Otterblog

We had a transformer blow at our printing plant last night about 8:30. It knocked out power, sent smoke pouring into the place. And it shut down our printing press. As deadline approached and the power wasn’t restored, we moved production to the News & Record. They printed about 10,000 copies. Our power came back on later, so we moved back to our plant around 3 or so. A hairy night, with our night editing crew, our technical staff and production team moving pages and files at a furious pace. It was something to watch and admire.

There are a lot of unspoken rules about putting out a daily paper, but at the top of the list—just after “get it right the first time” —is “we publish no matter what.” In this day of the Internet and Web publishing, you might think putting out the hard copy of the paper is not that big a deal. If there’s a problem, it’s still all online and what’s the harm.

The harm is simple and profound. There’s an unbroken chain of publication, and it speaks to credibility and trust. The sun rises each day, and the newspaper lands on the curb or the porch or somewhere in between. It’s a powerful rhythm that needs to be respected and not bargained away in times of crisis. Unlike a lot of businesses, we can’t just delay production. If you lose an edition, you can never make it up. It’s gone, and years from now, when some kid was using the microfilm at the library, there would be a gap.

We owe the folks at the N&R for last night. They were there when it mattered. This is the pact that newspapers make with each other. Fierce rivals on things that matter—stories, advertising, subscribers. But able to cooperate when a tradition is on the line.

Couple of technical/logistical issues delayed posting today ...

1) We appreciate everybody’s calls about the changes to the stocks pages. Even the complaints. Change is tough. But it’s happening. One thoughtful writer said essentially that the more we tell people to go online to find things that used to be in the newspaper, the worse off we are. Some truth to that, but it’s a much more complex problem than that. Newspapers believe—correctly, I think—that what we can do best is provide news and content that can’t be found elsewhere. Stocks didn’t fit that goal at a cost-benefit we were willing to maintain.

2) The surgeon general is always news in Winston-Salem, as it was on our front page today. It’s who we are, part of our historical DNA and our present DNA as well. If you ever have time, it’s worthwhile to go back and read the initial report on smoking and health from 1964. Here’s the link. Without taking sides in the debate, as I have good friends who work in tobacco and relatives who have died of smoking, it’s a remarkable document, and it’s amazing how this issue has changed and broadened during the past 42 years. The intersection of health and politics and personal responsibilty is an incredibly lively area.

3) Our front-page piece on why North Carolina’s gas tax is so high is what I would call a clip and save. You may not like the answer, but the explanation is a good primer on why our state is the way it is. Not necessarily better or worse, but different.

On my desk, behind the coffee mug and the stapler and next to the candy dish, is a rain gauge. I brought it here on Friday to help put together a graphic on our low-level drought. It was a really nice graphic. It never ran.

We pulled it on Friday night, after the torrential summer storms swept through our area. The drought hasn’t gone away, but it was apparent that a graphic that showed an empty rain gauge against cracked earth would look a little—what’s the right word?—goofy on the front page. We made the call late in the production process, and it was the right one, and as a result a lot of talented people—paginators, line editors, photographers, reporters and copy editors—worked their tails off to make our new front page for Saturday look as sharp as it did.

Front pages have changed a lot in the 20 years I’ve been at the Journal. They’re more designed. Better planned. With more moving parts. Thank the computer for the technology. Thank the page designers who have become true craftsmen (and craftswomen) in creating pages that read well and look good.

The danger in the intersection between design and journalism is that you don’t want your design to dictate your news too much. Form and function have to work together. Awesome art and presentation can elevate a story’s prominence, but it only gets you so far. And planning is vital for design, but flexibility and an understanding that things can and will change as quickly as the weather are much more important during crunch time.

There’s a column moving today on the Romenesko journalism Web site that suggests that bloggers have all the fun and the mainstream media, known often as the MSM (and not be confused with MSNBC) are stuck in a death spiral of depression and despair.

