Otterblog

When it comes to car factories, North Carolina appears to be a perennial bridesmaid. As we noted today, Toyota chose Tupelo, Miss. (yes, it’s the whole Elvis thing) over a bunch of other places, including a site in Davidson County.

Despite Detroit’s problems, car factories are still silver tunas, especially Toyota plants. One of my favorite sites, the Rural Blog, which is run out of the University of Kentucky journalism school has an interesting piece on the role the newspaper in Northeast Mississippi played in the recruitment effort. The paper is called the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, and it’s goal for the past 50 years has been to tie that corner of the state together into a viable region for growth.

Our regionalism efforts here aren’t quite so robust or consistent, but the competing counties do work together much better than in the past, and it’s becoming more the rule than the exception.

The news pages of newspapers (as opposed to the opinion pages) have always done a balancing act when it comes to being a part of economic recruitment. I look at the Journal’s coverage of Dell’s move here, or more recently, The Charlotte Observer’s reporting on the Google incentives. We certainly understand that growth means—or has the potential to mean—more readers and the like, but being a cheerleader is a difficult role for many of us.

One other interesting tidbit about the NEMJ is that it is a rarity, an independent newspaper that is owned by a foundation, in this case the Create Foundation, which does community work in that part of the state. Private owners can be just as demanding as public shareholders, but as newspapers look for new ownership models in this day and age, other ways of doing business are worth considering.

Most days, the front page of the Journal carries some headlines and photos above or beside the masthead. They’re called skyboxes, or ears, and they are a way to promote stories inside the paper or those that are coming in the next day or two. Fridays, we usually turn one of those spaces over to promote a Sunday story. Last Friday, it was for a story on how the city moves forward in a positive manner after the Darryl Hunt apology and settlement.

That story didn’t run on Sunday. Here’s why. A police officer was killed Friday morning, and we felt that the juxtaposition between our coverage of the continuing investigation into the death of Sgt. Howard Plouff at the Red Rooster and coverage of the Hunt/Sykes case, with its implicit and explicit discussion of how police made mistakes in that investigation would be wrong.

We could argue in good faith that the articles were independent of each other, but perception is important, and the stories would have looked wrong on the same page and in the same issue.

Ashtrays come standard: Our Sunday story on the move of Imperial Tobacco into the U.S. market contained this interesting fact. Three of Commonwealth Tobacco’s top brands are also car names: Malibu, Riviera and Sonoma. Now, know nobody drives a Lucky Strike or a Marlboro, but I wonder if there are other overlaps between these two sectors of the economy (no Camel jokes please). If you think of one, send it my way.

Winston-Salem is by no means the biggest town in the U.S. or even the state of North Carolina, but I am always amazed at how disproportionately we figure into important events. Take this morning’s story on Jim Black’s plea. The news angles are both Winston-Salem (or at least Forsyth County) centric. First, the whole deal that brought the former speaker down was an alliance between him and former Rep. Mike Decker.

Second, and more interesting from a trivia standpoint, is the origination of the Alford Plea, which allows a defendant to plead guilty without admitting guilt. As we wrote, it originated with a case in Forsyth County.

If you want to read the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alford opinion, click here. It’s very good.

During a seven-day stretch, from last Monday to Sunday, we ran two major front-page stories about sports issues. The first was on the Davis Cup coming to Winston-Salem. The second, this Sunday, was about Toyota’s entry into Nascar’s Nextel Cup Series.

There was a time when the newspaper was very segregated editorially. That is to say that the front page was for national and international news, the local section was for local news, and sports news stayed on the sports pages.

The world is more complicated today, and stories are more nuanced. There’s a lot of bleeding between issues. I don’t consider myself a huge Nascar fan, but I appreciate the courage and nerve it takes to run around a track at speeds that make most of us pass out. And as a a news person, I realize that there are a lot of facets to most sports stories. Nascar, for example, is a huge business, and there’s a worthy debate over whether it is a sport first and a business second or vice versa. Which is how a story ends up on the front page and why every other commercial on TV seems to be for a pickup truck (Interesting aside, The Charlotte Observer also had a Toyota-Nascar story on its front page Sunday.)

New Blog: There is another new blog in the JournalNow family. It’s called Style File. And true to its name, it’s about style and fashion. The bloggers are Mary Giunca, who covers neighborhoods, religion and housing issues, and Stephanie Stallings, who is our newsroom’s administrative assistant and a sometimes reporter. It would not be a stretch to say that most journalists—this one included—are not overly concerned with these matters. So we rely on the wit and wisdom and fashion sense of people such as Mary and Stephanie to keep us straight and point out when we’ve crossed the line between casual Friday and bathrobe Saturday. Here’s the link: http://journalnowfilestyle.blogspot.com/

Iin this time of angst in American newsrooms, a new study is making the rounds. It’s from the University of Missouri, and it suggests that investing in quality journalism directly benefits the bottom line. Here’s the release. What’s important to remember about studies like this is that most of the terms are pretty subjective. I have an idea what quality journalism is, but it may not be somebody else’s idea, and—most important—it may not be a reader’s idea.

The essential question remains: what drives people to read a newspaper. I like the three Rs: Reflection (We reflect the world we live in), refraction (we provide context and meaning to complicated subjects) and reaction (we respond to events and seek out the uncomfortable truths).

A site worth checking out. My first journalism job was as a night clerk on the foreign desk of the Wall Street Journal. The day clerk was a kid named Gregg Birnbaum. We haven’t talked in more than 20 years, but I ran across his tracks the other day. He is now the political editor at the New York Post, a pretty demanding job, and also the operator of a web site called justhillary.com, which as you might guess, is devoted to Hillary Clinton and her run for the presidency. There’s something for Hillary lovers and Hillary haters on this site. For those who would like to ignore the whole thing, sorry.

