Otterblog

Vacations are over. The new year is here. 2009 is going to be an incredibly challenging time for journalism, for the economy, for the region. Here’s hoping that we come through with grace, dignity and our essential characteristics intact.

I had a few days off, and when I wasn’t working on home-improvement projects, I read Lost Worlds, by Bruce Beehler. He’s the ornithologist we wrote about a few months back before his speech at Wake Forest University. Incredible book about the destruction of habitat in the rain forest and the developed nation’s myopic approach to environmental issues.

I hope people had a chance to read the first installment of Life’s Journey this Sunday. It’s an ongoing series about one man’s encounter with death (his own, eventually). There’s an incredible tale here, about bravery and managing adversity. And it’s what newspapers do very well. It’s also a risk for us. A series implies several articles, and we enter this project not knowing whether Mr. Cherry has one month or 5 years left to live. So it’s a journey for us as well, and one that we don’t know how it will end.

I feel that during the past few months, I’ve been a bit distracted from this blog, and my conversations and interactions with our readers. I will work harder at this in 2009. As always, your thoughts and comments are encouraged.

OTTERBLOG will be operating on holiday mode for the next two weeks. The news cycle—from a local standpoint—is sluggish this time of year, and there’s no reason to elevate events to postworthy status.

When it’s all said and done, 2008 will be looked at by historians as the watershed year for American newspapers. This year, we were abandoned by the capital markets, we searched for a new business model for both systemic and economic reasons, and we became firmly tethered to the Internet. 2009 will be filled with challenges and strains from even more directions.

The basic issue remains the same. The need for reliable and entertaining news and information remains the same. The need to tell what happened is hardwired into who we are.  But the value judgment, i.e. what are we willing to pay for that information, has undergone a rapid transformation and erosion. That won’t let up anytime soon.

At the Journal, we’ve said good bye to some important parts of our newsroom this year, culminating next week in the retirement of Charlie Elkins, our senior editor for presentation. Charlie is a unique individual, with incredible gifts in design and language, a rarity of balance in the right and left sides of the brain. He has a ruthless grasp of style and grammar and an artist’s sense of how the news ought to be presented. He is one of those people who believe—correctly, I might add—that grammar matters, that clarity counts, that proper punctuation isn’t anything goes. Through the years, I’ve worked with him on more projects than I can remember, and he’s always come through, even when I’ve made a hash of it from my end. At the end of the year, he’ll retire after 43 years at the Journal. It’s well-earned.

The question I am getting asked today is “What do you think about Detroit?” And the people asking aren’t wondering about my views on the auto bailout. They’re talking about the decision by the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press to pull back on home delivery from seven days a week to only three days, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. The papers operate under a joint-operating agreement that gives Sunday to the Free Press alone, so for the News, it’s only two days a week.

There’s lots of discussion about this on the journalism Web sites. What’s staggering about this experiment is the scale on which it is being tested. These papers aren’t small dailies. They’re major metro, albeit major metros in a struggling market. Until fairly recently, newspaper economics were somewhat accepted ratios. A daily paper’s value was somewhere about $1,000 per subscriber. You had a journalist for about every 1,000 circulation, and your circulation revenues were somewhat equivalent to the cost of running your newsroom. These are all rough, but general, yardsticks that varied by paper. So, if you accept those past equivalencies, it’s pretty clear that the folks in Detroit are doing a whole new calculus with several key assumption/hopes/dreams:

1) That a significant number of seven-day a week subscribers will purchase the paper on days when it doesn’t hit the sidewalk in front of their house. They’ll be 3 or more as opposed to 4 or less.
2) That those who don’t buy the paper will read it online on the days they don’t, triggering more page views and higher online ad revenues.
3) That advertisers don’t desert the single-copy editions.

They’ve said they have no intention to cut journalists, because the demands of keeping the Web sites updated are going to increase. We’ll see how that goes.

What’s interesting from the decision about days is abandoning the Wed. subscribers. Most papers use Wednesday as the food day, and the paper tends to have lots of circulars. Quite often, advertisers who use circulars don’t like to insert them into single-copy papers, because those papers can’t be targeted.

The other main issue in Detroit is that the economy in Michigan is much more in trouble than the rest of the country. So, the publishers there are switching models at a perilous time for customers and advertisers. My guess: If it’s successful, there will be a lot of imitators. If not, the idea still isn’t going away.

Let me know what you think of this idea.

