Otterblog

Sorry for the slack posting. I was in Raleigh Friday (more on that in a second), and off yesterday, taking in some mountain air. It is true about the leaves this year. They are spectacular.

Anyway, I was in Raleigh for a job fair, recruiting college students (and a few recent graduates) for internships and full-time work down the road. Other than having to get up way too early and hit two rush hours on the drive back, it’s an incredible experience to spend the day talking with bright and ambitious young people about journalism. Lots of schools represented: Carolina, WSSU, ASU, NC State, NC Central etc.

With all the perceived troubles in our industry, there’s a small amount of fear about what you might find at such an event, i.e. what if they gave a job fair and nobody showed up ... The students I spoke with are pretty savvy. They know what is happening in journalism, the budget constraints, the changing media appetite of the American public, our limited attention spa ...

And they care and don’t care. Certainly, they (and their parents) want a secure job future with a reasonably good paycheck. But they also want more. They want to tell great stories and make a difference in the communities they cover, which at the end of the day is what it’s all about.

It is always a little wierd to be in the news. I prefer a more anonymous existence. But you can’t always control everything.

I have leading role in a story on the Poynter Institute’s Romenesko Web site about a young journalist’s job search this summer. Here’s the link.

The background: a recent college graduate called me up and said he was going to be in town and could he come by for an interview. Nice guy. We talked. He left. He wrote me a few months later with a draft of a story he was working on for Poynter about hunting for a job. A little strange, especially the notion of a private discussion suddenly being the subject of a story. And it’s interesting to see how other people see you. The implication from the piece is that I am a hardass. Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m pretty direct and I believe job interviews aren’t just for chit-chatting.

You know that feeling you get when everybody is talking about a movie that you didn’t see or a book you didn’t read or a snowfall that somehow missed your street? That’s a bit how it was yesterday with our earthquakes. I slept through the first one. So did the dog, but that’s another tale. So all day at work, everybody was yammering about the quake this and the quake that, and all I could do was smile and nod. I even missed the second one. I caught up with the last quake, at 9:15, so I went to sleep happy, knowing that I was now part of this itty-bitty crumb of history ...

A 2.6 earthquake is one of those great events of nature. No damage and destruction. No tsunamis. Just a firm reminder that mother nature is out there, giving us shakeup calls when we get too uppity. Although we covered the story both in print and online, the power of the Net was in full force yesterday. Just before our morning planning meeting, we posted an update and asked readers to tell us what they felt. 20 minutes later, I had 30-some emails from readers about the rocking and rolling. It is amazing to see how many different ways we can say that a)we were sleeping b) a big crash of sorts woke us up. c) we wondered what it was. d) we were glad it wasn’t North Korea sending us a present… There are some really descriptive writers out there.

This is citizen journalism, i.e. people reporting what happened, participating in a news event. It’s hard to even imagine how long it would have taken us to track down 30 people to get the same comments. They did their part. We did ours. And it was very natural and unforced, which is how I think these sorts of things should work.

And for those earthquake junkies, this is a pretty cool site.

We had a question a week or so back about the appropriateness of making photos of the Amish at the funerals of the girls who were shot to death at the school.

Here’s some more information, from a column by the ombudsman of the Washington Post. It’s a good summary and includes some comments from the photographers who participated.

We faced a difficult decision this weekend in our story about the family that won $400,000 from the Forsyth County school system in a civil case. The quick rundown: a former teacher at East Forsyth was convicted of having sex with a student. The family sued the system, arguing that officials knew the teacher had a problem but continued to employ him.

Typically speaking, open court is open court and court records are open court records. Particularly so when public agencies are involved. If the school system is going to pay $400,000, then the recipient of that money ought to be acknowledged.

But not always. The Journal’s coverage of rape victims and sex crimes has evolved over the years. Now, we don’t name the victims of sex crimes, unless they agree to be named.

Complicating things were are the fact that the girl is now 20 and that there’s evidence that the relationship was “consensual.”

We felt that the governing factor was the age of the girl at the time the crime was committed, and that state laws have been written to remove consent as a factor in sex cases involving students and teachers. There may be extenuating circumstances, but it is better to err on the safe side in this instance.

AND THE WINNERS ARE: Otterblog Jr. and I judged the first annual pumpkin headline writing contest. By unanimous vote, the winner was Dwight Defee with “The Cinderella Regatta.” Honorable mentions to Holy Floatin’ Curcubitas! and Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Paddler. Dwight wins the Journal coffee mug, which I will leave at the front counter for him to pick up. Thanks to all contestants.

It’s a beautiful day outside, crisp as an apple. Here’s a little poetry to end the week on. It’s by a guy named David Tucker, who is an editor at the Newark Star Ledger. His latest volume is called Late for Work, and it’s a really fine collection of writing and reflecting on the business and soul of the newsroom. Enjoy. And in our own more, condensed version of poetry, I will announce the winner of the pumpkin headline contest bright and early on Monday. Have a good one.

Today’s News
A slow news day, but I did like the obit about the butcher
who kept the same store for 50 years. People remembered
when his street was sweetly roaring, aproned
with flower stalls and fish stands.
The stock market wandered, spooked by presidential winks,
by micro-winds and the shadows of earnings. News was stationed
around the horizon, ready as summer clouds to thunder--
but it moved off and we covered the committee meeting
at the back of the state house, sat around on our desks
then went home early. The birds were still singing,
the sun just going down. Working these long hours
you forget how beautiful the early evening can be,
the big houses like ships turning into the night,
their rooms piled high with silence

For readers in western Forsyth County and eastern Davie County, we’re making some changes in our zoned edition, The Clemmons Journal, that runs on Thursday. It will have a new name, a new mast and an additional reporter. Lisa O’Donnell, one of our most talented features reporter, will be joining the staff.

