Otterblog

I am rising right now—for a limited time only—to make an important commercial announcement. It is this:

VOTE.

From the presidential primary all the way down to county commissioner, there are important races for both Republicans and Democrats tomorrow. Good candidates with diverse views across the board. They deserve your attention and a few minutes of your time in the voting booth. Yes, there’s the old saw that if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain, but I think it’s deeper than that. It’s about having a stake in the system and about being part of something that is larger than yourself. There are real and important differences between the candidates, so who gets elected does matter to each of us. But that said, one of the real long-term dangers to our system of government —to me at least—comes from disinterest. So VOTE.

Now, I am putting the soapbox in storage for a while.

Good read: A friend recommended the book Goodbye to a River, by John Graves, which is an eloquent tale of the Brazos River and the history of Texas and life and learning in the 1950s. Part travelogue, part personal journey, part elegy to a vanishing landscape, it is heart-breaking and uplifting, sad and joyous. 

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.

Yesterday, I did my civic duty and answered the call for jury duty. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Right in the middle of spring break. But what are you going to do? Everybody I told I was doing this said essentially the same thing? They’d let you be on a jury? I tried not to take that as an insult on my impartiality/intellect/independence. The conventional wisdom is that journalists never get picked for juries. Lots of reasons/speculation: We’re anti-authority. We don’t believe what anybody says. We know too many lawyers. We’ve written about the plaintiffs/defense/prosecutors etc. Take your pick. But times have changed. I know several journalists who have been picked to serve on juries in recent years. My guess is it’s a function of several things. First, that the jury pool is more shallow than we care to admit. Second, a realization that we’re good at sifting through complicated matters and rendering fair decisions.

Now, civic duty takes many forms. For me, it was this. Sitting in a room about as cold as a meat locker for seven hours reading magazines and doing some work. In the background, reruns of Sanford and Son and the Jeffersons. Sort of an interesting dynamic there. The TV was off for the first 90 minutes. Then somebody turned it on. At first, it was a big annoyance, but slowly our group’s attention turned to the rantings of George and Louise, Fred and LaMonte. Even the most hard-boiled of us was laughing by the end of it all. And so, if most of us didn’t get to serve on a jury, I’d like to think there was a little bit of bonding and good will formed through the day that will carry over into our daily lives. That and the $12.

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.

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.

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.

Ah Fridays ...

Flu is still ravaging the ranks.
Sunday stories have to be edited.
There is a shooting near West Forsyth High School.
There is a college student to talk to about her career and the future of journalism (hold your laugh lines...)
Critiques to do. Stories to plan.
And an angry reader has sent in an email complaining about mssing clues in today’s crossword puzzle.

The crossword puzzle is—of course—the last straw. Rome is burning and somebody cares about a missing 9 across clue?. But reader service is reader service, so I dig out the number of our syndicate person who supplies these puzzles and get to it. While I’m talking to him, I look again at the puzzle and realize the answer to this problem and all the other zaniness in the world today.

LEAP YEAR. Thankfully only once every four years.

Public service takes many forms in the newspaper biz. There’s the whole righting wrongs thing, speaking for folks who have no voice, etc. And there’s what I like to call “refrigerator journalism”, the publication of important events in people’s lives, such as dean’s lists and Eagle Scout awards. And then there’s my wonderful telephone call with a reader named Robert this afternoon. Nice guy. He couldn’t figure out how to play the Sudoku puzzle we have in the paper. For better or worse, one of my jobs here is Sudoku outreach coordinator. I’m addicted to the puzzle. So Robert and I spent about 10 minutes on the telephone working a Level Two puzzle together. It’s difficult to explain logic puzzles solely through words, but we made our way. And it was pretty rewarding when I heard him say, “Oh, I get it.” Hopefully, he will be hooked on a great way to keep your brain sharp.

Speaking of public service. We’ve been dogging the good folks in Davidson County for several weeks to get the settlement figure that they paid the family of Carlos Claros Castro. Today, we published it.  $1 million. Settlement figures are public, but, all too often, counties will duck and dive on releasing this information. I’d like to think that Davidson County would have released it anyway, but I think our persistence had a great deal to do with this. It’s important that people know what governments have to pay when they commit fatal errors. I know many folks say that we do this just to embarrass officials, but I think we speak for taxpayers and citizens. Anybody can ask for these figures. We’re the public.

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OK, so it’s not quite up there with who shot J.R. or (closer to recent memory) Mr. Burns, but I need to say a few words about our decision to reveal the identity of our restaurant reviewer. Today’s relish has the scoop.

When we started down the Dinner Belle path two+ years ago, we had some pretty simple and sensible reasons for Laura to have a nom de spoon. She was covering higher education, and we thought that it would be awkward for her to negotiate that public beat of objective journalism while wading into the subjective world of risotto and ribeyes. We did some juggling a month or so back and moved Laura to features, and now the world of food will take up a large chunk of her time. And because one of her areas of coverage will be culture/food/restaurants, it seemed silly to have her be a reporter for some bylines and the anonymous dinner belle for others.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Laura is a great writer about food, and as a reviewer she is painstakingly honest. It gives her no delight to be disappointed by the food at a restaurant.

A quick word about anonymity. Most restaurant reviewers go to great lengths to avoid publicity. In big cities, some have worn wigs, or used fake names to make reservations, etc. The idea being that if the folks at the snooty restaurant recognize the reviewer, he or she will get better service and an extra shrimp (the one that should have been in your appetizer ...). Winston-Salem isn’t at that place yet in its food culture. My guess is that Laura can wander in and out of restaurants with impunity. Still, she is preserving a shred of her anonymity, which makes sense. Our cover doesn’t show her face.

So what does Laura look like? As a special OTTERBLOG treat, I have attached my own artist’s conception/cartoon/courtroom sketch of the dinner belle, hard at work. And yes, I am going to stick to my day job. Now, let’s eat.