Otterblog

A little drama unfolded here last night that is a stark reminder of the way our technological marvel of a world is wired together. A leak in our roof got into a router late yesterday afternoon and knocked the sucker out. The computers went dark. A serious problem. There is no closet of manual typewriters that we haul out for just such an occasion.

As many of you know, the Journal is printed off-site. Our printing presses are about three miles away, on East Fifth Street. The paper is laid out downtown, and then the images are sent electronically to the plant, where they are burned onto plates. Unlike the old days, there are no negatives. It’s a good system, except when the network has trouble. Essentially, there’s no other way to get an image through.

Newspapers take enormous pride in not missing a day of publication. Yes, the Web gives you “publication” options that didn’t exist 10 years ago, but we will do just about anything to make sure a paper comes out the next day. We don’t want to have to put a note in the microfilm collection that says “There was no paper on such and such a date.”

For about three hours last night, we considered our fallback positions—what was the latest we could publish? how could we reconfigure the paper? Mostly, with the screens black, we waited. And then, thanks to the technical wizardry of our MIS department, we got it working again. We went to press and then to the doorsteps and racks across NW NC.

Two journalists with ties to Winston-Salem are in the headlines. Cole Campbell, who grew up in Winston-Salem, and worked as a top editor at papers in Greensboro, Norfolk and St. Louis, died in a car wreck in Nevada late last week. And Linda Austin, who worked at the Journal early in her career, is the new editor at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky.

dreams.jpg

As we begin this new year, one of the things I’d like to do from time to time is acknowledge more fully the various players in the Journal newsroom who contribute to making our newspaper all it can be. And I’d also like to continue with my goal of pulling back the curtain on how things happen. Ideally, I can do both at the same time.

A case in point:

We ran a very thought-provoking drawing in Tuesday’s paper in our Living section to accompany a story on dreams. The drawing is in the file, but I’ve also attached it.

It’s a pretty wild—and effective—collection of images. I find the creative process very interesting, and you wonder where people come up with ideas. So I asked the artist, Jeremy Boyd, about his inspirations. Here’s his response:

Some drawings for the illustration came from small random sketches scattered throughout some of my sketchbooks. I have over 30 full sketchbooks going back to 1997 so I had plenty of images to choose from. The tentacle in the coffee mug and the wind up car are little images that have popped up in my sketchbooks repeatedly over the years. The chicken leg, the running guy and the two headed person/creature were also little doodles from my sketchbooks. The rest of the ideas for images all came from a book on dream interpretation that was given to me years ago by an old friend who was into that sort of thing. I think she gave it to me with the intention of borrowing it on a long term basis. I randomly turned to a page in the book, put my finger on a random spot on the page and whatever subject it landed on, I did a quick drawing of. The axe, scissors, flies, candle, and umbrella all came from the book. I did several other drawings, these just all fit together better compositionally. With the subject of the story being dreams, I felt like I could draw just about anything and it would work. The more open to interpretation I could leave it, the better the illustration would fit the story.

My favorite is the tentacle in the coffee mug. That’s what 6:30 a.m. feels like every day. Happy Friday and have a good weekend.

We got an email today from somebody who was watching the GOTC last night and said that the closed captioning on Fox said the Wake Forest Demon Deacons were from Winston-Schlep, not Winston-Salem. I’m looking for confirmation. If you saw it, let me know. If you can get it as a screen shot and send it to OTTERBLOG, even better.

If that was so, our motto would be “Oy, Winston-Salem, that’s living?”

Happy New Year. The newsroom looks different today. Vacations are over. There aren’t random tins of brownies on every filing cabinet. And of course it feels like spring out there. With all the holiday comings and goings, some of you may have missed the news this past weekend about changes to our comics pages. Peanuts is back. Doonesbury is back (after a hiatus of around 15 years). Lio has moved. Over the Hedge is gone. FoxTrot is gone.

The impetus for this change was the decision by FoxTrot creator Bill Amend to change his schedule and just publish FoxTrot for Sunday. It’s hard to blame him. Cartooning is tough work. Seems easy. You get paid to draw cartoons? Just three little windows a day? But it’s a grind, and with all the calendars and collections of the best of FoxTrot that have been published, Amend doesn’t need the money at this point. 

Peanuts and Doonesbury were natural choices. The reason: readers wanted them. We got rid of them for very different reasons. It’s tempting to say that the reinstatements are an admission of our error in the first place when we dropped them. Maybe. But I think there’s something larger—and hopefully better—at play. I still firmly believe that it wasn’t a mistake to drop Peanuts after Charles Schulz died. It was based on sound reasoning, and the idea that cartooning is a living art. That was the prevailing view of the other senior editors here. Enough readers thought otherwise, so Snoopy is back. It’s OK to try new things. If they don’t work. Try something else or go back to the old way.

I view the comics page as the menu at family restaurant.. You don’t have to like everything in there, but you ought to be able to get a good meal. Maybe not the chicken livers, but certainly country-fried steak or the spaghetti.