Otterblog

We’ve discussed in the past the power of words to help define a situation. That’s what’s going on today with the media, in terms of the situation in Iraq. Several outlets, most notably NBC and the Los Angeles Times, now refer to the Iraq conflict as a “civil war.”

Here’s a discussion from Editor & Publisher.  The Bush administration, not surprisingly, objects to this terminology. One general couldn’t say what it was if it wasn’t civil war, but said there were “unacceptable levels of violence.”

The Associated Press, which the Journal often but not always defers to in matters of style, has yet to use “civil war” without a qualifier. Usually it writes of the situation as possibly deteriorating into “all-out civil war.” It tends to be more cautious than many individual papers and members who belong to the AP.

The larger question, of course, is whether it makes a difference what the situation is called. I think it does. One person’s civil war is another’s sectarian strife.

As we move into Turkey Day mode, some quick thoughts:

1) OJ. A classic example of media synergy gone awry. Maybe OJ can post it on a My Space page (also owned by News Corp.)

2) Beauty and the bees. There’s a good lesson in the profile this morning of Brady Mullinax, apiarist extraordinaire. He lobbied Congress to make the honey bee the national insect. No go. Apparently the monarch butterfly had its own powerful lobby. This utility vs. grandeur argument is as old as the nation (remember the turkey vs. bald eagle debate from your history textbooks)

3) We have a v. interesting story running tomorrow on how the cig-excise tax in NC cut smoking rates and raised revenues. Sounds like a win-win situation, unless of course you make cigarettes for a living. Another example of the changing fabric of this state and this city.

fire.pdf

Each issue, the Columbia Journalism Review has something called The Lower Case, which is a collection of botched headlines and unfortunate juxtapositions of stories in papers around the country. They’re equal opportunity.  Small dailies and weeklies get included. So do august publications, such as The New York Times. My sense is that there’s a special glee when the majors make a screwup.

Anyway, a reader said our local front from today warrants inclusion. It’s attached as a JPEG above. The criticism is the adjacency of a story about an arrest in a burning case where a body was found and a feature photo package about a pep rally/bonfire at West Forsyth High School. Another caller said the placement wasn’t funny or ironic but callous.

Personally, I think it’s a stretch to tie the two together. But that said, with the clarity of hindsight, I would have moved the arrest story to another spot on the page, because I can see how people might link the two.

There is perhaps a bit of irony or justice or bad karma running over my dogma that I turned 45 on the day that George Clooney was named (again) the Sexiest Man Alive.

Maybe next year. Probably not.

We ran a story this morning on Clooney and his plans to film a movie in North Carolina, with some hints that parts may be in our neck of the woods. A romantic comedy with Renee Zellweger. Its placement next to our piece on the availability of the Plan B emergency contraceptive was purely coincidental. If there’s a connection, it’s that they are both nice readers, topical stories that inform and entertain.

We plan to have some fun with this in terms of star sightings etc. in JournalNow, but here’s the immediate offer to the farflung members of the Otterblog community. If the movie gets filmed here, the first person to send me a jpeg photo of the SMA in the greater TMSA (that’s Triad Metropolitan Statistical Area to those out of the loop) gets a prize. There it is: go, point, click, send, win.

If you saw the brief in today’s paper, you know that we let five members of our newsroom go during the past three days as part of a cost-cutting plan. It is difficult and dreary work.
The five positions were our NFL reporter, our outdoors columnist, our film critic and two people who prepared photographs for publication, known as scanning technicians. Good people all. We didn’t make these decisions lightly.
Newspapers—and other media companies—are in a tough environment. Advertising is moving online, and circulation is struggling. For publicly traded companies, there is pressure from Wall Street to keep profits up. Cost cutting has hit virtually every newspaper I know of, and it forces newsroom managers to make tough choices on what to keep and what to forego.
It’s usually the lesser of two evils. Consider, for example, our film critic. We were one of the smallest newspapers to have a full-time film critic, and we enjoyed that distinction. But there’s plenty of excellent film criticism out there that we can use for nationally released movies. We’ll still occasionally review movies with a local tie-in. By contrast, nobody else is covering the local board of education or the city council. It’s unique content. So in making our decisions, we were guided by our belief that what we can do best is cover Winston-Salem, Forsyth County and Northwest North Carolina. That’s where we think our future lies, being a metro paper with a strong community focus.
And we’ll keep covering the NFL and try to offer some outdoors coverage, although probably not at the same level as before. Sometimes quantity equals quality. Sometimes it doesn’t. Having fewer bodies forces you to choose and sometimes be smarter in how you approach coverage, dispensing with the routine and focusing on trends and bigger pictures. That’s the goal.

Coverage has to change to reflect the world and the resources we’re given. My first job at the Journal was covering aviation. That beat no longer exists. But we have made room for pro basketball and hockey and technology and so on.
I know this makes it sound bloodless and clinical. It isn’t. These cuts hurt, and I’ve grieved over them.

