Otterblog

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…

It’s amazing that after all these years we are still running into new ethical gray areas in journalism. Here was yesterday’s issue: We posted a short story early in the afternoon about the double homicide off of Coliseum. Our online stories allow comments. One of the first comments was from a woman who said she knew one of the victims. If you read our comments, you know that the identity of the commenter is a little squishy. People often use screen names. In this case, it was—I think—Angelina1. Anyway, if you’ve ever posted a comment on journalnow, you know that it requires registration, including an email address. So we had this woman’s address. And the question was, whether it was proper to contact her and see whether she wanted to talk with a reporter about her friend. Our Web site has an extensive privacy policy, which spells out a lot of things, but doesn’t exactly say whether your email address can be given to a reporter. I talked with our attorney who helped draft the policy, and it was his opinion that legally we were allowed to contact this person. From an ethics point of view, we didn’t. Our reasoning was as follows: the comment was made with the expectation of privacy. Now, that’s not a rule going forward. It’s how we looked at this particular case. If it was a life or death situation, i.e. a killer on the loose etc., we might see things differently.

But this shows the mingling of the online and print worlds in ways we couldn’t imagine. I’m going to do some research on this—time permitting—and see what other news operations do in this area.

I’m also interested in your thoughts about the proper course of action.

OK. So I’m back from a week at the beach. Sort of like Nixon. Tanned, rested and ready. A week largely unplugged. Got my news from the Wilmington paper. It is strange being at the beach and reading the local paper. All this news about school boards and road construction. And all I’m concerned about is the next high tide and the price of bait shrimp…

One of the things that I found pretty interesting is how quickly Jesse Helms’ death vanished from the front and center. It was huge news. Then it was big news. And now, it’s gone. Our staff did an exceptional job on July 4, covering the breaking news of his death. And you don’t realize what a team of dedicated folks you have until you start trying to get them to come in on a paid holiday to report and write a big piece. Even now, with all the turmoil in our industry, that is something to be proud of.

When I returned to North Carolina in 1990 as a political reporter, I was thrown into covering the Senate race between Helms and Harvey Gantt. My sense is that Helms was past his political prime, even though he had 12 years left in the Senate. He could still give a good speech, still had great political antenna, but not the lion/tiger/bear he once was. I don’t know if he hated the press as much as people said he did. My guess is that he understood us better than he let on, and he loved to use reporters as foils for what he was doing or not doing. And for a reporter, there was no bigger thrill than for your paper being singled out in one of his speeches as an example of what was wrong with the world. What I also remember is just how incredibly polite he was when you got him one on one. He understood that politics was about relationships.

One of the questions that keeps getting circulated in the aftermath of his obituaries is whether the press, which was so hard on him when he was in the Senate, gave him a pass in his obituaries in recounting the very raw and ugly side of his political career. There’s some credence to that. I think it is harder to speak ill of the departing than the staying, and of the dead rather than the living. At this point it doesn’t change anything.

Beach reads: The Great Gatsby. Somehow, this classic evaded me during high school. It’s one of OTTERBLOG Jr.‘s favorites, and the writing and pacing is incredible. Like Twain, it is timeless. Also, Stiff, by Mary Roach. Perhaps more than anybody needs to know about the cadaver business. Entertaining and amusing.

A few weeks ago, the editor of our sister paper in Bristol, Va./Tenn. made headlines when he wrote a column criticizing Andrea Mitchell, the NBC News correspondent, for the manner in which she characterized the folks of Southwest Virginia.

Similarly, there’s an outrage in Findlay, Ohio, over a story in the Washington Post about how voters in Findlay, known as Flag City, USA, are paralyzed by rumors about Barack Obama. The local paper, the Findlay Courier, wants an apology.

For as long as there have been big cities, there have been big-city journalists who have been coming to small towns and either (depending on your view) speaking the essential truths that the locals dare not speak or painting gross caricatures that oversimply complex relationships. As a mid-sized newspaper (and city), Winston-Salem and the Journal get to be on the giving and receiving end of this examination. I’ve cringed when out-of-town reporters come here and botch the nuances of life here. And I’ve also been upset when I’ve felt that somebody who wasn’t from here managed to find meaning that was right under our noses.
On the giving end, we have reporters who cover many small towns in Northwest North Carolina. And one of the charges I’ve given them is to write the stories that the local papers in those communities can’t or won’t do. One of our recent successes was our examination of the drop out rate in Lexington. Last year, we did a big takeout on the changing culture in Yadkin County. It was a controversial story. For every reader who thanked us for examining why the county’s embrace of the past was getting in the way of the future there were others who said we got it wrong, talked to the wrong people and were simplistic in our analysis.