The new name: The Clemmons-Lewisville Journal. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but we think it’s representative of the land beyond Muddy Creek. When we began this publication many years ago, Lewisville hadn’t incorporated, and Clemmons was the 800-lb gorilla out there. It’s still the biggest town, and the commercial center. But Lewisville has grown enough to deserve a spot on the masthead.

We think it’s a good fit that will mirror the improvements we made a year ago with The Kernersville Journal.

AND KEEP THOSE PUMPKIN HEADLINES COMING ...

diffee.doc

A few years ago, we wrote a piece about a guy named Matt Diffee. Grew up in Forsyth County. Went to Gospel Light Christian School. Now has a job as a cartoonist at .... The New Yorker. I’ve attached the story.

He’s a funny guy, with the sort of sense of humor you’d expect from a cartoonist. He has a book out, and here’s a column he wrote about it in the LA Times.

CONTEST UPDATE: Right now, I have a whopping total of two, yes, two entries for my pumpkin headline contest. Again, the winner gets a coffee mug. I’ll accept entries through the close of business Friday.

Sometimes, I am struck by the difference between what is considered important local news and important national and international news. Like a lot of newspapers, we think our franchise is in reporting on local events, stories you can’t get anywhere else. But we also recognize that the world is a complicated place, and that readers ought to be able to get a reasonably complete snapshot of their world, soup to nuts, with their morning Ovaltine, green tea, coffee, coke, water, milk or OJ.

The result is a front page that is on occasion one of strange bedfellows. Take Sunday’s paper. We essentially have two lead stories. One is on North Korea and its nuclear ambitions, which are a serious threat to peace in the Far East. The other: “Utility-panel oversight to be considered.”

This is a good story, and it’s an important story. The City-County Utility Commission is an 800-lb gorilla in our community. They run the water. They run the sewer. They run the landfill. Think about that the next time you turn on the tap, flush your toilet or put your trash out. And there are some serious concerns about whether their autonomy is a good thing or a bad thing. But that oversight aside, the water will still come on tomorrow.  It pales in comparison to the threats posed by the Korean peninsula.

So what to do? If you measure serious news by the extent to which you or a lot of people could end up dead, we would have a very different front page than we have now. And that’s not what we’re aiming for, so when we choose stories for the front page, we look at importance and also relevance, which is why those two stories exist cheek by jowl.

GOURD UPDATE/OTTERBLOG CONTEST: Now that the fair has come and gone, it’s time to wait on the seed catalogs and stop musing about agriculture for a while. But here’s one last look at the harvest that was. This photograph moved across the wires this weekend. It’s of a pumpkin-canoe race in Wisconsin. Write me a headline. Best entry gets a Journal coffee mug.

Fellow blogger Esbee sends in the following question or questions:

Ken, are you open to suggestions for what to discuss? Because I’m very interested in why the print media seems to be so intensely focused on the Amish schoolgirls who were killed, to the point of snapping as many pics as possible of their funerals and mentioning every intimate detail they can grab a hold of, while the accompanying text almost always mentions how much the Amish dislike having their pictures taken, want to live privately as much as possible, etc.? It seems more than slightly disrespectful, especially since the previous shootings, including the one where the girls were sexually assaulted, haven’t generated the same print media… “fixation” is the best word I can come up with.

Please note that by print media, I mean in general. But since I can’t ask the print media in general, but I maybe can ask you, I’m doing so.

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We had a discussion yesterday at our afternoon story budget meeting about the art for the Amish funerals and whether to use photos that showed the Amish. Being respectful and being disrespectful are not always opposites. The Amish don’t like to have their photos taken, yes, but at some level, a funeral is a community event and I think a larger group of people than the immediate families wants to share in the grief. There were a lot of photos available, none that I would call outstanding. What I’m drawn to in the shot we used are the sunglasses of the young man on the left. They seem fairly hip and stylish, a little intrusion from the outside world that the Amish try to keep at arm’s length and to me symbolic of some larger themes.

I think America and by extension the media have had a love affair with the Amish for years. There’s also a lot of fascination, envy, jealousy, and skepticism thrown in as well. It’s that whole Witness thing. The Amish are presented as honest, hard-working people with these beautiful fields who have turned their back on much of the technology we take for granted. Do they really not have cell phones? computers? DVD players? How can their kids function without IM? We joke that they have to be cheating somehow, raiding the technology refrigerator at night, so to speak.

And while the Amish have been trying to live this pious and simple life of worship, farming, and buggies, the world is closing in. Land prices are up. Temptation is everywhere. The moat isn’t what it used to be. The school shootings of the other day are unfortunately the perfect symbol of the Amish inability to seal off their “better” world from our world of Columbine and 9/11. They’ve failed, and so have we. And if a crazy man can kill five girls in a one-room schoolhouse set among farmland so pretty that it makes you cry, then God help the rest of us.

Point is, it’s a great story on many levels, and newspapers and the rest of the media love great stories. And the privacy that the Amish hold so dear, that they don’t want to weep and grieve in public, makes them that much more noble and the story that much better. I think some papers/TV stations have gone a little overboard, but in many ways it’s more interesting than the House page scandal.