Otterblog

I was having dinner out on Friday with OTTERBLOG Jr. and Wheel of Fortune was on the TV in the background. I rarely watch it, but it’s one of those programs that I find both incredibly lame and reasonably enjoyable, largely for the same reason: it’s so easy. I hadn’t seen the Wheel in a while but had been thinking about it because of our recent story on Winston-Salem being an answer in a recent puzzle.

Here’s our editorial page’s take on the whole thing, which I think is spot on.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I made my way through the Saturday crossword puzzle. One of the final clues was 51 ACROSS: One of its nicknames is “Camel City. The answer, of course, is Winston-Salem.

That is a good clue. It just about made my day. And in true understated crossword puzzle fashion, there was no press release or publicity agent calling us so we would write a story about it ... my karmic circle was complete.

A letter we received the other day:

If the Winston-Salem Journal is going to print promotional ads for John Edwards disguised as news articles three days in a row, such as those by James Rosemer run on the front page December 16, 17, and 18, wouldn’t it be simpler and more honest to run an official endorsement of Edwards on your editorial page?

Or are we to assume that you will be running three consecutive days of free front-page promotions for all the candidates in coming weeks?

We dispatched one of our best reporters to Iowa last week to follow the Edwards campaign and to report on the Iowa caucuses. We even started a blog, although it will morph into more general election coverage as the months go by.

The question of whether our political coverage is too Edwardscentric isn’t just an external question. We’ve had the same debate in our newsroom. I think there are a couple of things going on that explain our reasoning.

1) Edwards is a North Carolinian, and the first serious candidate from the state in years. Plenty of people don’t like him, but that’s neither here nor there. To the nation, he is us, and we need to take his candidacy seriously. Not as a booster, but as journalists.

2) The Iowa caucus is a political lifetime away from the North Carolina primary in May, and our readers can’t vote in Iowa. So us looking at the presidential race through the prism of a local candidate doesn’t really alter the outcome. It’s a way to organize coverage and prioritize our resources. For better or for worse, our state’s leaders decided that NC would probably not be a player in choosing the major party candidates. If by some chance, there is still uncertainty about the nominee prior to our primary, I can assure you we will give detailed coverage of candidates (both Dem. and Rep.) ahead of time.

As we move into full holiday mode, a couple of final thoughts.

My posts will likely be minimal in the next week or so (my gift to you all ...) and will get back into full OTTERBLOG mode come 2008.
Have a safe and healthy holiday with family, friends and --- yes, even enemies.
I appreciate all the comments, snide remarks, admonitions and sound advice this past year.

Thnx

If you were like me, you got up this morning, went outside with the dog, looked for the paper, scratched your head, went back inside. And waited. And waited. The problem, as we noted on our Web site, was a severe electrical and mechanical problem that jammed up our press for more than four hours. It involved some bad paper, a broken slitter, web breaks, the whole nine yards.

If you’ve ever seen a newspaper printing plant when it is running flat out, you know what a thing of power and beauty it is. Absolutely stunning. Like every other piece of machinery that is asked to work hard at high speeds and high detail, presses have problems. The difference between our business and most other businesses that have occasional production problems is that customers know about ours ours right away. Or at least a few hours later.

I’ve spend a fair bit of time with Frank Clayton, who’s our production manager. He’s about as dedicated a professional as you are going to find, and when he says that it took four hours of work to get it all fixed, my guess is that it would have taken another crew about six.

This isn’t to dismiss a late delivery as unimportant. It matters to all of us that the paper gets to your house/apartment/diner/box on time. And in this day and age, when home delivery to your computer wasn’t affected, we take it all the more seriously.

You will probably have to wait a long time—or at least until next year—to see two front-page photos on college sports championships in a three-day period on the front page of the Journal.
That’s the deal this past weekend, beginning with ASU’s trouncing of Delaware in the FCS championship and WFU’s knockdown/dragout against Ohio State yesterday.

As our sports department can attest, I’m not the world’s biggest fan. I don’t watch ESPN (although I do like the magazine a great deal.). And in my perfect world, academics would get the same respect that athletics gets. But I recognize that for many of our readers, college sports is incredibly important. And the stories of young men and women who have come together as a team and dedicated themselves to a goal are powerful stuff, particularly in times like these.

Along with all the emails thanking us for our coverage have come a few taking us to task. How big a headline are you going to use when real news happens, one person wrote, referring to our THREEMENDOUS headline on Saturday. One of the things about front pages is that they exist only on a particular day. So Saturday’s paper is really measured against what was available and how we used it. Yeah, there are some things to consider with regards to fairness and balance and equal time. But to scale back on blowing out an exclusive and great spot photo of young people celebrating an unprecedented win just seems a little hard-hearted and short-sighted. If there had been equally important “hard” news that day, we would have figured out another plan.

We launched a new political blog today (or maybe late yesterday). It’s called Trail Mix, and it’s written by James Romoser, our Raleigh bureau chief. James is scary smart, and a great observer and analyzer. There are a zillion political blogs out there. We hope ours will be distinguished by its quality of content, not just the sheer quantity of links being dumped onto a site. I hope you will check it out and let James know what you think.

