Otterblog

Another year, another season of American Idol… Somebody asked me if I was going to blog about it. I said that would require me to watch it. I recognize the phenomenom. There may be a small part of me that appreciates the phenomenom. But I don’t have to be part of it.

If you picked up our features section today, now renamed LIVING, you might notice two different things about it. First, it has a staff story from Las Vegas, written by Tim Clodfelter. Tim was our TV reporter, but in the past year, we’ve reoriented much of his time to technology, particularly personal technology. And the place to get a heaping helpful of technology is the ICES show, where Tim was last week. Look for more of his coverage on Monday and throughout the week. Two was the recipe for Mac and Cheese, the perfect food, at the bottom of the page. We’re not abandoning our Wednesday food section, but as we noted to readers a few weeks ago, we’re moving stories around a bit, and trying to not carry themes out the window. Readers say they like variety, fish with their “chips” in this case.

Speaking of food. We got the scoop of the month this Saturday, with our piece by Lisa Boone on the great Martha Stewart truffle hunt in Stokes County. Who knew? The next thing you know, they will be feeding acorns to the pigs to make prosciutto up in the hills.

Finally, a quick technical update. As faithful readers can attest, the OTTERBLOG site has frequently been set upon by spammers. When it was a trickle, some of our IT folks said it was a good thing. It meant that I was getting enough traffic to attract the attention of spammers. Then it got out of control. They’ve tweaked the comments section, which should eliminate much of the problem.

When I stepped outside this morning with the dog to get the paper, there was a little nip to the air. The dew was heavy. The leaves were rustling. All signs pointed to one undeniable truth: The Dixie Classic Fair is back in town. So today, at least for this post, we’ll forget about journalism per se and I will give you five reasons why I love the fair.

1) The agricultural competitions. Where else do people square off over who has a better sweet potato? One of my most cherished possessions is the ribbon I won in 1994 for a decorated gourd. Not quite the Pulitzer Prize, but it’s up there.

2) The crowds. We all live in a fragmented society. You can spend your whole life in Forsyth County and never get to Walkertown or New Sherwood Forest or anywhere in between. The fair is one of those great seas of humanity, where you get to see how different and alike we all are.

3) The crafts hall. I am always amazed at the talent there. From the kiddie LEGO displays to the incredible carvings and cheesy photographs of waterfalls and sunsets, it is all great.

4) The Midway. The water pistol races, the knock the bottles down tosses, the ball in the bucket game. They’re a testament to American hucksterism and the idea that everybody else is a sucker except us. And where else can you pay $2 and win something that costs $1.

5) The food. You need to pace yourself so you can eat twice. First, a hotdog and some pinto beans at one of the church or community stands, then out into the larger world of sausage, funnel cakes, kettle corn, deep-fried twinkies and cotton candy. Don’t forget the bag of peanuts for the ride home!

Got a fair story? Let me know. Happy Friday.

Obituaries are a staple of newspapers. We run paid ones inside the local news section, and we also run news obituaries of important people. Important is a relative term and a subjective term. People can and do disagree about whether somebody is important enough or interesting enough to deserve a news obituary.

Obituaries can be tricky. Sometimes, the reasons people are newsworthy are not the most favorable to their legacy, and there’s a real balancing act between being true to a person’s actions in the community and also not speaking ill of the dead (There’s an old newspaper adage that “You can’t libel a dead person,” but we’ll save that discussion for another day.).

Two recent news obits highlight the tension. First, our news obit on Mark Corts, the long-time pastor at Calvary Baptist Church. He was a charismatic figure, and he built his church into the county’s largest house of worship. Our news obit reflected that passion and his vision, but some readers felt that we were too charitable to him, that where his supporters saw an unflinching belief in biblical teachings other saw meanness and intolerance for those who choose to view the Bible differently. Second was a brief we carried on the death of Jim Daulton, a former police officer. He was one of the original investigating officers in the death of Deborah Sykes, and—rightly or wrongly—he became a scapegoat for the WSPD’s bungling of the case. He’s not a mover or shaker like Corts, just an important footnote in our city’s history.

News obituaries are important. They’re a way of marking time, of taking stock. And sometimes, with the power of time and distance, we can reflect on the controversies people were involved with and give them new context and meaning.

More competition: I’m not a big fan of tofu, but I do like the occasional vegetarian meal, so I’m excited about the debut of Veggin’ Out, the latest blog on journalnow.com. It’s written by Cassandra Sherrill and Julie Harris. Cassandra is a graphic artist at the Journal, and Julie is our library manager.  Julie’s first job at the Journal was as my clerk when I was business editor way back in the late 1980s, so she and I go way back. They’re smart and funny writers, and good cooks. Check ‘em out.

