Otterblog

Ah Fridays ...

Flu is still ravaging the ranks.
Sunday stories have to be edited.
There is a shooting near West Forsyth High School.
There is a college student to talk to about her career and the future of journalism (hold your laugh lines...)
Critiques to do. Stories to plan.
And an angry reader has sent in an email complaining about mssing clues in today’s crossword puzzle.

The crossword puzzle is—of course—the last straw. Rome is burning and somebody cares about a missing 9 across clue?. But reader service is reader service, so I dig out the number of our syndicate person who supplies these puzzles and get to it. While I’m talking to him, I look again at the puzzle and realize the answer to this problem and all the other zaniness in the world today.

LEAP YEAR. Thankfully only once every four years.

You could probably write an entire book on photo-ethics in the digital age, and my goal isn’t to do that, but I thought I would do a quick follow on last week’s post on the photoshopped eclipse photo that a reader sent us.

I read with interest a story in the Wall Street Journal about a scandal in China involving a photo of a high-speed train in Tibet. Clearly a lot more at stake here than just a pretty shot of the moon and the Wachovia building. What’s also important is the way technology helped break the scandal, both in uncovering evidence of the misdeed and broadcasting the incident itself.

Good news, bad news: The current issue of Wired has a big spread on places with free WiFi. Good news. We’re on it. Bad news. They call our community “Winston-Salem County.” The city’s annexation lust hasn’t spread that far and wide ... Elsewhere in the mag is a great article on the folks who rescue capsized cargo ships. Sort of like Ocean’s 11 meets The Poseidon Adventure. As the Exxon Valdez case makes its way to the the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s particularly relevant.

eclipse2.jpgeclipse1.jpg

One of the phrases tossed around newsrooms a lot these days is “user-provided content.” It’s all the stuff that readers and clickers send us—recipes, requests for recipes, calendar items, business milestones, photographs etc. Newspapers love them. Two reasons. First, they’re free. We don’t pay somebody to write us two paragraphs on Jimmy getting his Eagle Scout award. Second, they appeal to this idea of community, that is to say, by publishing these items, we’re connecting with our readers and making them part of the process, engaging them and all that other feel-good stuff.

I think all of those reasons are good, and I am generally in favor of this process. The trick is to know where the limits are.  The key to UPC is to exercise the same level of judgment and ethics with this material that you do with staff content or wire content. We got a good lesson in this yesterday morning, when a reader sent us what appeared to be a fabulous photo of the eclipse. See ECLIPSE1 above. Everybody got excited. We were ready to post it and to move it into a position of prominence on our home page. Our photo editor, Walt Unks, was working with the photo to tone it more properly and discovered that it wasn’t all it seemed to be. See ECLIPSE2. So, for what will be obvious reasons, this picture got yanked.

From time to time, I’ve included the updates that the Associated Press sends us on style changes. I think they’re interesting, because they speak to the ever-evolving use of words and the shifts in meaning as culture adapts over time. Like most large institutions, the AP tends to be fairly conservative, so when they change something it’s not done just on a whim.

Here’s what they sent out last night:

Latino

Often the preferred term for a person from—or whose ancestors were from—a Spanish-speaking land or culture or from Latin America. Latina is the feminine form. Follow the person’s preference. Use a more specific identification when possible, such as Cuban, Puerto Rican, Brazilian or Mexican-American. See Hispanic, nationalities and races, and race entries.

This is a little murkier than I like in a style guide. What does preferred mean? Most of the time?

Latino/Latina wasn’t in the old stylebook, but it’s gained in popularity through the years. And it’s just one of many terms that can be used to describe people who are from south of the U.S. border or even from parts of Europe. It’s not interchangeable with Hispanic. While a person from, say, Nicaragua, might be both. A person from Brazil would be the first and not the second.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists has as its sub title: Increasing the influence of Latinos in U.S. Newsrooms. It’s not a pick one and only one solution.

The tempting thing for Anglos to do is to make a blanket statement to the effect: These folks can’t figure it out. Why should we bother?

To me, that’s a cop out. The world comes in more flavors than it used to. I’d like to think that’s a good thing, even when it causes confusion in trying to accurately describe people.

Taste Test: There was a story in the paper yesterday about making kosher pickles. I am a serious pickle person, and, while this is not the time of year to be making pickles, reading the story gave me a hankering. So, I got all the ingredients and followed the five easy steps. I will report back in a week on whether this recipe is worth its (kosher) salt.

I received a pretty angry—but polite—telephone call on Friday afternoon from a reader. She had seen our skybox tease in the paper for a Sunday story on the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of Sgt. Howard Plouff.

The caller said she was a friend of the family, and she was outraged that we continued to run stories about Sgt. Plouff’s death. “It’s a wound that you won’t let heal,” she said. There was more, about the pain we were putting the family through, the kids, etc. This went on for some time, and of course it finally ended up with the question: “If this had happened to someone you know, wouldn’t you feel differently?”

Editing a newspaper isn’t an easy thing to do. You often need to step outside your own skin, your own relationships and look at right and wrong in a local and global sense. This caller wanted us to be compassionate to the family. Her idea of compassion involved us nearly avoiding coverage of the Plouff shooting. Sometimes compassion—or sympathy, empathy, what have you—is in conflict with journalism. It’s important to step outside one-on-one relationships and look at what makes sense from a story standpoint.
For better or worse, the Plouff homicide is a public death. Better, in that it is a shared grief. Worse, in that the grief is not controlled by those most affected. It’s different than all the other homicides we had in 2007. There’s a public-policy component --night club regulation, officer safety, etc.— that can’t be ignored. Except for the scale of tragedy, it’s no different than the Virginia Tech shootings or 9/11.

