Otterblog

One of the interesting things about the new news world order is how stories move through the media, up and down the food chain. Often, it’s difficult to track the stories, because there are so many of them on a given topic, but the case of Dick Vitale—he of YEAH BAY-BEE fame—makes for a good little case study.

As the more rampant college bball fans know, Vitale had throat surgery two months back to repair throat lesions. He couldn’t talk for a few weeks (Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about what a blessing that might be…) But he’s back, and just in time for the thrilla in Chapel Hilla tonight, featuring old rivals UNC and Duke. We ran a story last week about Vitale’s return to the job he loves. I happen to like the guy. He’s funny and enthusiastic and knowledgeable, a good combination in my book.

John Dell, the reporter who wrote the story, said he pursued it because he thought it would be a good idea to follow up with Vitale after his voice went dark at the beginning of the season. Turns out we weren’t the only ones with the same idea. The Tampa Tribune, our sister paper in Florida, had the story two days earlier. Three days after our story ran, the N&O followed with its own piece. And today, the NY Times gets into the act. Tipoff tonight is at 9, so you can hear for yourself.

So, the big question is: What does all this mean? Beyond the fact that ESPN and Vitale know a good marketing/PR opportunity when they see it ....  I think it means a couple of things. First, is that what constitutes news is fluid. Second, original content is in the eye of the beholder. Third, being first is no longer the be-all and end-all for media. It still matters—a lot. But not being first is no longer reason to drop a story. Good writing and analysis also are vital.

Careful readers of our Living section have probably noticed that during the past few months that we have de-emphasized the strictness of the day’s theme. In other words, Tuesday’s features section, which has a focus on health, is also likely to have stories on other topics. The idea is to offer readers a wide variety of topics on various issues. Take yesterday’s section, which has its focus on Food. The centerpiece was about a after-school program that teaches kids how to cook, but there were also stories about Monopoly going cashless and $5200 cashmere sheets (I thought all these stories could be lumped under a collective headline “Signs of the end times” but that’s just me.).
Today’s Living section had two stories about food, including the whole Chowhound phenomenon, and tomorrow, we’re previewing a new wine column by Michael Hastings. Michael used to be our only food writer. Now we have a second. Laura Giovanelli, a former metro reporter, has moved over to features, where she will cover the intersection of food and culture, as well as general assignment features. In these troubled times for newspapers, it might seem a bit frivolous to stick another journalist onto the eating beat. But Laura is a spirited writer who is as animated and knowledgeable talking about food as she was talking about higher-education policy in her previous role here. And all our research suggests that many of our readers (including this one!!) are passionate and curious about all aspects of food. We’ll have some additional coverage changes in features to announce in coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Another year is upon us.
I’ve been away for a few days, and it is always a bit strange to get back into the flow of things. Especially this week. The holiday order sort of assured that this week is pretty quiet. The real start of the year will be next Monday.

In no particular order, I spent the few days away reading (Microtrends, Rome and Jerusalem and The Mother Tongue), watching a few movies (Charlie Wilson’s War and Juno) and visiting friends here and there. In a span of a few short days, we had an epic rain and, this morning, the first time that I felt really cold all season.

This promises to be a really interesting year for the nation in general and journalism in particular. Here’s why: First, the elections. This is the first national election since the bottom fell out of newsrooms. Most staffs are down, and there is going to be pressure from all sides to cover and inform voters on critical issues. And oh, yeah, don’t stop entertaining us about Britney et al. So, for all newspapers, there are going to be hard—but valuable—decisions on how we use our resources. On the other end, the digital gatherers—Yahoo, Google etc.—continue to add original content. The extent to which they wade into politics is yet to be seen, but they have the resources, if they choose, to be players. Second, Fleet Street vs. Wall Street. Newspaper stocks got crushed last year, and in my opinion, most were spared the brutality of restructuring (again) by the fact that they were all in the same boat, so activist shareholders couldn’t single out one company as being the cloud in an otherwise sunny day. My guess is some of that patience will wear thin in 2008. Finally, the economy. Oil is at $100 a barrel. Housing market is generally flat to down. Much more than in the past, our economy—and a whole lot of newspaper revenue—is built on consumer spending.

On the plus side, newspapers are savvier than ever. We’re taking more risks, doing less things just for the sake of tradition, and looking carefully at our role in the community and in the little d democracy we live in. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth watching. So stay tuned.

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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.

I received this email today from the Associated Press about an update to its stylebook:

A new entry has been added to the AP Stylebook:

Allah

  The Muslim name for God. The word God should be used, unless the Arabic name is used in a quote written or spoken in English.

