Otterblog

Our lead headline today said “Bombings in Iraq kill journalists.” It’s an interesting headline from a lot of different perspectives. First, there’s the whole question of whether the death of a journalist is more important than the death of a soldier or the nearly three dozen Iraqis.

I’d like to think all life is sacred, but I think the work of journalists—particularly those in war zones—is among the most important work done anywhere. These are people, essentially given over to the idea of objective coverage, going into a killing field armed with a flak jacket and a notebook or a camera. The truths they tell are almost guaranteed to upset somebody. Journalists continue to make enormous sacrifices to cover this war the best they can. It is a call to duty and a noble mission.

The second thing I find important about this headline is the use of the word journalist to describe the camera and sound men. It wasn’t too long ago that photographers and camera men and the like were seen as second-class citizens, more support personnel than journalists. But they are. I know at our own shop that some of the best journalism we do is done by photographers and graphic artists etc. And there’s been a growing recognition that journalism is more than just words. It’s the whole package, pictures, sound and presentation.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE: Saw Over The Hedge, the movie, yesterday. This is based on one of our new comic strips. I found it funny, but not particularly coherent. It’s also strangely dark, filled with the unspoken sense that the stars of the movie, i.e. the animals, will ultimately be paved over by the gluttonous, SUV-driving, Spuddies-eating intruders, aka us.

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Three quick thoughts:

1) The true definition of power in America: Having your name on your own personal water bottle. Check out above link of Michael Dell in town yesterday at the Dell factory. Will let all of you know when Waterblog is available. Water bottles in photos bug me, but they are here to stay.

2) The parentheses lobby took a hit yesterday. Our friends at the Associated Press, arbiter of most newspaper style in America, issued the following rule change:

An AP Stylebook entry has been updated:

Editor’s Note: This changes AP style to eliminate parentheses.

telephone numbers

Use figures. The form: 212-621-1500. For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515.

3) JournalNow, kind host of the Otterblog, has won its first EPPY Award, sponsored by Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek magazines.
JournalNow won in the category of Best Internet Community Service Effort for its presentation of the Winston-Salem Journal’s series Unsafe Haven: The Crisis in Home Health Care.
JournalNow.com worked extensively with Winston-Salem Journal reporter Paul Garber to create a Web presentation based on his computer-generated reporting. The series also was expanded online with graphics, case studies, tips for finding good health care (including a government document on the subject) and two databases.
Danielle Deaver also worked on the print portion, and Joe Murphy and Lee Rawles did the online work.

Corrections are an important part of a newspaper’s attempt to be a transparent and credible institution. Almost all are a result of trying to cram a day’s worth of news into a paper on a short deadline. I spend a lot of time dealing with corrections, and there is almost always shared blame. A reporter may make the error, but editors looked at the copy and didn’t see the failed logic etc.

We ran an interesting correction last week from a story in the New York Times. Maybe you remember the story. It was about a purported plan by Airbus, the big airplane maker, to produce a plane where passengers would stand instead of sit, so even more passengers could be crammed into place. Without laps, so to speak, there’s more room for fares. It got a lot of play, in the Journal, and elsewhere.

Turned out, however, that Airbus, had abandoned the idea about two years ago. The story wasn’t really a story, more of a glimmer of an idea. This is not to slam the Times. It’s a great paper. And everybody makes mistakes.

The Times has a public editor, a guy named Byron Calame. He wrote an interesting column about the Airbus affair. Calame breaks down the errors of omission and comission that led to the mistake. It’s not pretty, but it’s a good tour of how big newsrooms work and how things can fall between the cracks if people aren’t careful.

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We ran what I thought was a gripping account of life inside our local animal shelter over the past two days. It’s a different approach for us, a story that lacks a precise time element but is just a compelling read because of the subject matter. It also makes for incredible art. Much of Friday was spent in a debate and discussion among senior editors about the main art for the first part of the story.

