Otterblog

Our AP feed allows me to create a message alert each time a story moves with a word or words. So I get an email every time the words “Winston-Salem” appear in an AP story from anywhere. Among the other alerts I’ve set up is one that sends me a message every time a story or caption or agate listing has the word “Iceland.” Yes, Iceland. I’ve been fascinated by this country for years, dating back to a Scandinavian literature course in college, and last summer went there with OTTERBLOG Jr. An incredible place, filled with breathtaking scenery and friendly people.
For most of the past year, the alerts have been ho hum. Handball scores. Whaling treaties. The occasional Bjork publicity event.
No more. The country is in a freefall, its financial system is collapsing. In a year’s time, it’s gone from the success story of global capitalism to teetering on the verge of national bankruptcy.
Here’s a story from the Washington Post on the troubles. Essentially, Iceland’s banks were too big, and they were over-leveraged. The result: good times are great. Bad times are atrocious. Making matters worse is that the country’s currency (the Krona) is falling, and for a country that relies on imports for just about everything, the result is crippling for its residents.
I don’t know how it will all play out, but this is a scary time—for all 300 million of us in the USA, and for 300,000 people on a volcanic rock the size of Ohio in the middle of the Atlantic.

Sense of humor poetry department: Michelle Johnson, our team leader for multimedia, knows of my love for a good haiku. She sent me this email a short time ago:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Johnson, A. Michelle
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 12:32 PM
To: Otterbourg, Kenneth D.
Subject: Market haiku

How about you finish it?

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So that is my challenge to all you OTTERBLOGGERS out there. Finish this Haiku. Send it to me. I will choose the winner, and he/she will get a special prize…

There is a good story in the NY Times today about the decline in statehouse reporters, pegged to the situation in Albany, NY. The story line is predictable. Newspapers are cutting costs and looking at state capital bureaus as one place to save. This is really a print issue. TV stations—save for those in capital markets—have never given a lot of attention to state government news.
This is an unfortunate trend. Less coverage means less oversight. Less oversight means more chance for abuse of power. There are newsletters and blogs and the like that attempt to fill the void, and some of them do a good job, but few approach it with the goal of objectivity.
The situation is not much different in Raleigh. When I covered the legislature in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the press corps was more robust, probably 15-20 journalists. My guess is it’s about a dozen now, maybe (The Journal has one reporter there, down from two two years ago. Prior to his death, my brother-in-law, Art Weissman, was the Trenton bureau chief for the Asbury Park Press in NJ, a state well-known for its “inefficient government,” and I remember him giving me a tour of the place one year. There were probably 40-50 journalists there. Again, no more. There’s still top-quality work being done in statehouses. Just less of it. The holes in the net are bigger and more stuff gets through.
When I think about the interface between technology and journalism and end users, I think of three areas: distribution (how we get the news); aggregation (how the news gets packaged into what we want and what we don’t want) and generation (how news gets created). Technology is really good at the first two, but not so good on the last one, and I don’t think you can repackage the first two into a quality substitute for the third leg of the stool.

As we all sit in front of our computer screens and watch the Dow drop and drop ... some odds and ends and catching u p

First, the Dixie Classic fight hoax. We ran a story on Friday about the police chief having a news conference to say there was no truth to the rumor that there was going to be a gang fight at the DCF. I was talking to a friend of mine in the TV news biz that evening, and he had asked me why we ran that story.
The short answer is that we thought it was news. The long answer is that the world of bomb scares and hoaxes has become more complicated in these times. Back in the day, when I was in high school, I probably spent 20 mornings shivering outside my high school, while they searched for a “bomb.” None of this made the paper; the idea from news folks is that reporting on these scares gives the pranksters what they want. But we live in different times, and this past week, the fight scare wasn’t just a phone call. It spurred emails and telephone calls and the like, so we thought that the correct thing to do was to try to put these rumors to rest in as public a way as we could....

