Otterblog

An update of sorts:

I wrote a few months back about the proposal to turn SECCA over to the State of North Carolina, a deal that has now been largely completed.

In part, I wrote:

SECCA’s move was driven in part by the cost of maintenance and repairs at its facility off of Reynolda Road, but there is something a bit troubling about museums becoming part of the state. Art is expression, First Amendment and all that, and inevitably, when the government gets involved with the First Amendment, there is a change. SECCA made its bones by being provocative and taking risks, challenging the government over what constitutes art. Can that happen when it’s part of the government? Maybe. But don’t bet on it.

Thorns Craven, who was the former chairman of SECCA’s board, is a latecomer to the OTTERBLOG (shame on him!), and so by the time he saw that post, the comments period had expired. He sent me this email, which follows here. Thorns makes some good points, and I have a few thoughts at the very bottom in response

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This censorship, government involvement in the arts keeps coming up, but there is very little basis for what seems to be an obsession.  We can certainly point to a great deal of mediocre work that is often the default selection of “public art”, but I would like to see some more documentation for governments actually, and successfully, censoring art.

The instances involving SECCA, to my mind, had little to do with censorship, or even with the works in question, and much more to do with politicians seeing an opportunity to pander to their supporters.

The point I have tried to make to Ken Keuffel, to John Railey, and perhaps to others at the Journal, is that exhibitions at SECCA, at the NC Museum of Art, at the Museum of Modern Art, etc. are arranged and curated by arts professionals.  I doubt you could find any of them who would say that organizing an exhibition involves “challenging the government over what constitutes art.” I would expect you to find that curators and the artists they choose are expressing their view of life in our times, and some times that provokes us.  It often also amuses, inspires, bores, perplexes, challenges, disgusts us.  But the “us” is all of us, reacting individually, and I don’t recall any government response to SECCA or any other museum.

Now there is the separate question of financing arts institutions using government funds, and certainly there is more potential for politicians to question expenditures in one area or another, and expenditures for arts purposes do draw attention and often controversy.  But the NC Arts Council and our local Arts Council successfully provide funds, public and private, across the state, with little or no controversy.

Another point I have tried without success to make to the Journal is that we happen to be fortunate enough to live in a state which now has over 50 years (at least) of successful state participation in cultural affairs..  We have the NC Symphony, the NC Museum of Art and the NC School of the Arts.  With the success of these institutions, North Carolina’s public officials and all of us as its citizens, have accepted and embraced a role for public support of the arts and the institutions needed for them to flourish. Politicians have taken on the elimination or curtailment of these organizations at their own risk.  Have we had anyone running for office recently on a platform of eliminating these institutions?  Didn’t the legislature just appropriate $60,000,000 for expansion and renovation of the NC Museum of Art?  Hasn’t NCSA become not just a fixture in the greater university system, but a source of pride to anyone who promotes North Carolina as a place to live, work and invest?

SECCA is now joining that outstanding group.  Instead of going out of business after 50 years, people concerned about the cultural affairs of North Carolina determined that the value of continuing the active exhibition of contemporary art in our state was too important to let go, and that our state’s cultural resources include SECCA and the reputation it has built nationally and internationally.  That, to me, is more an opportunity for rejoicing instead of lamenting.

We in Winston-Salem are fortunate to have in our reach within minutes from our homes and businesses outstanding institutions devoted to exhibition and interpretation of the art of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.  I suspect there are few cities our size that could match the level of presentation that we have, and many much larger cities can’t reach that level.  For that I am grateful, and I am grateful that the state of North Carolina understands and appreciates the value of the investment which has been made in these institutions, and that it is willing and able to add SECCA to its responsibilities.

I can’t quit without going back to that censorship bogeyman which keeps coming up.  My impression is that corporate interests are the ones which impose limits, and often those limits are understandable.  That first amendment you refer to does not protect us against that form of censorship.  If there does come a day when some work of art or exhibition at SECCA or elsewhere is challenged and threatened with closure because its being funded with tax dollars, the first amendment will be providing the ground to fight on. 

