Otterblog

If you haven’t already, you need to check out our story and multimedia on John Dell’s day as a WSSU football player. It is great stuff. A highly enjoyable story told well. As I’ve noted before, John is a first-class reporter who is equally at home writing player profiles and exposes of financial irregularities. And if there’s anybody on our staff who could pull off an afternoon running sprints with young men half his age, it is John.

Here’s the link. Enjoy.

As John wrote, there’s a long and distinguished list of journalists putting on somebody else’s pants for a day/week/season to write about the experience. George Plimpton made a career out of it, most notably with Paper Lion. And that thread continues with the Dirty Jobs show on Discovery. Successful versions of this genre do several things well: First, find the right job. Second, make appropriate fun of your limitations. Third, respect the people whose jobs these are when the camera/notebook is turned away. Fourth: Find the larger story. Fifth, let the story tell itself. Trying too hard creates disaster or treacle.

Update: John’s account of his life with the Rams is the subject of a very interesting message board on SportsJournalist.com. Click here to read.

We are still getting emails about the John Edwards story. The refrains are: We should have run something sooner. Who cares about this? Why was there no followup story in Sunday or Monday about it.

Between chores and projects, I spent a good deal of time thinking about this during the weekend. What we should have done differently. Could have done differently. Quick answer. I don’t know. One journalist friend of mine spent a week in California trying to confirm the meeting that the Enquirer wrote about. He was unable to. It seems to me that the press gets criticized on the one hand for having no standards and on the other for having too high standards. From what I can gather, the Enquirer got half the story right, that Edwards had an affair. But the child isn’t his. Of course, there’s a chance he’s lying about that. My guess is that the paternity will eventually come out one way or another. At some point, the child is going to drop his pacifier and somebody will pick it up and do a DNA test on it…

On the same day that Edwards fessed up, a not-so-tidy war erupted in Georgia, between the former Soviet Republic and Russia over a dissident province. Tanks rolling from Russia are not the sort of footage you liked to see. The last time I saw them was in Afghanistan, and that was a disaster on too many levels to repeat. Edwards was our big story. The Russia-Georgia war ran across the bottom of Pg1. In another part of the country, perhaps the Russian tanks got a higher spot in the paper. Not here. A former N.C. senator’s confession of an affair during his run for the president is big news, regardless of how the story finally made it into print. That said, the Russia-Georgia story has legs. And it isn’t going away.

It is a measure of John Edwards’ considerable fall from grace and place that the story faded so quickly. The spigot of coverage was open wide on Friday. Saturday, it was reduced to a stream of sidebars. Sunday, it became a trickle. The last gasps are reports from Newsweek and the LA Times about their reporters’ bizarre encounters with Rielle Hunter years ago. As I said a week or so back, the mainstream media—despite what conservative commentators may think—has never been in love with John Edwards. With his candidacy dead and the fact that he was never under serious consideration for a VP slot, they were more than happy to give up their first inclination to bury him and to just do something even crueler: ignore him and move on.

Update: Here is a nice discussion that includes Rick Thames, the editor of The Charlotte Observer, discussing his paper’s coverage of the Edwards story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather and about the precision with which we write about the weather. In one sense, hot is hot. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether it is 98 or 101. But one number is a story, and the other is a standalone picture. The way we decide that is by finding out the exact temperature. Thermometers are like clocks. There are good ones and bad ones, and even the good ones don’t always agree with each other.

Most weather stories have two parts. The first is what happened. Did it snow. How hot was it. How much rain fell? etc. The second is trickier. It is the forecast. What’s it going to be like tomorrow, this weekend?

How weather gets collected and collated and communicated is sort of a tricky business—and it is a business. The Journal essentially has three providers of weather information. Our weather page is produced by Accuweather, which bills itself as the largest private weather service in the world. They’re out of State College, Pa. But there’s also a local insert from Fox8, the television station in High Point that we have a news-sharing agreement with. The third entity is the National Weather Service. They are the collector of much of the raw data that feeds all these other sources. Typically, everybody is in pretty strong agreement about what happened, mainly because they’re all pulling from the same pot of info, even if they don’t always attribute the data to the NWS. The forecast gets a little trickier. It’s sort of like doctoring a recipe. The National Weather Service puts out a perfectly good forecast. What the private weather services do—and often do pretty well—is interpret the forecasts based on local knowledge. It’s very rare that they say black when the NWS says white. What happens more often is that they say it’s going to be a darker shade of gray than the NWS forecasts.

