Otterblog

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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.

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In more than two years of writing this blog, I’ve talked about ethics, hirings, firings, public records, etc. But never about the snow. I haven’t had the chance. Today is the day…

In the pantheon of weather stories, a snowstorm is at the top of my list. Journalistically, it can’t compete with a hurricane or epic flooding, but there’s something nice about the whole deal. Usually not a lot of damage or loss of life. It’s incredibly pretty, and it’s a nice disruption to the every day. And because we live on this interesting knife edge when it comes to snow, there’s a lovely uncertainty and serendipity.

A newsroom—at least down here—is a funny place when it snows. Folks haul out clothes that look like they only get used during a winter storm. One editor has on socks with snowflakes on them ... It’s like casual Friday meets Northern Exposure.

But there is some good journalism going on here that reflects how we’re adapting our coverage with technology. If you go to Journalnow, you’ll notice that we have a closings box. For years, we ceded that area to TV and radio. The idea being that our print product would be dated by the time it hit the ground. The Web has changed that, and our online team has hustled to develop a way for folks to post closings on our Web site. It will grow and improve over time, weather permitting. Secondly, our multimedia team came to work at 3:30 or so, posting stories, photos and videos really early, while the world slept in the muffled stillness and the angels’ frozen breath draped itself over limb, eave and blade (sorry, will stop with the purple ...) That’s as close as we’ve gotten to a 24-hr newsroom in many years, and it’s pretty cool.

Some quick notes: Check out the multimedia on Dorothy Calloway, teacher extraordinaire from Pilot Mountain. And if you wonder why we fight so hard to keep public meetings open, read Scott Sexton’s column today. Finally, we’re targeting photos from Kernersville in our online galleries and also in the Kernersville Journal, which is published Thursday. Here’s the story. If you’re in K’ville and have a good eye, send us your shots.

And as a special winter treat, your faithful correspondent has attached his own photographic effort from this morning. Have a good one.

I was working the nightshift last night and had a few minutes to kill between editions so I was flipping through a back issue of Newsweek. Anyway, they have a little section in the front of quotable quotes, including those submitted by readers, such as this one from Larry Roth, from Germanton:

You don’t want to just take one that can’t play dead in a cowboy movie—WFU Football Coach Jim Grobe.

The coach said that in an article in the Journal in late November. Newsweek credited us as the source, although in the tiny type. Still appreciated.

Another year is upon us.
I’ve been away for a few days, and it is always a bit strange to get back into the flow of things. Especially this week. The holiday order sort of assured that this week is pretty quiet. The real start of the year will be next Monday.

In no particular order, I spent the few days away reading (Microtrends, Rome and Jerusalem and The Mother Tongue), watching a few movies (Charlie Wilson’s War and Juno) and visiting friends here and there. In a span of a few short days, we had an epic rain and, this morning, the first time that I felt really cold all season.

This promises to be a really interesting year for the nation in general and journalism in particular. Here’s why: First, the elections. This is the first national election since the bottom fell out of newsrooms. Most staffs are down, and there is going to be pressure from all sides to cover and inform voters on critical issues. And oh, yeah, don’t stop entertaining us about Britney et al. So, for all newspapers, there are going to be hard—but valuable—decisions on how we use our resources. On the other end, the digital gatherers—Yahoo, Google etc.—continue to add original content. The extent to which they wade into politics is yet to be seen, but they have the resources, if they choose, to be players. Second, Fleet Street vs. Wall Street. Newspaper stocks got crushed last year, and in my opinion, most were spared the brutality of restructuring (again) by the fact that they were all in the same boat, so activist shareholders couldn’t single out one company as being the cloud in an otherwise sunny day. My guess is some of that patience will wear thin in 2008. Finally, the economy. Oil is at $100 a barrel. Housing market is generally flat to down. Much more than in the past, our economy—and a whole lot of newspaper revenue—is built on consumer spending.

On the plus side, newspapers are savvier than ever. We’re taking more risks, doing less things just for the sake of tradition, and looking carefully at our role in the community and in the little d democracy we live in. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth watching. So stay tuned.

I was having dinner out on Friday with OTTERBLOG Jr. and Wheel of Fortune was on the TV in the background. I rarely watch it, but it’s one of those programs that I find both incredibly lame and reasonably enjoyable, largely for the same reason: it’s so easy. I hadn’t seen the Wheel in a while but had been thinking about it because of our recent story on Winston-Salem being an answer in a recent puzzle.

Here’s our editorial page’s take on the whole thing, which I think is spot on.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I made my way through the Saturday crossword puzzle. One of the final clues was 51 ACROSS: One of its nicknames is “Camel City. The answer, of course, is Winston-Salem.

That is a good clue. It just about made my day. And in true understated crossword puzzle fashion, there was no press release or publicity agent calling us so we would write a story about it ... my karmic circle was complete.