One last tweak:  I’ve been trying to think of successful instances of “censorship” in Winston-Salem and North Carolina.  The only thing that comes to mind is the disappearance of “Doonesbury” from the Journal many years ago.  Who called that shot?

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A couple of points. I’ll be brief. First, thank you, Thorns. You framed your arguments well. I think “censorship” can take many forms. Most have some basis in the corruption of the golden rule, i.e. he who has the gold makes the rules. It’s true that it’s very rare that the government kills a work of art or cancels a controversial performance on opening night. There’s probably more self-censorship than censorship, i.e. people not pushing the envelope because they want to avoid fights. I agree that North Carolina has done a lot of successful things with publicly funded arts. There’s a lot of high-quality art, to be sure. The recent production of West Side Story comes to mind. But is it cutting edge and controversial? That I’m less sure of. More to the point, if a curator at SECCA went to his or her boss, a public official and said I want to put on a show that features a work of art called Piss Christ, would the boss say yes? Or would the curator not make the pitch? Tough call.

Finally, Doonesbury. I’ve written about this before, and you can search OTTERBLOG to find the post, but the bottom line is that this wasn’t censorship. Our publisher at the time, Joe Doster, killed it. He didn’t like it. Sure some folks in town didn’t like it, but nobody made him do it. And after we killed it, people could still read it in numerous publications. I disagreed vehemently with the decision then, but I understood that Joe got to make the call.

Surry_Publishing.pdf

One of the great truisims of any business is that your customers don’t really care that much about your problems. They want what they paid when they paid for it. Pretty simple. Newspapers are no different. The back stories on why an investigation fell through or why a photo didn’t reproduce well etc., are lost on readers. But there are a few exceptions, which is what today’s post is about.

Saturday afternoon, a fire swept through the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s printing facility in Hanover County, Va. They were printing their Sunday classified section. The Sunday paper is huge for publishers, in both size and profit. Anyway, the fire took out their printing plant. The T-D and the Journal are both owned by Media General, but we’re three-plus hours apart, so a fire there shouldn’t be our problem. But it was/is. Here’s why.

First, the Hanover facility acts as a server farm for some key parts of the Journal operations, including our obits-billing system and JournalNow. Those were dead for a few hours while traffic was rerouted. More importantly, the Journal ended up printing the Classified section of the Sunday Times-Dispatch and then putting the inserts on a truck and heading north. (That’s why the paper was late on Sunday.) We printed their business and living sections for today’s paper. Lots of people here—mainly in the pressroom, circulation and IT departments—scrambled to get it done and done right. The Washington Post printed the rest of the paper. Those sorts of arrangements are fairly routine through the industry. Newspapers compete like crazy, but if somebody’s press goes dark, we’re there to help.

I try to keep OTTERBLOG focused on local journalism, but there’s an interesting cautionary tale of the intersection between old and new media that’s too funny to pass up ...

Yesterday, I was looking at the Romenesko Web site run by the Poynter Institute. It’s a good clearinghouse for journalism news, gossip and reporting/writing ideas. A story about “The Pot Farm next door” caught my eye. It’s a well-written story about how marijuana growing, once the purview of country folks, has moved to the cities and suburbs. So I read it and thought about whether there’s a house in Ardmore or Sherwood Forest or Advance that is really just a shell used to grow pot ...

The story is out of the Daytona Beach News-Journal in Florida, which is a pretty decent independent paper. And like a lot of papers, its online paper is a mishmash of ads and journalism. They have some sort of partnership or arrangement with Google in terms of advertising, in that the stories and keywords in the story (my guess) help generate the footnote ads at the bottom of the story. For example, a short on an elderly person being bilked was followed by four little teaser ads for background checks and the like. Or a piece on a surfboard had links to tsunami and hurricane relief. You get the idea. The logic isn’t always crystal clear.