All aTwitter: Some of you may know about the messaging tool known as Twitter, which allows users the ability to send brief (140 character) text messages to others, either on their computers or cell phones. In my constant attempt to try to keep only slightly behind the leading edge of technology, OTTERBLOG is on Twitter. There is a certain goofiness to it, but it’s all about information ... If you’re using Twitter, check me out…

This is another fluid (to put it politely) day in the financial world. I woke up to see a full-page ad on A3 trumpeting the Wachovia-Citigroup deal, then learned an hour later that Wachovia had entered into an agreement to be bought by Wells Fargo. (Lots of Dewey beats Truman jokes ...) If you’ve been reading our copy, you know most of it is the work of a business reporter named Richard Craver. He is a pro, perhaps the most knowledgeable and respected banking reporter in the state. He started as a sports journalist many years ago, and he still brings that competitive spirit and a desire to make sense of winners and losers. In this new era, writing for the paper isn’t enough. You have to post to the Web, update the Web and then write for the next day with info that isn’t on the Web site. Richard juggles it all and rarely loses his cool. A good journalist to have in a crisis.

Long-time readers of OTTERBLOG know of my deep affinity for gourds of all shapes and sizes. So it was with deep appreciation that I read our story this morning about Eldon Snow, who is the Tiger Woods of gourd growing. No, I didn’t assign the piece, although for years I have marveled at Mr. Snow’s green thumb and consistency at growing humongous gourds. It’s one of my must-see stops at the Dixie Classic Fair, which opens today.

Many years ago, when I had just become the Journal’s business editor, I paid a call on John Medlin, then the chairman and chief executive of Wachovia. He’s a smart and cordial and curious man, and he had a question for me as we looked down on Winston-Salem from a dining room in the old Wachovia tower. “What do people think of the bank,” he asked. What I told him was there was a perception that Wachovia wasn’t the most generous corporate citizen. In Charlotte, where there were two large regional banks, the competition to be first was a battle of hearts and minds, house by house, block by block…
Those sorts of competitions to be biggest, best, most loved, etc. take their toll over time, and we’ve seen the fallout first hand in the past few weeks. Bank of America, the successor of NCNB/’NationsBank etc., is now one of the survivors, an institution throwing out life preservers (for a price), and First Union/Wachovia, which doubled down to grow, is in the lifeboat, but at a steep price for most everyone involved.
It isn’t pretty to watch or write about.
The question that everybody has been asking me this week is “How bad is Winston going to get hit?” My guess is a lot, but that’s just informed speculation.
We still tend to think of Wachovia as a local institution, but in reality it isn’t, and hasn’t been for 7 years.
What I think is interesting is that all this comes almost exactly 20 years after the battle for RJR began. That was the deal that defined Winston-Salem and helped spur the changes that remade the city. So the question beyond how bad is Winston going to get hit is really the more important one. Which is this: What do we do next?
When the dust clears, that is the next great story in our city.

Today is already shaping up to be a bear. Wachovia is being bought by Citigroup, and that will have huge ramifications for North Carolina and Winston-Salem. More on that later, as it gets fleshed out.

I’ve been thinking about our political coverage and its presentation. On Saturday, 20,000 people showed up in Greensboro at a rally for Sen. Barack Obama. That’s front-page news, and I don’t need to apologize for or explain our placement decisions. We talk about these things constantly, and we always note that if McCain comes to the state we’ll do the same for him. But here’s the rub: McCain hasn’t come to North Carolina so far. His last visit was during the primary, and it was for a talk at WFU. I haven’t talked with the McCain staff on their decision, but my guess about what’s going on is as follows: He thinks North Carolina is safely in his column, that it may be close, but close doesn’t matter in the electoral college. You win North Carolina by 1 vote or 1 million and the result is the same: 15 electoral votes.
That said, campaign rallies by definition are partisan events, and it’s hard to write about any politician’s rally without giving them some boost (It may fire up opponents as well.). So, there’s the appearance that we are covering the Obama campaign more kindly and generously. There’s no good way out of this. To ignore the Obama rallies seems petty. He’s here, after all, and the reasons why he’s here are politically intriguing. He’s trying to be the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win North Carolina…
The best tactic to me is the one we’ve been doing. Cover the events, and be prepared for the McCain-Palin campaign.

Presidential debates are always interesting, if not always important. This year, I think, they’ll be both.

