Otterblog

Bowdoin College, where I spent four years cobbling together a degree in economics, used to have a student photo magazine. It was called No Cats, No steeples. The idea being that if you were a photographer in Maine and the only things you could find to take pictures of were cats and churches, then you were pretty sorry indeed.

Twenty-plus years later, that idea still resonates. I like cats and dogs, but I don’t put them at the head of the line, my general belief being that if we’re paying too much attention to cats and dogs, there are probably bigger stories we’re missing. And while I agree that you can tell a lot about a society by how it treats its pets, you can tell more about a society by how it treats its people. Still, like many papers, we run a lot of animal stories in the Journal, and usually I am the brake in discussions about play and space, pushing for restraint.

Not yesterday. At our budget meeting, an editor said a reporter was working on a story about four kittens that had survived a cross-country trip in a motorbike crate. That is a great pet story, and one worthy of the front page.

It’s important to cover pets. They’re a huge part of people’s lives, and there are serious issues involved, as we’ve noted in stories about the animal shelter. But it’s also important to put them in perspective. So, pets and the front page can mix. But you want to set the bar high. Four kittens in a crate from California makes the cut.

One other note on this story. It was written by Jae Haley, one of our four summer interns. She’s a student at WFU. Our other three interns (Ayesha Rascoe, Howard; Lauren Carroll, UGA; and Anne Tate, UNC-CH) are all doing an incredible job for us. One of the most rewarding things about journalism is teaching the next generation, and it helps when the students are such willing learners.

Sometimes, in between the crises over Lio/Peanuts and the demise of our stocks section, we get to work on big, important stories and are reminded of the miracle of the daily newspaper. This weekend was such an example. A team of three reporters had been working for several months about the death of Carlos Claros Castro in the Davidson County Jail. It’s a big, broad story, with lots of angles and complexities.
We were on a deadline of sorts, because we had heard that one of the deputies charged in his death was about to take a plea. We didn’t know when. It turned out to be Friday.
This is a hazard of writing about current events. Sometimes, they take a twist that is—to put it politely—inconvenient.
And so it was on Friday. We were largely done with the reporting and writing, but still had huge chunks to figure out. A team of journalists—reporters, photographers, designers,editors of various stripes—spent Saturday and Sunday getting our story ready. It is really something to watch bright, committed people focus on a task and get to it.
It’s worth a read. In this day of bloggers and Internet news sites, etc., this is a reminder of what newspapers do best. And why newspapers matter.

One of the casualties of publishing the Davidson story was that our story on what ails Dell and what it means for Forsyth County was held. Look for it this Sunday.