So at the bottom of this article about an entrepreneurial dope grower who got 10 years for building a suburban agri(evil)empire, the Google computers ended up with four ads for companies selling hydroponic supplies, closet systems, grow-lamps, etc. All the stuff you would need to grow marijuana in your house.

And so it goes ... 

When people think of Big Media in NWNC, they typically think of the Journal, or of WXII, or maybe even the juggernaut that WFDD/NPR has become. But they don’t think of the Yadkin Ripple.

We published a fascinating story today by Sherry Youngquist about the changing face of Yadkin County and its small but noticeable progressivism. I was thinking of that story yesterday (I had read it before publication...) when I was doing a small canoe trip on the Dan River just north of Danbury. The Dan is like the Yadkin, more muddy than mighty, but still very pretty and an easy place to lose yourself in thought. Stokes and Yadkin are similar places. They’re close to W-S, but it only takes a few turns or a few paddles to feel like you are a long ways away.

The paper in Stokes County is the Stokes News, and like the Ripple, the Elkin Tribune, the Mount Airy News, the Pilot and the Jefferson Post, was just sold by Mid-South Management to Heartland Publications in Old Saybrook, Conn. Reminds me of that salsa commercial where the old-timer says to the other, “This stuff’s made in NEW YORK CITY.”

Jokes aside, out-of-town ownership is a fact of life for many companies these days, media and otherwise. The Journal is owned by Media General, out of Richmond. And I think it will bear watching how Heartland proceeds in these communities. The Tribune, most noticeably, has had a reputation for being a very good non-daily newspaper, and the Ripple, while in my opinion often too controversial for its own good, never seemed to shy away from printing news. How do these papers survive and thrive going forward? By being indispensable. The loss of community has been noted often in big cities and suburbs, but it is slowly hitting smaller towns, particularly those that are finally—due to better roads and people’s willingness to drive longer distances—getting sucked into the urban rhythm.

Some people might think that I want Heartland to fail, that it will help the Journal. I don’t. The Journal and the smaller papers that are in NWNC fill different roles. But strong journalism helps everybody. The papers and the readers AND the communities.

We talk about a lot of serious stuff on this blog. Today, not so serious.

Last night, OTTERBLOG Jr. and I took a spin to check out the new Krispy Kreme doughnut sundae, the subject of a story in today’s paper and online.

It’s hard to argue with the basic idea: soft-serve ice cream on a doughnut with some toppings. That said, the concept needs some work:

1) I found the portion a little on the puny side for $3.19
2) The doughnut and ice cream taste all right together, but the cold of the ice cream seemed to harm the airy consistency of the doughnut. A brownie on the other hand is good cold or warm.
3) The nut toppings we got with one sundae came in a little—and I mean little—bag that we had to sprinkle on ourselves. Maybe it’s for sanitation reasons, but the packaging diminished the experience. Felt like the little bags of pretzels on an airline.

Most critical, you can’t drive and eat. OTTERBLOG Jr.’s idea—and you heard it here first—take all that stuff and put it in a blender and make a doughnut sundae milkshake. Might rival the fine banana pudding shakes at Cookout and Mayberry’s.

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT, check out our multimedia on the memorial service for Larry Leon Hamlin, the work of Michelle Johnson, our MM editor.  Good stuff.

A friend emailed me this story this morning from the Courier-Journal in Louisville, KY. The summary: The NCAA kicked out a sports reporter from the NCAA baseball tournament because he was doing a blog while covering the game, in violation of the NCAA’s rules about unauthorized Internet broadcasts of its events.

This is one of those old world meets new world struggles that is both serious and silly at the same time. Serious because net broadcasts come in all shapes and sizes, from print to video, from commentary to the whole match. Broadcasters pay rights to broadcast, and they don’t want people to watch the game through some back door. And silly, because, it’s just a blogger filing some notes and outtakes from a laptop.

