Otterblog

three_mugs.doc

Some followups and quick thoughts ...

A week ago, we ran an exclusive about Wake Forest selling the naming rights to Groves Stadium to BB&T. The reader comments are very interesting and more extensive than for many stories. Two most prevalent threads are 1) that WFU sports may have become a bit flashy for its own good and 2) that BB&T still isn’t considered a hometown company by many people in Winston-Salem. Both are good points of discussion. We do a lot of these reader reactions, and sometimes they click and sometimes they don’t. When they do, it’s an impressive conversation. As it is here.

Several of us had a good chuckle recently with Scott Sexton’s column on the sketch artist who drew the picture of the person of interest in the killing of Jonesville police office Gregory Martin. The sketch looks a fair bit like Adam Lane, the Jonesville trucker charged with murder and assault. And there’s a fair resemblance to Scott as well. The above file has all three mugs side by each.

I was a little bothered this morning by the story we had of the reported rape and assault on the woman in West Virginia. Generally we don’t identify rape victims, but in this case the Associated Press named her, because that was her wish and that of her mother. This is the old classic of just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

A couple of quick notes as we head into the Labor Day weekend.

1) Pearls before Swine will disappear on Monday as part of our rotating test of comics to replace Kudzu. F Minus takes its place. If you have comments about either strip, you can send them to or this link on JournalNow. Very different strips. I liked the clean lines of Pearls and the silliness of it all. Will see if F Minus grows on me.

2) We have posted a story about the continuing fallout of the Jill Marker/Kalvin Smith investigation. The city manager is ordering a new review. This comes in part as a result of our initial investigation into the crime and the police and prosecutorial work. Similarly, the story this morning about the eugenics exhibit at the library is based in part on our reporting on the state’s sterilization program. One of the things that newspapers get accused of is having an agenda and pursuing that agenda at the expense of other stories. Agenda is a loaded word. To the extent our resources allow, it is incumbent upon newspapers to report on injustices and not just in an initial report but the follow-ups where the actual decisions are made. I think that at times, readers get a little exasperated. But there’s not a great deal of choice in the matter when it comes right down to it. If we don’t do it, who will.

3) Have a safe and fun Labor Day. Don’t drink and drive, and if you drink and grill, please use a potholder.

I was forwarded a thoughtful complaint today from a reader about the art used with our coverage of Coy Privette. For those with a short memory, he’s the big-time moral lobbyist and former legislator who was arrested Thursday on six counts of aiding and abetting prostitution. As story lines go, this one’s got a lot. First, the hypocrisy issue. Second, the age angle. He’s 74, she’s 32. Finally, race. He’s white. She’s black. Here’s the writer’s complaint:

Two people are involved in an illegal act:  prostitution.  One is a white boy of the “good old” variety, a Baptist and an elected official.  The other is an African American woman.  Despite the guilt of both parties, the journal illustrated the incident with a single face.  No surprise which one it was.

Why, then, do I see only the face of an underprivelidged black woman in the paper?  Where is the weight of justice and equality in this?

As I told this writer, we ran a previous story that used only a photo of Privette, but her point is well-taken and important. Her picture isn’t that important to our understanding of the story. Just as it wouldn’t be if she was closer to Privette’s age and of the same race. Ms. Summers was arrested as well, so her mugshot—newsroom parlance for the small headshots we run—was available, but the fact that we can run something doesn’t mean we should.

We had a spirited discussion this morning about the juxtaposition between our two main stories on Page One on Sunday. The first was a centerpiece about the disparity in arrests between white and non-white students in the public schools. The second was about officials trying to figure out what to do about the Friday night events for young people, which has turned into a disaster for the city.

Race plays a central role in both articles. The first was a story that was in the works for some time. The second was spot news, important developments after a shooting late Friday. Taken together, they could paint an unflattering portrait of young minorities. And they might appear as if we are piling on. The stories are not part of a package, but they are side by each.

Juxtapositions are sometimes unfortunate, and we work hard to avoid those that don’t have a legitimate reason for co-existing on the same page. But I think that the events from Friday night and the seriousness of those events pushed us into three possibilities. One, to move the shooting folo to another page or place on that page. I don’t like that idea because it’s an important story and it deserved to be in that spot. Two, to move the centerpiece or hold it. That’s a possibility, but it’s easier said than done, and we had already told readers it was coming. Three, to do what we did. To me, that’s the best of three difficult choices.

Let me know your thoughts.

We have published several stories in the past few days that look into questionable conduct by elected officials. They include our story of last week about Debra Conrad, a Forsyth County Commissioner; our stories about the foundation run by the members of the N.C. General Assembly’s black caucus, and a related piece yesterday. Some might even throw in our column from a week or so back about Rep. Larry Womble and his Ferrari.

