Otterblog

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One of the great things about a newspaper is its institutional memory. Some of it is carried around in our brains. But a lot of it resides in our library and our clip files. While we were looking at pictures of the Hanes property on South Stratford Road yesterday, we came across this photo from the 1950s. it is looking North, and it is before the hospital and the mall and Thruway were built.

This is one of those days when news just seems to be exploding all over the place. The Hanesbrands plant on Stratford Road nears Hanesbrandstown is closing. 600 jobs. Gone. Sad. Not surprising. Cheap underwear doesn’t just make itself.

I was looking at some Employment Security Commission numbers for apparel employment. In 1990, 96k jobs in NC. Today. About 20,000. Minus 600.

Other big news: The Senate vote on Iraq timetables. And we’re tracking the police department’s re-investigation of the Silk Plant Forest beating in 1995. And the one-year anniversary of the lottery. It’s a thankful scramble to figure out how to get it on the Web. Get it in the paper. And most important, get it right.

Googling yourself. We’ve all done it. Long before that word became a verb, I remember trolling for my name in the tobacco company’s searchable archives. Lots of reporters ended up there, mentioned in executive summaries of interviews conducted and stories written. It’s how big corporations played the game. They still do. Wired magazine—a great read—offers a fascinating memo of what Microsoft put together to help manage a journalist’s story on corporate culture at the software company. Click here to read it.

For as much as all the iterations of RJR have oozed with native pride, it’s largely been run by people not from around here for the past 30-some years. Ross Johnson. Lou Gerstner, Andy Schindler, Susan Ivey. Ty Wilson and Paul Sticht.

Sticht died today, at 89. He was a corporate chieftain like few others, at a time when what was R.J. Reynolds Industries straddled the globe. The path of RJR from tobacco company to conglomerate to LBO poster child for greed to holding company to smaller, more focused, independent company is a neat dovetail with the history of late 20th Century capitalism. And Sticht, who started out in the steel business and later moved to soup and retail, was the catalyst and in some ways the main character in the company’s rise, fall and rise. Johnson, with his larger-than-life personality and extravagances, gets a lot of the billing, but for my money, Sticht was the great Roman tragic figure in all of this.

We wrote about this extensively in the late 1990s with our Lost Empire series. Sticht is the aging monarch who turns over too much power to a young turk (Johnson) who has curried favor with him and sown discord about the other heir (Wilson). The results are dramatic for the company and its hometown, and the aftershocks still get felt today.

In a few minutes we will have our afternoon editors meeting. Not so many years ago, it would have been all male and all white. Now, it’s more diverse. We have female editors, minority editors, a greater cross-section if you will. But in one way, we’re lagging. Very few young people. Some days, there’s nobody under 30 at the meeting.

This is a preface to a good story in American Journalism Review about young journalists and how they view their profession in this time of wrenching change. They love what they do, are worried about the future, concerned that their elders either a) don’t get it,  b) say they get it but really don’t get it c) will never get it.

This is difficult stuff. For the most part, people who run newspapers are middle-aged. If we say we get it, it’s largely because we listen to our kids. And if you asked our kids whether we get it they would likely laugh.

So, what can be done about it? That’s a more difficult question. I like my job, think I’m pretty good at it, and I’m not about to just roll over let a person half my age take it. If you read the article, it’s questionable that any of them would want it!!! But we have to do a better job at giving young journalists a larger voice in our operations. That can mean management, but it can mean other ways as well—from brainstorming sessions to overseeing projects important to them.

Special NCAA basketball edition

1) As much as Roy Williams hates 9:57 p.m. game starts, we hate them more. They’re a severe test of all aspects of our operation, from news to production to circulation. For news, it means slamming in stories and columns with only the smallest window. Our team in Rutherford, N.J. to cover Carolina knows the drill, and I am amazed with the ground they cover in a short time. For the press, it means a quick turnaround to hustle the paper through the printing process. The real burden falls on the circulation folks. To get a paper from Winston-Salem to a driveway in Boone is much more than just a two-hour drive and a toss out the window.

2) One of our sports reporters was severely criticized earlier this week for a column that said Josh McRoberts was leaving Duke to enter the NBA draft. He was called irresponsible, a gossip monger (in less polite terms) etc. Turns out, we were right. McRoberts is leaving. This is not a time for me to say Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. Or to gloat or anything. But I think that one of the things that has happened in our hyper-info-packed world is that everybody assumes that nobody really does any reporting anymore. It’s just a bunch of opinion masquerading as fact. It isn’t. Not for us.

3) Finally, we had a short today about Tubby Smith leaving Kentucky to go to Minnesota. Without trying to incite a war, I would say that it is a reasonable to say that the state of Kentucky, along with Kansas and North Carolina, have three of the four richest b-ball legacies in the country. I’ll let you fight over the fourth. I met Tubby a few years back, when I was out in Lexington at an event he helped organize to honor Big House Gaines. A gracious man with a competitive streak that just does not end. If you think your job is difficult, try being a Div. 1 basketball coach. Yes, you get paid a lot of money, and everybody wants to talk with you. But you never get a day off, and in a state like Kentucky, about 3 million people or so take apart every decision you make—or don’t make.