Newspapers are a business to some as much as a calling for others, and the two can’t always be reconciled. It’s easy to forget that fact, particularly in flush times. There was a lot made in the trade press last week about Dean Baquet, the editor of the LA Times, getting forced out for refusing to go along with budget cuts. That raises interesting questions about leadership. I think everybody who is running a newsroom in America has asked themselves what would they do if they were in Dean Baquet’s shoes. My answer: I don’t know. We each have our threshold for when we think cuts are too deep and alter the mission of the calling that is journalism.
I haven’t given up. Journalism is in transition, from print to digital, and given a choice and a chance I want to see what comes out on the other side and play a part in shaping that future.

We ran a brief obit the other day of a gentleman named Bulend Ecevit. No, he wasn’t an extra in Borat. He was the former prime minister of Turkey, a moderate and secularist who helped govern that country for much of the 70s as well as a briefer period in the 90s. He pushed for open markets and integration into the European community. He also invaded Cyprus ... a conflict that continues to smolder to this day

And, he was a journalist. In fact, for about six months in 1954 and early 1955, he worked as a reporter at the Journal and its sister paper, the Sentinel. This was all courtesy of a state department program. By all accounts, Ecevit was a classy guy. Highly literate, a good observer, gracious and charming. Also a good writer. His last article for the papers ran on Jan. 9, 1955. It’s really very interesting to see how a stranger takes apart the flaws of a society, meticulously, carefully and utterly. Ecevit wrote: I cannot take seriously all that well-meant “gradual integration” and “give us time” stuff either ... One does not need “time” to grant that a human being is a human being.”

At the bottom is what the LA Times editorialized about his death.

Movie watch: Got around to seeing Thank You for Smoking this past weekend. Katie Holmes is not a very convincing journalist, but it’s a satirical look at the tobacco industry that is so near and dear to many of us and the culture of hypocrisy in the U.S. Winston-Salem has a cameo role as well. When I covered the legislature way back when, I got to know a lot of the tobacco lobbyists. They were incredibly good at what they did, not just because of campaign contributions, but because they understood the dynamics of representative government. And they were zealous advocates for their clients and causes. Not necessarily huggable, but there when it counted.

Bulent Ecevit, one of the most important leaders in modern Turkish history, died Sunday in Ankara. His dream may be dying a slow death in Brussels, Belgium.
“There can be no Europe without Turkey, and no Turkey without Europe,” Ecevit said in 1999. A four-term prime minister, Ecevit was by the end of his career a supporter of open markets and greater integration with the West.
On Wednesday, the European Commission released a progress report on Ankara’s bid to join the European Union. It was highly critical of the pace of Turkey’s reforms on issues such as freedom of speech and its failure to recognize Cyprus.
Cyprus is indeed the stumbling block of the day, but there is a more fundamental resistance across much of Western Europe to the idea that Turkey could join the EU. The EU is still digesting 10 new Central and Eastern European members with a lower standard of living, and there are some understandable concerns about absorbing 73 million Turks on the continent’s periphery.
But the genius of Europe’s enlargement process has been its ability to raise living standards in new member states while being flexible in phasing in full integration so as to not drag down living standards among richer members. Because of the terms of Poland’s accession to the EU, for instance, its farmers have not impoverished French farmers. What’s more, given demographic trends, Europe would increasingly benefit from Turkey’s large labor pool and its vibrant consumer market.
Opposition to Turkey’s candidacy in nations such as France is increasingly about cultural identity. This is unfortunate, as it undermines the idea of a largely secular Muslim Turkey serving as a bridge between West and East. Its successful integration with Christian Europe would demonstrate that the religions need not be at odds and that Western-style democracy is not unattainable in the Middle East.
But confronted with European rejection, many sectors of Turkish society seem intent on derailing integration, making the Turkey-isn’t-suited claim a self-fulfilling one. Turkey’s Article 301, a vague law that makes it a crime to publicly insult the nation, is a nationalist measure aimed at provoking Brussels.
And then there is Cyprus, which joined the EU in 2004 and thus has the ability to block any new members. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, under Ecevit, and part of the island remains under Turkish control while Ankara refuses to recognize the Cypriot government. Talks to resolve the impasse recently collapsed.
At an EU summit in mid-December, commissioners may decide to suspend accession talks with Turkey for a year or more. That would be unfortunate—for both sides of this courtship.

I received several complaints about some police briefs that we had in Wednesday’s paper. There were four briefs about various robberies and shootings. The second one carried this headline: Police look for tall, thin white man in robbery. The other briefs made no mention of the suspect’s race, which led callers to assert that we were going out of our way to avoid using race when black suspects were involved.

I’ll agree that the juxtaposition is problematic, and the headline is jarring, and if we had to do it again, we’d rewrite, but there’s a larger question about when we use race as a descriptor in police stories.

My good friend, mentor and predecessor as managing editor, Jim Laughrun, assembled a crime coverage manual that guides many of our decisions in this area. Like all guides, it’s not meant to be carved in stone. The first line in our section about racial IDs says, “Do not mention a person’s race or ethnic background unless it is relevant to the story.”