What’s the common thread here? Is this “gotcha” journalism, or are there more substantial issues at play. First, let’s remove the Womble Ferrari from the discussion. I’m not sure it’s unethical to drive a nice Italian sportscar. May be un- something else, but that’s another debate for another day. Since the fall of Mike Decker/Jim Black, Meg Scott Phipps. etc., the ethical bright line in North Carolina has moved. Nobody said it moved. But it did. And perhaps what was business as usual a few years ago now feels kind of—well—icky.

The media’s role in this is complicated. Sometime we are accused—with a bit of justification—of being society’s nannies, of tsk-tsking disapprovinglyabout every little thing, and making transgressions seem more serious than they are. But my other feeling—which trumps the Nanny 911 deal—is that little problems are quite often indicators for larger problems. They are the warning signs. And as a newspaper, assuming that you are handling the material responsibly, there is a predisposition to publication when you are dealing with elected officials.

Good Summer Read: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. This is a crazy, big book built on a big, crazy (and fictional) premise: that the Jews of the world are relocated to Sitka, Alaska and its environs after the collapse of the goal to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the late 1940s. To paraphrase the old Levy’s rye bread commercials, you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it….

A friend emailed me this story this morning from the Courier-Journal in Louisville, KY. The summary: The NCAA kicked out a sports reporter from the NCAA baseball tournament because he was doing a blog while covering the game, in violation of the NCAA’s rules about unauthorized Internet broadcasts of its events.

This is one of those old world meets new world struggles that is both serious and silly at the same time. Serious because net broadcasts come in all shapes and sizes, from print to video, from commentary to the whole match. Broadcasters pay rights to broadcast, and they don’t want people to watch the game through some back door. And silly, because, it’s just a blogger filing some notes and outtakes from a laptop.

From the perspective of a newspaper person who has at times had a love/hate relationship with the Web, I can tell you this. The Internet always wins. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But eventually. Not just newspapers, either. But all institutions, from governments to businesses. The Web is about the flow of information, and that flow can’t be denied. It can be slowed. But that’s it. The NCAA can boot the credentialed journalist. But my guess is there’s somebody in the stands with a BlackBerry doing essentially the same thing. Next year, he’ll bring a laptop. The following year, he’ll have video off his camera phone. And so on and so on.

New media. New rules.

It’s easy to reduce Larry Leon Hamlin, who died yesterday, to a caricature of himself: a flamboyant, purple-wearing, dramatist. But that misses the point. He found success in what on the surface appears to be an unlikely area: making Winston-Salem THE home of black theatre in America. Unconventional people are difficult heroes for the rest of us. We’re quick to focus on the flaws, the parts, not the whole. That Hamlin could balance (or is it juggle) the creative and administrative sides of theatre is testament alone to his gifts.

Hamlin was a difficult person for the Journal in many ways. A tough interview. Inscrutable often. Maybe he didn’t trust the reporters (who were mostly white) that interviewed him. Or the difficulty was part of the public image. I don’t know. But his death and sickness were no less inscrutable. Since he became seriously ill about a year ago, there has been an incredible wall of silence about what he had, how he was doing, whether he would recover.

And that continued right up to the end. On Tuesday, his family intimated he was still recovering. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was hope talking, not deceit.

The illnesses of public people are a strange netherworld for journalists. We saw this the other day, where Marc Basnight, the leader of the N.C. Senate took a leave of absence so he could care for a sick family member. Which family member? Basnight’s office initially wouldn’t say. But it was an open secret in Raleigh that his wife was very sick, and so eventually, that was confirmed by colleagues. Hamlin is a private citizen, but in some ways he is a public figure, no less than the mayor or the sheriff. His illness and subsequent death have an impact on a wide range of people. And I’m not sure all the silence for the past year was in everyone’s best interest, including the NBTF. Clearly, we don’t want to bury the dead before they are dead. But I do think that clearer communication of his condition would have been beneficial for everyone.

You would think that a surefire way to be depressed is to spend two days at a meeting of newspaper editors and newspaper circulation managers. I did. And I’m not. Maybe I should be, but that’s neither here nor there. Myself and about 50 other news and circulation types from Media General (which owns the Journal) spent two days at the Benton Conv. Center talking about circulation, mostly what’s called single-copy sales and mostly about Sunday single-copy sales. Single copy is all the papers sold through racks and at stores. In markets like WS, it’s a growing part of our total circulation.

