Otterblog

Imagine if Coke or Pepsi wasn’t allowed in its advertising to urge people to drink soda? If they weren’t allowed to say that an ice-cold cola is awesome and refreshing and makes your day? What would the ads say? Drink Coke. It’s brown and sweet. OK. You see why I’m in the news business, not advertising, but you get the idea.

That’s the situation facing Howard, Merrell & Partners of Raleigh, which won (if that’s the right word) the $8 million contract for advertising of the N.C. Lottery. The lottery legislation spells out the restrictions, including that no ad “may have the primary purpose as inducing persons to participate in the lottery.”

Winston-Salem’s own Mullen ad agency also competed, but didn’t get the job. Our reporting suggests that the agency’s ads played up the possibility of big wins, another no-no.

It’s hard to sell a product with one ad tied behind your back. And my guess is that there will be a lot of disagreement over the meanings of the words “primary purpose” and “inducing”. With $1 billion on the line every year, it’s likely that the definitions will get looser over time.

If there is a more enjoyable computer experience than dragging a cutout of Naomi Campbell’s lips and placing them in the middle of Michael Jackson’s face or Allen Joines’ face or Virginia Foxx’s face and then having a little chuckle, I’ve yet to find it.

This guilty pleasure comes courtesy of the fine people at JournalNow, our online partner. They put together this very cool game for today that lets you match up lips with faces. Good, clean and harmless fun.

The folks at JournalNow do a lot of serious journalism. Their presentations of the Kalvin Smith and Darryl Hunt cases have won national awards. But creating a dynamic journalistic culture that moves easily between print and online has to be about more than the sober grist of hard-hitting stories.

Hence the lips. Newspapers have always recognized that readers want a buffet of sorts. Meat. Potatoes. Dessert. You don’t want to scrimp on dessert. It’s the last thing people eat before the check arrives.

Dessert isn’t a frivolity. It’s what people expect. For dinner. In print. And online.

Winston-Salem lost a good man yesterday with the death of Pete Oldham. His real name was Warren, but everybody knew him as Pete. It was a childhood nickname he picked up as a kid in Indianapolis.
Pete Oldham was a lot of things—coach, university official, legislator—and he did all of these jobs the same way, modestly and purposefully, always keeping in mind whether a particular course of action was the right thing to do.

I remember Doug Wilder, the former governor of Virginia and now the mayor of Richmond, telling me that in Pete’s day, he was one of the premier running backs in college football. It wasn’t the sort of thing Pete bragged about, but even toward the end, he carried himself with the step and confidence of a former athlete.

Pete Oldham and I came to the General Assembly at about the same time during the early 1990s, him as a freshman legislator, me as a rookie statehouse reporter. So we bonded over the insanity of the legislative process, the characters that still controlled life in Raleigh, and the pomp and circumstance that envelopes life at the capitol.

Pete Oldham didn’t make waves as a state representative, but he understood his role in the process: to stand firm on the things he believed in at his core; to be flexible on other matters; and to know the difference between the two.

There are a lot of ways that technology is changing how reporters do their job. Some good. Some bad. We used to have to call people to get information. Now we just go online. It’s quicker, but of course something gets lost in the anonymous transactions. Good reporters still call their sources.

Online diaries are also being mined. Many students post bios and write extensively about themselves on myspace.com and facebook.com. They’re fun snippets of young people and their friends and their thoughts. They’re also potentially valuable sources of information—for parents, for prosecutors, for reporters.

Imagine this scenario. A college student is charged with a serious crime. Would he give us his high school yearbook so that we could better understand who he is and what he believes? Probably not. But we can go online and find out much of that information from facebook or myspace. They’re essentially open sites.

We studied the facebook entry of Marcos Bryant the other day. He’s the student at Winston-Salem State University charged with two counts of murder. We used some information from that site, but other information we chose not to include in our story because we thought it was inflammatory and it was hard for us to get a sense of the spirit in which it was written. Context is important. And as most of us know, what we write and tell our friends isn’t always the truth.

Online diaries were a key part of the reporting on the tragic death of James Dungy, the son of Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts. His myspace entries painted a very different picture than what he often appeared like to family and friends. Reporters chose to use those—and I think rightly so—because the comments were extensive enough to offer some insight into his troubled mind. 

For nearly 10 years, Winston-Salem has been at Ground Zero of the battle over the wisdom and legality of giving incentives to businesses. First came the lawsuit by Bill Maready. That went all the way to the N.C. Supreme Court, which ruled that incentives were OK. A more recent lawsuit is challenging the massive incentives package that the state, Winston-Salem and Forsyth County ponied up to get Dell to build its computer-assembly plant in southeast Forsyth County. A resolution on that is probably years away.
In the meantime, as we reported today, companies are expected line up for incentives as part of the FedEx project at Piedmont Triad International Airport. The companies who will use the cargo hub need to be close to the airport, but they can choose from several counties and cities in which to locate. That means pitting Guilford against Forsyth, High Point against Greensboro, Winston-Salem against ... you get the idea. Not exactly the ideal arrangement for bringing a region together.
My suspicion is that there are several good reasons why the Triad is such an incentives hotbed. But basically it comes down to a) our economy has been battered more than the other major metro areas of Charlotte and the Triangle; and b) We still have enough municipal wealth to offer sizable incentives.
Look for incenties to be an issue in our local race for the 31st State Senate seat held by Ham Horton, who died last week. A polling person called me the other night from an outfit called Tel Opinion, and asked all sorts of questions about incentives and how I felt about the three Republicans who have said they are interested in the seat: Pete Brunstetter, Gloria Whisenhunt and Nathan Tabor. The person didn’t know who the client was. 

