Otterblog

Sorry for the slack posting. I was in Raleigh Friday (more on that in a second), and off yesterday, taking in some mountain air. It is true about the leaves this year. They are spectacular.

Anyway, I was in Raleigh for a job fair, recruiting college students (and a few recent graduates) for internships and full-time work down the road. Other than having to get up way too early and hit two rush hours on the drive back, it’s an incredible experience to spend the day talking with bright and ambitious young people about journalism. Lots of schools represented: Carolina, WSSU, ASU, NC State, NC Central etc.

With all the perceived troubles in our industry, there’s a small amount of fear about what you might find at such an event, i.e. what if they gave a job fair and nobody showed up ... The students I spoke with are pretty savvy. They know what is happening in journalism, the budget constraints, the changing media appetite of the American public, our limited attention spa ...

And they care and don’t care. Certainly, they (and their parents) want a secure job future with a reasonably good paycheck. But they also want more. They want to tell great stories and make a difference in the communities they cover, which at the end of the day is what it’s all about.

diffee.doc

A few years ago, we wrote a piece about a guy named Matt Diffee. Grew up in Forsyth County. Went to Gospel Light Christian School. Now has a job as a cartoonist at .... The New Yorker. I’ve attached the story.

He’s a funny guy, with the sort of sense of humor you’d expect from a cartoonist. He has a book out, and here’s a column he wrote about it in the LA Times.

CONTEST UPDATE: Right now, I have a whopping total of two, yes, two entries for my pumpkin headline contest. Again, the winner gets a coffee mug. I’ll accept entries through the close of business Friday.

Sometimes, I am struck by the difference between what is considered important local news and important national and international news. Like a lot of newspapers, we think our franchise is in reporting on local events, stories you can’t get anywhere else. But we also recognize that the world is a complicated place, and that readers ought to be able to get a reasonably complete snapshot of their world, soup to nuts, with their morning Ovaltine, green tea, coffee, coke, water, milk or OJ.

The result is a front page that is on occasion one of strange bedfellows. Take Sunday’s paper. We essentially have two lead stories. One is on North Korea and its nuclear ambitions, which are a serious threat to peace in the Far East. The other: “Utility-panel oversight to be considered.”

This is a good story, and it’s an important story. The City-County Utility Commission is an 800-lb gorilla in our community. They run the water. They run the sewer. They run the landfill. Think about that the next time you turn on the tap, flush your toilet or put your trash out. And there are some serious concerns about whether their autonomy is a good thing or a bad thing. But that oversight aside, the water will still come on tomorrow.  It pales in comparison to the threats posed by the Korean peninsula.

So what to do? If you measure serious news by the extent to which you or a lot of people could end up dead, we would have a very different front page than we have now. And that’s not what we’re aiming for, so when we choose stories for the front page, we look at importance and also relevance, which is why those two stories exist cheek by jowl.

GOURD UPDATE/OTTERBLOG CONTEST: Now that the fair has come and gone, it’s time to wait on the seed catalogs and stop musing about agriculture for a while. But here’s one last look at the harvest that was. This photograph moved across the wires this weekend. It’s of a pumpkin-canoe race in Wisconsin. Write me a headline. Best entry gets a Journal coffee mug.

Fellow blogger Esbee sends in the following question or questions:

Ken, are you open to suggestions for what to discuss? Because I’m very interested in why the print media seems to be so intensely focused on the Amish schoolgirls who were killed, to the point of snapping as many pics as possible of their funerals and mentioning every intimate detail they can grab a hold of, while the accompanying text almost always mentions how much the Amish dislike having their pictures taken, want to live privately as much as possible, etc.? It seems more than slightly disrespectful, especially since the previous shootings, including the one where the girls were sexually assaulted, haven’t generated the same print media… “fixation” is the best word I can come up with.

Please note that by print media, I mean in general. But since I can’t ask the print media in general, but I maybe can ask you, I’m doing so.

—————-

We had a discussion yesterday at our afternoon story budget meeting about the art for the Amish funerals and whether to use photos that showed the Amish. Being respectful and being disrespectful are not always opposites. The Amish don’t like to have their photos taken, yes, but at some level, a funeral is a community event and I think a larger group of people than the immediate families wants to share in the grief. There were a lot of photos available, none that I would call outstanding. What I’m drawn to in the shot we used are the sunglasses of the young man on the left. They seem fairly hip and stylish, a little intrusion from the outside world that the Amish try to keep at arm’s length and to me symbolic of some larger themes.

I think America and by extension the media have had a love affair with the Amish for years. There’s also a lot of fascination, envy, jealousy, and skepticism thrown in as well. It’s that whole Witness thing. The Amish are presented as honest, hard-working people with these beautiful fields who have turned their back on much of the technology we take for granted. Do they really not have cell phones? computers? DVD players? How can their kids function without IM? We joke that they have to be cheating somehow, raiding the technology refrigerator at night, so to speak.

And while the Amish have been trying to live this pious and simple life of worship, farming, and buggies, the world is closing in. Land prices are up. Temptation is everywhere. The moat isn’t what it used to be. The school shootings of the other day are unfortunately the perfect symbol of the Amish inability to seal off their “better” world from our world of Columbine and 9/11. They’ve failed, and so have we. And if a crazy man can kill five girls in a one-room schoolhouse set among farmland so pretty that it makes you cry, then God help the rest of us.

Point is, it’s a great story on many levels, and newspapers and the rest of the media love great stories. And the privacy that the Amish hold so dear, that they don’t want to weep and grieve in public, makes them that much more noble and the story that much better. I think some papers/TV stations have gone a little overboard, but in many ways it’s more interesting than the House page scandal.

