Otterblog

Winston-Salem is by no means the biggest town in the U.S. or even the state of North Carolina, but I am always amazed at how disproportionately we figure into important events. Take this morning’s story on Jim Black’s plea. The news angles are both Winston-Salem (or at least Forsyth County) centric. First, the whole deal that brought the former speaker down was an alliance between him and former Rep. Mike Decker.

Second, and more interesting from a trivia standpoint, is the origination of the Alford Plea, which allows a defendant to plead guilty without admitting guilt. As we wrote, it originated with a case in Forsyth County.

If you want to read the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alford opinion, click here. It’s very good.

When I stepped outside this morning with the dog to get the paper, there was a little nip to the air. The dew was heavy. The leaves were rustling. All signs pointed to one undeniable truth: The Dixie Classic Fair is back in town. So today, at least for this post, we’ll forget about journalism per se and I will give you five reasons why I love the fair.

1) The agricultural competitions. Where else do people square off over who has a better sweet potato? One of my most cherished possessions is the ribbon I won in 1994 for a decorated gourd. Not quite the Pulitzer Prize, but it’s up there.

2) The crowds. We all live in a fragmented society. You can spend your whole life in Forsyth County and never get to Walkertown or New Sherwood Forest or anywhere in between. The fair is one of those great seas of humanity, where you get to see how different and alike we all are.

3) The crafts hall. I am always amazed at the talent there. From the kiddie LEGO displays to the incredible carvings and cheesy photographs of waterfalls and sunsets, it is all great.

4) The Midway. The water pistol races, the knock the bottles down tosses, the ball in the bucket game. They’re a testament to American hucksterism and the idea that everybody else is a sucker except us. And where else can you pay $2 and win something that costs $1.

5) The food. You need to pace yourself so you can eat twice. First, a hotdog and some pinto beans at one of the church or community stands, then out into the larger world of sausage, funnel cakes, kettle corn, deep-fried twinkies and cotton candy. Don’t forget the bag of peanuts for the ride home!

Got a fair story? Let me know. Happy Friday.

There’s a great line in Talladega Nights where Ricky Bobby’s Daddy (say that three times fast) tells his son: “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

I think it’s human nature to keep score. And even people who don’t keep score keep score on how much better they are than the rest of us at not keeping score.

We write a lot of stories about how our community stacks up. Today alone, there was a piece on the average incomes in N.C. counties (Forsyth is ahead of many, but behind a lot, too.); SAT scores (up generally); and the spread of obesity across this great land of others (The South is still the buckle on our ever-growing girth belt.)

Numbers mean something. And behind every number is a story, and sometimes the stories appear to contradict each other. A careful reader of all these stories could reasonably say something to the effect in Forsyth County of “Poorer, a little fatter and a little smarter.” Or not. Each of these numbers are aggregates, and at the anecdotal level things can be quite different. Your neighbor, for example, could be rich, thin and stupid. But as with all stories that look at how different groups compare with each other, they help define patterns and suggest ways for policy makers to target resources and programs to improve.

And for those who don’t subscribe to RBD’s philosophy about the importance of being first, there’s this important line from Episode 1: “There’s always a bigger fish.”

Dylan on Dylan: With all the back and forth on our Web site and in our paper about whether Dylan is dead, alive, or somewhere in between, Bob himself speaks in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. Hustler? Reclusive genius? Weary old man? You decide.

Quick thoughts for a rainy Wednesday:

1) Energy and politics have been entangled for years. They’re likely to become even more so in the future. That’s the back story of a push by GOP members of Congress from Western NC to allow for gas exploration off the NC Coast. This used to be a third rail issue for our delegation. No more. The War in Iraq, uncertainty across much of the international oil belt and supply constraints have changed the dynamics of offshore drilling. Won’t happen anytime soon. But it will happen.