I think it is human nature to dismiss outside criticism as invalid and uninformed, and to sieze on tiny errors as proof of maliciousness or total incompetence. It’s also easy to dismiss these stories as hit-and-run journalism. The reporters come in, gather selected facts, write a scathing piece and then leave, never to be seen again. That too, is simplistic. Reporters want to be accurate and the ones I know sweat to get it right. Particularly in this day and age. A generation ago, a reporter who wrote a similar piece on Findlay was insulated from the locals. Now, with the Web, they’re a click away from making his or her life misery.

I noted the other day the running commentary on our Web site about the racial descriptions used (or not used) in stories about crime. A couple of folks have asked me to write about how and when the Journal decides to use race as a descriptor. I won’t call this a rule, because rules tend to imply a yes-no approach to something. I’ll call these guidelines.

Essentially, it is this. We use race when it is relevant to the story or helpful in the capturing of a suspect.

Imagine this description of a robber at a convenience store: Police are looking for a black man in his 20s. Or this one: The robber was described as a heavy-set white woman. As the detectives in Law & Order might say, that ain’t a lot to go on. As you add more details, height, weight, clothing, etc., a fuller description emerges: Witnesses said the driver was a white man in his 20s with a beard and was wearing overalls and an Atlanta Braves ballcap.
But even if those barebones description aren’t helpful to the police, are they relevant to people’s understanding of the event? Some people suggest that when we leave race out of descriptions, we are doing it to cover up the extent that crimes are committed by members of one race or another. I don’t think we are. It’s just that the race doesn’t in our opinion appear to be relevant to the crime. When instances occur where members of one race appear to be targeting victims based on their race, then those caveats might be reexamined.
You’ll notice before that I said “guidelines.” One reason for that disclaimer is this: Different editors sometimes have different benchmarks on when a threshold has been reached to use a racial descriptor. We’ve erred in the past on using race when she shouldn’t have, and also in not using it when we could have. We learn from each episode.

Followup: Some time back, I told you about a great read by Gene Weingarten, on an experiment at a Metro train station in D.C. Here’s a followup. It is proof positive of the old journalistic adage, There are no new stories, just new reporters.

Like a lot of folks, I read the Journal on line and in print. I get different information from each medium. I tend to browse the Web site, and do my “serious reading” with the hard copy. Usually, but not always. There’s a whole school of research—emerging and otherwise—about how the Web is changing how we process information. The Atlantic had a good piece on this in the current issue, entitled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”
The answer—of course—is maybe. There’s a big discussion of short attention spans and the battle between surfing and diving. And so on. Google doesn’t make us any more stoopid. We make ourselves stupid…
But anyway, one of the ways that I do think the Internet changes with regards to my media habits is that I am really interested in what other people are interested in. Not to the extent of only following the crowds, but just as wondering about the intersection of my tastes and interests and the rest of the world. So one of the things that fascinates me on JournalNow and on other news sites is the most commented boxes. It’s a check and balance against the wisdom of editors and a referendum—if not a scientific survey—about what our readers like. For example, this morning, there were two important Supreme Court rulings. One was on the resolution of the Exxon Valdez case. The other on the death penalty for rapists. We put the Valdez ruling out front, and the rape ruling inside. My thinking is that the issue of punitive damages has wider ramifications than the handful of capital cases involving child rape (And this is not to diminish the seriousness of this crime in any way…) But based on the comments on our Web site, our readers—or at least those who chose to comment—are clearly energized about this ruling on both sides of the opinion. So this feedback of sorts is instructive and constructive as we make our way through coverage issues and determining the balance between what we think readers are interested in and what they tell us they are interested in.

Summer reading: I just finished an incredible biography about Genghis Khan, who built an empire that stretched across Asia and into eastern Europe. An incredible tale of how to wage war and wage peace after winning those wars. The book is Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world, by Jack Weatherford.

Back from a week at a leadership development seminar in Richmond. As I’ve told several people, it was by turns terrifying and invigorating. Terryfing because, well because, the media landscape is a terrifying place. Layoffs. Crashing revenues. Readership issues. Etc. etc. But it’s also invigorating. As we were told time and again, the demand for information has never been greater. So, if you care about news and media, this is the time to be in there fighting and leading change and the rest.

As most people know by now, George Carlin died early this morning. I’d like to think that comedians and journalists share a common bond. We understand the importance of words and the power of words and the power in the precision of words. Carlin certainly did. He’s best remembered for his “filthy words monologue,” i.e. the seven words you can’t say on TV.

Of course, now you can. Just not on network TV…

You’ll read a lot about his death in the coming days. Here’s my little addition. Click here to read the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in FCC v. Pacifica, which ruled that—indeed—you couldn’t say those words on TV. Like most court opinions, it is long.  But it’s a fascinating tour through the conflicting views and balance between free speech and the public airwarves.