Otterblog

Today is 9/11, and there are plenty of events that commemorate the attack on our country six years ago. We remember, and vow never to forget. At times, the attack still seems fresh. At other times, it is fading like a scar. Still, it is one more day that I have added to my Outlook calendar with plenty of advance notice so that I remember to remember and plan coverage accordingly. It’s there with Pearl Harbor, D Day, the holidays, and all the local events that we want to make sure we recognize at the appropriate time.

Remembering to remember seems like a strange concept and idea, but it’s an essential part of the job, and of life for that matter. It sounds cynical and opportunistic, that if you have to remind yourself to remember then it’s not an event you care about. I don’t need an Outlook reminder for my birthday ... But I think that misses the point. Reminding yourself to remember—I think—is honoring the event. It says that you cared enough to make a note for the future.

It’s gotten more complicated in recent years, as publication cycles have sped up. Many newspapers now tend to commemorate events with stories on what will happen on a particular day, then don’t do a whole lot with what actually happened on that day. The logic behind this is that by the time the newspaper hits the driveway on the next morning, the world has moved on. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Often it’s best to do both.

We ran a little business brief Tuesday about the decision by the Dispatch in Lexington to stop printing its newspaper. Instead, the paper will be printed in Spartanburg, S.C. Yes, Spartanburg, 130 miles away. The fact that the New York Times Co., which owns both papers, thinks it’s more efficient, i.e. more profitable, to print the paper, put it on a truck and drive two hours says a lot about the economics driving the newspaper business these days. Press closures and consolidations are everywhere. Here at the Journal, we print the Statesville Record & Landmark, one of our sister papers. It goes to bed before our first edition is put on the press. The Hickory paper prints the papers in Morganton and Marion.

There are a couple of factors driving this trend. First, of course, is the push to squeeze costs. Presses are huge and expensive pieces of equipment. In the old days, they cranked up once a day for the run. Now the goal is to maximize their use throughout the day. Second, is a personnel issue. It’s become harder to find people to work the press, particularly in small towns, as the equipment has become more complex. In addition, the hours of a pressman are hard, and it’s an exacting job without a lot of wiggle room.

This isn’t just an issue in smalltown America. Even the big metros are getting in on the act, as this story about the Boston Herald makes clear.

Newspaper delivery and distribution continues to change. People get their news from the newspaper in different ways and different forms. It’s possible—even likely—that the press in Spartanburg will be able to print a better paper than the smaller press in Lexington did.

But that misses a larger point. If you’ve ever watched a newspaper press in action, you know that it is a thing of beauty, power and grace to behold. It just roars, and it does this roaring at a time when most people are sound asleep. It’s the heartbeat of a city carried over from one day to the next. And when the heartbeat is divorced from the folks who read the paper, who put it together, who rely on it, there is a loss that is hard to measure but still a loss nonetheless.

Our story this morning about the problems that have befallen the Teapot Museum proposed for Sparta is one of those bittersweet cautionary tales. We’ve written extensively about this proposal, and it’s been covered in the national press as well. The national press got on board for two reasons. First, it showed up on a list of pork-barrel spending projects. There’s a legitimate economic-development argument to make about the intersection between the arts and business, but a musem about teapots is too big and juicy a target for ridicule, regardless of the merits of that ridicule. Second, and this speaks to newspaper/media culture, there’s a “writesitself” story line that also makes for great headlines: Steeped in controversy. In the bag. Brewing battle. Tempest in a teapot. You get the idea.

There’s still some unanswered questions about what is going to be salvaged from the scaled-down proposal. A teapot museum? A regional crafts/arts center? Not quite sure. One of the emerging stories that we keep coming back to in our newsroom is how do the small former-manufacturing communities in the mountains, from Sparta to Independence to West Jefferson, remake themselves for the 21st Century, and how do these places balance growth against preservation and come to terms with a tourism-based economy.

NBTF coverage: Check out our multimedia presentation for our coverage of the National Black Theatre Festival. Very sharp.

While it is not the close of business here at Fifth and Marshall streets, for much of the world in Winston-Salem it is. And so with it, comes a close to my first-annual summer writing contest. We had two entries. To recap:

First entry is a nice haiku:

speed dating was doomed
like agnolotti stuffed with
cheesy nocebo

The second entry is a Tom Wolfe vocabulary builder with a fun narrative:

Nodding his ginormous head to the crunk emitting from his hacked dvr, Larry continued to read the gray literature about getting started in bollywood. He had given up on his plan to become a snowboardcross super-athlete after the IED blew him off the course in Nepal – like the worst RPG smackdown he’d ever been given except this one left him flex-cuffed to a hospital bed with little agnolotti shaped burns all over his body, a perfect storm of pain. Finding that the chaebol financed all productions through their sudoku holding companies and speed dating extortion rackets, suddenly Larry’s viewshed opened up, each piece of the hardscape a microgreen nocebo attempting to break his spirit, like the pimply kid in the telenovela he was ignoring in the background.