A word I just created: Schadenflood It means taking a perverse pleasure in somebody else’s water-related damage. There’s a little of that in our story today about the collapsed culvert on Knollwood Street, near PB’s Takeout. It’s hard to laugh at what happened in NOLA with Katrina, but there’s something slightly—or very—amusing about a jury-rigged culvert that comes crashing down in a storm (providing nobody gets hurt).

Newspapers are a serious business and sometimes journalists are too serious and we take ourselves too seriously. The culvert isn’t going to win the Pulitzer Prize, but as entertainment, it can’t be beat. It’s easy for us to forget about the importance of entertaining people as a way of capturing their attention.

Our travel piece on Foamhenge reminded me of the other American henge, Carhenge, which is in western Nebraska. Here’s the link. Never been there, but my guess is it would be an epic road trip, and with gas at only $2.70 a gallon, this may be your last, best chance.

We are in another battle over 911 calls with local law-enforcement officials. We had asked for tapes from calls made for help with a stabbing death and with a fire on Brownsboro Road. On Monday, we reached agreement to get transcripts from the stabbing, but a judge sealed several of the fire 911 calls.

What’s interesting about our story is that although we got the stabbing transcripts, we only mentioned them at the very end and didn’t make a big deal of them. The reason is simple: there wasn’t much on them.

Now, one argument would be Why are you wasting time and money for something that turns out not to have much news value? The reason is simple. We don’t know what’s on the tapes/transcripts until we see them, and we believe that the public ought to have the right to judge their value, rather than have the law-enforcement/legal community judge on their behalf.

We’re still evaluating our options on legal strategies. I’ll keep you informed.

Memory Lane: Mike Decker’s guilty plea brought back a lot of memories from the 3+ years I spent covering the General Assembly. Decker was a more interesting politician than a lot of people think. Socially awkward, uncomfortable with the back-slapping go-along-get-along world of the General Assembly. In a profile from 1991, I wrote: He has a phrase for life at the General Assembly: fun, food and frustration.

And what about IHOP, where the deal between Decker and House Speaker Jim Black was allegedly hatched. Love the place and their pumpkin pancakes. You wonder if there is an ad campaign in the whole thing: Pancakes and politics, They go together at IHOP.

Newspapers—including this one—often have very complicated relationships with other major institutions in the community. You can see/read that complexity in how we cover such folks as the sheriff’s office, or Wake Forest University or the School of the Arts. Quite often, we will have a “positive” story one day and a “negative” story the next and on and on. From our standpoint, it’s perfectly logical. It’s just the news. But it can cause an outsider to scratch his or her head.

Our most tangled relationship, I think, is with Reynolds Tobacco. At one point, members of the Gray family, which were intimately connected with RJR, owned the Journal, although that was quite a while ago. The Journal’s coverage of tobacco and tobacco-related issues has certainly changed through the years, particularly as the knowledge of the health risks associated with smoking have become clearer. We’re no longer a cheerleader, but I don’t think we are the village nag either. We just cover the news. Our coverage is complicated by the fact that RJR is a neighbor. Many of us know people who work there. It’s much easier for journalists who don’t live here to come to W-S and write about the faults of the cigarette business etc. It’s tougher when you run into the people you criticize at the supermarket or coaching Little League.

I got to thinking about this because of our story this weekend on the new cigarette lounge that Reynolds plans to open in downtown Winston-Salem. It’s going to be a stone’s throw from the Journal. For all I know, it could be our new hangout. But it’s a bizarre concept, a place designed to sell a particular brand of cigarettes. And it comes on the heel of the latest Surgeon General’s report, a tough document about the risks of second-hand smoke. In many places, such a development would be greeted with skepticism, and the health activists would be up in arms. The public-health community in W-S is certainly more vocal than in the past, but for now, the idea of a lounge that essentially promotes smoking is simply a downtown development story. That could change, but it hasn’t yet.

ON ANOTHER NOTE: The great BBQ hunt took me far afield this past weekend, to the Dillsboro Smokehouse in Western North Carolina. Mapquest puts it 190 miles plus to Lexington, but it’s closer in spirit, if not vinegar, so to speak. Worth a road trip? Maybe not. Worth a detour? Sure.

A question put to me on Sunday morning: Why with all the important stuff going on in the world, would you choose to run a story on how people talk in Walkertown?

