Sometimes, in between the crises over Lio/Peanuts and the demise of our stocks section, we get to work on big, important stories and are reminded of the miracle of the daily newspaper. This weekend was such an example. A team of three reporters had been working for several months about the death of Carlos Claros Castro in the Davidson County Jail. It’s a big, broad story, with lots of angles and complexities.
We were on a deadline of sorts, because we had heard that one of the deputies charged in his death was about to take a plea. We didn’t know when. It turned out to be Friday.
This is a hazard of writing about current events. Sometimes, they take a twist that is—to put it politely—inconvenient.
And so it was on Friday. We were largely done with the reporting and writing, but still had huge chunks to figure out. A team of journalists—reporters, photographers, designers,editors of various stripes—spent Saturday and Sunday getting our story ready. It is really something to watch bright, committed people focus on a task and get to it.
It’s worth a read. In this day of bloggers and Internet news sites, etc., this is a reminder of what newspapers do best. And why newspapers matter.
One of the casualties of publishing the Davidson story was that our story on what ails Dell and what it means for Forsyth County was held. Look for it this Sunday.
Monday, July 03
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Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
Or “I,” said the editor, breathlessly, “love crunch time!”
Ken:
Don’t ya hate it when life gets in the way of a story. Next time tell the crooked killer deputy to makle his plea after the story breaks!
Misunderstood. Again. The point here wasn’t to boo hoo about the news getting in the way of our plans or to preen about journalistic machismo, but rather to explain how a 150 inch story on current events ends up in the paper on short notice.
As in most aspects of life, timing is important. But you have to take what you can get.
I read the story in its entirity and would never have picked up on any of it being a rush job. Kudos to your staff.
Blogs will never replace newspapers for indepth reporting (said the blogger thankfully). The only thing blogs can do better than newspapers is scoop, since blogs are published continuously and the physical paper comes out once a day. But even these scoops aren’t terribly reliable, as the accuracy often isn’t there as the story is still developing.
Out of curiosity, would the Journal ever, or has it ever, put out an “Extra”, a later-in-the-day edition because a momentously newsworthy event has occurred? If it has, when was the last occasion?
Our last extra edition was on 9/11. It was important for us to not wait a day before publishing. People wanted to hold something tangible in their hands about the attacks, and the newspaper fulfilled that need.
Our other extra edition, of course, is JournalNow, our Web partner. They act as a site for continuous publication of the Journal’s news and information, regardless of the time that an event happens. It’s an evolution of culture and process, to get all of us, who used to think in terms of only one deadline a day, to become accustomed to many deadlines and to understand that when our readers say they want information now, they really mean it.
This saga is apparently only beginning to unfold. Thanks to Phoebe Zirkle and her associates, the real story has been presented front and center. I have been somewhat perplexed that the cultural aspects until now have been left untouched. Of course, the search for the truth will culuminate in a courtroom, as is appropriate. But for now, the WSJ has served a vital public interest with this story.
Spreaking about crunches, when the Journal printed the 9/11 extra edition that Ken mentioned, they had an “extra” page with no content to fill it. Then (one of their tech guys, not an editor) suggested to print an all black page. It turned out to be a great idea. I’m sure you all miss David.
We do miss David (a very smart info systems guy who is now at our sister paper in Bristol), but the black page is actually more complicated than that. Our goal was to fill this extra page with an American flag, but the file kept getting corrupted and that’s what we were left with.
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