Otterblog

Back from a little R&R ... so I hope this post isn’t too dated, but I think it’s on a more universal point.

Our Sunday story was about the drought. We started working on it in earnest on a Monday, and by Wednesday, the rain was conversation topic No. 1. Sunday stories of the heft and context that we like to publish don’t just get plucked out of thin air. And so, as the weather remained soggy, we were faced with a choice: Bag the drought story and find a substitute or Run the drought story and try to provide the background and spin to show that a few days of rain aren’t the end of our water woes.

We chose the latter, of course. But we had a lot of good discussion about whether that was the right thing to do. I thought it was then—and still do. And not just because it was less stressful than finding another centerpiece. One of the things that newspapers get accused of far too often is switching gears and moving on too soon. What I thought our Sunday story did was outline a larger problem that is bigger than a few days of rain. That said, would I have preferred a week of sunshine before it ran? Of course. You can’t get everything.

Separately, this is an interesting column from the editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh about their changing use of descriptors in police briefs. It’s different from what we do. Would like to hear your thoughts on this.

We published some gorgeous photos this morning by David Rolfe, one of our photographers, of fall along the Blue Ridge Parkway. David is an incredibly gifted shooter, with an eye for landscapes and the relationship between the manmade and natural worlds (more on that at the bottom).

One of his shots was from a place called E.B. Jeffress Park, which is along the Parkway right at the place where Ashe, Watauga and Wilkes counties meet, mile marker 271 or so. It’s known for its Cascade Falls.

Most folks don’t know who E.B. Jeffress was, but everytime you drive the Parkway and marvel at A) its sheer beauty, B), its proximity to our front door and C) the incredible bargain it presents, you ought to thank him.

Here’s the deal: Edwin B. Jeffress was born in Canton, west of Asheville, in 1887. He graduated from UNC and began a career as a journalist, eventually becoming president of the company that published the Greensboro Daily News. Jeffress was a political broker, backing Max Gardner in his campaigns for governor. When Gardner won in 1928, he made Jeffress chairman of state highway commission, a forerunner to NC DOT. They were both instrumental in consolidating road building at the state level, rather than leaving it to individual counties.

Even then, politics were part of road construction. The original route for the parkway, which began as a public-works project in the Depression, was supposed to go through Virginia and the Great Smokies, bypassing North Carolina. Jeffress persuaded Interior Secretary Harold Ickes that the highway needed to follow the Eastern Continental Divide, which moved the road’s route to the south, to the route we’ve all come to know and love. And he also argued that it ought not to be a toll road.

So what happened to Jeffress? He was often mentioned as a candidate for governor, but an operation to remove a brain tumor in 1934 left him physically weakened and pushed him into semi-retirement. He died in 1961. The park in his honor was opened in 1968.

And that, as Paul H. says, is the rest of the story.

To backtrack for a second, I asked David for a few tips on shooting fall foliage. Here’s his response:

The approach to shooting good fall color is basically the same as shooting good photos generally.  Give your photo a dominant point of interest, and pay attention to the light.

1) Avoid general scenes.  A breathtaking expanse of colorful trees will still profit from a single point of focus, such as a lone red tree in a blanket of yellow ones, a rocky outcrop against a wall of color, or a starkly contrasting white trunk of a dead tree against a tapestry of lush colors.

2) Get in close.  Position yourself to have a single bright leaf or branch in the foreground or off to the side.  The eye is attracted to the close-up leaf, then slides easily into the rest of the scene.

3) Don’t shoot into the sun, or into the shadows… unless the colorful tree that caught your eye is nestled against a dark background.  In that case, move in close enough so that the tree is the brightest object in the scene.

4) Use a flash to light up leaves in a shady foreground, or from underneath the branches.

5) Don’t be afraid to make photos on rainy or foggy days.  You won’t get the sweeping panoramas, but you can still capture the rich colors of leaves up close, standing out against the hazy background fading softly into the distance.  A National Geographic photographer once said that bad weather makes good pictures.

My tip: Please don’t click while you’re trying to drive ...

This is a two-fer....

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Jones Sausage Road in Raleigh, the legacy of Slim Jims, and made reference to Jesse Jones hot dogs. I said I would get back with the rest of that story. Lenox Rawlings, our sports columnist, has the full tale in his Sunday column. As with all of Lenox’s column, there’s an incredible amount of history, grace, sports knowledge and—that rarest of commodities in most sports columnists—restraint wrapped up in 30 or so column inches.

Not everyone is a lover of the dyed-red hot dog, but those who are are apparently very loyal.

I’ve had several people ask me about the ads showing up on the front pages of several sections—sports, travel—and whether they are a permanent addition to our landscape. The answer is ... maybe.  You would be hard-pressed to find an editor who thinks they enhance the appearance of a front page, but the advertising premium for that display space is hard to turn away in this current environment. While it’s of little comfort to many of our readers, high-quality newspapers in many countries have carried front-page ads for years. That’s not a justification for doing something, but it does give you an idea of the varying sensibilities around the world.

Finally, two thoughts from the world of magazines. First, the current issue of Natural History magazine has a very good discussion of the global water crisis/issue. Sometimes, it’s instructive to get up at 30,000 feet and take a look at the big picture, beyond the Yadkin, Dan and Falls of the Neuse Lake. Unfortunately, the article isn’t online (yet.) Second, I ran across an interesting magazine this weekend, called Garden & Gun, which is published by the owners of the Charleston newspaper. It’s a strange mixture of southern lifestyle, the sporting life and whatnot. It’s very glossy. Not quite The New Yorker, not quite Town & Country. We’ll see if it makes it…

Sorry for the late post. One of those days.