One of our reporters had an interesting lesson in new media last week. Bert Gutierrez, who covers city government, was out doing a story on people recently annexed by Winston-Salem. He interviewed a guy named Joe Bryant. Joe has a blog, so while Bert was interviewing him, Joe was doing the same thing right back. He even got the pictures to prove it.

Here’s the link. It’s pretty amusing. Bert comes off as exactly as I would expect him to: honest, to the point, determined.

Citizen journalism is a brave new world, and we in the professional journalism business are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge that you don’t need a) training b) a printing press c) editors to be a journalist these days. That said, I think these things help. Some more than others. For printing press, substitute distribution. At some level journalism is about reaching an audience and writing stories that get read.

Fair update: We went to the DCF on Sunday: Chicken on a stick, awesome root beer (over by the Yesteryear village, 50 cents a cup), WSPD hotdogs, fried snickers, bag of peanuts. Can’t beat it. The biggest crowd drawer/pleaser is the 921 lb. pumpkin. Unbelievable. People were filing by it like it was a dead head of state. This is an N.C. record, and pumpkins this big don’t come along very often, so don’t miss it.

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

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.

Every once in a while, it’s worth remembering all the good that the media and particularly newspapers do. If you listen to the Far Right, we are damaging national security and endangering Americans while we gloat under the protection of the First Amendment. The Far Left says we are kowtowing to the powers that be, afraid to stir the pot and ruffle feathers.

So, here’s a story about how journalism makes a difference in your community. We wrote a piece on Sunday on the Johnston family from Granite Quarry, a little town in Rowan County. Cancer—specifically colon cancer—runs in their family, and our story by Janice Gaston was about the incredibly hard decisions this family has made as they’ve come to learn of the disease in their genes. It’s very powerful and moving and courageous.

Since our story ran, several families with histories of cancer have gone to the hospital to get tested, to be informed of their risks, to know what they’re battling. I hope it turns out well for them. We shine all sorts of lights as journalists. Some expose wrongs or call officials to task for their actions. And some simply push people to seek out their own truths. They’re all equally worthy

Good reading: I’m not a huge fan of Time magazine, but their cover story this week by Michael Weisskopf is exceptional. He’s the Time correspondent who lost his hand in Iraq when he tossed an IED out of the Humvee he was riding in.

If you’ve been reading the paper, then you know there is a major investigation underway involving a WSFC teacher. The story broke last week when we got hold of a search warrant that asked to search the teacher’s home computer. From there it’s snowballed into much wider and more serious charges.

You’ll also note that a judge sealed an arrest warrant, which is highly unusual. We negotiated to get that order amended, because we believe that there is information on that warrant that doesn’t name the children that is still valuable for the public to know. This would include how many children are involved. One child is one too many, of course. But is it three or five or 10? That’s what we want to know, and what we believe the public ought to know.

Many people think public records and public-records laws apply just to the media. But they don’t. In fact, if you read the law, which is Chapter 132, you’ll note that the word “newspaper” is never mentioned. The operative word is public. They’re your records.

9X9: I am a serious Sudoku freak. It’s a great brainteaser/unscrambler. We’ve got a

of it on JournalNow. Here’s the link. Try it. You’ll be hooked

We get all sorts of budget lines every day from the wire services we subscribe to. Here are two from the same news cycle of the LA Times/Washington Post News Service, known as LATWP.

  BUSH-POLL—WASHINGTON—President Bush’s approval rating has
reached its highest level for the year, helping to boost the
Republican Party’s image across a broad range of domestic and national
security issues just seven weeks before this year’s mid-term election,
a new Times/Bloomberg poll has found. Developing, by Ronald Brownstein
(Times).

      LAURABUSH _ NEW YORK _ Laura Bush has proved to be a popular and
comforting presence during the nearly six years that her husband has
served as president. But her sustained presence at the center of the
world stage this week is unprecedented, which White House aides are
promoting in the belief that her emerging profile can only help
bolster President Bush’s sagging popularity. 1,150 words, by Michael
A. Fletcher (Post).

So which is it? a) reaching its highest level or b) sagging. You decide!

Through the years, we’ve had dozens of exceptional interns come through the Journal newsroom. We’ve hired many of them. They’re bright, young journalists, and because they are so bright and eager, we’ve taken some pleasure in the occasional prank. The best goes like this: We call a reporter over to an editor’s desk and tell them that we’ve just gotten a call that a train has hit a liquor store in Yadkinville. They jump out of their seats, and start making phone calls like crazy. It usually takes only a few minutes for them to learn they’ve been had. Yadkin County has no liquor stores. It has no trains. It’s a great prank, and it NEVER got old.

But now, we have to find a new one. Voters in Yadkinville approved ABC stores yesterday in a referendum (Voters in Jonesville turned them down).

I’m not going to get into an argument about the morality of alcohol, but this is the end of an era (and not just for pranksters). Sometimes, change happens so slowly that you can’t see it. But other times, there is a clear dividing line between the past and present. And the sale of liquor in Yadkin County is one such event. It speaks to the county’s evolution into a more suburban county, more firmly tied to Forsyth than in the past. The Yadkin River is not the Berlin Wall that it used to be from a cultural standpoint. It’s just a muddy river with a couple of bridges.

Good Reads: Why is rebuilding so hard? There are two good articles that explore the problems in the complex redevelopments of New Orleans and Ground Zero. The NOLA piece is in Fortune from a couple of weeks back, and it’s by Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 (an exceptional book about pre-Columbian America ...) and the Ground Zero piece was published in the NYT on Monday and is by a reporter named Deborah Sontag. They are exceptional in their depth and breadth and their willingness to explore the intersection of ego, power, suffering and property. And they make clear that Democracy is a messy, messy process when it comes to dealing with such a huge and emotional undertaking.