Otterblog

If you’ve ever seen any of those newspaper movies from the 1940s or so, there’s always a moment where the editor yells “Stop the presses,” and then a million pounds of steel and brass come to a screeching halt.

In reality it’s a lot more complicated than that. We came close on Tuesday night with the death of President Gerald Ford. The first AP flash of his death came at 11:55. Normally, we would be locked up for first edition.

Our copy desk chief had left before that flash, and he heard about the death at 1:40 at home. But he knew it wasn’t in the paper when he left. I got the call at 1:45. We talked for a minute. Because of press problems, we only had one edition, and the question was when did the press start running?

Gerald Ford, as you can tell from our extensive coverage the past few days, has some important local ties to our community. And if his presidency was short, it was also incredibly important as a bridge, and you can argue that his actions paved the way for Carter, who paved the way for Reagan etc…

So I put on a pair of jeans and started driving to work to figure out what to do. But first I called the pressroom. It turned out to be a false alarm. Because of the production problem, we were actually able to get Ford’s death into all editions. A false alarm. Many early editions of newspapers around the country didn’t have the Ford obit. Because of this glitch, we were able to, and consequently, our follow-up stories for Thursday’s paper were able to look more forward than otherwise.

Another death worth noting: A good friend died the other day. James Archie died on Christmas Day. I got to know James through volunteering at the Food Bank. He was the first person I met there nearly 12 years ago. He drove one of the salvage trucks and was a familiar sight at supermarkets and elsewhere. Through a life that included more than its share of sorrow, he carried himself with grace and humor. He’ll be missed.

Tonight is the last night of Hannukah, and the start of the long Christmas weekend And we had our holiday party at the Journal just minutes ago. An unbelievable spread. For all of you in the Otterblog community, from friends to critics, I wish you a good holiday season.

Some quick thoughts:

Blink and you might miss it: Had a brief telephone interview on MSNBC this afternoon re: John Edwards and his presidential aspirations. They talk fast on TV…Four questions and we’re done. My remarks in a nutshell: Edwards is still a longshot. Smart guy. Resume-challenged.

We got an email the other day that harshly criticized us for failing to cover the fall graduation from Winston-Salem State University. Off-season graduations are a fairly new thing, and they are indicative of the larger trends in higher education, i.e. different paths, customized programs etc. Some 400 students, and their families, so we probably ought to have been there. We have covered it in the past.

But the unspoken question is this: how do we decide what to cover. Spot news is easy. There’s a wreck on Business 40 or somebody says they want to build a ball park. Much of everything else is up for debate. We look at lots of events for coverage. Everything has a constituency. We’re not required by law or anything else to be there, just by our own sense of what’s right and fair.  You don’t want to follow rules out the window. One argument says that if you covered something the previous year, you can take a break this year. The other says that coverage is a commitment and that it’s unfair to one group to just say “We did it last year. Too bad.”

My own belief is for us to try to get to as many events as our staffing allows. There will always be events we can’t get to or choose not to, and the universe of demands grows and grows. But we err on the side of coverage.

If you are like me and spend most mornings before it is light hunched over an inside page in the Journal’s feature section doing the Sudoku puzzle, you can thank (or curse) Michael Mepham.

Mepham wasn’t exactly the creator of the Sudoku (the puzzle originated in Japan), but he was responsible for bringing it to the West and the puzzle’s popularity is testament to his reputation as a dazzling puzzle master.

Mepham died on Sunday in England. He was 62. Here’s the obit, from The Telegraph.

I have preached about the elegance of the Sudoku puzzle before. It is all logic. There’s none of the initial guessing of the Cryptoquote, or the need to know obscure words and trivia that goes with the crossword puzzle, or the tolerance of bad puns for the Jumble. It’s just you and your mind (one of my favorites is the baseball sudoku in ESPN magazine.)

Every once in a while I’ll do a Sudoku puzzle online. There’s about a jillion sites out there. But it is just plain more fun to do it in the paper. The email we received from Mepham’s syndicator says his assistant will pick up where Mepham left off.