I’m not going to dwell on the lack of entries, but instead take pride in the quality of these two participants. Each gets a mug, and I will communicate with them next week on how to get their just rewards.

And as a special Friday treat, here’s my own entry:

Sudoku sure beats
Speed dating, a perfect storm.
Telenovela smackdown.

Enjoy.

Many years ago, we sent a reporter and a photographer out to the Nantahala National Forest to do a story on the wild boars out there that were tearing up the place. They spent about 3-4 days, traipsing up and down the hills. They got a great story, but no sightings of a boar. Nature stories can be like that. So it was with a little trepidation that I approached the story that ran today about the search for the Hellbender, a rare salamander that lives in mountain streams. It had all the makings of a snipe hunt, and we were resigned for defeat, as there is a long and proud tradition of nature journalism not quite panning out. (By the way, Boar is very tasty. If you ever see it on a menu, order it ...)

This time, we got lucky. For most of the day, our crack library was hunting down an image of a hellbender that we could use. Not as easy as it sounds (maybe it doesn’t sound easy ...) But right after they found a photo, we heard from our photographer, Kelly Bennett. The researchers had caught one of these critters, and we had the photos to prove it. Our entire newsroom—probably me loudest—cheered. Great story. Great photos.

Summer writing contest: The other day, Merriam-Webster released its list of new words in the 2007 dictionary. Lots of cool words, like Bollywood, and microgreen, etc. So, here’s the contest. You write a three-sentence paragraph or 5-7-5 haiku using as many of these words as you can. I will choose a winner, who will get a free, yes, free, Journal coffee mug, along with the satisfaction of a job well done. Deadline is close of business on July 20. Have fun!!!

Surry_Publishing.pdf

One of the great truisims of any business is that your customers don’t really care that much about your problems. They want what they paid when they paid for it. Pretty simple. Newspapers are no different. The back stories on why an investigation fell through or why a photo didn’t reproduce well etc., are lost on readers. But there are a few exceptions, which is what today’s post is about.

Saturday afternoon, a fire swept through the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s printing facility in Hanover County, Va. They were printing their Sunday classified section. The Sunday paper is huge for publishers, in both size and profit. Anyway, the fire took out their printing plant. The T-D and the Journal are both owned by Media General, but we’re three-plus hours apart, so a fire there shouldn’t be our problem. But it was/is. Here’s why.

First, the Hanover facility acts as a server farm for some key parts of the Journal operations, including our obits-billing system and JournalNow. Those were dead for a few hours while traffic was rerouted. More importantly, the Journal ended up printing the Classified section of the Sunday Times-Dispatch and then putting the inserts on a truck and heading north. (That’s why the paper was late on Sunday.) We printed their business and living sections for today’s paper. Lots of people here—mainly in the pressroom, circulation and IT departments—scrambled to get it done and done right. The Washington Post printed the rest of the paper. Those sorts of arrangements are fairly routine through the industry. Newspapers compete like crazy, but if somebody’s press goes dark, we’re there to help.

I try to keep OTTERBLOG focused on local journalism, but there’s an interesting cautionary tale of the intersection between old and new media that’s too funny to pass up ...

Yesterday, I was looking at the Romenesko Web site run by the Poynter Institute. It’s a good clearinghouse for journalism news, gossip and reporting/writing ideas. A story about “The Pot Farm next door” caught my eye. It’s a well-written story about how marijuana growing, once the purview of country folks, has moved to the cities and suburbs. So I read it and thought about whether there’s a house in Ardmore or Sherwood Forest or Advance that is really just a shell used to grow pot ...

The story is out of the Daytona Beach News-Journal in Florida, which is a pretty decent independent paper. And like a lot of papers, its online paper is a mishmash of ads and journalism. They have some sort of partnership or arrangement with Google in terms of advertising, in that the stories and keywords in the story (my guess) help generate the footnote ads at the bottom of the story. For example, a short on an elderly person being bilked was followed by four little teaser ads for background checks and the like. Or a piece on a surfboard had links to tsunami and hurricane relief. You get the idea. The logic isn’t always crystal clear.

So at the bottom of this article about an entrepreneurial dope grower who got 10 years for building a suburban agri(evil)empire, the Google computers ended up with four ads for companies selling hydroponic supplies, closet systems, grow-lamps, etc. All the stuff you would need to grow marijuana in your house.