The photo that many editors liked I have a link to at the top. It ran inside. It is a complex and disturbing photo, beautiful and haunting. It is of a young woman sitting with a dog as it dies. There is a needle in the dog that the shelter staff uses to tell them when the animal has died (it stops twitching). I thought it was filled with grace and dignity. Other editors said yes, but that in the end that people would never get past the needle. So we moved it. 

It was a spirited discussion, with a larger context of a newspaper’s role and ability to shock the public and the responsibilities that go with that power. 

Now that our funny pages fight has abated for the time being, we can return to other matters. Notice I didn’t say other more serious matters. The comics are serious, as we rediscover every time we change them.

Some of you may have heard about a little movie coming out today. It’s something like the Da Vinci Code? It’s supposed to be based on a book? Seriously, this is one of those perfect storms of media and entertainment that raises a lot of questions about the role of newspapers in an increasingly fragmented media marketplace.

It was hard to turn around during the last two months and not be bombarded with something about DVC. Whether it was snippets of Tom Hanks’ long and oiled hair-do or members of Opus Dei defending themselves and the Catholic Church, there have been bazillions of stories: about the movie, about the role of a novelist and higher truths, even stories about the stories. You have to believe that an executive with Sony is somewhere folding his hands together and stating in a Mr. Burns-like manner “Excellent.”

So what did the Journal do? A couple of things. First, we decided that DVC is a big event, and one that we didn’t want to be excluded from. Two, we realized that our best purpose was not to rehash the endless stories that people could get from Entertainment Tonight or Time magazine. True to our mission, we took a local approach, talking to local clergy and others about why—for all the hoopla—this isn’t another Passion of the Christ. And we let readers tell us what they thought.

One thing is for sure: the conspiracy movement is alive and well in America. If you assert something as fact, then get a major organization to go ballistic and attack it, there are a fair number of people who think the enormity of the denial points to a kernel of truth. 

I wrote last week about changes to our comics pages, which began this week. Peanuts and Spot the Frog are out. Lio and Over the Hedge are in.

There’s been a little outrage, but not the torrent we expected or at least planned for.

Here’s one email we received: YOU LITERALLY RUINED MY MOTHER’S DAY - I HAVE BEEN READING PEANUTS
(CHARLIE BROWN) SINCE 1958 EVERY DAY, AND
WAS ENJOYING THE OLDER ONES ALL OVER AGAIN.  CHILDREN PROBABLY DON’T
READ THE COMICS SO WHY ADD SOMETHING
ABOUT WOODLAND CRITTERS.  CHARLIE BROWN IS ABOUT LIFE.

It’s hard to know how to respond to such visceral pain. And I would not attempt to tell this reader that she has no right to feel that way. She does. But I think that our Sunday story about the changes explained our position in an honest and open way. That matters.

Our reporter, Tim Clodfelter, has dabbled in comics, and he knows his stuff. And let me say for the record that I am a huge Peanuts fan. I named my first pet Snoopy if that’s any indication. But the past years have been tough on Schulz & Co. As cheesy as it is to watch the Family Circus kids talk about the Internet, it was in many ways much more painful to look at the Peanuts gang frozen in time. At first, there was comfort in their constancy. Then it became sort of like a museum, a homage to the dead rather than a conversation about life.

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I am in New Orleans to fish with some good friends. The devastation in this city and region caused by Hurricane Katrina cannot be believed. We fished from a place called Shell Beach, where boats still lie stacked on top of each other. We stopped by a little general store there on the way back. The owners were unbloodied and unbowed about their future. The store is in a FEMA trailer, and before and after pictures are on the front door.

The pictures of the Ninth Ward don’t begin to tell the story of the damage to community here. There are blocks upon blocks of houses, some collapsed, others flooded beyond salvage. The flood water line is like a telltale scar across the neighborhood. Rescue graffiti tells a grim shorthand on every house. It’s the sort of place that every American needs to see for himself, either here or in Mississippi.