The AP spends a lot of time thinking about what to call God. Here’s it’s entry on deities:

DEITIES: Capitalize the proper names of monotheistic deities: God, Allah, the Father, the Son, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer, the Holy Spirit, etc.
Lowercase pronouns referring to the deity: he, him, his, thee, thou, who, whose, thy, etc.
Lowercase gods in referring to the deities of polytheistic religions.
Capitalize the proper names of pagan and mythological gods and goddesses: Neptune, Thor, Venus, etc.
Lowercase such words as god-awful, goddamn, godlike, godliness, godsend.

As I’ve noted before, names matter. What we call things—whether countries, people or deities—influences how we think of them. Islam is one of the three monotheistic religions that all spring from the same tree of Abraham. Sometimes, it’s hard to divine the intentions behind the AP’s style changes, but I think the point the news cooperative is trying to make is that God is God is God, and that having different religions call what many theologians consider to be the same deity different names is confusing and causes more problems than it solves.

On another front: Here’s how the Philly paper is covering the arrest of the students who have been arrested on identity-theft charges.

You know times have changed when ... Wake Forest football is the subject of national rumor mills. That’s the situation with Coach Jim Grobe, and the intense speculation (is there any other kind?) that he may or may not be interested in the top job at Nebraska, which I suppose is to college football what Lexington is to barbecue. We were engaged in some very spirited discussions about how to cover this story. Coaching searches are maddening affairs. There are leaks. Well-intended but misinformed speculation, etc. etc. And sometimes the news is that there isn’t any news. Don’t know Grobe. People say he’s a nice guy. Certainly a good coach. He’s smart enough, too, to not close the door on anyone. So it’s not that he’s encouraging the rumors, so much as he’s not very effective at publicly squelching them. The continuous news cycle has also fed this beast. ESPN, message boards, blogs, etc. etc. Everybody has space to fill, air time to fill. In the old days, rumors had less places to land. News or the lack of it was more effectively controlled. That’s all changed. The result is that newspapers—in addition to all our other responsibilities—are the place to go to make sense of the rumors, things we might have ignored in a more gentlemanly time.

The state of journalism. Matt Taibbi and Ben Bradlee are from very different points on the news spectrum. They both have some interesting things to say about how we are doing and where we are going, particularly as it related to political journalism.
Here’s Taibbi, the political reporter for Rolling Stone. Here’s Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post. A note to young OTTERBLOG readers. Their comments are PG-13.

Finally, worth reading. BusinessWeek has a really well-done story on economic development in Africa and what it means to some of the world’s poorest people and the rich people here and elsewhere who rely on Africa’s resources for our daily conveniences.

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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.

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.

I was out of town a few days last week—more on that in a second—so when I read the Saturday paper I was reading it as a reader, not as a person who knows the back stories on a particular story. And when I read the front-page piece on the high-school sweethearts and the restraining order, my immediate reaction was: Why are we naming these students? Yes, there’s a restraining order against the former boyfriend, and there is a simple assault, but still… They’re high-school kids, 17 and 16. It seemed to me that the particulars of names was less important than the larger theme, how adult issues, such as domestic violence, keep getting thrust into our school system and forcing hard choices. My thought as the reader was that I don’t know these students, so their names are meaningless to me.

I talked with the reporter this morning, and what Dan told me was that naming them was unavoidable and impractical. The father of the girl essentially held a news conference, and the former boyfriend showed up—or thereabouts—to refute his actions. In a sense, they made it a public issue with names. Still, this is one of those instances where I wonder what happened to modesty on the part of parents. Our world is one big Jerry Springer show…

I was in Washington last week for the Associated Press Managing Editors conference. As you might expect, it’s not the cheeriest time to be at an editor’s conference. That said, it’s not all gloom and doom. The sense I got was that the days of hoping for smoother sailing are gone. The new reality is here to stay, and everybody is dealing with it, rather than hoping it goes away. The realities are: 1)continued financial pressure and their impact on news gathering and 2) the end of newsrooms as gatekeepers of information.

Washington is a city being remade before your eyes, but there are still plenty of institutions around. I managed to eat at one Friday morning. Jimmy Ts on Capitol Hill. Tin ceiling. Great waffles. Decent coffee. My guide for the meal says that Howard Coble is an occasional diner as well ...

Close readers of OTTERBLOG will remember a post sometime back about the confusion over what to call Mumbai, formerly Bombay.

A similar debate is raging—journalistically speaking—over Burma/Myanmar, the site of civil unrest and protest in Southeast Asia. The Journal calls the country Myanmar, following Associated Press style, but not everyone agrees. This is a nice column from the Boston Globe on the controversy that gets at much of the tangled history and the power of names.

Interestingly enough, the U.S. government apparently doesn’t recognize the new name. Here’s the entry in the CIA World Factbook, easily one of the most useful sites on the Web.