Otterblog

Quick thoughts for a Friday.

Bracket calculus: I’m told that something like 4 million people sent brackets to ESPN. Of those, supposedly only four contained the combination of GMU, LSU, UCLA, Florida. Impressive picking. Hard to know who to root for. Like the Bruins for the history, the Patriots for the whole Cinderella schtick, the Tigers for the Band of Brothers stuff; and the Gators because the Florida-Butler game at LJVM in 2000 was the best game I’ve ever seen.

Lottery calculus: First day sales $11 million. Also impressive. The goal is to make $1.4 billion a year. For that, they only need to sell about $4 million of tix every day.

Good read: As some may know, it’s the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl. What’s happened there? Basically, it’s become a wildlife refuge. It’s all explained in Wormwood Forest, a fascinating book. Neat essay on the same in Natural History magazine (not online :( ), one of the unsung great mags out there.

Well, the lottery is here. The scratching began at around 6 this morning. The world still looks pretty much the same. I was surprised that there didn’t seem to be that much pent-up demand for playing, no huge lines, etc. I guess folks who like scratchoffs have been playing them for a while, just going to Virginia to do it.

Afternoon update: My crack lottery sources say there are lines in some places, and that there is frustration that the lottery is a cash-only enterprise. No debit cards, tacking on a ticket on a gas fill-up etc.

For newspapers, our coverage offers an interesting case study in the separation between the news and editorial pages. Our editorial pages said the lottery was bad public policy and a bad idea. The newsroom --which operates independently of the opinion pages—doesn’t have a position. We just cover what is news, and the start of the lottery is a big news event. It can seem a little promotional, but it’s difficult to tell folks about something big starting without telling them that something big is starting.

The challenge for the N.C. Lottery moving forward is going to be to deliver the revenue it has promised to the state, and to figure out how to market the games within the confines of the restrictive legislation.

I appreciate everybody’s civil and interesting comments on immigration. Good discussion.

More from the definition wars.

As the debate over immigration rages from Washington to Winston-Salem, there’s a lot of discussion about what to call the people in the United States who are not legally entitled to be here.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists is asking news organizations to refrain from using the phrase “illegal alien” and the shorthand “illegals” in favor of “undocumented worker” or “undocumented immigrant.”

NAHJ suggests that illegal implies a criminal wrong, when immigration status is a civil violation, and that alien used to mean foreign and now conjures up weird images of MiB and ET. 

Obviously, there is a political subtext to all of this. One person’s clarification is another’s euphemism.

AP style on this is to prefer this middle ground: illegal immigrant. It probably dissatisfies many people, but to me it’s a fair compromise. Illegal is illegal, regardless of whether it’s criminal or civil laws that are at issue, and immigrant is a humanizing term that reminds everyone that we are talking about people, not bizarre life forms from outer space.

With the news of Graham Pervier’s impending retirement, Forsyth County now finds itself in the same situation as the city of Winston-Salem, which is hunting for a new city manager.

Nobody is irreplaceable, but replacing Pervier won’t be easy. He’s essentially functioned as an eighth county commissioner, and he has an institutional knowledge and understanding of how Forsyth County works—and doesn’t work—that can’t be picked up in a crash course or by reading a history book.

In addition, the politics and realities of the board have changed in the past 19 years. It’s more conservative, money is tight, demands are growing, constituents have gotten angrier. As I’ve noted before, the best city-county managers don’t just carry out the will of the elected body; they educate and lead. Tough balancing act.

The Google-free house: Interesting interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Fortune. Yeah, he’s got gazillions of dollars, but he won’t hook his kids up with the technology that counts! Here’s what he says: Question: Do you have an iPod? Answer: No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.

Here’s the full interview:

Not too long ago, a close friend of mine asked me what the deal was with Jim Black. He’s the speaker of the N.C. House, and the word “embattled” seems these days to be permanently fused to his name, as in “embattledspeakerjimblack.”

On Sunday and today, we answered that question, with a two-part series that is really a primer on how the world works in the General Assembly. I don’t know what will happen with Black, but what I think our story did exceptionally well was lay out the tale in all its Shakespearean grandeur.

Writing about corruption or the appearance of corruption is difficult stuff. It’s rare that things are black and white, or even dark and light gray.
It’s the subtlety that makes it interesting, and the Jim Black tale is filled with subtle details about how power ebbs and flows in Raleigh. Yes, a story this long takes some time to read, but it also gives you a panoramic view of what’s happened and why it’s happened.

Newsrooms are different animals than most other parts of businesses. They’re highly inefficient. They’re almost meant to be. People work incredibly hard, but good stories take time to report and to write, and it’s impossible to do an accurate cost-benefit analysis on a single story. But it’s the inefficiencies that in many ways define a newspaper.

Patriot’s Day: That strange gnashing sound you heard this morning was everybody’s NCAA bracket being sent to the office shredder. Gotta love GMU. Even here, in North Carolina.