They have a special place in Winston-Salem, as we’ve been host to two presidential debates in relatively recent history. The first Bush-Dukakis debate, in 1988. Then the G.W. Bush-Gore debate, in 2000.
It’s interesting to look back at these debates with the benefit of hindsight. The Bush-Dukakis debate was seen as one of Dukakis’ better showings. It’s the second one, where he appeared too emotionless over a question involving the death penalty, that is remembered by the public. The Bush-Gore debate here was marked by its civility and its deep discussion of foreign policy, with Gov. Bush out to prove that he understood the complexity of the modern world. If there was no knockout, it gave many swing voters comfort in Bush’s ability to handle an uncertain world.

Here’s how Washington Post columnist David Broder summed it up:

Even the foreign policy discussion, which dominated the first half of the Wake Forest debate, unexpectedly played into Bush’s hands. This is one policy area where Gore has the advantage of years of experience. But Bush appeared far more comfortable in Wednesday’s extensive conversation on that topic than he had been in the brief exchanges that took place eight days earlier at the University of Massachusetts.

It’s really interesting to go back and look at some of these presidential debates, the tone and substance. You can find transcripts at this Website, courtesy of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

And the Emmy goes to ... Some of you with good memories may remember a young man named Rashaun Rucker, who was a photo intern here in the late 1990s. He grew up in the city, went to Carver, then N.C. Central. A tremendous journalist and good friend. He is working at the Detroit Free Press, and just received an Emmy for a documentary he filmed on pit bulls. Here’s the link. Who would have ever thought there would be a day when a newspaper would win an Emmy? That is convergence.

We’re celebrating the life of Mary Garber today. She died yesterday at 92. You can read more about her remarkable life as a journalist by going here. I highly recommend the video. And for what another paper is saying about Mary’s life, here’s a piece from the Los Angeles Times.

Why all the fuss about a tiny woman who covered sports? Mary Garber’s life is all about humanity, about the desire to be accepted for who you are and what you want to do. I won’t claim a close, personal friendship with Mary. By the time I came to the Journal, she was already easing toward retirement. But the stories about her work ethic, her respect for players and coaches, and her tireless work to demand that this respect be returned are the very fabric of an eloquent life.

In her last days at here, she would come to the office with these walking sticks that looked like ski poles with tennis balls on the ends of them. She’d be over in the sports department, discussing the news of the day and adding insight and opinion to the conversation. And long after she left the Journal, we still had a parking space reserved for her, in hopes that we would look up from our desk and see her making her way slowly across the newsroom, ambling with that half smile of optimism and determination that she wore so well.

We’ll miss her.

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.

Wall Street. Main Street. Fourth Street. Your street. We essentially had two disasters during the past few days. Ike and the disaster unfolding on Wall Street. One of the continuous discussions in our newsroom is how to cover and present these stories. Ike is visual. The shots of wiped out houses along the Gulf. Folks lined up for drinking water. The piles of debris. Wall Street is different. Essentially money just disappeared in the sense that stock that was worth x amount on Friday was worth only half that amount on Monday. And the images are subdued.  The investment bankers walking into emergency meetings over the weekend. Lehman Brothers employees filing out of a building. Brokers in Mumbai, Frankfort and New York, with that weary exasperation on their face that needs no caption.

Financial stories of this magnitude are difficult to capture. Part of the problem is that they are really complex. We get hurricanes. The wind blows. The rain falls. The tide surges. Your house is gone. But the subprime mortgage disaster is complicated and the reasons are diffuse. It’s true that most of us are married to the market in a way that didn’t exist a generation ago. The Dow Jones average is as important a number in our lives as our blood pressure or cholesterol count. It’s our retirement. Our nest egg. Our money to do social good, send kids to college etc.

The media tends to focus on the Dow because it’s such a bellwether of the economy, Up is good. Down is bad. Way down. Very bad. And try as people might to put a 449.36 drop in context, i.e. a 4.1 percent drop, the raw number is just that—Raw. We’ve had a lot of conversations in recent weeks about how to cover economic news—particularly the bad news that seems to be most prevalent. As an earlier post noted, there is one view that the bad news is creating more bad news, call this another version of the trickle down effect.

My guess: The hurricane season will be over before the storm season on Wall Street ends.