Two deaths in the larger journalism community that I think are worth noting. The first is Barry Tunick, a long-time puzzle editor at the LA Times. His puzzles are carried in many papers, including the Journal (or at least they used to be). Creating and editing crossword puzzles is really hard. It takes the right balance of concision and humor and clarity. And for those of you who are crossword puzzlers, you know about that wonderful combination of joy and frustration that makes spending an hour with a tough puzzle so worthwhile.

The other is Ernest Withers, a long-time photographer in the Memphis area. Withers created some of the most iconic images of the civil-rights movement, including incredible photos from the striking sanitation workers in Memphis prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He has a straightforward approach and a great eye for detail and sweep.

You can see some of his photos here.

snake.JPG

Conflicts of interest are unavoidable in many aspects of life. Eventually, many of us run up against them. There seems to be two camps in deciding what to do about them. The first camp says “when there’s a conflict, walk away.” The second path is to disclose and then go about your business. This happened the other day at CBS, with an interview of the Lynne Cheney done by a correspondent whose husband represented Ms. Cheney in a publishing deal. CBS disclosed the relationship, then did the story.

A similar thing is going on here in Forsyth County, with a deal involving Pat Swann, the chairman of the City-County Utility Commission. We wrote about it this Sunday. Swann disclosed that he is the broker on a real-estate deal that got started in his capacity as a member of the utility commission. He disclosed the relationship to board members , the mayor and the chairman of the county commissioners. Disclosure is honorable at some level, but it doesn’t resolve the conflict. It just acknowledges it and asks somebody else to do something about it.

It’s true that viewers of the CBS broadcast can judge for themselves whether the correspondent was too easy on the vice president’s wife. And the public can decide whether Mr. Swann cut himself a sweet deal. And disclosure is better than hiding the relationships. But I don’t think they are the best routes. It forces decisions by the public after the fact, and those decisions are often quite different than those made on the cusp of a deal.

PHOTO of the WEEK: I rarely post photos, but this one’s too good to miss. It’s a shot from Bethabara this weekend of a small snake. You can see something coming out of its mouth besides its tongue. It was another snake. That is a meal that doesn’t go down easy.

I was out of town a few days last week—more on that in a second—so when I read the Saturday paper I was reading it as a reader, not as a person who knows the back stories on a particular story. And when I read the front-page piece on the high-school sweethearts and the restraining order, my immediate reaction was: Why are we naming these students? Yes, there’s a restraining order against the former boyfriend, and there is a simple assault, but still… They’re high-school kids, 17 and 16. It seemed to me that the particulars of names was less important than the larger theme, how adult issues, such as domestic violence, keep getting thrust into our school system and forcing hard choices. My thought as the reader was that I don’t know these students, so their names are meaningless to me.

I talked with the reporter this morning, and what Dan told me was that naming them was unavoidable and impractical. The father of the girl essentially held a news conference, and the former boyfriend showed up—or thereabouts—to refute his actions. In a sense, they made it a public issue with names. Still, this is one of those instances where I wonder what happened to modesty on the part of parents. Our world is one big Jerry Springer show…

I was in Washington last week for the Associated Press Managing Editors conference. As you might expect, it’s not the cheeriest time to be at an editor’s conference. That said, it’s not all gloom and doom. The sense I got was that the days of hoping for smoother sailing are gone. The new reality is here to stay, and everybody is dealing with it, rather than hoping it goes away. The realities are: 1)continued financial pressure and their impact on news gathering and 2) the end of newsrooms as gatekeepers of information.

Washington is a city being remade before your eyes, but there are still plenty of institutions around. I managed to eat at one Friday morning. Jimmy Ts on Capitol Hill. Tin ceiling. Great waffles. Decent coffee. My guide for the meal says that Howard Coble is an occasional diner as well ...

Close readers of OTTERBLOG will remember a post sometime back about the confusion over what to call Mumbai, formerly Bombay.

A similar debate is raging—journalistically speaking—over Burma/Myanmar, the site of civil unrest and protest in Southeast Asia. The Journal calls the country Myanmar, following Associated Press style, but not everyone agrees. This is a nice column from the Boston Globe on the controversy that gets at much of the tangled history and the power of names.

Interestingly enough, the U.S. government apparently doesn’t recognize the new name. Here’s the entry in the CIA World Factbook, easily one of the most useful sites on the Web.

It’s no secret that most media stocks have been in the doldrums of late. Yesterday, they got a bounce. The reason: Belo’s decision to spin off its newspaper business into a separate company, The result would be two companies, one focused on broadcast, the other on newspapers/print.

There are a lot of media companies with print/broadcast operations. Gannett, the nation’s biggest newspaper publisher, owns a bunch of TV stations, as does Media General, which owns the Journal, and saw its stock jump about 8 percent in trading yesterday. MG owns 20-some newspapers in the Southeast, and about the same number of TV stations, also mostly in the Southeast. I have no inside info into the honchos who run our company in Richmond, but publicly traded companies with a variety of businesses always face this problem. Companies with publishing heritages, such as ours, are treated as old-line businesses, with accompanying diminished expectations. Despite our efforts to rebrand ourselves as an “information provider,” that message has a hard time taking hold in the eyes of Wall Street and the investing community.

My best guess, the transformation and realignment of public media companies is starting to pick up steam and will accelerate in the next year to 18 months.

IN THE NEWS: Paul Garber, one of our staffers, writes a nifty blog for us called Fathers After 40, which is as you might surmise about the challenges and joys of being an older father with a younger child. It’s getting noticed, most recently in an ABC News story about all the presidential candidates who have kids much younger than their chronological age would suggest.