I got a good chuckle today reading the Food section. One of my favorite things in there is the Recipe Swap, which appears on Wednesday on the second page .. The recipes are always for these dishes that seem to be from another era and run counter to our Atkins-loving, carb-hating, fat-loathing way of life. Maybe they appeal to who we really are. My type of food.

But I digress.

Today’s swap was for Tamale Pie. I like a good Tamale Pie, and I always assumed that cornbread or tortillas or something of that ilk was an essential ingredient. But I was wrong. One of the recipes called for Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti, which just may be as crazy as it is delicious.

My other chuckle was in the story about the battle between police and club owners about how often police get called to these establishments. One of the places with a reasonably high call count is the Piedmont Club. I’ve been there a few times, and I’ve seen the occasional person double-dipping a shrimp cocktail. But that said, you wonder what sort of possible high crimes and misdemeanors are going on there.

Two years ago, this very weekend, I went for a hike with my dog in Basin Creek and climbed up to Caudill Cabin, which sits high in a clearing with a commanding view of the world below. It’s a magical, majestic place. And I remember thinking as I made my way down the trail, crossing the stream and leaping on the rocks, that this would not be a good place to get injured.

I’ve thought about that trip these past few days as we cover the disappearance of a Boy Scout in the Basin Creek wilderness that is below the cabin. If you have ever been lost in the woods, you know how scared you can get and how fear sometimes gets the best of common sense.

Our reporters have been in Wilkes for the past two days with the rescue teams and we’ve been updating the story on our Web site. This is the third of these rescue stories we’ve covered in the past six months or so; the others were the young man from Clemmons who drowned in the New River and the little boys from Stokes County who drowned in the Dan. I hope this story has a happy ending, but all too often these stories have a tragic rhythm that plays out over several days.

The rumor mill is sometimes amazing. We have spent hours in the past few days telling callers that Tolly Carr, the newsman at WXII who has been charged in a vehicle accident involving the death of another young man, did NOT commit suicide. Good callers. Smart callers. People who don’t buy timeshares over the telephone or respond to email scams. Just astounding.

The callers take several varieties: The curious (a friend heard it from a doctor who was there…). The concerned (Lord, I hope he didn’t do anything rash). And the callous (Well, he should have.)

Like most of these deaths, this is a difficult story. I read the obituary on Casey Bokhoven. He seemed like a v. good person with a zest for life and my sort of wide-ranging palate for food (He was a cook.) And I met Carr last year on a panel at WSSU, where we gave student journalists advice on how to interview and write resumes. He was personable and spot on in his recommendations.

At times, we have half-seriously discussed posting a story on JournalNow that says “Carr still alive.”

You can grouse about the corporatization of collegiate sports, whine about how the big conferences call all the shots and the underdogs get zip, about how unfair the selection process is to the Drexels and Appalachians of the world, but I still say that the NCAA basketball tournament is about as good as it gets for drama in sports.

We get a taste of the action tomorrow. It’s not the Final Four, but the first round often has some of the best basketball and the chance of incredible, office-pool busting upsets. The best game I ever saw was Florida nipping upstart Butler seven years ago at Joel. Great seats. Great game.

We’ve been planning our coverage of the first round for some time, mainly through our sports section, but also across other sections, from relish to the local section.

We’re also pushing more stories onto the Web to take advantage of the online possibilities.

As a special treat to friends of Otterblog, here’s a preview of part of our NCAA quiz tomorrow. No googling the answers.

The teams in Winston-Salem are UNC, Eastern Kentucky, Georgetown, Boston College, Belmont, Michigan State and Texas Tech. Match these schools with these alumni:

a) Chris Farley

b) Trisha Yearwood

c) James Caan

d) Maria Shriver

e) Rick Dees

f) Lee Majors

g) John Denver

h) Leonard Nimoy

This is a letter we received the other day:

“Would you please explain to me and 50,000 other people, why you keep having articles in the paper about Darryl Hunt. That case and situation has been a done deal for ever so long. You people need to get on to other news.”

My guess is that this writer isn’t the only person with that sentiment. We do write a lot about the Hunt case. Here’s why:

1) It’s an important case that speaks to larger issues of justice and fairness.
2) It has had important public-policy and political implications in this town that still exist to this day. For example, and this is a bit of an oversimplification, DA Don Tisdale prosecuted Hunt, and was punished in the Democratic primary with a loss to Warren Sparrow, who was subsequently defeated by current DA Tom Keith. And if you read the city’s Skyes report, it’s a blueprint for how to make things better.
3) The newspaper has a special role in this case. Deborah Sykes worked at our sister paper, and the Journal’s coverage is a key factor in the resolution of the investigation.

Sometimes it reads like overkill. From my standpoint, it’s like this: If we don’t cover these issues, nobody else will. I hear some of you saying, “That would be great.” It’s not. Ignoring problems rarely makes them go away. Things don’t get better by just wishing them to be so.

What’s for breakfast? One of our reporters was down in St. Petersburg, Fla., a week or so ago at a training session and she brought back a copy of the St. Pete Times, where I used to work. They had a feature story about a place called Skyway Jack’s. It’s a great read. There are a lot of good breakfast places in the world, including several right here in W-S (IHOP, the Lighthouse, Omega House to name but a few), but Skyway Jack’s is in a league of its own. It’s in South St. Pete, not too far from the bridges. If you’re ever down there, check it out.