If you were like me, you got up this morning, went outside with the dog, looked for the paper, scratched your head, went back inside. And waited. And waited. The problem, as we noted on our Web site, was a severe electrical and mechanical problem that jammed up our press for more than four hours. It involved some bad paper, a broken slitter, web breaks, the whole nine yards.

If you’ve ever seen a newspaper printing plant when it is running flat out, you know what a thing of power and beauty it is. Absolutely stunning. Like every other piece of machinery that is asked to work hard at high speeds and high detail, presses have problems. The difference between our business and most other businesses that have occasional production problems is that customers know about ours ours right away. Or at least a few hours later.

I’ve spend a fair bit of time with Frank Clayton, who’s our production manager. He’s about as dedicated a professional as you are going to find, and when he says that it took four hours of work to get it all fixed, my guess is that it would have taken another crew about six.

This isn’t to dismiss a late delivery as unimportant. It matters to all of us that the paper gets to your house/apartment/diner/box on time. And in this day and age, when home delivery to your computer wasn’t affected, we take it all the more seriously.

You will probably have to wait a long time—or at least until next year—to see two front-page photos on college sports championships in a three-day period on the front page of the Journal.
That’s the deal this past weekend, beginning with ASU’s trouncing of Delaware in the FCS championship and WFU’s knockdown/dragout against Ohio State yesterday.

As our sports department can attest, I’m not the world’s biggest fan. I don’t watch ESPN (although I do like the magazine a great deal.). And in my perfect world, academics would get the same respect that athletics gets. But I recognize that for many of our readers, college sports is incredibly important. And the stories of young men and women who have come together as a team and dedicated themselves to a goal are powerful stuff, particularly in times like these.

Along with all the emails thanking us for our coverage have come a few taking us to task. How big a headline are you going to use when real news happens, one person wrote, referring to our THREEMENDOUS headline on Saturday. One of the things about front pages is that they exist only on a particular day. So Saturday’s paper is really measured against what was available and how we used it. Yeah, there are some things to consider with regards to fairness and balance and equal time. But to scale back on blowing out an exclusive and great spot photo of young people celebrating an unprecedented win just seems a little hard-hearted and short-sighted. If there had been equally important “hard” news that day, we would have figured out another plan.

Back from some R&R. I hope you all had a nice T-day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday etc. etc. ...

One of the amazing things about journalism and the new world order is how stories get picked up and repackaged for different audiences, often outside the control of the creators, and how information flows and finds its own level.

Two quick examples. First, last week, during one of the most bizarre news weeks leading up to the Feast of the Turkey, we ran a story about a dowry dispute involving an Indian woman who was injuried in a car wreck in Yadkin County and originally taken to WFUBMC. It has been a major story in the Indian press, and our inboxes were flooded with folks offering up their real and imagined expertise on all things dowry-related.

Second was our exclusive on RJR deciding to drop its print advertising—at least for a year. We pursued and reported this piece as a straightforward cost/benefit business piece, but it has been picked up in the fashion press, playing off the whole Camel No. 9 deal.

If you go to that Jezebel site, click on the other big smoking news there, showing Amy Winehouse picking up a smoke off the street.

One last post before rambling off into drumstick heaven…

As most of you know, we’ve been doing an audition of sorts the past few months for a comic strip to replace Kudzu, after the death of Doug Marlette. Here’s a piece from The Wall Street Journal about the comics business that speaks to many of the issues we’ve been dealing with. And as a reminder, you can post your comments about our tryouts here..

Have a safe, festive and restful Thanksgiving…

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Yesterday, we were hosts to a group of journalists visiting from the UK. They were in town to look at our editorial system, which is called Content Watch, as a replacement for their current system. CW is what we use to manage files through the production process. They work for a company called Trinity Mirror plc, which is the largest publisher of newspapers in the England, Scotland and Wales. Their titles include regional papers in Birmingham and Wales and the national paper, the Mirror, which has a circulation of well over 1 million, is their flagship paper.

The Mirror’s history is part of the very fabric of journalism. It was the first tabloid newspaper, for many years was the best-selling newspaper in England, and then was taken down by Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. and the Sun. Now it’s one of several tabloids jostling for space and market identity on the newsstands. Wikipedia has a reasonably cogent summation of the Mirror and its ups and downs.

In my conversations with these folks, it’s clear the British journalism is a lot different than that practiced in the U.S. They’re much racier, and celebrity-focused, and because British consumers tend to be single-copy buyers rather than subscribers, they have to make their bones every day. That said, we face a lot of the same issues—the value of print in a digital world, a changed workforce with neither the time or inclination to read, the eternal search for what readers want: today, tomorrow or the next.

This past Sunday, I gave a talk to a group called “The Tankers,” which as I understand it, is a collection of retired and semi-retired university types and assorted friends who are interested in public affairs. They had asked me to come talk about politics and the media. I’ve attached a copy of the speech in a pre-delivery shape. They were a good group that asked a lot of pointed but reasonable questions.