We write about stories to the amount needed—no more, no less. We listen to victims and their concerns. We don’t write stories just because we can. We don’t overplay stories. And we listen to readers, whose sense of our coverage is sometimes more finely tuned to subtleties than our own. Friday’s caller didn’t agree with our decision to write an anniversary story, but I do think we each hung up the telephone with a better understanding of the other side of the equation. What we’re really talking about is not just compassionate journalism, but rather common-sense journalism.

Public service takes many forms in the newspaper biz. There’s the whole righting wrongs thing, speaking for folks who have no voice, etc. And there’s what I like to call “refrigerator journalism”, the publication of important events in people’s lives, such as dean’s lists and Eagle Scout awards. And then there’s my wonderful telephone call with a reader named Robert this afternoon. Nice guy. He couldn’t figure out how to play the Sudoku puzzle we have in the paper. For better or worse, one of my jobs here is Sudoku outreach coordinator. I’m addicted to the puzzle. So Robert and I spent about 10 minutes on the telephone working a Level Two puzzle together. It’s difficult to explain logic puzzles solely through words, but we made our way. And it was pretty rewarding when I heard him say, “Oh, I get it.” Hopefully, he will be hooked on a great way to keep your brain sharp.

Speaking of public service. We’ve been dogging the good folks in Davidson County for several weeks to get the settlement figure that they paid the family of Carlos Claros Castro. Today, we published it.  $1 million. Settlement figures are public, but, all too often, counties will duck and dive on releasing this information. I’d like to think that Davidson County would have released it anyway, but I think our persistence had a great deal to do with this. It’s important that people know what governments have to pay when they commit fatal errors. I know many folks say that we do this just to embarrass officials, but I think we speak for taxpayers and citizens. Anybody can ask for these figures. We’re the public.

We ran a preview yesterday of a play appearing at SECCA at the end of the month. Nothing unusual about that. Except this: Nobody under 18 is going to be admitted to Southern Baptist Sissies, a Theatre Alliance production that tells the story of four young gay men and their relationship with the Baptist church. A disclaimer: I haven’t seen the play. There’s no MPAA rating system for drama. But at first blush this seems pretty darned close to the NC-17 rating, which has replaced the old X rating. Here’s what the ratings mean. As you might imagine, there have been extremely few NC-17 movies produced in recent years for commercial distribution in mainstream movie theatres. And I would be hard-pressed to remember the last time we reviewed an NC-17 movie.

I wasn’t here the later part of last week, but there’s a small part of me thatI felt a little bit uneasy about previewing a play that—at least on the surface—had the same admissions bar as an NC-17 film. I asked Lynn Felder, an assistant features editor who coordinates much of our arts coverage, for her thoughts on whether I was potentially overreacting or overreaching. In a word: Yes. Here’s her fuller comments:

X-rated? Where’d you get that?

It’s more like between a PG-13 and R.
“Aimed at mature audiences, Southern Baptist Sissies, the last in the Shores trilogy, contains graphic language and content, some nudity (not frontal) and cigarette smoke. No one under 18 will be admitted.”
I’m confident that the No one under 18 is a way to err on the conservative side. Theatre Alliance has done this frequently, as they frequently produce shows aimed at “mature audiences.”
I think the fact that Jamie Lawson, the director, was willing to say “This is what it was like for me growing up in the church” gave the story some context right away. The play takes a humorous look at a serious subject.
I don’t imagine it’s any more risque than “The Full Monty” and about a gazillion other entertainments that we tell people about.
I guess we would extend the same preview status to an NC-17 movie if there was some reason to, but we’d take it case-by-case.
This is a local production with local folks standing behind it and a respectable theater company producing it.

Lynn makes some strong points. And the self-restraint aspect, in terms of erring on the side of not letting children in—even if accompanied by adults—is an important difference between this and the NC-17 rating.

One of the interesting things about the new news world order is how stories move through the media, up and down the food chain. Often, it’s difficult to track the stories, because there are so many of them on a given topic, but the case of Dick Vitale—he of YEAH BAY-BEE fame—makes for a good little case study.

As the more rampant college bball fans know, Vitale had throat surgery two months back to repair throat lesions. He couldn’t talk for a few weeks (Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about what a blessing that might be...) But he’s back, and just in time for the thrilla in Chapel Hilla tonight, featuring old rivals UNC and Duke. We ran a story last week about Vitale’s return to the job he loves. I happen to like the guy. He’s funny and enthusiastic and knowledgeable, a good combination in my book.

John Dell, the reporter who wrote the story, said he pursued it because he thought it would be a good idea to follow up with Vitale after his voice went dark at the beginning of the season. Turns out we weren’t the only ones with the same idea. The Tampa Tribune, our sister paper in Florida, had the story two days earlier. Three days after our story ran, the N&O followed with its own piece. And today, the NY Times gets into the act. Tipoff tonight is at 9, so you can hear for yourself.

So, the big question is: What does all this mean? Beyond the fact that ESPN and Vitale know a good marketing/PR opportunity when they see it ....  I think it means a couple of things. First, is that what constitutes news is fluid. Second, original content is in the eye of the beholder. Third, being first is no longer the be-all and end-all for media. It still matters—a lot. But not being first is no longer reason to drop a story. Good writing and analysis also are vital.