Otterblog

It’s that time of the year again,when a bunch of the best and brightest college students invade our newsroom for three months of work and learning. As I’ve said in previous posts, this is one of the true pleasures of the job, helping smart and ambitious college journalists advance in their careers. Many of our interns have gone on to big-time journalism jobs, and I’d like to think that some small part of their success was based on their 12 weeks at our paper.

Our four newsroom interns are Erik Spencer Hill, Winston-Salem State University; Liz DeOrnellas, UNC Chapel Hill; Maura O’Keefe, University of Virginia, and Jamie Chevillet, University of Ohio (she graduates next month).

So, you will likely see some unfamiliar bylines during the next few months. Give them encouragement and let them know what you think.

One of my favorite sites is something called The Rural Blog. It’s really a collection of news about rural America, but the folks who run it do a good job of culling stories and packaging. The most recent installment has an interesting debate about Obama and Appalachia. One thing that caught my eye in the included map is the boundary of Appalachia, as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission. Winston-Salem is in the region, but curiously enough, Roanoke, Va. isn’t. Will have to look into that.

Other views: It’s been a while, but about two years ago, I posted a bit about what to call people who aren’t in the country illegally. It’s an issue at newspapers across the country. Here’s what Ted Vaden, the ombudsman at the News & Observer of Raleigh has to say about the issue.

I’ve gone back and looked at my political entries for the last four months and all I can say is --- I blew it. The idea of North Carolina being the keys to the kingdom, the last dance/waltz/chance, the Alamo, the dagger through the heart, our finest hour (your metaphor goes here.) ... was preposterous. But here we are. Two weeks from a primary that is crucial to both candidates. It’s silly to suggest that at this stage of the game that the whole campaign comes down to Murphy to Manteo, or is it Murphy vs. Manteo. But North Carolina’s mix of urban/rural, black/white/brown, lunch bucket and lab coat, etc. is a true proving ground for Sens. Clinton and Obama.

Journalistically, it’s incredibly energizing for our newsroom, if somewhat exhausting. The reason is simple: We matter. Yes, candidates can take to the airwaves, and they have blogs and email blasts and Web sites to reach their core supporters and the like, but you will see in the next two weeks a courtship of the NC print press that you haven’t seen in years. My sense in Iowa and New Hampshire is that the candidates are working two crowds. First and most important are the local reporters, whose customers will vote. But second are the national press, whose stories define the race and help drive fundraising. Of course, you’ll see that here as well. But the national dynamics are largely set. Now, it’s all about the votes here. My guess is that you have to go all the way back to 1976, when Jesse Helms resuscitated Ronald Reagan’s campaign in the NC primary to find a time when our primary vote was ultimately so consequential.

Down the road: A heads up of sorts. This Sunday, we will be starting—in print and online—a special five-part series on the killings at the Christmas Tree Farm in Grayson County in January. It’s the work of many outstanding folks on our team, principally Monte Mitchell, our NW reporter. I hope you will check it out and let me know what you think. It is a heckuva tale.

Jim Crawley, whose byline was a regular feature of our Washington coverage when he covered the military for Media General, died last night. He was 51. Jim was a class act. Smart. Connected. Passionate. Helpful. A journalist’s journalist. And a friend.

The story of Eng and Chang Bunker is one for the ages, as our story this morning made clear.

The phrase Siamese twins is now considered pejorative, and rightly so. The preferred word is “conjoined.” But what I find so fascinating about the Bunkers and this history is that the name was appropriate for them. They were twins—of a fashion—and they were from Siam, now Thailand. And their life, from Asia, to the carnival life, to country gentlemen married to sisters in the mountains of North Carolina is an incredible journey.

Historians, writers and filmmakers have been wrestling with the Bunkers—metaphorically speaking—for years. And there is a whole body of work about them. Darin Strauss’s Chang and Eng is an imagined narration by Chang of their life together. I don’t know how much of it is true, but it is a lyrical novel.

Blue Ridge Country wrote about the Bunkers some time back.

But for my money, the best thing I’ve seen recently was a piece in June 2006 in National Geographic on the Bunkers and their descendants, who now live in and around Mount Airy.

Getting some recognition: Our Raleigh correspondent, James Romoser, scored an exclusive yesterday, with an interview of Barack Obama and his regret over remarks that seemed to denigrate small-town, rural America. The story went viral, and we’ve got something like 5 pages of comments on JournalNow. Incredible. Another example of how the Web is changing politics and political reporting.

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I’ve been spending the past few days thinking about the death of Roy Thompson, who died Saturday at Salemtowne. For many years, he was the local columnist and a reporter for the Journal, and he was really one of a kind. In the golden age of newspapers, before the Internet, before cable news, he was the real deal. In that era, many columnists were almost inseparable from the identity of their city. Think of Mike Royko and Chicago or Jimmy Breslin in his prime and New York. The city’s stories bubbled through these people. For better or worse, Winston-Salem’s stories bubbled through Roy Thompson. Its quirks. Its optimism. Its manners. Its sense of place in the world.