And now a special holiday offer from Otterblog. As puzzlers know, the Sudoku comes in four levels, 1-4, with 1 the easiest and 4 just flat out brutal. If you have solved a level 4, send me your step by step solving method for the day involved. The first person to send me a solution that doesn’t involve trial and error gets a Journal coffee mug, and I’ll post the answer and the puzzle so others can see how it’s done.

With all the success of the Wake Forest football team, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there is another school with yellow (or gold) and black that’s having a heckuva season.

That would be Appalachian State. It’s pretty unusual to have two teams in different divisions having outstanding seasons at the same time in the same media market. At times it has strained our hard-working sports staff. Try getting to Chattanooga. It’s one of those places that defies a straight shot. 1-AA isn’t the BCS, but the football is great, and the teams are from scrappy schools, where nothing is given away.

We’ll have three staffers at the game tonight. Win or lose, it’s a great story about a school and a team with a lot of heart. And if anybody has a photo of Chancellor Peacock (see our story today) giving a chest bump to an ASU fan, please forward it on.

Small world dept.: UMass is in Amherst, in central Mass., beyond the gravitational pull of Boston, which likes to call itself the Hub. The newspaper there is the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Talked to the Managing Editor there yesterday. He’s a friend of mine, named Larry Parnass. He used to be a business reporter here in the 1980s, but returned to rural Massachusetts and the tug of family. We have a friendly wager on the game…

It’s not much of a stretch to say that Sheriff Bill Schatzman owes his election to the Journal. The newspaper spent a lot of time in the 1990s investigating the misdeeds of his predecessor, Ron Barker, and it’s these reports that gave Schatzman plenty of ammunition when he ran again Barker in 1998 and then successfully in 2002.

That said, the newsroom doesn’t care who is sheriff. We just want people do their job. Our story today about how Sheriff Schatzman chose to punish himself for a departmental offense offers an interesting window into the look of one of our top elected officials.

Sheriffs are unique law-enforcement officials. They are county employees, but are outside the chain of command of county government. And they are in the state’s constitution, with a power that is derived in part from common law—remember Robin Hood and Nottingham Forest? But they’re not above the law or above scrutiny. It’s what we told Ron Barker way back when, and what we told Preston Oldham before that.

Two things come to mind. First, Schatzman gave up a lot of money for having a beer at a Marines get-together. Second, is a punishment that nobody knows about really a punishment? Sort of, but not exactly.

Is it news? You bet. Would it have made a difference in the outcome of this fall’s election against Bobby Blakely Jr.? Nope. Is it something voters ought to have known about before they voted? Yep.

We had a good debate this afternoon about a story running on the wires about a conference in Iran that is a collection of Holocaust deniers. Yes, there are people out there in the world who continue to insist that this tragedy never took place. This story, published electronically, and soon to be published the old-fashioned way in many newspapers, raises good questions about the limits of objectivity and the idea of balancing different beliefs.

The debate focused about whether a story on a bunch of holocaust deniers—including David Duke—ought to run anywhere. Point being, the standard narrative of journalism frequently has person A saying one thing, and person B saying another. Often, the sense of weight or proportionality gets lost, and you’re left with an on the one hand, on the other approach that fails to recognize the intellectual, scientific or historical imbalance of the arguments.

My guess is that if this conference was in Singapore or Barcelona, we would kill it. But it’s in Iran, which has been singled out—along with Syria—by the Iraq Study Group as our new partners of sorts in finding a solution for war in Iraq. It was organized by the president of Iran, and it indicates who we will be dealing with in the months ahead.

Making a list: The AP this time of year sends out its lists of top news stories for the state and the nation and the world. If you’ve got ideas for stories that ought to be on our local top 10 list, let me know. Could be Wake’s ACC win, shakeup on the county commissioners, the school bonds, etc.