2) The 31st Senate District continues to be nasty—and will get nastier in the final week. Money helps in politics. But it isn’t everything. My predicted order of finish: Brunstetter, Whisenhunt a close second, then Tabor, which might set Whisenhunt up nicely for a second primary challenge if she chooses and Brunstetter doesn’t get over 40 percent of the vote. She has the least money, but if you look at voting results, she consistently received more votes than Brunstetter when they ran in the same district on the board of county commissioners.

3) Ash trays and spitoons. Reynolds American is paying $3.5 billion—with a B—for Conwood. It includes the Taylor factory on US 158. Interesting move. The old RJR used all its cash to get away from tobacco. The new RJR can’t get enough. Times have changed.

When done correctly, competition can be a wonderful thing. It makes us better, sharper, more responsive. That theory works in autos, in newspapers, and—yes—even in blogville.

With that in mind, a couple of quick announcements on some blog news happening at the Journal. We have some new offerings that will be competing with everybody’s undying and unwavering loyalty of the Otterblog. First, Monte Mitchell, our reporter in our Northwest bureau, will be running a blog for the next few days about Merlefest, the annual Wilkes County roots music festival that is this weekend. Look for it on JournalNow beginning tomorrow and through the weekend.

Second, we’ll be starting a blog for Kernersville and Eastern Forsyth County as part of our Kernersville Journal. Melissa Hall, one of our reporters in downtown K’ville bureau, will take the lead on that. It will hit the net for the edition of May 4. While the idea of all blogs is to have a dialogue with the community, we’ll be pushing this concept a little more forcefully in our K’ville blog.

A lot of blogging by the dreaded MSM, i.e. the Journal, is an experiment in new ways of doing things. Balancing tradition and innovation is tricky stuff. But take a look at these when they launch and let me know what you think. Your feedback is important.

WORD WATCH: Newsweek has a cover story on the Duke Lacrosse scandal, and like everybody else the most loaded word in the whole article is swagger. An interesting word. Norwegian in its origin, says my Webster’s dictionary, from svagra, to sway. You can search North Carolina’s statutes for a long time, and you still won’t find swagger in the criminal code. Court of public opinion is a different matter.

For all its success in economic development, from Dell to pharmaceuticals, North Carolina has never landed the silver tuna: a car factory. As the foreign car makers have set down roots in the mid-South auto belt, away from Detroit and its unions, North Carolina has been a perennial bridesmaid. BMW got past us to S.C.; Mercedes went to Alabama. Nissan to Mississippi, etc. etc. It can give you a bit of a complex.

Now come reports that Toyota, which is poised to overtake GM as the world’s biggest car company, is looking at Greensboro and three other states as a site for a car plant.

Potentially big news and big money. Reporting on incentives is tricky business. The folks involved don’t want to discuss anything, but the public input that is part and parcel of the incentives process requires openness. Invariably, the deal makers gripe that that publicity kills deals. But it doesn’t. We went through this with Dell, and it’s virtually impossible to find an instance where reporting on a reputable company that wanted incentives sent that company to another site.

Worth a read: The Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Print journalism’s annual salute to itself. It can be self-congratulating and a little excessive, particularly in this era, but some of the work is outstanding. I recommend the series in the Rocky Mountain News on a Marine whose job it is to tell the families of Marines that their loved ones have been killed. In the wrong hands, a subject like that can drown in cliche. This is sparse and unflinching. It won for both feature writing and photography, a rarity.

Some quick thoughts for a Thursday:

1) Words matter. The title for yesterday’s hearing on immigration was “Gangs, Fraud and Sexual Predators: Struggling with the Consequences of Illegal Immigration.” Not hard to figure out where this group of elected officials is coming from. Complex problem. And despite what people say, complex problems demand complex solutions.

2) Politics matter. It’s hard not to look at the picture of Erskine Bowles on our front page at his installation as president of the UNC system without thinking that for much of the last five years he spent a great deal of time wanting to do another job. i.e. be a U.S. Senator. My guess is that he will do better with the politics of the state education bureaucracy than he did with voters. It’s a different constituency, and one that plays to his strengths.

