Otterblog

Ah, democracy. The smell of it is in the air. A heady mixture of barbecue, promises, and the fumes of all those campaign buses. Close readers of OTTERBLOG know my great love of the state of Iowa, and now we are getting a chance to experience what is old hat out there.

That said, the WAY that Sens. Obama and Clinton are campaigning here is different from what happens in the early states. Less retail, more wholesale. Or maybe less Mom n Pop and more big box. Pick your metaphor. To date, the candidates have kept their appearances along the great Megasprawl known as Charwinsalgreenangle, other than the obligatory stops in Fayetteville, for the whole military thing. You’re not seeing the one-on-one/small towns that’s expected and de rigueur in Iowa and New Hampshire.

As our story today made clear, Obama appears to be trying to look past the primaries and go after McCain already. Clinton, on the other hand, is trying to prevent a stampede, particularly by so-called superdelegates. Her camp seems to be of two minds whether North Carolina is a must-win. Our main political reporter, James Romoser, has all the goods on his blog, Trail Mix.

Clinton will be in Winston-Salem today. We have an interview scheduled with her, and what I think is kind of cool is that we dropped a little box in the paper and online soliciting questions that people would like us to ask her. We’ve received about two dozen, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, there are some inappropriate ones about blue dresses and the like in there, but for the most part, they are thoughtful, policy-related questions asked by voters across a wide spectrum. This is a great example of how the digital and non-digital (analog?) newsrooms work together.

Now, what about Sen. McCain? I’d love him to come to Winston-Salem as well. In the past, neither nominee has campaigned much in North Carolina after the conventions. It’s been sufficiently and reliably Republican that neither candidate has wanted to spend/waste time here (other than those fine debates at WFU...). From a public-policy and journalism standpoint, I would love that to change, but we’ll have to wait and see.

We had a spirited discussion today about our story on Monday on the marking of the 4000th death of an American in Iraq. This comes on the heels of last week’s coverage of the war’s fifth-year anniversary (Incidentally, our cover graphic on that issue was mentioned on several newspaper design Web sites.)

The argument against these stories is somewhat philosophical, that numbers are arbitrary. The 3,999 death is as important as the one before and the one after. And is the fifth year any more a testament to U.S. arrogance/resolute leadership (take your pick) than the fourth year and 364th day.

There is power to this argument, but I think it runs counter to our nature. We keep score. We mark anniversaries, birthdays, milestones, yahrzeits, you name it. It’s a way to know where we’ve been and hopefully where you are going. To treat events of the magnitude of the war in Iraq as a day-to-day event is the equivalent of trying to look at the world only through a one-inch wide pipe. You need different views and perspectives.

Flying, writing: We had a story this morning about the resignation of Bill Diffenderffer from Skybus, the discount airline that has set up shop at PTIA. He said he is going back to writing books. Some analysts sense trouble for the carrier. I haven’t read any of his books, but here’s an excerpt from his 2005 book, The Samurai Leader.

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Two weeks ago, I gave a writing lesson at Cook Elementary School. The dozen or so students are in the third grade in Mr. Ruddy’s class. Great kids. We talked about newspapers and about writing, and I brought a couple of things from the world of nature for them to describe and write about. The great thing about working with very young minds is that they describe things in incredibly unusual ways. Their imaginations haven’t been restricted yet. One young woman described the holes in a piece of coral as being like snowflakes. Which they are, although I had never thought of them that way.

Anyway, I went back yesterday for my regular tutoring session, and the kids gave me some thank you cards, which were very touching and meaningful.  The first image is by a young man named Dwight, and I am trying to honor his request, at least in a digital setting.  The second is by Alphonso, the young man I tutor. His drawing made me smile. Alphonso also happens to be the best dominoes player I know, and he takes extreme pleasure in beating me.

There’s that great scene in Casablanca, where Capt. Renault is shocked to find there’s gambling going on at Rick’s.

I feel a little of that misplaced energy this morning, after Sen. Barack Obama’s speech on race yesterday. Love him, hate him, just don’t care for him. It’s hard not to be impressed by the pain and power in his speech. Over the past week, I get the sense that many white Americans have been shocked, shocked, to find out that a) Barack Obama is black, and b) that he goes to a black church; and c) that he has a black minister who has preached on controversial and potentially divisive topics, particularly when seen in a short video snippet.  Was I shocked?  Not really. Still, the harshness of the preacher’s rhetoric was jarring and a little unsettling.

And if Obama ends up as the Democratic nominee, you will see these clips again and again through November.

