Otterblog

There are a lot of things that make newspapers unique. First on the list is this: we routinely anger our two main sources of revenue, i.e. readers and advertisers. Sometimes we do both at the same time. That’s a twofer. Do we go out of our way to do this? Nope. But it comes with the territory.

That’s the situation we’re in right now with our restaurant critic, The Dinner Belle, who wrote a less-than-glowing review of Dudley’s on the Park. The owners didn’t like it, so they’re conducting a little flier campaign to try to unmask her. Which I guess is their right, even if it’s a bit juvenile.

Restaurant critics have a tough job. A bad review can hurt a restaurant, maybe even close a restaurant. So there’s all that rah-rah “help the local economy stuff”. Which leaves a newspaper with three alternatives. One is to take the Lake Woebegon approach: all restaurants are above average. The second is to not review any of them. The third is to only write up reviews where the restaurants would get good marks. None of these work for me. It’s an abdication of our responsibility to inform.

The two scarcest resources people have these days are time and money. What good critics do is tell people what they think are wise investments of those resources. Do we expect people to agree with critics every time? Of course not. That would be boring.

What I ask of the paper’s critics is simply this: Be honest, be open-minded, be professional, be prepared, be entertaining. I know the Dinner Belle. The Dinner Belle knows food. And if you go back and read her reviews, you will see that she is extremely diverse in what she likes. She’s not anti-downtown, or anti-suburbs, or anti-sandwich shops, or anti-steakhouse etc. To me, that’s a signal that she is focused on what she finds when she walks in the door.

Quick thoughts for a rainy Wednesday:

1) Energy and politics have been entangled for years. They’re likely to become even more so in the future. That’s the back story of a push by GOP members of Congress from Western NC to allow for gas exploration off the NC Coast. This used to be a third rail issue for our delegation. No more. The War in Iraq, uncertainty across much of the international oil belt and supply constraints have changed the dynamics of offshore drilling. Won’t happen anytime soon. But it will happen.

2) The 31st Senate District continues to be nasty—and will get nastier in the final week. Money helps in politics. But it isn’t everything. My predicted order of finish: Brunstetter, Whisenhunt a close second, then Tabor, which might set Whisenhunt up nicely for a second primary challenge if she chooses and Brunstetter doesn’t get over 40 percent of the vote. She has the least money, but if you look at voting results, she consistently received more votes than Brunstetter when they ran in the same district on the board of county commissioners.

3) Ash trays and spitoons. Reynolds American is paying $3.5 billion—with a B—for Conwood. It includes the Taylor factory on US 158. Interesting move. The old RJR used all its cash to get away from tobacco. The new RJR can’t get enough. Times have changed.

When done correctly, competition can be a wonderful thing. It makes us better, sharper, more responsive. That theory works in autos, in newspapers, and—yes—even in blogville.

With that in mind, a couple of quick announcements on some blog news happening at the Journal. We have some new offerings that will be competing with everybody’s undying and unwavering loyalty of the Otterblog. First, Monte Mitchell, our reporter in our Northwest bureau, will be running a blog for the next few days about Merlefest, the annual Wilkes County roots music festival that is this weekend. Look for it on JournalNow beginning tomorrow and through the weekend.

Second, we’ll be starting a blog for Kernersville and Eastern Forsyth County as part of our Kernersville Journal. Melissa Hall, one of our reporters in downtown K’ville bureau, will take the lead on that. It will hit the net for the edition of May 4. While the idea of all blogs is to have a dialogue with the community, we’ll be pushing this concept a little more forcefully in our K’ville blog.

A lot of blogging by the dreaded MSM, i.e. the Journal, is an experiment in new ways of doing things. Balancing tradition and innovation is tricky stuff. But take a look at these when they launch and let me know what you think. Your feedback is important.

WORD WATCH: Newsweek has a cover story on the Duke Lacrosse scandal, and like everybody else the most loaded word in the whole article is swagger. An interesting word. Norwegian in its origin, says my Webster’s dictionary, from svagra, to sway. You can search North Carolina’s statutes for a long time, and you still won’t find swagger in the criminal code. Court of public opinion is a different matter.

Stuck in Philly yesterday waiting for a flight. I’m a loyal consumer and I try to buy/fly local, but the economics of the airline industry are such that it was still considerably cheaper to drive to RDU, fly to Philly and rent a car and go to NYC then to fly out of PTI to LaGuardia ... Anyway, during my stay, I read the Inquirer, once one of the great metro papers in America, and now on the auction block looking for a buyer.

But there was an interesting collection of pieces in their Insight section that attempted to answer the question: Can we live without newspapers? Not surprisingly, the three answers were yes, no and maybe.

The yes and no answers are a bit simplistic in my book. Maybe recognizes the profound opportunities and perils of the digital age and also the unique properties of a newspaper, which are these: The organizational clout and resources to tackle big issues, and a way to distribute the material in a way that gets people’s attention. It’s true we lack a monopoly on either of those attributes, but we have clout.

Take our Sunday story on the economics and numbers behind the proposal to build a trolley in Winston-Salem. A pretty good piece of public-service journalism. Could a blogger do that same story? Of course. But how would he or she tell 100,000 people that they had done it. That’s a lot trickier. At least for now. 

If you ever want to get a scary, close-up look of what happens when big business meets big government, take a look at the Master Settlement Agreement between the cigarette companies—RJR, PM, et al.—and the states’ attorneys general.

It’s an amazing document, one that we’ve written about and will continue to write about for years to come. The latest battle is over the major cig companies’ claims that their market share has dropped so their payments ought to drop as well.

