Otterblog

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.

I’ve been getting barraged with emails the past few days about the Associated Press. The emails center around the conduct of Ron Fournier, who is the AP’s Washington bureau chief.

While many folks think that the NY Times is the most powerful news organization in America. It isn’t. AP is. The reason is simple. Most newspapers rely on AP for the meat and potatoes of their out-of-market coverage, nationally and internationally.

Here’s the start of one such letter:

I expected AP to be free from bias as it has always been fairly “middle of the road” in coverage of various issues over the years but I have to admit the new D.C. Bureau Chief Ron Fournier has shown a shocking lack of balance so far this election year!

What has the emailers all in a swivet is an analysis by Fournier on Sen. Barack Obama’s pick of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Led by Moveon.org, these folks allege that Fournier crossed over from analysis to opinion and that he unfairly slammed Obama. As proof of his bias, they note that Sen. John McCain at one point offered Fournier a communications job (which Fournier declined.).

I asked AP about the whole flap, and it’s their decision not to comment on Moveon.org’s allegations. But a spokesman noted that Fournier has solid credentials as a journalist known for fairness and shoeleather. The organization also notes:

“ The dual role of AP Washington Bureau Chief and political writer has long roots in AP history, as well as that of other Washington bureaus. Walter Mears, who won a Pulitzer for his 1976 presidential coverage, served in both capacities from 1977 to 1984. As bureau chief he continued to write news copy, usually analytical pieces. Likewise, other leading news organizations have often had their bureau chiefs serve in both capacities.”

For a not particularly flattering profile of Fournier, click here. I read the analysis, which was clearly marked as such. It seemed to me more of a column than an analysis to me. And in the important advice that it is often not what you say that matters but how you say it, the piece is very blunt, more blunt than most of the content on the wires. You can find the column at the bottom of this E&P story.

But that said, I don’t believe the AP is out to get Barack Obama. Generally speaking, I think the coverage is even-handed. And I’ve heard some folks in the news biz grouse that the AP’s daily coverage on the campaign trail is too Obama-centric.

What seems pretty clear in all of this is that the media is finding itself under intense scrutiny for every sentence in this election year.

Update: Follow this link to a memo from AP about the Fournier flap. I’m not sure it addresses the central question of whether that analysis was analysis or opinion, but it’s a good primer on the interconnectedness of Washington media circles. 

Some of you may remember a young woman named Chelsey Powers. She was shot to death a little more than a year ago. Our most recent story was in late May. She was a freshman at Reynolds High School.

This past weekend, we covered another high-school tragedy, that of a young man named Matt Gfeller, who died while playing football. He was a sophomore at Reynolds. We remade our front page for Sunday, and followed up with another story today, and my guess is that there is further coverage to come.

Two kids. Two tragic deaths. Two very different levels of coverage. Why? It is a difficult question. There are a couple of reasons, to my mind. First, Matt’s death happened in front of several thousand people at a game. Chelsey was killed in front of her home at 2 a.m. Second—and unfortunately—children dying playing football is rarer than children being shot to death. Third, the community responded in different and more public ways that made this past weekend’s events a larger story.

Certainly, there are socioeconomic factors as well. The Gfellers are wealthier and better-connected than the Powerses, but I think that’s secondary to what made us react the way we did. To me, the main thing was the public nature of the event and the grieving.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect story than the piece we ran Thursday on the Wilkes County man who caught a state-record catfish on his granddaughter’s Barbie fishing pole after she ducked out for a few minutes to—as he says—“go potty.”

In the news biz, this is called a “talker,” and it’s the sort of story that quickly finds a home at the bottom of page 1. It has all the elements: quirkiness, family love; struggle and happy ending.

We ignore these stories at our own risk. Yes, there is a lot of serious news in the world. Some of it is incredibly sobering and painful and distressing. The Arctic ice is melting. South Ossetia, a place that many of us didn’t know existed, is the latest flash point in the world. People are excited about gas at $3.50 a gallon. On and on.

As I’ve said before, the goal is balance. I love serious and important news. But a Barbie rod and a 21 pound catfish. It is a story that everybody can relate to. If you do a Google search for Barbie and fishing, you get 4 million hits. Now, not all of them are our story. But you’d be surprised—or maybe not—how many times this story has traveled electronically around the world.

More naming issues: This is a follow up from an earlier post about what to call things. As we’ve reported, the NC School of the Arts is now UNC School of the Arts. That’s a mouthful. And it doesn’t exactly fit in a headline. So, one shorthand is its initials UNCSA. But saying U-N-C-S-A takes too long. So the acronym we use is Uncsa, pronounced UNK-sa. And my guess is that despite many people’s efforts to the contrary, that is going to become how it is known. 

With all the attention focused on the race for president, it’s easy to forget that we’re also choosing a governor this year. Last night was the first live televised debate between Lt. Gov. Beverly Eaves Perdue and Mayor Patrick Lloyd McCrory of Charlotte.

Those are their full names. There’s a bit of a controversy over their political names. McCrory goes by Pat. Perdue goes by Bev, or at least she wants to, but most of the media won’t let her. The AP refers to her as Beverly Perdue. So do most of the state’s major newspapers. After some discussions last week, the Journal is calling her Bev, a change from how we used to do it.

Why the change? Journal style used to be that we always called people by their full name. The exceptions were for celebrities. The idea was that the full name minimized confusion. But over the years, it’s been relaxed. There are a lot of reasons behind it. For politicians, this has always been tricky territory. We were sticklers about calling Jim Hunt James B. Hunt Jr. and Jim Martin James G. Martin, but we have no problem calling Michael F. Easley Mike Easley.

The rule—if there is one—is that within reason, people ought to be named in the manner in which they refer to themselves doesn’t lead to confusion. Bev is a reasonable and accepted nickname for Beverly, no different than Mike or Jim or Fred. I suspect the reluctance for most of the media to use Bev Perdue is a matter of consistency. Mike Easley has always been Mike Easley. It’s not clear when Beverly became Bev on political documents, but you can see the change on ballots. Click here for the 2004 election, and here for the 2008 candidates list.

I’m not sure of the reason behind the switch, if Beverly has always called herself Bev or if there’s a political angle, i.e. to appear more approachable, but again, within the realm of generally calling people what they want to be called, it’s a fair and reasonable use.