The mix of race and politics on which the Democratic primary will now likely turn is familiar ground to many journalists in North Carolina. Some of the overtones and undertones of this primary are reminiscent of the 1990 primary between Harvey Gantt and Mike Easley. In that campaign, which I covered a lifetime ago, Gantt did an effective job—at least in the primary—of courting a sufficient number of white voters, while sewing up a huge majority of black voters. Obama hasn’t quite done that, but he’s deftly managed the calculus of the sprawling primary schedule.

Obama is in Fayetteville and Charlotte today, giving speeches, a reflection of the renewed interest in North Carolina’s primary voters. See James Romoser’s Trail Mix blog and our story this morning for more details on that.

This is a very fluid story, and what I will be interested to see as the day wears on, is whether Obama’s talk in Fayetteville, which is supposed to be a “major address” on the War in Iraq (now in its fifth year) can fight its way through the more provocative story that features the endless video clips of the Rev. Wright.

Back after a week in corporate development. Good to get away. Good to be home.

One of the things we spent a lot of time wrestling with in Richmond was the continuous news monster, the potential, the power, the pitfalls.

There’s a report out today from the Project for Excellence in Journalism on the state of the media, 2008. Needless to say, it’s not all that cheery.

Key points from the intro:

The reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience, than in the legacy media. The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists.2

But more and more it appears the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.

If you’re interested in the media business, I recommend the report. The PEJ has some biases, and they don’t have a solution, but their reports are to me a generally accurate mirror/prism of the state of things.

So, I’m in Richmond for a few days, with some other managers of Media General, looking at the future of our industry and where we are going. Some very bright minds, and some very optimistic minds.

One thing that is clear is that journalists bring a different toolkit to the conversation. Not necessarily better. But different. We tend to be more skeptical, distrustful of power, more wedded to tradition and the power of history to inform the future. So, it’s been a challenge for me to straddle my roles as journalist and manager and stare forthrightly at what might lie ahead.

Some observations so far:
-- Users of content are going to determine more than ever the value of that content.
-- There is an incredible demand for specific, local content.
-- It’s not clear if multimedia content can be monetized at the level that print and broadcasting content has been and is.
-- Delivery of content is becoming as important as the content itself.

One random thought, and I’m going to ultimately ask this question of our birding experts when I return to W-S, but ... On my drive up I-85, I saw more red-tailed hawks than I have ever seen in one afternoon. Granted it was over a 150-mile stretch ... but it made me wonder. We think of the return of hawks as a signal that our environment is being healed, but I wonder if there is something out of whack in the prey part of the ecosystem that is driving the hawk increase.

I’ve been thinking about murder tonight.

There is an incredible story in Chapel Hill today. The student body president was found shot to death, maybe a carjacking. 22 years old. Morehead-Cain scholar. Pre-med, etc. etc.

And closer to home, Winston-Salem had its first homicide this year, a 45-year-old man shot to death in a drive-by shooting. Another waste.

And there are the suicide bombings in Iraq, where 50+ people are dead.

Newsrooms are a cynical place, by habit, maybe by design and default. But we don’t joke about events like these or how to play them. Sorting through these deaths, this editorial triage of the day, is a grim task.  It’s about applying news judgment to death, and by extension, placing relative values on human lives. Which is more important to our understanding of the world, of our community: a seemingly random crime 80 miles away; a probably less random crime in our city; a truckload of death half a world away that underscores how much work is left to be done in Iraq.

And then when you get all that done, you’re left with this question: which is the better story? The story that more readers will be interested in. I didn’t say should be interested in, but will be. For tomorrow, it’s the student body president. They’re all universal stories, with issues that go beyond the immediate cause and effect But a dead student body president at the state’s flagship public university tops the list.

The drill is getting eerily familiar. There’s a report of a gunman on a college campus. Lockdown. Panic. Then an all-clear. The Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007 and last month’s shootings at Northern Illinois University have focused attention about the very real dangers of high-profile shootings. But what about the hoaxes and the scares? That’s what happened yesterday at Appalachian. Today, police said it was all a hoax, and they’re moving to file charges against the person who made it all up. A somewhat similar event happened at Ferrum College last week.

As journalist, uncertainty is part of the deal. But that said, it’s incredibly difficult to get folks to jump in their cars and drive 2+ hours on the rumor of a gunman being seen. But of course it has to be done. To not go, to say you fooled me once and you’re not going to fool me again, is to invite a larger problem: Not being there.