There’s a lot of money at stake. One clue: The state allocation percentages of exhibit A. The shares are calculated out to 7 percentage points.  N.C.’s share is 2.3322850%. 

LAX and the NYT: Interesting piece in Slate magazine about how the New York Times has been covering the rape charges involving members of the Duke Lacrosse Team.

If you’ve lived in this area for any length of time—say, more than five minutes—you know that people take their college athletics seriously. Very seriously. I frequently believe there are readers who do word counts on our coverage of Wake Forest and compare it with UNC or Duke or whatever.

We got an interesting e-mail this morning from an irate reader blasting us for not having an advance on the ACC Track Championships starting at WFU today. His theory was that our sports department is run by UNC grads who look for an opportunity to ignore everybody else.

We know who our home teams are (WFU, WSSU and ASU), but we also know that fan loyalty and interest cross county lines. And I’ve found that often the harshest critics of athletic teams are the reporters who went to those schools.

For those keeping score, here’s the rundown on universities attended by our sports staff, starting with our sports editor: Florida Southern, Duke, UNCG, Wake Forest, UNC, High Point, Lees-McRae, USC, Radford, Georgia, Bowling Green, Miami of Ohio, Averett, ASU, Florida. We have four folks who attended UNC, not that surprising considering it has a large and well-regarded journalism program. Tied for second place, with two apiece: Wake Forest and Bowling Green, home of the Falcons.

There’s a lot of police lingo that floats in and out of newsrooms. One of these is the word “mugshot,” which as I’m sure you all know is slang for the photo of a person taken at the time of their arrest. They are rarely flattering photos. Over time, for newspaper purposes, the word mugshot has also come to mean any small, tightly cropped photo of a person that we run, regardless of whether the story has to do with crime. It’s just a picture of what they look like.

We run a lot of mugshots, crime-related and not. We ran four this morning on our front page. Two had to do with the increasingly nasty battle in the GOP primary for the 31st Senate seat once held by Ham Horton. The others were the booking photos of the two deputies arrested in Davidson County and charged with second-degree murder in the death of an inmate.

Why do we run mugshots of people charged with crimes? The flip answer is because we can. But that’s wrong. The reasons have to do with the role of a media that is independent of the government and our responsibility to bear witness. It’s not about shaming people. But mugshots—particularly of those charged with crimes—are snapshots, and they give us some inkling into who people are. It’s the newspaper as window and as mirror.

For all its success in economic development, from Dell to pharmaceuticals, North Carolina has never landed the silver tuna: a car factory. As the foreign car makers have set down roots in the mid-South auto belt, away from Detroit and its unions, North Carolina has been a perennial bridesmaid. BMW got past us to S.C.; Mercedes went to Alabama. Nissan to Mississippi, etc. etc. It can give you a bit of a complex.

Now come reports that Toyota, which is poised to overtake GM as the world’s biggest car company, is looking at Greensboro and three other states as a site for a car plant.

Potentially big news and big money. Reporting on incentives is tricky business. The folks involved don’t want to discuss anything, but the public input that is part and parcel of the incentives process requires openness. Invariably, the deal makers gripe that that publicity kills deals. But it doesn’t. We went through this with Dell, and it’s virtually impossible to find an instance where reporting on a reputable company that wanted incentives sent that company to another site.

Worth a read: The Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Print journalism’s annual salute to itself. It can be self-congratulating and a little excessive, particularly in this era, but some of the work is outstanding. I recommend the series in the Rocky Mountain News on a Marine whose job it is to tell the families of Marines that their loved ones have been killed. In the wrong hands, a subject like that can drown in cliche. This is sparse and unflinching. It won for both feature writing and photography, a rarity.

With all the sturm und drang over immigration reform, it’s easy to forget the other demographic pig in a python that is changing our country. That is the graying of America and Forsyth County. Old people are among the fastest-growing group in the nation, and their numbers will swell in coming years as people who are old live longer and us baby boomers join the group.

Huge policy implications. Huge moral implications. Huge financial implications. And it intersects with the immigration issue, as you are probably aware if you have been in a nursing home recently. Many of the people who take care of our elderly are immigrants, and compassion and treating the elderly with dignity transcends their legal status.

The power of mulch. Community is where you find it. And sometimes it’s hard to recognize. But it was there in the line for free leaf mulch on Saturday at the city leaf dump in back of Reynolds Park Rec Center. Pickup trucks as far as the eye could see. W-S’s skyline off in the distance. A fraternity (and sorority) built around the pitchfork and the wheelbarrow. Not half bad.

Today is the first day for so-called “early voting.” I will get on my soapbox here and tell everybody to vote. I don’t care who you vote for, just so long as you do. Higher turnouts mean more legitimate results, which mean a more confident and more connected government.

You can tell from our coverage that we’re in the thick of the political season, with lots of candidate profiles etc. But anybody who thinks politics is deadly dull ought to read our front page piece on the battle between Rep. Julia Howard and Frank Mitchell. It’s like the West Wing as written by Seinfeld. Mitchell was trying to prove that he lived in Howard’s district, and the State Board of Elections cut him off at every pass. It’s all about details. Where he used the most electricity. Where he kept his toothpaste. Where his dog lived.

The saddest thing in the whole story was Mitchell’s attorney denying that the dog was a pet. It was just a stray, he said. “The dog just showed up.” Ouch.

Friday trivia: Our travel photo of the day shows a woman in Kenmare, N.D. with a U.S. 52 road sign next to her. Here’s the question: U.S. 52 and U.S. 421 intersect in downtown W-S. Where else do they cross paths.

Click here for the answer.