As somebody who loves journalism and thinks he’s reasonably good at it, I can tell you that it’s humbling to spend an hour or so thumbing through Roy’s clip files. He could flat out write. The Roy Thompson column was a work of beauty. Sly. Visual. Elegant in its simplicity and respect for clear writing. Roy was of the old school, where columnists never said what they thought. They just described what was going on and let the weight of their words paint a pretty clear picture of the events as they ought to be seen. As a reporter, he was wide-ranging, covering everything from the Klan to Thomas Wolfe and the Vietnam War. I’ve attached one of his later columns, which is both an essay on clutter and the ineptitude of state government.

There’s an expression somebody told me several years ago that applies to many of the jobs that people do. It goes something like this: Imagine a triangle with three words at the corners. One is Good. The other Cheap. The last Fast. When you are getting a job done, you can at most pick two of those. In other words, something that is cheap and good isn’t going to be fast. Roy was fast. And he was good. I don’t know if he was cheap, but whatever we paid him back then, it was a bargain.

Roy retired a year before I came to the Journal, so we never had a chance to work together. Surely my loss more than his.

Lot of Kismet rolling around in the Kosmos these days.

A few days ago, someone sent me a link to a very cool site, called boonvilleusa.com, which is the work of a NY photographer/artist type named Tim Briner. The basic concept is that he is spending a month at each of the six Boonvilles in the U.S., and only those with one E. No Boonevilles need apply. The goal is to explore community and interaction across this great land. There’s a lot of really crappy multimedia and the like in the Interland. This is the rare exception, and the section on Boonville, NC, just down NC 67 is really good. And that got me thinking about the old days at the Journal, 20 years ago, when my best friend here was a fellow reporter covering Yadkin and Davie counties, and occasionally we would sneak out to Boonville to have lunch at this restaurant called Betty’s. They had frog legs, among other delicious things.

My friend, Steve Mills, left, but he’s still my close friend, and he is a heckuva reporter and has probably done more groundbreaking work on police and prosecutorial misconduct than any journalist working today. Here’s the second part of his series on officer-involved shootings that appears today in the Chicago Tribune.

Irony factor: Last night, as we were working on the story about Jim Grobe becoming the next coach of Arkansas, an email rolled into my inbox from WFU. It’s entitled What’s New @ WFU. Here are the top items:

Wake Forest accepts bid to Meineke Car Care Bowl December 29; purchase tickets and register for Wake Forest bowl events
Law, medical schools receive $7 million gift; scholarships created
Wake Forest is backup site for Presidential Debate

Of course, this is produced well before the time it’s sent, but still ...

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I don’t know how many of you saw the obituary story that ran the other day on C.B. Hauser. He was a remarkable man, one whose life journey was both a mirror and a metaphor of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

In researching that story, one of our editors came across a photograph of the story in the Mount Airy News on Hauser’s arrest in 1947 for failing to yield his seat while on a bus. I’ve attached the photo here. It’s a little tough to read, but it’s an incredible glimpse into our past. Hauser is referred to as an “educated negro,” and it’s not clear whether that adjective is used to assert that he a) ought to know better or b) ought to be given more privileges than “uneducated” Negros.

As a journalist, when I look at these stories from the past, I often ask myself “What would I have done.” Injustice is injustice, but journalistic detachment often competes with journalistic compassion for the underdog. I do think that this article was an important piece of journalism, because writing about it—even in the stilted manner in which it was done—showed the ridiculousness of the Jim Crow laws. To report is to acknowledge, and acknowledgement is along the path to respect.

Separately, a quick plug for a pair of fellow bloggers. Our StyleFile blog, which is all about fashion and such, is back on the Web after a shoe closet full of technical problems. Its hosts are Stephanie Stallings and Jeri Young. I told them they should rename it the OTTERCLOG. But they declined. Check it out.

We published some gorgeous photos this morning by David Rolfe, one of our photographers, of fall along the Blue Ridge Parkway. David is an incredibly gifted shooter, with an eye for landscapes and the relationship between the manmade and natural worlds (more on that at the bottom).

One of his shots was from a place called E.B. Jeffress Park, which is along the Parkway right at the place where Ashe, Watauga and Wilkes counties meet, mile marker 271 or so. It’s known for its Cascade Falls.

Most folks don’t know who E.B. Jeffress was, but everytime you drive the Parkway and marvel at A) its sheer beauty, B), its proximity to our front door and C) the incredible bargain it presents, you ought to thank him.

Here’s the deal: Edwin B. Jeffress was born in Canton, west of Asheville, in 1887. He graduated from UNC and began a career as a journalist, eventually becoming president of the company that published the Greensboro Daily News. Jeffress was a political broker, backing Max Gardner in his campaigns for governor. When Gardner won in 1928, he made Jeffress chairman of state highway commission, a forerunner to NC DOT. They were both instrumental in consolidating road building at the state level, rather than leaving it to individual counties.