3) At the end of the day, it’s the votes that matter. Bowles and U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, who brought the immigration hearing to W-S, know that. So does Bucky Covington, who was voted off the American Idol island last night. Long hair and a nice smile can take you pretty far, but not to the finish line.

Community takes a thousands forms in this day and age. We orient ourselves around where we live, around the schools we attend, the teams we root for, the politicians we like (or dislike), even the barbecue we eat.

In some ways, all communities are equal. It doesn’t matter who we commune with as long as we commune.  In other ways, they’re not. I think that geographic community is most important, because face-to-face conversations with our neighbors builds a better world (No, this is not going to be a sermon ...).

That’s my interest in the fire that destroyed the Clingman Community Center, and a reason it’s on our front page today. Community centers seem a bit archaic today. I mean, does anybody really go these sorts of places? Well, as the folks in southeast Wilkes told our reporter, yes, they do. And these centers house memories.

It’s true that a fire doesn’t kill a memory any more than a fire destroys a sense of community. But the absence of a physical structure makes it harder to contain those memories and community. They spread and scatter. It may be the same amount of community, but it’s harder to know it’s there.

A week or so back, I wrote about the Duke Lacrosse case and the power of images. As most of you are aware, there have some been dramatic new developments in the case: the players’ lawyers say that DNA tests done by the state SBI lab refute the notion of a sexual assault.

Not all sexual assaults leave behind DNA and conversely the absence of DNA doesn’t automatically make prosecutors drop cases. Darryl Hunt can attest to that. But in this day and age, with skeptical jurors and CSI overloads running through our brains, it makes it very difficult for jurors to convict without forensic evidence.

If you believe the players’ attorneys—who are some of the best and best-connected criminal defense attorneys in the state—this case is over. Maybe. Maybe not. What does seem clear is that the events of that night are much more complicated than have originally been reported. And this raises some interesting issues about media responsibility in a 24/7 world. There has been intense pressure to publish and broadcast and post on this case for the reasons I wrote about last week. If you take the sexual assault off the table—assuming for the purpose of this discussion that it didn’t happen—is there still a story about piggish and racist (but not criminal) behavior by a bunch of college jocks? Yes, but it might not make the national news.

What should the media do? Our car doesn’t go in reverse, yet based on what’s happened so far some of the earlier reporting is way too breathless. So this is yet another reminder that most issues—sexual assaults, wars in Iraq, peace in the Middle East, immigration—are much more complex than the providers AND consumers of news want to admit. Neat and tidy works for kitchen cabinets, but little else.

It’s hard to think of another university that consistently gets such adoring coverage in the media as Duke University. Maybe not always in the local media, but certainly in the national press. Part of Duke’s rise to national prominence, in my opinion, has been about finding a brand, which I will call here “Excellence through enlightened competition” and then living it and selling it each and every day.

The poster boy for all this is of course Coach K, teacher, leader, mentor, talking about trust and Chevys, etc. A great brand.

So, it’s interesting when that brand is challenged, as it is today with the widening investigation into allegations of rape involving members of the Duke Lacrosse team. Instead of basketball coaches in their suits on the sidelines, we have a photo of a swaggering lacrosse coach in a pair of sunglasses. A much different image.

Time magazine had a good read on the rape case, as did the Associated Press in the past weekend. They’re both a little overwritten, but the bones of this case, regardless of guilt, read like something from an episode of Law and Order. White athletes, rich school, black student at the HBCU across town working as a party stripper for some extra cash, town and gown, etc. This is a story that writes itself, and for an institution such as Duke that has been extremely successful in controlling or at least managing the story lines that get written about it, the pounding is just brutal.

Not that PR is everything. Again, this is a serious allegation of a serious crime, and how the university addresses the systemic issues raised here is what will determine whether the old image and brand of Duke survive or what takes its place.