We ran into a problem the other day when trying to produce a graphic on what the weather would be like for Tuesday. The problem was that we got the information for the forecast from the NWS. It conflicted slightly with what Accuweather and Fox8 were predicting. Our graphics editor asked whether we in essence wanted to have what amounted to two different forecasts in the paper, even if they only disagreed by a degree or two. So, we pulled it at the last minute.

I’ll be honest. I understand the need to know what the weather might do, but there’s something magical about waking up to a snowstorm that you didn’t know 5 days out as going to arrive.

Water, water everywhere: I took part today in a blind taste test of bottled and tap water to see if we could taste the difference between all the stuff being hawked and guzzled out there. Surprising results. Look for the story in our living section in the next week or so…

I was involved in a thoughtful email exchange last week with a Realtor upset with our coverage concerning real-estate prices, locally and nationally. Her take was that this coverage is self-fulfilling, that negative stories destroys consumer confidence, reducing demand and reducing price, thus reducing consumer confidence ....

Here’s part of my response:

Yes, we run a fair number of stories from New York or elsewhere about the national housing scene, but we also run a great deal of local stories about our housing market. Typically, we take stock of the market here once a month. Normally, the figures we use are Triad-wide, furnished by the N.C. Association of Realtors.  That makes sense, as we circulate beyond Forsyth County.
It’s pretty clear from the figures that the local market is struggling. Perhaps not California struggling, but struggling nonetheless.
The unasked question is this: Why does the Journal bother running stories out of New York on the national real-estate market. The answer is two-fold. First, it’s news. Second, as I’m sure you know, the national economy feeds into the local economy. Not just psychologically, but financially. We have banks, retailers, garage-door manufacturers, mortgage insurers etc. that are based here but do business all across the country. The cough in California becomes a cold here.
That said, we will work harder at providing context to the intricacies and subtleties of the real-estate market, locally and nationally.
Finally, I want to address your opening paragraph about our news coverage “delivering the wrong message to our local economy.” It seems illogical, but the newsroom’s job isn’t to sell ads. It’s to write, report and publish credible and factually accurate news and information. I would like to think that people buy our newspaper because the news there is honest and objective, rather than skewed to help a particular industry or person. It’s that credibility that makes the newspaper such a great place to put an ad to sell a house.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not wishing a collapse in home prices. I’m a home owner, too, and when the time comes for me to sell, I want prices to be moving nicely upwards, but once we start making news decisions based on what’s best for selling ads, the whole thing falls apart.

That’s one view of the newspaper’s role in the housing market. The economic news these days seems to come in three varieties: poor, bad and worse. There are small bright spots, to be sure. But despite the best efforts of the Fed and the Treasury and everybody else, the economy has cycles, and we’re at the low end right now. NW NC is in much better shape than other parts of the country, but that is little consolation if you are looking for a job or trying to sell your house.

Sin Tour: Our story on Saturday about the resurrection of Schlitz beer got some of us thinking about the old days in W-S, when a savvy traveler could hit the factory tour at Whitaker Park, get some smokes, and then head down 52 to the Schlitz brewery and grab a beer or two. Unfortunately, factory tours have pretty much become a thing of the past. That’s one of the great things about being a reporter, you can still take factory tours. Over the years, I have been able to get inside factories that made newsprint, orange juice, cigarettes, blenders, toasters, ball bearings, armored vehicles, furniture, thread, chicken breasts, mobile homes, cooked shrimp, tires, chemicals, crackers, T-shirts, sweatshirts, denim, fans, springs, ice cream sandwiches, turbine blades and .... kitty litter.

It was with a great deal of disappointment and sadness that I read yesterday of the decision by the Lexington Dispatch to stop publishing a Monday newspaper. They will be Tuesday-Saturday.

We compete with the Dispatch and compete hard when we have to. I’ve frequently told our reporters who go up against smaller papers that I want them to do the stories those papers can’t do or won’t do. But that said, I don’t wish these papers to become less competitive. More news invariably means better news.

Many newspapers, not just small ones, are evaluating whether they ought to publish every day. It’s the sort of thinking that might have been heretical just a few years ago. But advertisers have become much pickier about where and when they run ads. The Journal’s Monday paper is thinner than most other days of the week, and in some senses, that’s a reflection of how we no longer ease into Monday, but barrel into it, trying to get going, going as quick as we can. And there are a million things to do, so reading the paper (and looking at the ads) gets pushed to the back. And as to the question that’s hanging out there: Is the Journal going to stop publishing on Monday? No. Could that change? Of course. That’s not me grasping for wiggle room. It’s simply a recognition that in today’s media environment, anything is possible. 

