Otterblog

Back from a week at a leadership development seminar in Richmond. As I’ve told several people, it was by turns terrifying and invigorating. Terryfing because, well because, the media landscape is a terrifying place. Layoffs. Crashing revenues. Readership issues. Etc. etc. But it’s also invigorating. As we were told time and again, the demand for information has never been greater. So, if you care about news and media, this is the time to be in there fighting and leading change and the rest.

As most people know by now, George Carlin died early this morning. I’d like to think that comedians and journalists share a common bond. We understand the importance of words and the power of words and the power in the precision of words. Carlin certainly did. He’s best remembered for his “filthy words monologue,” i.e. the seven words you can’t say on TV.

Of course, now you can. Just not on network TV…

You’ll read a lot about his death in the coming days. Here’s my little addition. Click here to read the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in FCC v. Pacifica, which ruled that—indeed—you couldn’t say those words on TV. Like most court opinions, it is long.  But it’s a fascinating tour through the conflicting views and balance between free speech and the public airwarves.

We’ve talked from time to time about the dangers of photoshopping, i.e. adding “content” to a photograph that wasn’t there in the first place. Here’s the latest, and it involves Jocelyn Kirsch, the young woman from Winston-Salem who is in trouble with the authorities in Philadelphia for various ID theft and related charges.

There are all sorts of rules about creating photoillustrations, essentially the merging of a photograph and artistry (beyond the photograph itself). One is that it ought to be labeled as such. In this case, the newspaper did, but I’m told it was in teeny-tiny type. But I think more importantly, when a photoshop result looks like reality, as opposed to fantasy or the like, it is something to be avoided on serious subjects, such as crime and punishment.

Yes, this Bonnie & Clyde tale of young lovers in Philly is good stuff, but that’s not an excuse for lowering the standards.

I apologize for the extended absence. Friday was a blur, with tornado coverage, and yesterday I was sick.  I know there are people who blog in their pajamas, but I am not one of them.

So where are we. Where were we?

One of the things I’ve been trying to wrap my head around recently is what I will call “disaster equivalency.” It is the horrid calculus of newspaper editors everywhere, in trying to equate tragedies at home with tragedies abroad. Now we have three. First is the damage from our May tornadoes in the Triad. Second is the tsunami disaster in Myanmar. Third is the earthquake in China. On a human scale, what happened here is a drop in the bucket compared to the unfolding tragedy in Asia. But as far as newsworthiness goes, it is a much bigger story, and one that people are still talking about. The high winds here yesterday kept the conversation going.

I know this: There is not enough time in the day nor column inches in the paper nor screens on the Web site to account for and take stock of all the suffering in the world from war and weather. So we pick and choose each day. This is not a cry for help or to yell “enough!). It’s simply a recognition that as our world shrinks, and more and more things become “local” stories, it is incredibly hard to find places for it all, in our hearts and minds and in our pages and Web sites. It’s not a desire to tune it out, either. Just a wish that there was less of it to worry about.

I had two radio appearances in the past two days, confirming once again that I have a face for that sort of business.

First, I was interviewed yesterday on WQMG by Busta Brown. He was talking about the photo that went with Day Three of our series on The Murders at Grassy Creek (It’s the 5th photo in the slide show). The shot shows Ron Hudler with First Lady Hillary Clinton when he was presenting the official White House Tree to the Clintons. There were two questions. One, were we making a political statement by running that photo? and Two, what was our intent with the two black men who can be seen in the background? To Busta, there was something a bit demeaning about the servile positions of these men. He’s a nice guy and a good and fair interviewer, so I enjoyed talking with him. My take is that A) the series was in the works long before we knew that there was a primary to worry about or that candidates would be in W-S that day, and B) the photo is about Mr. Hudler and Ms. Clinton. We received two photos from the presidential library, and this was the only usable one. The impression or pereception is bothersome, but not enough to not use the photo.

Second, I was interviewed on Talk of the Nation this afternoon by Neal Conan about the disappearance of local movie critics. As some of you may know or still remember, the Journal’s movie critic was let go during a downsizing several years ago. WFDD didn’t broadcast this half of the show, but it’s available online, although may not be available until later in the day. The summary of my comments: Tough decision, but ultimately the best of several bad scenarios. And movie watching and info about movies keeps changing. Citizen journalism includes criticism.

I received a request for help about archiving newspapers. I asked Julie Harris, our research director and library manager, who is an ace at all things regarding preserving the printed word: Here is her response:

It depends on how much newsprint to save, how often the papers are going to be used, and how elaborate you want to be in preserving the paper. Library of Congress has a discussion on preserving newspapers online. It discusses such things as microfilming and digitization but the main items are about preserving the printed paper itself.

Hope this helps.

If you read our Letters to the Editor, you’ve probably seen a fair number criticizing our columnist Scott Sexton. What started the ball rolling was a column about layoffs and executive pay at Hanesbrands and the company’s contributions to the proposed downtown arts complex. The gist of their comments are that corporate philanthropy is worthy, regardless of the giver or the timing of the gift, and that people who don’t recognize the value of downtown arts projects are shortsighted Philistines.

But more to the larger point that I sense in these letters and conversations around town is the idea that a columnist for a newspaper or a TV station (where Jesse Helms earned his stripes) or a Web site should be a cheerleader for and never ask hard questions for the folks in power. That they shouldn’t jab or poke or prod or tease.

That’s precisely what they should do, as well as praise if they think it’s warranted. Interpret facts and state an opinion. It’s not the newspaper’s opinion. It’s their opinion. We provide a columnist a forum (and a paycheck) because we think the voice is worth hearing, if not always agreeing with.

Now Scott works for the Metro Editor, who reports to me, and I report to the Executive Editor who reports to the Publisher. So, yes, there are a lot of people who could tell Scott what to write about (or more likely what NOT to write about.) But it’s a false Eden. The result is pablum. Once you start telling an opinion writer what their opinion has to be, pretty soon the whole thing falls apart. You can’t have a guard dog protect only one half of the yard.

Do I agree with everything Scott writes? Of course not. But that’s not the point. Or my job. It’s to make sure that he plays fair, reports accurately and states his opinion in a way that’s easy to understand and hopefully enjoyable to read.

The Hyphens. The I-40s. The Hushpuppies.

Those are my suggestions for what to call the Warthogs when they take the field next year at the new stadium. As our columnist, Scott Sexton, asked, “What’s wrong with keeping the Warthog name?

I don’t mind the Warthogs. A big improvement from the Spirits, but progress marches on.

One of the ticklish things about yesterday’s announcement by the folks who will be running the Winston-Salem MLBTTWCTW* is that the Journal will be one of the funnel points for folks offering their suggestions on what to rename the team.

Me, personally, I’m not crazy when the business side of the house gets involved in issues that we might cover. There’s the potential for conflicts or the appearance of conflicts. But if you think about it, the Journal outside the newsroom is already doing business with many if not most of the institutions we cover. It’s unavoidable. So all we can do is manage it, and by that I mean be upfront and work hard not to let the back side affect the front side.

*Minor-league baseball team that was called the Warthogs.

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.

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.

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.