Otterblog

Not too long ago, a close friend of mine asked me what the deal was with Jim Black

. He’s the speaker of the N.C. House, and the word “embattled” seems these days to be permanently fused to his name, as in “embattledspeakerjimblack.”

On Sunday and today, we answered that question, with a

that is really a primer on how the world works in the General Assembly. I don’t know what will happen with Black, but what I think our story did exceptionally well was lay out the tale in all its Shakespearean grandeur.

Writing about corruption or the appearance of corruption is difficult stuff. It’s rare that things are black and white, or even dark and light gray.
It’s the subtlety that makes it interesting, and the Jim Black tale is filled with subtle details about how power ebbs and flows in Raleigh. Yes, a story this long takes some time to read, but it also gives you a panoramic view of what’s happened and why it’s happened.

Newsrooms are different animals than most other parts of businesses. They’re highly inefficient. They’re almost meant to be. People work incredibly hard, but good stories take time to report and to write, and it’s impossible to do an accurate cost-benefit analysis on a single story. But it’s the inefficiencies that in many ways define a newspaper.

Patriot’s Day: That strange gnashing sound you heard this morning was everybody’s NCAA bracket being sent to the office shredder. Gotta love

. Even here, in North Carolina.

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With all the hand-wringing going on about print journalism, it’s often easy to forget about all that is good in a newspaper.

And today’s front page shows an awesome confluence of great art and great layout that is almost impossible to duplicate on a screen. I had the benefit of being in the budget meeting when we planned our front page, so I wasn’t surprised at the picture of First Pres’ steeple (click on steepleshot) on the front, but it was still very cool to take the paper out of the bag and look at the top half, and then open up the whole front page and see the punchline.

When I was in college, I took a photo course, and the professor helped put together a book of student shots that was called “No Cats, No Steeples,” the idea being that any respectable photographer should steer clear of shooting churches and kitties. I still like that rule, but all rules deserve to be broken for the right photo, and this is it.

All three columns worth. As I’ve noted before, one of our missions is to be entertaining, to surprise and amuse, etc. Most typically, we think of that challenge in terms of stories. But it applies to photos as well.

Busy day. Lots of fires to put out. Here’s the grenade tossed into newspapers collective lap this morning. It’s a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts

on how people get their news, and as you might expect, it’s not a ringing endorsement for print.

Boiled down, the findings say that for many folks—and particularly young people—the Internet is their primary source of news. The newspaper or the magazine is now a supplement. The good news would be that newspaper Web sites continue to be leaders in this category, and perhaps investments in these sites will pay off. The downside is the report’s suggestion that this transformation is happening quicker than many people expected and that the way people use and find news on the net is different.

Think about your own habits. We browse the Web differently than we browse a newspaper. One is more linear than the other. On the Web, itt’s much easier to skip over—or never even run into—stories you think you have no interest in. Newspapers are a serendipitous experience.

How you browse determines what you find and what you don’t find. My take is that the next big thing in news Web sites will be redesigns and reprogramming that reflect how people use the Internet. Very soon, successful online news sites will do more than just have a different delivery system. They will look different and be different.

Beyond the arc: Lots of criticism today from the Blue Devil hard core over

You know it’s springtime when we publish the annual list of unpaid property taxes in Forsyth County

. One definition of geekdom is if you a) look forward to this publication; and b) curl up on the couch on Saturday and go through it page by page. It is short on adjectives, but highly entertaining.

Everybody who does this has the same pattern. First, they check for their own name (It was just an honest oversight!). Then they check their neighbors, and then anybody and everybody else. 

The law requires the county to advertise the list, but as

as presented by the Forsyth County Commissioners Drama Club. Shame is a powerful tool. Even the government knows that.

And it’s fun for newspapers to climb aboard and write about who owes taxes. It’s not our list, we can say, we’re just reminding people that it exists. And when somebody complains, we have an easy answer: pay your taxes.

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John Delong is one of our ace sportswriters on a staff with a lot of aces. He knows a lot about basketball and just won an NBA Writers column-writing contest, which is a pretty neat trick considering W-S doesn’t have a pro team. He did what I consider an outstanding job of dissecting the N.C. State basketball program and its coach Herb Sendek

today.

What caught my eye was at the bottom, where he talks about one of Sendek’s failings being a poor relationship with the media. At first glance, this looks like a bit of self-aggrandizement. I mean, he’s a basketball coach. He’s paid to a) win games; b) graduate his students. Everything else is gravy. And it speaks to the human tendency to look at things through the prism that is most relevant to US, i.e. the old adage “If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.”

But as John’s column makes clear, that simple world of black and white just doesn’t exist. It would be nice if all of us were measured in performance strictly on objective measures. But we aren’t. For better or worse, important folks get judged by how they do in front of a dozen microphones. Those who do well get the benefit of the doubt. Those who don’t get just the opposite. Does it win games? No, but it sure makes the losses easier to swallow. That goes for basketball, business and politics.

More water bottle madness. Note the water bucket in the right of the photo (click on Sendek above). Gatorade is gone. Somehow dumping a bottle of Dasani on a coach after winning the big game just seems wrong.

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Rather than talk about the War in Iraq or the collapse of the Tar Heels, I thought I’d just give everyone something fun to look at for a Monday and the first day of spring.