I cut my reporting teeth on a paper much like the Dispatch, the Register-Citizen in Torrington, Conn., which published five afternoons a week, Monday-Friday. It was a great time. Eventually, we made the switch to morning publication, because the reading trends were heading in that direction, and we added a Saturday edition as well. But the five day p.m. was really the perfect arrangement because the week was the week. There was no bleed over, and when you came to work Monday morning at 6:30 a.m., you got right to it. Coffee. Doughnut. Story. Repeat until deadline.

One of the great things about the English language and our highly mobile and interwoven society is the way words and phrases travel and make their way from the sidestream to the mainstream. I was reading a story yesterday in our sports section about an Olympic sprinter and it had this passage:

For sprinter Walter Dix, the epiphany came when he was 9 years old and playing street football.
A “big kid,” four years his senior, challenged him to a race. A mismatch, some figured. Not so much. Dix beat him by a lean, which was the moment that Dix and those in his Fort Lauderdale neighborhood realized just how freakishly fast he was.

Not so much. Everybody is saying it these days. And now it has made its way into the great American newspaper as that most useful of phrases: The quick and snappy transition sentence. It does two things well with only three words. First, it bursts the bubble of the intended outcome. Second, it establishes the writer as a hip person in the know, not a stuffy, tradition-bound, gasp, print journalist,.

Not so much fever, at least in my world, began in earnest after Borat came out. But the phrase has been around a much longer time. Here’s a great piece on the history of not so much. As the story points out, the inflections in the saying have hints of Yiddish, the original language of the smart aleck.

New search engine: Just when Google has invaded every pore and fiber of our being comes a new search engine. One of my co-workers sent me the link to cuil.com last night, and in the interest of research I am going to use it for a few days to see how well it works. Its founders came from Google. And yes, it is pronounced “cool.”

Cuil update. Good-looking, not so good-working. The results don’t seem to jibe with how my brain works (no jokes, please). I think we all want search engines that think how we think. In other words, if we had the brain capacity to store all this info, it would be categorized by our version of the Dewey Decimal system. Case in point. This morning, I was trying to get the conversion from cubic feet to gallons. So I typed in those words to cuil and got page after page of nonsense. Did the same thing with Google. Got a bunch of links that all had the info, as well as a standalone figure. For those playing at home, it’s 7.48 gallons to a cubic foot. With some other searches, I’ve been quite pleased, but many seem to be a bit off the mark. Will keep trying, as I like the way the searches are displayed. Hopefully, the intuitive aspect of it will improve.

A letter we received today:

Why isn’t the Journal discussing the controversy surrounding John Edwards?  It appears to be a real story and if not, please discuss why it is not.  I remember the Journal covering the Senator Craig bathroom fiasco.  Why is a potential VP candidate treated differently?  If the story is true, then let it fly.  If it is false then disprove the claims.  The story is a week old now.  I promise you it won’t go away.  If the National Enquirer is falsely harassing Senator Edwards, then we need to know.  This IS NEWS and you are withholding it from us.  Is it because the Journal only does Republican scandals?  I really think you would sell more papers if you gave out the news and did not try to help cover up political scandals.

For those who aren’t up on the news, there is a report in one of the tabloids that Edwards is having an affair and was caught sneaking out of an L.A. hotel late at night. The MSM (aka the Mainstream Media) has not written about this story, but in the manner of all things netty, it’s still been laundered into the press through blogs and comments, etc. The LA Times went so far as to ask bloggers not to write about it, as the only confirmation of the tryst was the Enquirer.

So, what about here? We have two choices on this coverage, the way I see it. We can take one of our reporters and send him or her on a plane to California, and he/she can spend a week at terrific expense to see if he/she can nail down this story. Or, we can let our wire services handle it. If it’s true, it will come forward. I don’t buy the letter writer’s argument that the press is tougher on Republican scandals than Democratic ones. They might want to ask Eliot Spitzer about that ... Or Bill Clinton. Folks forget, but it was the NY Times that pulled all the threads loose on the wide-ranging scandal that came to be known as Whitewater.