Ten months later, work is being done to rebuild but there is so much to do. It’s difficult to know what the answer is. Rebuilding encompasses a lot of possible outcomes, and how the Ninth Ward is rebuilt will hold the keys to the future. But for now, it just looks like a bomb went off there. As bad as the houses are, what is most unnerving is that there is no noise here. No cars backfiring on the street. No lawnmowers in the afternoon. No shrieks of children playing in the yards.

I have attached a few photos of the Lower Ninth.

ON ANOTHER NOTE: New Orleans is a great food city, and I got to indulge in two of the city’s great treats. One is a fried pie made by Hubig’s Pie Co. I’m a huge fried pie fan, and their coconut fried pie is outstanding.

The second is a Lucky Dog, sold out of these hot dog-shaped vending carts in the French Quarter. Readers of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole will recall that Ignatius J. Reilly, the story’s main character, had an eventful experience as a lucky dog man.

This Sunday we’ll be making some changes to our comics pages. We’ll have a story Sunday explaining the changes, but the teaser is that a long-time favorite is going away.

Making changes to the comics pages is tough. There’s a constituency for virtually everything on the page, and our readership seems sliced and diced into individual categories. For everybody who thinks that the Family Circus is the comics equivalent of ODing on sugar, there are others who loves its wholesome brand of humor. Some people love Get Fuzzy. Others just don’t get it. A friend was explaining the other day about the wisdom of Judge Parker. I haven’t found it.

But the comics are a living entity. They change with the times and they reflect who we are, what we find amusing, what moves us. I would love Calvin and Hobbes to return. Not going to happen. Same with The Far Side.

So we add and subtract. Not always successfully, but always with the same goal. What’s the best use of these two pages. Yes, some people are going to be angry, and that’s OK. There’s a reassuring comfort in reading the comics every day, and nobody likes their routines to be upset. But change is good, and my hope is that you will give these new strips a chance. I’ll talk more about this on Monday. Please read our Sunday story. 

Sorry for the late post. Much of today was spent with a colleague who is leaving the Journal. David Rice is our senior Raleigh correspondent, and he’s moving out of journalism to take a job as a media/government consultant with a Raleigh law firm. A big loss for our paper.

David was a pro in the highest, best sense of the world. He probably knew more about state government—all of state government, including the nitty gritty that nobody knows about—than anybody I’ve ever met. A great memory and mind for detail. A love of bad jokes. A cell phone attached to his ear. A relentless reporter.

Anyway, that’s the circle of life at newspapers and other enterprises. Many newspapers have moved away from coverage of state government. The Journal has moved in the other direction. We expanded our government coverage a few years back. The reason is simple: the decisions that affect our lives, from taxes to education and health-care policy, are made in Raleigh, and state government functions best when an independent press is down there, hanging out in hallways trying to figure out what the politicians are doing with your money and your rights.

So I took a call this morning from a person—and I don’t think they were a Carolina fan—questioning our decision to put the hiring of Sidney Lowe at NC State on our front page. Their general beef was that there’s a war in Iraq, gas prices through the roof, world coming apart, etc. etc. etc., and putting a story on basketball on A1 shows a further deterioration in the cultural compass that once was America.

It’s a good conversation point.

There’s a lot of thankless tasks in journalism. The front-page budget meeting isn’t one of them. It’s a dozen or so bright people talking about the next day’s paper. It’s not a democracy, but sound reasoning beats a fiat every time.

So why Sidney Lowe. It’s a no-brainer for us. One, he has what we call a great story line: He’s part of the once-glorious hoops past of the school. So he’s coming home. Two, he has ties to our city through his wife. Three, basketball is important. It’s what people care about. And it’s not just winning or losing. Sports is a huge business and part of the vast Education-Industrial Complex.

There’s a part of me that wishes people cared about basketball less and about Darfur more, but that’s not the world I live in.

Stories are like vegetables. You can’t make people read anything just by putting it out there and saying it’s good for them. That doesn’t mean most-common denominator journalism or giving up on stories that are important. But it does mean the balance between what people want to know about and what they ought to know about.