Can’t speak for all journalists in either camp, but I beg to differ. Blogging is a lot of fun, but it can be work, too. And being part of the horde and herd of the MSM is work, but it’s often a great deal of fun. Where I think they are different, at least for me, is that blogging is very much a solo sport. It’s me and my ideas. Journalism—at least the journalism we practice here—is very much a team sport. The discussions and debates about what to do and how to do it are the best part of the job.

Sometimes, it’s nice to retreat to the blog cave, but coffee and conversation with the world are a journalist’s best friend.

Headline I wanted to see somewhere after the U.S. lost in the World Cup yesterday: Going, going, Ghana

Happy Friday.

Beginning next Wednesday, we are eliminating two of our three daily stock-market pages. Here’s the full story from today’s paper. Not a lot of surprises here. Papers big and small—News & Observer, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the News & Record etc.—have done away with much of their financial agate in the past year.

It’s about cost—read newsprint—and utility. The fact of the matter is that as the amount of financial data out there has soared and space never kept pace with it in the first place. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, you name it. And of course there’s the Web, where most of us do our checking and portfolio management, if we’re lucky enough to have one.

I admit to a little nostalgia. Looking at stocks and baseball agate over scrambled eggs and coffee is not a bad way to kill 20 minutes, but the market-analysis page we’ve put together in place of our existing pages is a great overview of the previous day’s events. It’s one-stop shopping. I know what to expect when I see it.

This is one of the ways that newspapers are adapting to the changes brought by technology. We want to do what we do best and can provide the most value to our readers. Not everybody is going to like the changes, but change is unavoidable. If you have thoughts on the stocks changes, let me know. 

We published two stories this weekend about tragic deaths. The first was a followup to the death of a boy on an ATV. The second was about a man who survived the crash of a small plane where the pilot died.

Writing followup stories about deaths is tricky and painful territory. And they raise questions about what is fair in terms of assigning blame for accidents. In the plane crash, friends of the pilot asked us not to say what the National Transportation Safety Board had reported so far on the cause of the crash (They say it probably ran out of gas.) But we included that information in the story, not just because we could or out of spite, but because it’s a relevant fact and a natural question that any reader would have.

The ATV story raised more difficult questions. Nobody wants their son to die from an ATV accident, but this death was a perfect example of the limits of legislation. As some of you might know, the state passed restrictions on the use of ATVs by minors last year. But the laws are only good if people follow them. So our story wasn’t designed to punish the boy’s family again, but to illustrate the need for vigilance in ATV safety.

On the air: Myself and two other journalists were interviewed Saturday for NPR’s All Things Considered. Here’s the link to the segment. It was a good discussion about politics, the War in Iraq and other topics. Much of my comments reflected the input and feedback I’ve gotten from the Otterblog community. So thank you.

One of the criticisms newspapers hear quite frequently is: “You’re doing that just to sell newspapers.” My response is always the same: No, we’re doing that because it’s a story people care about and that for most of our readers, who have subscriptions rather than buy out of a rack, the decision to buy a paper has been made well before the paper is either planned or printed.

But there’s a provocative study making its way around journalism circles that challenges some of our conventional wisdom. Richard Morin writes about it in the Washington Post, and here’s the link to the actual study, entitled Blood and Ink and published in the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics (Study 285).

You’ll need your slide rule. The study is heavy-duty game theory and statistical analysis, but the authors essentially contend that the media and terrorists are in a mutually beneficial relationship, where terrorism leads to more coverage and more coverage leads to more terrorism. The inference is that this is a financially beneficial relationship for both parties. Terrorists use their press clippings to raise money, so to speak, and newspapers use banner headlines about terrorism to—you guessed it—sell more newspapers.

But the authors admit the limits of this implication. They note that their model probably only applies to tabloids and the like, which are based on impulse buying more than subscriptions.

It’s no secret that most newspapers are either losing circulation or holding steady. So, yeah, I want to sell more papers. But it’s hard to imagine our readers lining up to buy the newspaper if we overplayed every act of terror committed in the world today. We don’t think that’s where our future lies, and most studies about what readers want from a paper suggest that shock strategy isn’t a long-term success formula. Rather it’s information they can use, stories that demand to be read, and a presentation that ties it all together with sophistication and impact.