A couple of people have told me about Barack Obama’s interview on 60 Minutes last night. Steve Kroft. wife on the sofa, etc. etc. What piqued my interest was the candidate’s discussion of tobacco policy. Not federal. But personal. Apparently, according to his wife, Sen. Obama had to promise to quit smoking in order to gain her blessing to run for president. Here’s the online version of the CBS story.

This is sort of interesting. We haven’t had a smoker in chief in a long time, and my guess is that smoking is somehow seen as a presidential liability, i.e. if they can’t quit, how are they going to have the fortitude to go toe-to-toe with Vladimir Putin and the Sunnis and Shiites etc. etc. Maybe. I don’t smoke, but I’m not sure smoking is the third rail of electability. We too often expect our presidents to be perfect and then we are utterly shocked to find out that they aren’t. If you elect a smoker, you know from the get-go that they are human.

Now for the important stuff, at least for our little town. Which is ... what brand did Sen. Obama smoke and—if you are to believe his promise—give up. I have a good friend who is an editor at the Chicago Tribune, and he asked around, and the answer is .... Marlboro. 

A week or so back, we reported on a naming study done for the city of Winston-Salem that said that the city could make a lot of money if it sold naming rights for the coliseum. At this point, it’s a non-starter. Scott Sexton also wrote a column about it.

The Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum has been a controversial name since the very beginning, and the Journal has often been the focus of the controversy. A caller today screamed at me for the way we refer to it in the paper, Joel Coliseum (Most other media and WFU also refer to it like this). The calmer interpretation of what he was saying is that by removing the V and the M part of the name, we are not honoring the other men and women who served and died for this country.

I disagree. First, the journalistic argument on the name we use. It’s one of clarity and it’s how most people refer to the coliseum. Occasionally, someone says they saw a concert or a game at LJVM, but it’s almost always just Joel Coliseum or Lawrence Joel. The opposing argument would be that if the newspaper—and all the other media—had called it by its full name from the very beginning, we’d all be doing it. Language adoption rarely works like that. Clarity and simplicity find a way.

Second, the emotional argument. This goes back to the original fight over the name and the decision by the aldermen at the time to elevate one man above the others, while still adding these other parts in a Christmas tree fashion that was sure to cause confusion down the road. Political solutions to emotional issues rarely leave all parties happy. Lawrence Joel is our only Medal of Honor winner from Winston-Salem. He’s also black, and the elevation didn’t sit right with some people at the time and still today. In a sense, the full name honors three groups of people in the military. First, all veterans. Second, those who died in service. Third, Joel himself. Some people are in one category, others in two. Joel, himself, in three.

What I like about calling it Joel Coliseum is that that naming forces you to focus on one person and his bravery and courage. That said, I don’t believe it demeans or excludes other vets or those who died in service. If anything, it personalizes the sacrifice each of these people—even those who don’t have a coliseum named after them—have made.

Careful readers of the Journal’s weather page would note that the place that is consistently listed as being the coldest spot around is the little hamlet of Embarrass, Minn.  .

So, what’s the deal with Embarrass, which if you are planning a road trip ( I recommend the summer) is north of Duluth. How does one town in Minnesota get to be colder than all the others?

Here’s what the good folks at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources have to say about it all:

Communities such as Roseau and International Falls (remember those old battery commercials) claim cold-weather bragging rights because of their northern latitudes. Rival cold spots in Embarrass and Tower have monitoring stations in low-lying basins, which collect cold, dense air.

That sounds a little squishy, putting the thermometer in a ditch, but cold is cold. Current conditions up there: minus 27!!!

A few days ago, we created a new position in our newsroom: a multimedia editor. Our state editor, Michelle Johnson, will be that editor. She will work closely with JournalNow (host of the Otterblog) as we move positively and correctly to a place that respects the heritage and legacy and clout of our print paper, but also understands the digital future. Michelle has a broadcast background from years in radio, and she is the right person for the job.

Newsrooms of all sizes are still trying to figure out multimedia and digital news and how to do print and online in a era of budget constraints. There’s no set model that you can just plug in. Though I am reminded of the words of encouragement/admonishment that a former editor once said to me when I asked him what he wanted. The response: More, better, faster.

I’ll add a fourth. Now, more than ever.

To see the fruits of our multimedia efforts on a small—but entertaining—scale, click here to watch reporter Patrick Wilson’s video escapade of the great goose roundup in Winston-Salem this weekend.

There was an interesting remembrance of columnist Molly Ivins in the Washington Post the other day by Maya Angelou. Not everybody is a huge fan of her or her work. The criticism is that her diction and theatrical bearing can appear phony or arrogant. But I’ve come to like her work, and I think she is true to who she is. Never met her, but we are a better nation for having larger-than-life poets.

We get all sorts of tips and story ideas from readers. That’s one of the best parts of being a journalist. In the old days, somebody might call us up about a neighbor or a friend who had died and say the deceased was well-loved by everyone and we would proceed under the assumption that that was true—but with no way to know if it was really a much smaller circle of love and influence.

The Web changes that. Our story today on Michael Holcomb, whose autobituary was an inspiration and a darned good read, is a case in point. Bloggers and readers alike spotted the story. Our staff on JournalNow saw a huge spike in hits on our obits page. And the Legacy page—which is an online condolences book—confirmed the reach of Mr. Holcomb’s death.

Kim Underwood’s piece on the man behind the story brought it all home. This is—at least for me—the way that newspapers and Web sites ought to interact with readers. It helps us spread our reporting resources and find common threads and details where we might have had to hunt in the past.

There are few rivalries in town more intense than that between Womble Carlyle and Kilpatrick Stockton. Look for our piece tomorrow on five KS attorneys who defected to the other team.