging debate. But maybe that traffic is cheapening the discourse and making it nastier than it ought to be.

So, I’m interested in your thoughts on anonymous comments on Web sites. If you had to give your full name, would you be as likely to comment (on any Web site, not just this blog, but news Web sites in general). Let me know.

Update: Here’s a link to a forum at the newspaper in Knoxville about online comments. It runs the gamut.

There’s something slightly askew about publishing a story in the newspaper about the use of Twitter. Like hitchhiking to the Hummer dealer…

Digital communication is so different than that found in print. The velocity is amazing. The creation of new types of nuance are boggling, the character winks, abbreviations and such that are the shorthands we’ve come to rely upon. I’ve dabbled with Twitter, and I find it interesting but not terribly satisfying. It’s like flipping channels, where you get 30 second and only 30 second on each station before it moves to the next. Sometimes, there’s a funny joke. Often it’s only part of one, or something that doesn’t do it.

But it’s another way of getting information, and it poses challenges for traditional and conventional media. With all the angst and hand-wringing about the fate of the printed-on-paper world, I read a great speech last week by the publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal. You can read the full version here.

Here’s the fun part:

Finally, I’d like to conclude today with a scenario dreamed up by my friend, Ken Paulson, who recently retired as editor of USA Today.

To top it all off, you don’t need a long-term warranty or service protection program. If you’re not happy with this product on any day, we’ll redesign it and bring you a new one the next day.

Makes you think.

I got this in my inbox late last night. It’s a column by a friend of mine about a relative who died in World War I, and it’s pretty powerful. The author is Chris Healy, who is the executive director of the Connecticut Republican Party.

If you know anything about Connecticut and New England politics, you know that the New England brand of GOPism is being squeezed out. You will be hearing a lot from Chris directly or indirectly during the next 18 months, as Republicans target Sen. Chris. Dodd, the powerful head of the Senate Banking Committee, for his role in the financial meltdown. Along with the reelection bid of Sen. Richard Burr, it is going to be one of the marquee races in the mid-term elections.

Style note: The National Association of Hispanic Journalists sent out an email today regarding the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. It says a lot about where we are as a nation ...

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists would encourage news organizations to avoid any confusion over Judge Sotomayor’s ethnic background. To be factually correct, her Puerto Rican parents are not immigrants, as some journalists have reported, since island-born residents are U.S. citizens conferred by an act of Congress in 1917. People who move to the U.S. mainland from Puerto Rico are no more immigrants than those who move from Nebraska to New York.

It reminds me of the section in the back of New Mexico magazine called One of our 50 is missing, which has clippings of all the stories that refer to New Mexico as not being part of the United States.