James is in Iowa right now, which is one of my favorite places in this whole big country of ours. It’s big skies and the cliffs along the Mississippi and river towns and corn and campaigning as far as the eye can see. I told James to eat cheeseburger chowder soup wherever he can find it out there, but he wasn’t having any of it. I think it’s one of the great midwestern dishes.

Personnel files: If you read the story today about the conviction of Robert Watson, you’ll note that we have asked for the school system to release his personnel file to the public. Generally speaking, personnel files are not public, but the law allows school officials to release these records in limited circumstances. We think the public-policy issues here are important

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I’ve been spending the past few days thinking about the death of Roy Thompson, who died Saturday at Salemtowne. For many years, he was the local columnist and a reporter for the Journal, and he was really one of a kind. In the golden age of newspapers, before the Internet, before cable news, he was the real deal. In that era, many columnists were almost inseparable from the identity of their city. Think of Mike Royko and Chicago or Jimmy Breslin in his prime and New York. The city’s stories bubbled through these people. For better or worse, Winston-Salem’s stories bubbled through Roy Thompson. Its quirks. Its optimism. Its manners. Its sense of place in the world.

As somebody who loves journalism and thinks he’s reasonably good at it, I can tell you that it’s humbling to spend an hour or so thumbing through Roy’s clip files. He could flat out write. The Roy Thompson column was a work of beauty. Sly. Visual. Elegant in its simplicity and respect for clear writing. Roy was of the old school, where columnists never said what they thought. They just described what was going on and let the weight of their words paint a pretty clear picture of the events as they ought to be seen. As a reporter, he was wide-ranging, covering everything from the Klan to Thomas Wolfe and the Vietnam War. I’ve attached one of his later columns, which is both an essay on clutter and the ineptitude of state government.

There’s an expression somebody told me several years ago that applies to many of the jobs that people do. It goes something like this: Imagine a triangle with three words at the corners. One is Good. The other Cheap. The last Fast. When you are getting a job done, you can at most pick two of those. In other words, something that is cheap and good isn’t going to be fast. Roy was fast. And he was good. I don’t know if he was cheap, but whatever we paid him back then, it was a bargain.

Roy retired a year before I came to the Journal, so we never had a chance to work together. Surely my loss more than his.

Lot of Kismet rolling around in the Kosmos these days.

A few days ago, someone sent me a link to a very cool site, called boonvilleusa.com, which is the work of a NY photographer/artist type named Tim Briner. The basic concept is that he is spending a month at each of the six Boonvilles in the U.S., and only those with one E. No Boonevilles need apply. The goal is to explore community and interaction across this great land. There’s a lot of really crappy multimedia and the like in the Interland. This is the rare exception, and the section on Boonville, NC, just down NC 67 is really good. And that got me thinking about the old days at the Journal, 20 years ago, when my best friend here was a fellow reporter covering Yadkin and Davie counties, and occasionally we would sneak out to Boonville to have lunch at this restaurant called Betty’s. They had frog legs, among other delicious things.

My friend, Steve Mills, left, but he’s still my close friend, and he is a heckuva reporter and has probably done more groundbreaking work on police and prosecutorial misconduct than any journalist working today. Here’s the second part of his series on officer-involved shootings that appears today in the Chicago Tribune.

Irony factor: Last night, as we were working on the story about Jim Grobe becoming the next coach of Arkansas, an email rolled into my inbox from WFU. It’s entitled What’s New @ WFU. Here are the top items:

Wake Forest accepts bid to Meineke Car Care Bowl December 29; purchase tickets and register for Wake Forest bowl events
Law, medical schools receive $7 million gift; scholarships created
Wake Forest is backup site for Presidential Debate

Of course, this is produced well before the time it’s sent, but still ...

I received this email today from the Associated Press about an update to its stylebook:

A new entry has been added to the AP Stylebook:

Allah

The Muslim name for God. The word God should be used, unless the Arabic name is used in a quote written or spoken in English.

The AP spends a lot of time thinking about what to call God. Here’s it’s entry on deities:

DEITIES: Capitalize the proper names of monotheistic deities: God, Allah, the Father, the Son, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer, the Holy Spirit, etc.
Lowercase pronouns referring to the deity: he, him, his, thee, thou, who, whose, thy, etc.
Lowercase gods in referring to the deities of polytheistic religions.
Capitalize the proper names of pagan and mythological gods and goddesses: Neptune, Thor, Venus, etc.
Lowercase such words as god-awful, goddamn, godlike, godliness, godsend.

As I’ve noted before, names matter. What we call things—whether countries, people or deities—influences how we think of them. Islam is one of the three monotheistic religions that all spring from the same tree of Abraham. Sometimes, it’s hard to divine the intentions behind the AP’s style changes, but I think the point the news cooperative is trying to make is that God is God is God, and that having different religions call what many theologians consider to be the same deity different names is confusing and causes more problems than it solves.

On another front: Here’s how the Philly paper is covering the arrest of the students who have been arrested on identity-theft charges.