Otterblog

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.

If you hang out at enough newspaper forums—and I’ve been to a few—one of the phrases you hear over and over is “citizen journalists.” It’s kind of a funny and annoying phrase. It sounds like something out of a 1950s Red-scare movies reel. Or the B-side of the National Guard recruiting song by Kid Rock, “Citizen Warrior,” that is a trailer before the feature presentations at all the movie house. And it’s also a bit of a slap at us practicing journalists, as if we’re not citizens but rather some sort of foreign force of critics and cynics brought in to kick people when they’re down.

But I digress. One of the most important things about journalism is that you don’t need a license to do it. That’s thanks to my favorite amendment, number one.  It’s not like selling real estate, performing open-heart surgery, flying a place or cooking a hamburger to sell to somebody. You just do it. Now, distributing your material is a whole ‘nother matter (and another topic for another day)..Citizen journalism is really amateur journalism. But citizen sounds a whole lot more ... more ...
professional. And when I say amateur I don’t mean poor-quality per se, but rather the fact that it’s your avocation not vocation.

Thanks to cell phones, voice mail, IM and everything else, citizen journalism is alive and well. We saw it in spades on Friday, when gas prices started to soar based on predictions of Hurricane Ike slamming into the oil ports in Texas. $4.50/$5/$5.35 a gallon. Crazy stuff. We heard the rumors, then put out an email request for help finding these places. The calls, cellphone pictures, emails just started pouring in. Incredible. So rather than tracking down places, much of our reporting was verifying these numbers. Which is a different task. An important task. But an easier task. Calling in tips to the newspaper didn’t start with the Web. But the technology has made it easier.

The definition of an office used to be pretty simple. It was the place where you went to work if you had a job that was behind a desk. Technology has changed that, and in a larger sense, an office is anywhere you can do work. It’s a state of mind, rather than a place. It can be at your home. Or at the coffee shop down the street. Or in the car (although not while driving.)

The Journal has for years maintained offices in Mount Airy and North Wilkesboro as part of our coverage of Northwest North Carolina. Beginning next month, those offices are closing. The reporters who work from those offices—Monte Mitchell and Sherry Youngquist—are staying. Readers have come to rely on them for their graceful and insightful coverage of the people and issues of the mountains and the foothills. But the office has become archaic. It was a place where your phone was. And your fax machine. You got your mail there, or at the nearby post office. Technology has changed all that. Most faxes are junk. Important documents get emailed. And the phone rings in your pocket. Wherever you are. Frequently at the most inopportune times.

This transition has been in the planning for some time. Monte and Sherry each say the best part of their job is getting out and meeting and talking with people about the issues that are important to them. We don’t expect that to change. If anything, we think this added mobility will give them more time to do the journalism we and you value.

Gas on the Web: We put out a request for help at about 2:15 for places t hat were charging ALOT for gas. Within 5 minutes, somebody emailed us a photo of a station in Lexington charging $5.35 a gallon.  Yowza.

One of the real pleasures of this job is to track the careers of people who have been here and moved on to bigger pastures. We like to believe that their success is partly due (rather than in spite of) to their time spent here, nurtured by caring and devoted editors in a town where there is a lot of news to cover.

One of those folks is Marty Kady, who started here as a zones reporter in the late 1990s. He then covered Davidson County and City Hall before leaving to go work at Congressional Quarterly. He’s now a reporter with Politico, covering the McCain campaign. Here’s his latest dispatch.

Politico is an interesting concept, a true hybrid between a newspaper and a Web site. I don’t read it every day, but I occasionally skim it. It’s written a bit too much for the Beltway audience for my taste, but their analysis is good, and the publication has quickly established itself as a player among the national political media.

Marty was an ambitious and enterprising reporter here (all good things), and it was clear in his time in Winston-Salem that he wanted to cover politics on a larger stage. So it is great to see him get his chance during what is the most exciting and interesting campaign we’ve had in a long time.

There’s a new poll out today from USA Today about the presidential race. It shows the McCain-Palin ticket having done a reversal on Obama-Biden and now with a sizable lead. Political polls are a staple this time of year, and you can expect many more between now and election day. AP, the principal provider of national news for the Journal, also does its own polling. USA Today uses Gallup. AP uses an outfit called Ipsos.

Polls and politics have a long history together—and some of it is controversial. There is—of course—the famous Dewey beats Truman headline of 1948. But polling is a lot more sophisticated than it used to be, flaws and all. The main issue with polls these days is the surveyed electorate, as more people—particularly the young and the restless—don’t have land lines.

I find the journalism of poll reporting to be troubling. On the one hand, polls give a good snapshot of where a race is at a particular point in time, and that can inform the reporting on issues and strategies. It gives context and helps answer “why.” On the other hand, my concern is that polls become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A poll says a race is over. So people don’t vote. So the race is truly over. I think concern one outweighs concern two, if only because there’s no embargo on poll coverage. The Journal not running these numbers isn’t going to prevent many people from knowing about them.

That said, tell me your thoughts on this issue. You often hear candidates say “The only poll that counts is on Election Day.” Are they right?

We are covering an immense tragedy today, the death of four young people in a car wreck off of Yadkinville Road. If you go to the bottom of the story, you will find a running dialogue of comments that is startling. Boiled down, it is this: Some writers think the ethnicity of the victims explains the deaths. Others think that is beyond cruel. It is the megaphone and the microphone unleashed among the population.

Our policy on these sorts of comments is to tread lightly. Offensive is a difficult word to describe in a way that garners broad agreement. From time to time, we do remove comments. But generally, we don’t.

I find some of the comments offensive, but there is a conversation that nonetheless is worth having. I’m sure there are folks who think this isn’t really a conversation, but rather various anonymous folks talking and typing past each other. And that’s true to some extent. But the alternative is not to have them at all. And that’s a worse alternative. I’m interested in your thoughts on these online dialogues. They are a staple of online news stories now—everywhere. It’s the media, w/o the filter.

Today marks the end of a remarkable career at the Winston-Salem Journal. Terry Oberle, our sports editor, is retiring. His last official day is Monday, but it’s a holiday, and barring some unforeseen news this weekend, he’ll walk out the door today for the last time.

Terry has been sports editor here for 34 years. That’s a lifetime. And through that time, our sports staff has been known for its professionalism, its stability, its knowledge of teams and sports, and its flat-out hustle.

Winston-Salem is an incredibly difficult town to be sports editor. We have two major universities (WFU and WSSU) here and a third (ASU) in our circulation area. But many of our readers care less about these schools and want more coverage of the schools in the Triangle. There’s greater interest in pro sports for obvious reasons than there was 20 years ago, and we keep building new high schools. The result is a lot of competing agendas—for space, for reporters, for attention. Terry has juggled them all with a great deal of poise and grace for his time here. And honesty. If you ask him a question about why we didn’t cover something, he will give you an answer. It may not be the answer you want, but it will be based on thought rather than emotion.

Some message boards say we write too much about Carolina, proof that Terry is a Carolina grad acting as a homer for the school he loves. He isn’t. He is a Florida boy (just ask him ...) who went to Florida Southern.

We had a retirement party for him the other day, and one of the things I noted was Terry’s knowledge outside the world of sports. As befitting a top-notch journalist, he is interested in the world beyond his beats, and that knowledge has been incredibly helpful in covering stories from business to metro to features.

I wish him the best in the next stage of his life.