Through the years, the Journal has changed its comics pages, adding and removing as times and tastes change, and finding homes for new cartoonists to exist beside old favorites.

A minor change will happen early next year. Fox Trot, the popular strip by Bill Amend, is becoming Sunday only. Here’s the announcement. It’s grueling work being a cartoonist. Even the best of them struggle with the constancy of having to draw a new strip every day. And there have been some high-profile burnouts, such as Aaron McGruder and Boondocks.

Fox Trot isn’t the best-drawn strip in the paper by any means, but it’s clever and funny and insightful. I particularly like the antics of beleaguered Dad, Roger, and the uber-nerdiness of Jason and his friend, Marcus. We’re examining a lot of options for a replacement, keeping in mind comments many of you provided us during our last comics survey.

As a postscript, if you think the comics only make news in Winston-Salem, here’s an interesting story from Texas.

Among my favorites sites is this one from the Newseum. It gathers front pages from more than 400 newspapers from around the country. They’re in order by state. You can see how news was covered in Bend, Ore., Williamsport, Pa., Detroit, San Francisco etc. (One note, if you read this after 12/7, the front pages will be different…)

Today’s front pages are interesting, and I think they show the wide range of thinking about how newspapers look at coverage of local and non-local news. A phrase you hear in newsrooms these days is “hyper-local,” which means a lot of things to a lot of people but essentially says that newspapers need to be less of gatekeepers in deciding what is news and more of traffic conductors, just figuring out where to put the stories. Bake sale at the local elementary school? News. Traffic light out at the busy intersection? News. You get the idea. Point being, if somebody is interested in it, there’s a story. This can obviously—at least in my opinion—be taken to extremes.

You can see the impact of hyper-local thinking in front pages from today, because there’s a confluence of events that made for some real decision-making on the parts of newsroom editors.

First, was the release of the ISG report, a blue-ribbon blueprint that gives a direction for extricating the US from Iraq. It’s big news. Not as well-written as the report of the 9/11 commission, but an important and sobering look at where we are and what are our realistic options ahead. But if you look at newspapers from across the country, many of them buried this story. It’s at the bottom of the front page or not there at all.  The Journal made it our centerpiece and we devoted 2 inside pages to its content and reaction.

Second, today is the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and many newspapers devoted considerable resources to local stories about the event, often with profiles of vets and splashy presentations. This is also an important story, even if it happens every year. The attack changed our nation in profound ways that still affect us to this day.

I didn’t do an exact count, but a rough scan at the papers suggests that given a choice between a local centerpiece about a WWII-era vet and a government report about the situation in Iraq, a surprising number of editors chose the vets. We used our local front to profile a survivor of the Pearl Harbor attacks and ran a story at the bottom of our front page.

The short-term question for choosing stories for a front page is whether a local story on Pearl Harbor is better/more important/more relevant/more newsworthy/likely to sell more papers in a rack/enhance the brand value of a newspaper than a well-presented story on a road map for the most important issue of today.

This is not to suggest there’s a right answer or a wrong answer in choosing stories. Local news is a big part of our franchise. It’s what we do. But the other real power of a newspaper is the ability for a lot of smart people to synthesize the day’s important news and present them in an easy-to-read fashion that makes clear the scope of an issue. It’s too reflexive to say that “TV covered that. It’s not our story.” And we give that power up at our own peril.

We had a small but important announcement in the paper today about our parent company—and by default the Journal—joining forces with Yahoo! to sell online classified advertising. Classified was for years the exclusive domain of newspapers, but that franchise has eroded in recent years, and it will likely continue to erode.

So this is in some sense an acknowledgement that we need partners to help us navigate the commercial world of the Web.

Yahoo! is also moving into the news business as well. It has some original content, but it still is mostly an aggregator of others content. That’s also likely to change in coming years. Ultimately, I think, the definition of news will adopt and adapt to Internet models that emphasize quick bites and multiple authors and opinions with very little in the middle that resembles the conventional, dispassionate stories in the newspaper.