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With all the hand-wringing going on about print journalism, it’s often easy to forget about all that is good in a newspaper.

And today’s front page shows an awesome confluence of great art and great layout that is almost impossible to duplicate on a screen. I had the benefit of being in the budget meeting when we planned our front page, so I wasn’t surprised at the picture of First Pres’ steeple (click on steepleshot) on the front, but it was still very cool to take the paper out of the bag and look at the top half, and then open up the whole front page and see the punchline.

When I was in college, I took a photo course, and the professor helped put together a book of student shots that was called “No Cats, No Steeples,” the idea being that any respectable photographer should steer clear of shooting churches and kitties. I still like that rule, but all rules deserve to be broken for the right photo, and this is it.

All three columns worth. As I’ve noted before, one of our missions is to be entertaining, to surprise and amuse, etc. Most typically, we think of that challenge in terms of stories. But it applies to photos as well.

Busy day. Lots of fires to put out. Here’s the grenade tossed into newspapers collective lap this morning. It’s a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts on how people get their news, and as you might expect, it’s not a ringing endorsement for print.

Boiled down, the findings say that for many folks—and particularly young people—the Internet is their primary source of news. The newspaper or the magazine is now a supplement. The good news would be that newspaper Web sites continue to be leaders in this category, and perhaps investments in these sites will pay off. The downside is the report’s suggestion that this transformation is happening quicker than many people expected and that the way people use and find news on the net is different.

Think about your own habits. We browse the Web differently than we browse a newspaper. One is more linear than the other. On the Web, itt’s much easier to skip over—or never even run into—stories you think you have no interest in. Newspapers are a serendipitous experience.

How you browse determines what you find and what you don’t find. My take is that the next big thing in news Web sites will be redesigns and reprogramming that reflect how people use the Internet. Very soon, successful online news sites will do more than just have a different delivery system. They will look different and be different.

Beyond the arc: Lots of criticism today from the Blue Devil hard core over our story suggesting that J.J. Redick isn’t at his best in the Sweet 16. They say the Journal is anti-Duke. Tell that to the Wake fans ... All I want is a good game tonight and watch Shelden Williams and Glen Davis battle in the paint.

You know it’s springtime when we publish the annual list of unpaid property taxes in Forsyth County. One definition of geekdom is if you a) look forward to this publication; and b) curl up on the couch on Saturday and go through it page by page. It is short on adjectives, but highly entertaining.

Everybody who does this has the same pattern. First, they check for their own name (It was just an honest oversight!). Then they check their neighbors, and then anybody and everybody else. 

The law requires the county to advertise the list, but as we reported today, it’s not just about government legalities. It’s about The Scarlet Letter as presented by the Forsyth County Commissioners Drama Club. Shame is a powerful tool. Even the government knows that.

And it’s fun for newspapers to climb aboard and write about who owes taxes. It’s not our list, we can say, we’re just reminding people that it exists. And when somebody complains, we have an easy answer: pay your taxes.

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John Delong is one of our ace sportswriters on a staff with a lot of aces. He knows a lot about basketball and just won an NBA Writers column-writing contest, which is a pretty neat trick considering W-S doesn’t have a pro team. He did what I consider an outstanding job of dissecting the N.C. State basketball program and its coach Herb Sendek today.

What caught my eye was at the bottom, where he talks about one of Sendek’s failings being a poor relationship with the media. At first glance, this looks like a bit of self-aggrandizement. I mean, he’s a basketball coach. He’s paid to a) win games; b) graduate his students. Everything else is gravy. And it speaks to the human tendency to look at things through the prism that is most relevant to US, i.e. the old adage “If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.”

But as John’s column makes clear, that simple world of black and white just doesn’t exist. It would be nice if all of us were measured in performance strictly on objective measures. But we aren’t. For better or worse, important folks get judged by how they do in front of a dozen microphones. Those who do well get the benefit of the doubt. Those who don’t get just the opposite. Does it win games? No, but it sure makes the losses easier to swallow. That goes for basketball, business and politics.

More water bottle madness. Note the water bucket in the right of the photo (click on Sendek above). Gatorade is gone. Somehow dumping a bottle of Dasani on a coach after winning the big game just seems wrong.

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Rather than talk about the War in Iraq or the collapse of the Tar Heels, I thought I’d just give everyone something fun to look at for a Monday and the first day of spring.

This map (click on above) comes courtesy of Wes Young, a reporter in our K’ville bureau, and cartographers at East Central University in Oklahoma. Wes is also our census guru, and he’s got a good radar for obscure but interesting factoids.

This is a county by county map that shows what people call sweet carbonated water: soda, coke, pop, other. It’s nice to know that in this day of homogenization and regional blurring, many things are still unique. You can see the Coke belt, the soda belt and the pop belt. What I found most interesting is the St. Louis area, a sea of soda surrounded by pops on the North and Cokes on the south.

I don’t know much about St. Louis, but if anybody has an answer, I’d love to hear it.

Also, check out the pop (blue) dots in Surry and Davie counties.