And so it goes ...

When people think of Big Media in NWNC, they typically think of the Journal, or of WXII, or maybe even the juggernaut that WFDD/NPR has become. But they don’t think of the Yadkin Ripple.

We published a fascinating story today by Sherry Youngquist about the changing face of Yadkin County and its small but noticeable progressivism. I was thinking of that story yesterday (I had read it before publication…) when I was doing a small canoe trip on the Dan River just north of Danbury. The Dan is like the Yadkin, more muddy than mighty, but still very pretty and an easy place to lose yourself in thought. Stokes and Yadkin are similar places. They’re close to W-S, but it only takes a few turns or a few paddles to feel like you are a long ways away.

The paper in Stokes County is the Stokes News, and like the Ripple, the Elkin Tribune, the Mount Airy News, the Pilot and the Jefferson Post, was just sold by Mid-South Management to Heartland Publications in Old Saybrook, Conn. Reminds me of that salsa commercial where the old-timer says to the other, “This stuff’s made in NEW YORK CITY.”

Jokes aside, out-of-town ownership is a fact of life for many companies these days, media and otherwise. The Journal is owned by Media General, out of Richmond. And I think it will bear watching how Heartland proceeds in these communities. The Tribune, most noticeably, has had a reputation for being a very good non-daily newspaper, and the Ripple, while in my opinion often too controversial for its own good, never seemed to shy away from printing news. How do these papers survive and thrive going forward? By being indispensable. The loss of community has been noted often in big cities and suburbs, but it is slowly hitting smaller towns, particularly those that are finally—due to better roads and people’s willingness to drive longer distances—getting sucked into the urban rhythm.

Some people might think that I want Heartland to fail, that it will help the Journal. I don’t. The Journal and the smaller papers that are in NWNC fill different roles. But strong journalism helps everybody. The papers and the readers AND the communities.

I have one of those Close to Home cartoon of the day calendars. Last week, they had a three-panel gag. First panel shows a front door of a house. Second panel shows a kid running out of the house with his arms in the air. Last panel shows him trudging back inside. The caption was something like “Last day at home school.” A few days later, they had another home-school cartoon, this one with an “awards” ceremony and the same kid winning all the awards…

So what is it about home schools that inspires such satire and ridicule and media attention? We’ve had three or four stories in the past week, a few centered on Josiah Wright, a home-schooled student from Ashe County, who went to the national spelling bee. And with that story was a larger piece on why home-schooled kids do so well in bees. Then Saturday, we had a piece about a woman from Surry County, who is “retiring” from home school now that her kids have graduated.

It’s hard to say whether journalists pay too much attention to home-schooled students. The evidence is always anecdotal. From personal experience, I think that they may good stories for a couple of reasons. First, the kids are unfailingly polite. They’re good interviews. The parents tend to be advocates and used to fighting the system and navigating the world out there. Finally, we like subjects with strong convictions, who are living outside the conventions and who challenge the status quo. It’s hard to imagine going to school in your living room. The danger I think in some of the coverage is that home school is presented as an option for everybody. It clearly isn’t.  My guess is that if everybody went to school at home, our coverage would quickly change.

New face: I don’t do a whole lot of personnel stuff in OTTERBLOG, but some hires are more important than others. Our new photo editor, Walt Unks, started yesterday. He replaced Charlie Buchanan, who retired. Walt comes from the Herald-Sun in Durham. He’s a great shooter, looks a bit like Ron Howard in Happy Days, and we expect good things from his work with our staff.

It’s never easy to come back to work after a long weekend.

This was a busy couple of days, with some tragic stories interspersed with the coverage we had planned to carry us through the weekend. Each of these stories (a drowning at Salem Lake, the auto wreck that claimed four young lives, and the shooting death of a high-school student) was horriible in its own way. All senseless. And they each ended up on our front page, a reflection of the seriousness of the events. Each also told a larger story and one that I hope was reflected in the articles.

At times, people don’t want us to write about death. It’s too sad, they say, or it doesn’t change anything. I disagree. There are potential lessons in each of these deaths, about water safety and language barriers, about the volatile mixture of alcohol and automobiles, about the violence in many of our city’s neighborhoods. Solutions are hard to come by, but the search for answers only starts with questions.

Red-Green: An interesting email we received over the weekend. When the Winston-Salem Journal publishes what offices will be closed or open on a holiday, they use red and green dots as a legend. Since I suffer from red/green colorblindness, I can never distinguish which is which. I suspect I am not the only reader so afflicted. Could another color combination be used?

If you have color ideas, let me know