The word from West Africa: A former Journal intern is doing some very interesting work in Africa. Christina Holder worked in our newsroom for a few months probably four or five years ago. Very smart and capable. She is doing mission work in Liberia and also writing some stories. Here’s the link to her blog. Check it out.

UPDATE: ABC News is just reporting that Edwards has admitted to an affair, but denies fathering the child. We will have a front-page story tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Readers in eastern and western Forsyth County today may have noticed that their paper lacked the weekly supplement, the Kernersville Journal or Lewisville/Clemmons Journal. Those supplements were discontinued as of last week. Our executive editor, Carl Crothers, explained the situation in a note to readers that ran a week ago. Here’s what he wrote:

This is the final edition of the weekly Kernersville Journal, which has appeared each Thursday inside your Winston-Salem Journal since 1985.

Jack White’s column will no longer appear. We would like to thank him for his many years of astute observation of life and living in Kernersville.

These are the tough decisions that editors and publishers are making all over the country. None of it easy or fun. The upside to this is that there will be more news from the eastern and western reaches of the county in the daily paper.  That’s important, as many readers who live in one part of the county work, go to school or have friends and family in another part, and they have frequently complained that they couldn’t find those stories. Does this offset closing down these sections? Of course not. But it does cushion the blow.

There’s a funny little microclimate that exists on Spruce Street, right outside the Journal newsroom. Essentially, what happens is this: wind quite often gets funneled through the street because of the GMAC building and the Journal building acting as cliffs of sorts. And so it was yesterday afternoon, when the mother of all cloudbursts dropped in to town. Just about everybody got up to look out the window and see the rain and the wind howling and bending the trees. Truly a sight. I was living in Florida in 1989, but several people said that this is what it felt like when the tornado hit back then.

I had three immediate questions on my mind. 1) Are any more trees in my backyard going to get blown down? 2) How wet will I get when I eventually leave the building and make the mad dash for my truck? and 3) How are we going to cover this storm?. The answers for 1 was no. The answer for 2 was very. Here’s more about 3.

The problem was that we already had a strong centerpiece for our front page, on the earnings collapse and planned layoffs at Wachovia. That story had to run. So did the weather. Designing pages is hard work, and it’s difficult to put two centerpieces on the same page. So we kept Wachovia where it was, and moved our storm coverage to the local section, where it could get better display. What wsa interesting about this storm was just how localized it was. Many intown neighborhoods are abuzz today with the sound of chainsaws and chippers. Others were left nice and dry. So for many people, it was a non-story, except the pleasure we all seem to get looking at pictures of downed trees.

Lots of people made our coverage work: editors, reporters, copy editors and designers, but the true heroes were our photographers. They were out there in the middle of the beast, taking photos that we posted even before the storm ended. It’s a whole different level of wet, doing something like that.

Some more info: We carried a story today about the stunning biodiversity in Great Smoky National Park. Here’s some more information about the range of life in the mountains to the west of us.

Every afternoon, I get what is called a “Site Catalyst Report.” It’s a listing of the top stories on our Web site, based on page views. It’s pretty interesting to look at, because you get specific insight into what stories readers are reading and what ones they aren’t. And because it measures page views, it’s precise. Newspaper circulation works differently. We print and distribute 80,000+ copies, and our assumption/belief/spin is that readers read the whole thing, front to back.

Online, it is different. Those sorts of assumption don’t exist. It’s all targeted. We know which stories readers looked at, and which ones they avoided or failed to see. With this knowledge comes power, the power to tailor content (and advertising) that seems to fit better with what readers want. It creates the framework of a marketplace, where each story lives and dies on its own merit, rather than getting swept along with other more important news. It’s what many people have been arguing for with regards to the printed paper: Publish what people want to read, not what you think they want to read.

The flip side is that journalism isn’t a popularity contest. Based on the Site Catalyst Reports, it’s not infrequent for stories that we thought were important to get ignored online. The brutality of the online bazaar would lead you to the conclusion that we ought not to run these stories. Nobody is reading them, so they’re a waste of everyone’s time. Someday, it may come to that. Not yet. The fact is that one of our tasks as journalists is to bear witness to stories and issues that people ought to know about. It’s true that the emphasis on writing/reporting for readers is pushing us to rethink what we do and how we approach stories, but once you make decisions based solely on page views you end up spending all your time outside with your finger in the air, trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing.

Like everything else, there’s a balance. I think it works best like this: Find stories that readers are dying to read, and run them next to stories they ought to read. They come for the circus and stay for the lecture…