The section goes on to say it’s OK to use race if a suspect is at large and police have a good description. In other words, we wouldn’t just write that police are looking for a black man or a white man or a Hispanic man in his 20s. There’s thousands of people in our community who fit that description. It doesn’t really help anything. In the brief in Wednesday’s paper, here’s the description of the suspect we used: “white, in his 30s, 6 feet tall and weighing 150 pounds, with brown hair, a black baseball cap worn backward, a camouflage jacket and blue jeans.” That’s useful.

I checked our electronic archives, and here are some recent descriptions we used:

  —The robber was described as a black man between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet tall, 140 pounds, with a large afro that police said was probably a wig.
  He wore a purple windbreaker, a dark bandanna covering his face and a dark backpack with white writing on it.

— The robber was described as white, about 6 feet tall, 215 pounds, wearing a camouflage mask, blue sweatshirt and light-blue jeans.

  —The robber was described as a black man of medium complexion in his late 20s, about 6 feet 2 and more than 200 pounds. He was wearing a white T-shirt, a white baseball cap, long, faded blue-jean shorts and white shoes. Hints said that the man had a thin beard.

There’s nothing quite like an election in a newsroom. Even on the best of days, there’s a lot of compressed action, as reporters and editors push copy through on deadline. On election night, it’s magnified, as we wait for results and then work to make sense of it all. Lot of yelling and pacing and hoping that a computer glitch somewhere doesn’t mean we don’t have the tallies from an important precinct.

The TV in front of my desk today has been on CNN alot, and it’s been an endless parade of talking heads, going nonstop on what they think is going to happen, with an incredible amount of hedging so that if it turns out differently they can say they were still right (or at least not wrong.)

The electorate is fractured and angry and confused and emboldened. It’s still uncertain how it’s all going to turn out.

My predictions last week: GOP keeps control of the Senate and the House. Now, I’m not so sure. Still probably the Senate, but the House is much more in flux, and I think the Democratic candidates in toss-up seats may match up better against their opponents than on the Senate side. On the other hand, the GOP is better organized and the Kerry flap was the little gas on the fire to get the troops riled up. We’ll see what happens.

If you have any good tales from the polls, let me hear them.

Update, 8:04: We just had our pizza. You can’t cover an election without pizza. We had a big pizza meltdown—no pun intended—on the primaries, because we were feuding with our previous pizza vendor after its owners tried to out our restaurant reviewer. We went to a national pizza company, and there was nearly a revolt. Now, we’re at Vincenzos and everybody’s pretty happy. 

9:30: There’s some sort of snafu at the Forsyth Board of Elections. They’re calling it nothing unusual, but it’s only know that results are coming in. It’s much later than usual.

Two calls in quick succession today. First caller complained that we don’t have enough stories out of Iraq on the front page. Too many features on leaves, smoking issues, etc. She said Bush et al. have made a hash of it, and the media (i.e., the Journal) need to do something about it. Why don’t you be more like the New York Times in your approach to the front page. Second caller, literally 30 seconds later, said she wanted to praise us for our coverage of the stranded ponies in the Netherlands. With all the bad stuff happening in the world and filling up our front page, she said, the good news that you all print is more welcome than ever

So which is it? It’s probably a little of both. Despite what some of our critics say, we have no desire to be the NYT. We’re happy being the Winston-Salem Journal.

First, of course, is how we present the news. We’ve chosen a look that squeezes fewer stories onto the front in favor of better presentation and packaging. We believe presentation drives readership. Stories that are attractive to look at get read better than those of equal value that aren’t. Second is content. We choose stories based on what we think is their importance to our readers. The smoking referendums story that we published Saturday is important in Winston-Salem. As governments make it more difficult and expensive to smoke, there is an impact on a major employer here. Finally, is the mix. I like a variety of news on the front page. Hard news. Soft news. Good reads. Good art. Sometimes it seems like the brochure for the Museum of Strange Bedfellows, but that eclecticism is part of the charm of a local newspaper. It’s edited locally, hopefully by journalists who understand what their readers want to know and also should want to know.

Public Service Announcement: Tuesday is Election Day. Please vote. Whom you vote for is your decision. Just do it.

In my post the other day, I discussed how the news pages and the editorial pages don’t coordinate. A nice example of that two left feet is in today’s paper. On page 1 is a story about the collapse of fisheries because of overfishing.

The bottom editorial, meanwhile, has a different view.

Its title: Eat Fish.

Friends in high places: A good friend of mine just got a big-time journalism job. Andy Serwer is the new managing editor of Fortune magazine. He’s smart, well-connected and occasionally irreverent, like the magazine itself. Of the three biz magazines, Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek, it’s the best-written.

One of Andy’s last big cover stories for the mag was about Krispy Kreme and its plan for world waistline domination. A great read and an inside look at a company’s culture and mythology. Of course, we also know the story since then. Andy was classy enough to fess to his overexuberance after things fell apart. That honesty bodes well for him in his new position.