The question I am getting asked today is “What do you think about Detroit?” And the people asking aren’t wondering about my views on the auto bailout. They’re talking about the decision by the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press to pull back on home delivery from seven days a week to only three days, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. The papers operate under a joint-operating agreement that gives Sunday to the Free Press alone, so for the News, it’s only two days a week.

There’s lots of discussion about this on the journalism Web sites. What’s staggering about this experiment is the scale on which it is being tested. These papers aren’t small dailies. They’re major metro, albeit major metros in a struggling market. Until fairly recently, newspaper economics were somewhat accepted ratios. A daily paper’s value was somewhere about $1,000 per subscriber. You had a journalist for about every 1,000 circulation, and your circulation revenues were somewhat equivalent to the cost of running your newsroom. These are all rough, but general, yardsticks that varied by paper. So, if you accept those past equivalencies, it’s pretty clear that the folks in Detroit are doing a whole new calculus with several key assumption/hopes/dreams:

1) That a significant number of seven-day a week subscribers will purchase the paper on days when it doesn’t hit the sidewalk in front of their house. They’ll be 3 or more as opposed to 4 or less.
2) That those who don’t buy the paper will read it online on the days they don’t, triggering more page views and higher online ad revenues.
3) That advertisers don’t desert the single-copy editions.

They’ve said they have no intention to cut journalists, because the demands of keeping the Web sites updated are going to increase. We’ll see how that goes.

What’s interesting from the decision about days is abandoning the Wed. subscribers. Most papers use Wednesday as the food day, and the paper tends to have lots of circulars. Quite often, advertisers who use circulars don’t like to insert them into single-copy papers, because those papers can’t be targeted.

The other main issue in Detroit is that the economy in Michigan is much more in trouble than the rest of the country. So, the publishers there are switching models at a perilous time for customers and advertisers. My guess: If it’s successful, there will be a lot of imitators. If not, the idea still isn’t going away.

Let me know what you think of this idea.

I was on the treadmill this morning (no jokes, please), flipping channels. On FOX News, the story they are keying on is from Chapel Hill, where there is a controversy over the UNC libraries not having a Christmas tree this season. I’m not going to get into the politics or the merits of the debate, but what really interested me was the fact that this story was big in North Carolina last week, and now it’s made its way into the national news cycle. Seems like it took a fairly long time to make its way to this bigger platform. I’m always interested in the path that news takes from one place to another.  From a news standpoint, this is a perfect story for national news: public unversity with a (real or perceived) liberal bent; debate over political correctness; questions over the interpretations of religious freedom, and the middle of the holiday season.
I will tell you that the university is getting slammed on this, and my guess is that it has one or two news cycles left.

Up in Richmond, working on social media strategies. Interesting and scary stuff, i.e. do you want to hitch your wagon to the Facebook engine? There are lots of questions about how journalists interact with these sites, in terms of objectivity and the like. And these rules are being made up as we go along. In addition, if you think about it, the pace of evolution in social networking is moving at a dizzying pace. My Space was hot. Now, not so much. So, what is going to be the site 5-10 years from now?

There was a good story late last week about electronic media restrictions at ACC basketball games. Here’s the story. As the way media information gets used and produced, these sorts of issues are going to become more prevalent. I’m interested in your thoughts on this. Let me know what you think.

http://otterblog.mgblogs.com/images/uploads/Sudoku_Grading.doc

As we get ready to gather with family and friends, I thought I would make a brief list of what I am thankful for. And because this is a blog primarily about journalism, I will keep it focused on that. Here goes.

1) The First Amendment.
2) The N.C. Public Records Act (Not perfect, but still pretty good)
3) Number 2 pencils. They write upside down and you can sharpen them against the sidewalk.
4) That pants pockets are a quarter inch wider than reporters notebooks.
5) All the incredibly smart and passionate people I’ve worked with and still work with.
6) Coffee.
7) My newspaper carrier.
8) The incredible number of paper who use the word “paper” as a precise synonym for the Journal.
9) Google.
10) The N.C. Gazetteer, consistently the most interesting reference book I use.

That’s it. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving.

If you are traveling today, maybe you are stuck in an airport. And maybe if you are whiling away the time in an airport, you are doing a Sudoku puzzle. I love ‘em, and I got to wondering last week just how they create puzzles of different degrees of difficulty. So I wrote the good people at the Mepham Group, who distribute the Sudoku puzzle that appears in the Journal. And because they are British and polite, they wrote me back. I’ve attached their response. Other than making me feel like I should have paid more attention during Algebra II, it’s really interesting.

Back after a week of raking and more raking. Glad to see winter trying to arrive.