From the perspective of a newspaper person who has at times had a love/hate relationship with the Web, I can tell you this. The Internet always wins. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But eventually. Not just newspapers, either. But all institutions, from governments to businesses. The Web is about the flow of information, and that flow can’t be denied. It can be slowed. But that’s it. The NCAA can boot the credentialed journalist. But my guess is there’s somebody in the stands with a BlackBerry doing essentially the same thing. Next year, he’ll bring a laptop. The following year, he’ll have video off his camera phone. And so on and so on.

New media. New rules.

It’s easy to reduce Larry Leon Hamlin, who died yesterday, to a caricature of himself: a flamboyant, purple-wearing, dramatist. But that misses the point. He found success in what on the surface appears to be an unlikely area: making Winston-Salem THE home of black theatre in America. Unconventional people are difficult heroes for the rest of us. We’re quick to focus on the flaws, the parts, not the whole. That Hamlin could balance (or is it juggle) the creative and administrative sides of theatre is testament alone to his gifts.

Hamlin was a difficult person for the Journal in many ways. A tough interview. Inscrutable often. Maybe he didn’t trust the reporters (who were mostly white) that interviewed him. Or the difficulty was part of the public image. I don’t know. But his death and sickness were no less inscrutable. Since he became seriously ill about a year ago, there has been an incredible wall of silence about what he had, how he was doing, whether he would recover.

And that continued right up to the end. On Tuesday, his family intimated he was still recovering. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was hope talking, not deceit.

The illnesses of public people are a strange netherworld for journalists. We saw this the other day, where Marc Basnight, the leader of the N.C. Senate took a leave of absence so he could care for a sick family member. Which family member? Basnight’s office initially wouldn’t say. But it was an open secret in Raleigh that his wife was very sick, and so eventually, that was confirmed by colleagues. Hamlin is a private citizen, but in some ways he is a public figure, no less than the mayor or the sheriff. His illness and subsequent death have an impact on a wide range of people. And I’m not sure all the silence for the past year was in everyone’s best interest, including the NBTF. Clearly, we don’t want to bury the dead before they are dead. But I do think that clearer communication of his condition would have been beneficial for everyone.

I have one of those Close to Home cartoon of the day calendars. Last week, they had a three-panel gag. First panel shows a front door of a house. Second panel shows a kid running out of the house with his arms in the air. Last panel shows him trudging back inside. The caption was something like “Last day at home school.” A few days later, they had another home-school cartoon, this one with an “awards” ceremony and the same kid winning all the awards…

So what is it about home schools that inspires such satire and ridicule and media attention? We’ve had three or four stories in the past week, a few centered on Josiah Wright, a home-schooled student from Ashe County, who went to the national spelling bee. And with that story was a larger piece on why home-schooled kids do so well in bees. Then Saturday, we had a piece about a woman from Surry County, who is “retiring” from home school now that her kids have graduated.

It’s hard to say whether journalists pay too much attention to home-schooled students. The evidence is always anecdotal. From personal experience, I think that they may good stories for a couple of reasons. First, the kids are unfailingly polite. They’re good interviews. The parents tend to be advocates and used to fighting the system and navigating the world out there. Finally, we like subjects with strong convictions, who are living outside the conventions and who challenge the status quo. It’s hard to imagine going to school in your living room. The danger I think in some of the coverage is that home school is presented as an option for everybody. It clearly isn’t.  My guess is that if everybody went to school at home, our coverage would quickly change.

New face: I don’t do a whole lot of personnel stuff in OTTERBLOG, but some hires are more important than others. Our new photo editor, Walt Unks, started yesterday. He replaced Charlie Buchanan, who retired. Walt comes from the Herald-Sun in Durham. He’s a great shooter, looks a bit like Ron Howard in Happy Days, and we expect good things from his work with our staff.