We’ve been having a vigorous debate in our newsroom about whether to publish the cartoons that have sparked riots and violence across the Middle East and in Europe. To date, we haven’t.

By publication, I’m referring to both print and online. The Philadelphia Inquirer to date is the only major U.S. newspaper to have run the cartoons. There’s a healthy discussion across the media industry on whether to run the cartoons or even to link to them.

It’s easy to say that linking isn’t publishing. We’re just providing a way for readers to get more information if they choose. But I think that’s a bit of a dodge. If we provide the link, we are in a sense taking ownership of what’s behind that door.

Journalism is about a lot of things, but often it’s about being a gatekeeper. Every day, we decide what fits best into the newspaper, with an eye toward answering the questions of what do readers need to know about their world. We take these decisions seriously.

We have written extensively about the cartoons and described them in ways that make clear their content. In that sense, it’s no different than when we write that someone made a “crude gesture with his hand.” Most people know what that means.

Generally speaking, we try not to offend, and we never run stories or photos just for the sake of running them. But have we offended? Of course. The world is a dangerous and complex place. Many folks complained when we ran a photo of the Blackwater Security personnel who were killed and burned in Iraq. Others complained about our decision to run photos of the two sons of Saddam Hussein after they were killed.

We thought those photos told something that couldn’t be described in words.

Twenty-six years is a long time to hold the same job. But that’s how long Bill Stuart has been city manager in Winston-Salem. Now, he’s retiring.

There are a lot of tough jobs out there in the world; Being manager of a city as complex as Winston-Salem is one of the tough ones. This is a resilient city, to be sure, but it’s been through the wringer. During Stuart’s tenure, the economy has shifted from a reliance on tobacco and textiles to one built around financial services and health care. The demographics of the city have changed as well. We’re more diverse, less insular, more demanding, more politically divided.

Cities grow or die. They grow by bringing in more revenue, i.e. taxes, and by adding people. The first is done by increasing the tax rate or the tax base. The second is done by either being a desirable place to live that attracts new residents, or by annexation. Stuart has used all these arrows at various times. He’s angered many with his unapologetic support of annexation without the consent of the annexed.

City managers have enormous power under our system of government. While technically they just work at the behest of elected officials, the relationship is much more subtle. They guide, they teach, they push back, they stand up for their beliefs.

For better or for worse, depending on your perspective, Winston-Salem’s shape and scope reflects Stuart’s vision—and his longevity. In some cases, he just simply outlasted his adversaries. It’s doubtful his successor will hang around for a quarter century.

Wilderness is often a state of mind. It can exist in a small tract of land or a vast expanse of woods and mountains. But we don’t usually think of it being right in the middle of the city. So what to make of the gorgeous photo of the Bath Branch we ran today as part of a photo essay? It’s online and in print.

For all the world, this looks like a pristine mountain stream, rather than a once neglected water way. I’m sure there are no trout in it, but that’s not the point. It’s refreshing to see something so pretty so close to where we all live.

The waterway’s history is our own. It was one of the original water supplies for Salem. Much of the creek is buried under downtown, and organizers of the Piedmont Triad Research Park have talked about trying to restore the lower half to make it gurgle brightly once again.

A few weeks back, we ran a story about changes in kindergarten, how it’s now real school instead of sand in the buckets etc. And we had a great photo to go with it. There was one problem with the shot. Smack dab in the middle of this closeup of a teacher helping two students was a 20 oz. water bottle. We had a long discussion in our newsroom about the bottle. We don’t manipulate photos, so we couldn’t use Photoshop to take it out. But we did talk about the ethics of asking the teacher to move the bottle before we started shooting. That alters the reality as well, so the water bottle stayed in that shot, as it will in future shots.

But if you start paying attention to news photos, it’s amazing—or frightening—how many water bottles end up in shots. We ran one on Saturday with Joey Porter of the Steelers. They’re everywhere, along with coffee cups. Part of our disposable society. I was relieved last week that the President didn’t take a swig from an Aquafina bottle during the State of the Union speech.

We had an interesting item in Today in History on Thursday. It was the 136th anniversary of the Cardiff Giant being exposed as a hoax.

For those who don’t know the tale, the giant was this huge stone man unearthed in Cardiff, N.Y. in 1869. People thought he was a petrified man or a stone statue or a giant right out of the Bible. Folks paid money to see him. A year later, it was revealed to be a hoax, the chisel marks shown for what they were. People still paid money to see it. These days, the Giant is on display at the Farmer’s Museum near Cooperstown, N.Y.

I saw the giant many years ago, and it’s pretty cool. There’s a lesson there as well, about the way we believe in things and how truths get accepted as truths. There’s the idea that the truth is anything that enough people say is the truth. I disagree. There are objective measurements of many truths, but the acceptance of truth can be a group activity.

In many ways the acceptance of a new truth is a back story of the Darryl Hunt saga. We wrote about the latest twist this morning. It’s a fascinating case, intertwined with our city, our social fabric and this newspaper. For nearly 20 years, the accepted truth among many people was that Darryl Hunt killed Deborah Sykes. Even after Hunt’s pardon, the DNA evidence, the confession of Willard Brown, the apologies etc., there are still people who believe he was involved. We hear from them occasionally. They cling to a past truth, uncertain about new truths and unwilling to accept the chisel marks for what they are.