Even then, politics were part of road construction. The original route for the parkway, which began as a public-works project in the Depression, was supposed to go through Virginia and the Great Smokies, bypassing North Carolina. Jeffress persuaded Interior Secretary Harold Ickes that the highway needed to follow the Eastern Continental Divide, which moved the road’s route to the south, to the route we’ve all come to know and love. And he also argued that it ought not to be a toll road.

So what happened to Jeffress? He was often mentioned as a candidate for governor, but an operation to remove a brain tumor in 1934 left him physically weakened and pushed him into semi-retirement. He died in 1961. The park in his honor was opened in 1968.

And that, as Paul H. says, is the rest of the story.

To backtrack for a second, I asked David for a few tips on shooting fall foliage. Here’s his response:

The approach to shooting good fall color is basically the same as shooting good photos generally.  Give your photo a dominant point of interest, and pay attention to the light.

1) Avoid general scenes.  A breathtaking expanse of colorful trees will still profit from a single point of focus, such as a lone red tree in a blanket of yellow ones, a rocky outcrop against a wall of color, or a starkly contrasting white trunk of a dead tree against a tapestry of lush colors.

2) Get in close.  Position yourself to have a single bright leaf or branch in the foreground or off to the side.  The eye is attracted to the close-up leaf, then slides easily into the rest of the scene.

3) Don’t shoot into the sun, or into the shadows… unless the colorful tree that caught your eye is nestled against a dark background.  In that case, move in close enough so that the tree is the brightest object in the scene.

4) Use a flash to light up leaves in a shady foreground, or from underneath the branches.

5) Don’t be afraid to make photos on rainy or foggy days.  You won’t get the sweeping panoramas, but you can still capture the rich colors of leaves up close, standing out against the hazy background fading softly into the distance.  A National Geographic photographer once said that bad weather makes good pictures.

My tip: Please don’t click while you’re trying to drive ...

Sorry for the late post. One of those days.

Two deaths in the larger journalism community that I think are worth noting. The first is Barry Tunick, a long-time puzzle editor at the LA Times. His puzzles are carried in many papers, including the Journal (or at least they used to be). Creating and editing crossword puzzles is really hard. It takes the right balance of concision and humor and clarity. And for those of you who are crossword puzzlers, you know about that wonderful combination of joy and frustration that makes spending an hour with a tough puzzle so worthwhile.

The other is Ernest Withers, a long-time photographer in the Memphis area. Withers created some of the most iconic images of the civil-rights movement, including incredible photos from the striking sanitation workers in Memphis prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He has a straightforward approach and a great eye for detail and sweep.

You can see some of his photos here.

The two longest-running story lines in our paper both deal with criminal-justice issues intermingled with a good deal of politics. And they both started in the 1980s. The first is the Darryl Hunt case, now largely resolved except for the continuing echoes through study committees, legislative commissions and the like. The second is Michael Hayes, which began in 1988, is still going strong, and could continue for years.

Hayes is in court this week, trying to get released from his commitment to a state mental institution after being found not guilty by reason of insanity. It’s a commitment hearing with criminal and political overtones. This is one of those stories that I feel has been with me my entire career, and it’s incredibly difficult to cover. Many of the records are sealed by patient-confidentiality laws. The law on commitments in insanity verdicts is complicated. And there is so much emotion and anger on the part of the most-interested parties.

What I keep coming back to in this case is how different things could have been. We were talking this morning about the difficulty officials in Watauga County are having finding a jury for a capital murder case up there. Somebody cracked they ought to move it to Davidson County. It would be over in two shakes. The Hayes killings took place on Old Salisbury Road, a whisker away from the Davidson County line (It’s where the demolition landfill of NC 150 is.) I’ve thought from time to time what would have happened if Hayes had killed those people in Davidson, rather than Forsyth. Different trial? Probably. Different outcome? Likely. And all that followed would also be different

Our story this morning on the trial (lead) balloon being floated by the Arts Council is an interesting metaphor for a lot of other issues that swirl around Winston-Salem. The council has proposed that the county create a taxing district along one of the shopping corridors where an extra property tax would be levied and distributed to nonprofits. Not surprisingly, it’s going nowhere. There are logistical and mechanical and ethical and semantics problems that are virtually insurmountable.

But I think that within this idea is a germ of something much larger, that of a sense of longing for the good ol’ days, when raising money in WS was a lot easier. There were fewer doors to knock on and the owners of those doors were a lot more generous. Kind of like how trick or treatin’ has changed, come to think of it. But those days are gone, and they’re not coming back.
The Arts Council’s lament is a familiar one to lots of legacy industries and institutions. I’ll put newspapers in that category. The explosion of retail along Hanes Mall Boulevard and University Parkway and South Main Street in Kville and L-C road etc. etc. is largely fueled by national and regional companies setting up shop here. They’re not always the best advertisers in the paper. Doesn’t mean they’re bad businesses or the like. They do things differently. Wishing they would change or forcing them to change isn’t the answer. You have to find a third way, which is always the tricky part.

I believe in the importance of the Arts Council, just like I believe in the power of newspapers. But I also believe in the power of the marketplace, which is much less restrained than it was in the past. It often provides cruel truths to those who listen.