And unlike subscriptions, it’s much more variable. It changes with the weather, with the time of the year, and—of course—with what stories we put on the front page. It’s also clear from some of the research, that different people are looking for different things in their Sunday paper. Some folks want coupons. Others want deep-think pieces. Others want a quick read of the news—and don’t give them any depressing stuff. The main issue, though, is time. Sunday is no longer a day of rest, reflection and reading.

One of the exercises we did was to compare the best-selling and worst-selling Sunday papers from each of the newspapers and try to look at what worked and what didn’t. The winning papers had a couple of things in common. First, they were well-designed, particulary in the top half. Two, the main stories were local. Three, they tended toward more serious news . Not necessarily mayhem, but more news than lifestyles. (Our best-selling Sunday single-copy paper was about the investigation into the shooting death of Sgt. Howard Plouff.) But if there was an easy solution, I didn’t see it.

What I’m interested from all of you is the following. If you’re an occasional buyer of the Journal, tell me about your decision-making process in choosing to buy the paper on a particular day.

I don’t know how many of you saw this story today, about the arrest of the publisher of a weekly newspaper in Alamance County. Tom Boney, the publisher, is eccentric, but he cares about public records and open meetings, and he fights the good fight. If you saw our story the other day about the Davie school board holding meetings in a member’s garage, you know why this is such an important issue.

WK_FRST_paper_—Newspaper_struggles.doc

This morning I was part of a panel discussion regarding whether newspaper circulation declines are related to the professional press’ general rejection of public journalism. The findings, by Burton St. John III, a professor at Old Dominion University, are attached above. Also on the panel: Mayor Allen Joines, Mary Martin Niepold, a journalism instructor at WFU (and occasional reviewer and contributor at the Journal), and Justin Catanoso, who is the exec. editor of the Triad Biz Journal weekly.

I rejected the author’s conclusion. As the good folks at RJR say, correlation doesn’t imply causation. Public/civic journalism sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice it leads to gobbledygook.

Newspapers are having a hard time of late, and we do need to keep working at keeping close tabs on the concerns and voices of average folks, rather than just experts, but the answer isn’t in journalism by committee or by poll.

Here are the remarks I gave:

The press’ problems are not unique to newspapers, and it’s simplistic to say that the answer is public journalism. Broadcast journalism, both network and local, have also lost viewership, and you could argue that television has always been by default a much more interactive medium.
The problem as I see it is that newspapers are a general interest product in a special-interest world. And American society over the past 50 years, arguably since the end of World War II, has been about the rise of the individual and the decline and fracturing of geographic-based communities.
Look at Forsyth County, the most important county where we circulate. 30 years ago, there was Winston-Salem and Kernersville. That was it. Now we have 10 municipalities in the county. Each with its own demands. And there’s been a hardening of what people expect in their news. The idea of objectivity has been pushed away. Conservatives listen to Fox. Liberals listen to NPR. The middle—where objectivity and dispassionate reporting live—is getting pushed and squeezed like never before. Some of what we do comes off as arrogance, but I’d like to think our attitude is earned. It’s a tough business. And where one of the few enterprises that regularly and purposefully writes stories that are guaranteed to anger its customers. It comes with the territory
I agree with the author that newspapers are a unique and profound cornerstone to citizenship, but I don’t think public journalism gets us very far. News is a funny commodity. What we think is important isn’t always the same as our readers, and we ignore them at our own peril. We’re a business. Each day, we put together a newspaper that we think enlightens, informs and entertains. And then we put it out there for people to decide whether they agree.
Basically people don’t want to be preached to by newspapers about what they ought to think. They want—I think—a newspaper with the guts to challenge the conventional wisdom, with the integrity to listen to all sides and keep pushing to get it right, and with the common sense to understand there isn’t a formula.

Tucked in the bottom of the latest news out of Blacksburg, about Cho Sueng-hui’s video that was mailed to NBC, is the statement that the network delayed releasing the video at the request of the police.

These sorts of requests are not common, but they are not unusual. We’ve had two in the past few months. Both involved requests by the WSPD to delay running mugshots of people arrested. In both cases, the police argued that they were still doing witness lineups and that running a photo could corrupt that process. Because of our community’s history of bad lineups with the Darryl Hunt case, we agreed to delay publication for a short period. Not ideal, but workable.

Although some law-enforcment officials have criticized NBC for airing the video, many of the victims apparently found the message strangely cathartic, in that it gave them an explanation of why Cho did what he did, that it wasn’t them. It was him.

Another view: One of my co-workers is dating a Korean woman, and he pointed me to these newspaper Web sites that show how this story is being covered in South Korea, where Cho and his family are from.

http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/