Back in Rudy Giuliani’s heyday as mayor of New York and before 9/11, his police officials adopted what became known as the “broken window” approach to fighting crime. Essentially, that meant the cops went after what seemed to be minor infractions, i.e. broken windows, as a way of drawing a line in the sand. They realized that the broken windows were the warning signs of bigger breakdowns. The theory—which has been adopted by police forces everywhere—went that if you get out ahead of major crime and not tolerate the little minor offenses, you create a more civil society with less crime down the road.

So what does that have to do with journalism? A lot, it turns out. We adopt that idea with our approach to the state’s public records and open meetings laws. Two stories from this past weekend illustrate that point. The first looked at a potentially improper vote by the local board of elections to name a new director. The second was about police policy on chases.

Both these articles involved the Journal pushing for access—to meetings or to records about policies. Public officials often don’t want to tell the public what they are doing. I don’t think it is that they feel they are hiding anything as much as they feel they know best and can parcel out information as they see fit. Our view is that democracy is messy and citizens ought to know what their governments are doing and how they are doing it. Police officials asked us not to publish chase guidelines, because they said it might give criminals a leg up in avoiding arrest if they know police won’t chase them in certain circumstances. It’s hard to imagine a dangerous criminal doing that calculus when an officer pulls him over.

Our quest for open meetings and public records often revolves around what are considered minor points—chase policies, a vote for the director of elections that won’t change even if it’s taken again. But they are the broken windows in our system of checks and balances. When government closes up on the little things, it isn’t long until they are closed up on the big things. 

Here’s an email I received today:

I noticed in today’s Winston-Salem Journal that you showed a photo of President Bush above the quote from his speech about the death of al-Zarqawi that was out of context to the quote.  I watched the speech and the President’s face was very somber, not smiling, as in the photo you showed.  I am appalled that the lack of unbiased reporting should be so obvious.  While your newspaper has a reputation for being very liberal and anti-Republican and anti current administration, I hope you understand that not everyone is of the same persuasion.  I thought our President was very respectful in his wording and demeanor during his speech and I do not appreciate your trying to sway the image to suit your political beliefs.

The writer is correct. The mugshot we used of the president is from a later event in the day, when he was talking to the Chilean president. So he wasn’t somber all day. Politics aside, I don’t believe there is anything unethical about using a small photo in this manner. It’s more for illustrative and design purposes than anything else. If we showed him in a golf shirt, or he was laughing out loud, that might be a different matter.

As I discussed yesterday, the al-Zarqawi story was a chance to figure out how to display and present an important story that broke at a very non-competitive time for the print version of newspapers.

The Newseum is an interesting site that collects newspaper front pages. You can see how newspapers across the country covered this event—or ignored it as the case may be.

Separately, I hope you all had a chance to read our story on the Brown Mountain Lights today. Good piece. Great photo. There are a lot of special places in North Carolina. Wiseman’s View above the Linville Gorge is near the top of my list.

I woke up this morning way too early to the news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed in a U.S. airstrike. It’s a big story, and one that gets into a lot of the ethical and logistical issues that are reshaping newspapers today.

First, the news cycle. By the time, I got to work, I must have heard the name al-Zarqawi a thousand times. By the time Friday’s paper lands with a thud on the doorstep, it will be almost a day past prime. So our question this morning was how we present and play this story to give readers something new, without turning a hard news story into a feature story. There is a convergence between newspapers and the news magazines. We’ve become more interpretative. They’ve become faster-paced. But we don’t want to rush past what in the quest to explain why.

Second is the matter of photos. Among the dozens of pictures moving on the AP wire is a photo of a dead Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He’s been cleaned up a bit. But he is still dead. The shot is reminiscent of the photos of Saddam Hussein’s sons, after they were killed a few years back. The faces of death—even those of dead terrorists—are never easy to look at. We’ve had some discussions about whether and where to use, and they will continue through the day as we sift and evaluate through the copy and add our own touches and perspective to this event. If you have thoughts about publishing photos of the dead, let me know.