Many of you have asked about the changes in the Journal’s newsroom management. Carl Crothers, our vice president and executive editor, explained some of the rationale in a column yesterday.

The operations of a newspaper always seem a little quaint and archaic to outsiders, particularly the relationships between the content areas (news and opinions) to each other and to the business side of the house. The lack of coordination seems silly and damaging. Why would you not want to write positive stories about your best advertisers? Why would you not want to have the same people writing and supervising news and opinion?

The first one is pretty easy. It’s about credibility, an important but ephemeral quality that is hard-won but easily lost. If we write puffy stories about our best advertisers, can you believe what we’re saying? And not just on those stories, but throughout the paper?

The News/Editorial split is more difficult. In the old days, this split was nonexistent, particularly in cities with more than one newspaper. Paper X supported these various positions, and those positions affected how stories got written. Paper Y took the other position. Much of this was driven by the newspaper as the property of one person. Its opinions and news reflected the owner’s. Pretty simple. The rise of newspapering as a profession, the loss of multi-newspaper communities, and the move to corporate ownership created a different structure, one that valued moderation and fairness in the news pages and a separation from opinion. The best example of this has been the Wall Street Journal, with its notoriously eloquent and conservative editorial pages, and its news pages that frequently revealed the shortcomings of the policies endorsed on the opinion side.

The idea is a good one. We want the people who are writing opinion pieces to have strong opinions, but we want reporters and the folks who supervise them to not form opinions, but rather to sift and gather facts and let those facts form the basis of balanced stories.

Now, like any system, it’s not perfect. But it works suprisingly well. Our critics may think it’s all a big joke, that the opinion side and the news side are joined together in crusade. But we’re not. This new arrangement will be a little tricker, because Carl, unlike Linda, is my direct supervisor, but we’ll make it work the way we always have—through respect and communication.

Election Day is a week away. Or is it? As our story this morning makes clear, early voting has changed all the rules. What’s not clear yet—and may not be clear or not be able to be clear—is whether early voting changes the outcome. Does a two-week or three-week voting period change the composition of the people who vote and therefore the results?

Early voting is also changing journalism, and it has forced us to consider when we run stories. Traditionally, the goal was to get everything done before the Sunday before Election Day. But the start of early voting creates another deadline. It’s very likely that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the voters will have cast ballots before the official Election Day. We have tried, not always successfully, to use that as a guide. This year, that’s been easier said than done, as the campaigns here have been wilder than anything in recent history. That’s forced us to spend more time reporting the spot news, the events, the rallies, the ground war, and less time on set pieces. And one thing hasn’t changed. Our sample ballot will appear in Sunday’s paper.

One of my favorite politics sites is called simply The Note. It’s put together by ABC News, and it is an incredible digest of the day’s political news, with links to stories. Like many of these sites, there’s a lot of conventional wisdom floating around. But it’s a good clearinghouse for news and often reasonably entertaining.

There’s enough news/commentary etc. from our little patch of printed paradise that I rarely feel the need to write about somebody else’s newsroom. Today, I will make an exception.

The News & Observer is running a story on the retirement of Pat Stith, its longtime investigative reporter. Pat is the real deal, and it’s not overstating things to say his reporting has led to a better North Carolina. Journalists like the phrase “end of an era” and so we throw it around like a Frisbee, but this is one of those occasions where it truly applies. Pat came to the N&O before Watergate, and he leaves at the moment in time when the public-service journalism that he has embodied is under pressure like never before.

I am glad that I was never the subject of one of his investigations, but I can tell you that one of Pat’s most remarkable traits is his generous spirit. I feel fairly safe to say that if I called him up in the middle of the night and needed a favor, he would try to help me out. And he would probably do the same for the folks whose misdeeds he has so able uncovered for nearly 40 years. That’s just who he is. We’ll miss his work.

A quote you don’t see every day. In Wednesday’s paper, we used a rock ‘em/sock ‘em presentation to highlight the fight between Novant and WFUBMC over hospital plans in western Forsyth/Eastern Davie. That story hinged on differing interpretations of what Novant said at a hearing this summer. Today’s story was far more brutal. In 20 plus years, I can’t recall a CEO ever speaking of a competitor in the same community with the vitriol that Paul Wiles used to refer to his counterparts at WFUBMC. Here’s the quote: “I have never seen an institution lose its moral and ethical compass the way N.C. Baptist Hospital has under the direction of board Chairman Steve Robertson and acting President Donny Lambeth.” That is harsh.