Part of what makes a newspaper front page is the mix of news, the serious and sober, the enlightening and entertaining. And the Walkertown piece was just a fun read that gave us a chance to explore a lot of issues: class, Southern identity in a changing region, politics, and regional dialects. And apart from the sheer entertainment value, there are two competing messages that we can draw from. Sometimes how we talk determines how people treat us, for better or for worse, and that we would be all better off by listening to what people said rather than how they said it.

On an unrelated note, I will also tell the uninitiated that Mickey’s Country Kitchen, where we did a lot of our interviews, is a great place to stop in and get a meal if you are in W’town. You won’t leave hungry.

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I am in New Orleans to fish with some good friends. The devastation in this city and region caused by Hurricane Katrina cannot be believed. We fished from a place called Shell Beach, where boats still lie stacked on top of each other. We stopped by a little general store there on the way back. The owners were unbloodied and unbowed about their future. The store is in a FEMA trailer, and before and after pictures are on the front door.

The pictures of the Ninth Ward don’t begin to tell the story of the damage to community here. There are blocks upon blocks of houses, some collapsed, others flooded beyond salvage. The flood water line is like a telltale scar across the neighborhood. Rescue graffiti tells a grim shorthand on every house. It’s the sort of place that every American needs to see for himself, either here or in Mississippi.

Ten months later, work is being done to rebuild but there is so much to do. It’s difficult to know what the answer is. Rebuilding encompasses a lot of possible outcomes, and how the Ninth Ward is rebuilt will hold the keys to the future. But for now, it just looks like a bomb went off there. As bad as the houses are, what is most unnerving is that there is no noise here. No cars backfiring on the street. No lawnmowers in the afternoon. No shrieks of children playing in the yards.

I have attached a few photos of the Lower Ninth.

ON ANOTHER NOTE: New Orleans is a great food city, and I got to indulge in two of the city’s great treats. One is a fried pie made by Hubig’s Pie Co. I’m a huge fried pie fan, and their coconut fried pie is outstanding.

The second is a Lucky Dog, sold out of these hot dog-shaped vending carts in the French Quarter. Readers of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole will recall that Ignatius J. Reilly, the story’s main character, had an eventful experience as a lucky dog man.

There are a lot of things that make newspapers unique. First on the list is this: we routinely anger our two main sources of revenue, i.e. readers and advertisers. Sometimes we do both at the same time. That’s a twofer. Do we go out of our way to do this? Nope. But it comes with the territory.

That’s the situation we’re in right now with our restaurant critic, The Dinner Belle, who wrote a less-than-glowing review of Dudley’s on the Park. The owners didn’t like it, so they’re conducting a little flier campaign to try to unmask her. Which I guess is their right, even if it’s a bit juvenile.

Restaurant critics have a tough job. A bad review can hurt a restaurant, maybe even close a restaurant. So there’s all that rah-rah “help the local economy stuff”. Which leaves a newspaper with three alternatives. One is to take the Lake Woebegon approach: all restaurants are above average. The second is to not review any of them. The third is to only write up reviews where the restaurants would get good marks. None of these work for me. It’s an abdication of our responsibility to inform.

The two scarcest resources people have these days are time and money. What good critics do is tell people what they think are wise investments of those resources. Do we expect people to agree with critics every time? Of course not. That would be boring.

What I ask of the paper’s critics is simply this: Be honest, be open-minded, be professional, be prepared, be entertaining. I know the Dinner Belle. The Dinner Belle knows food. And if you go back and read her reviews, you will see that she is extremely diverse in what she likes. She’s not anti-downtown, or anti-suburbs, or anti-sandwich shops, or anti-steakhouse etc. To me, that’s a signal that she is focused on what she finds when she walks in the door.

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Rather than talk about the War in Iraq or the collapse of the Tar Heels, I thought I’d just give everyone something fun to look at for a Monday and the first day of spring.

This map (click on above) comes courtesy of Wes Young, a reporter in our K’ville bureau, and cartographers at East Central University in Oklahoma. Wes is also our census guru, and he’s got a good radar for obscure but interesting factoids.

This is a county by county map that shows what people call sweet carbonated water: soda, coke, pop, other. It’s nice to know that in this day of homogenization and regional blurring, many things are still unique. You can see the Coke belt, the soda belt and the pop belt. What I found most interesting is the St. Louis area, a sea of soda surrounded by pops on the North and Cokes on the south.

I don’t know much about St. Louis, but if anybody has an answer, I’d love to hear it.

Also, check out the pop (blue) dots in Surry and Davie counties.