This map (click on above) comes courtesy of Wes Young, a reporter in our K’ville bureau, and cartographers at

in Oklahoma. Wes is also our census guru, and he’s got a good radar for obscure but interesting factoids.

This is a county by county map that shows what people call sweet carbonated water: soda, coke, pop, other. It’s nice to know that in this day of homogenization and regional blurring, many things are still unique. You can see the Coke belt, the soda belt and the pop belt. What I found most interesting is the St. Louis area, a sea of soda surrounded by pops on the North and Cokes on the south.

I don’t know much about St. Louis, but if anybody has an answer, I’d love to hear it.

Also, check out the pop (blue) dots in Surry and Davie counties.

One of the recurring themes in the newspaper biz, and also on this blog, is how the definition of news is both constant and changing. Constant, because a good story is always a good story. Changing, because of changes in delivery methods, consumer expectations and values, the fragmenting of society etc.

That’s one of the backdrops against how the McClatchy takeover of Knight Ridder will ultimately be viewed. And it’s the fight of newspapers coast to coast—and eventually of news web sites as well. Remember this important fact: content isn’t cheap and in the end somebody has to pay for a reporter, whether she works at a newspaper or a web site, to write a story. In business terms, that’s called “monetizing”.

The

has a good take on the coming battle. Briefly stated, the mag says that newspapers may have squandered their monopoly and now found themselves in a competitive market without the DNA to compete.

An e-mail from a dissatisfied reader made this point: “The only reason that we continue to receive the Journal in our home is because you have the monopoly on the printed, local news.”

Maybe. But monopolies—and I would disagree that we have a pure monopoly—aren’t what they used to be. There is plenty of competition. TV. Radio. Government web sites. The list goes on. I can’t speak for the business side of our company, but speaking as a journalist, I love competition. In the end, it makes you better and the reader/viewer/clicker gets the benefits.

The RiverRun International Film Festival

starts today. It’s not Sundance, with celebrities and paparazzi in the Rocky Mountains of Utah. But it’s a nice, growing event that gives the city a chance to promote its self-proclaimed image as a (or is it the?) City of the Arts.

We had an

, which is held every other year in the city. The next festival is in 2007.

The NBTF gets government help, the theory goes, so RiverRun should as well.

Maybe. But at this stage, I think they are different events on different stages, so to speak, and they play to different audiences and are presented by different organizations. And while it’s important for W-S to present itself as a vibrant city of the arts for folks into independent films, our future probably is less tied to funkiness than it is to the message that being home to the NBTF carries. Which is: We like being host to an upscale cultural event that brings in thousands of black people for a few days of theater and fun.

Lots of places would like to get their hands on the NBTF. We have it. And my guess is that the city will do what it can—within reason—to keep it. So for RiverRun, maybe next year. And maybe not.

Since 9/11, the Journal, like many papers our size, has published front-page stories about soldiers and Marines from our circulation area who have died in combat. We’ve tried to run all of them above the fold, in the top half of the paper. Today’s story about the death of Sgt. Anton Hiett

was no exception.

He was an Army reservist from Mount Airy.

One of the complaints I on occasion hear is that running stories on the deaths and placing them in prominent positions is weakening our country’s resolve to sustain the fight. The argument, if I understand it, would be that we focus on the negative (the deaths) and rarely write about the accomplishments of all the men and women from this area who have not died and are serving proudly overseas and making a positive difference in the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s true that a story about a soldier’s death personalizes the war and brings it home. So our decision to run it on the front page makes a statement. But I don’t think it’s a statement based on whether we are pro- or anti-war.

Rather, it’s about an important role of the media, to bear witness, and to display society in all its complexity and pain for all to see and to consider.

Sgt. Hiett’s father said it best. “You know, we live in a free country, but no one wants their child to die ... I also know that somebody has to fight the battle, and freedom has a price.”

Newspaper style is all about consistency and clarity. The words we use in Tuesday’s paper ought to be the same words we would use in Monday’s paper given the same set of circumstances. THE driving force behind this is the Associated Press

and its influential stylebook. Many newspapers—including the Journal—have an inhouse stylebook as a supplement, but use AP style for most issues that come up.

The AP, for example, determines which cities take a state after their name in datelines and which don’t. The folks in Charlotte have been after AP for years about this, but if you travel around the country and read newspapers, you will always see Charlotte, N.C., but just plain old Atlanta. Newspapers aren’t required to follow AP style, but we often do, or at least we take our cues from the AP.

So, when the AP weighs in on a style change, it can matter. Yesterday, they sent out this update to their online stylebook:

Gay:  Used to describe men and women attracted to the same sex, though lesbian is the more common term for women. Preferred over homosexual except in clinical contexts or references to sexual activity. Include sexual orientation only when it is pertinent to a story, and avoid references to “sexual preference” or to a gay or alternative “lifestyle.”

The old entry was far less expansive. It said gay was an acceptable synonym for homosexual, etc.

The AP tends to be a conservative organization when it comes to change. It recommends the use of American Indian over Native American, prefers black over African-American, etc.

Words matter, particularly in the way that we define ourselves and others define us. There are probably many people who remember and long for the good old days when “gay” was just a rhyming word in

.

Those days are gone.  How do we know? The AP says so.