Otterblog

This Sunday we’ll be making some changes to our comics pages. We’ll have a story Sunday explaining the changes, but the teaser is that a long-time favorite is going away.

Making changes to the comics pages is tough. There’s a constituency for virtually everything on the page, and our readership seems sliced and diced into individual categories. For everybody who thinks that the Family Circus is the comics equivalent of ODing on sugar, there are others who loves its wholesome brand of humor. Some people love Get Fuzzy. Others just don’t get it. A friend was explaining the other day about the wisdom of Judge Parker. I haven’t found it.

But the comics are a living entity. They change with the times and they reflect who we are, what we find amusing, what moves us. I would love Calvin and Hobbes to return. Not going to happen. Same with The Far Side.

So we add and subtract. Not always successfully, but always with the same goal. What’s the best use of these two pages. Yes, some people are going to be angry, and that’s OK. There’s a reassuring comfort in reading the comics every day, and nobody likes their routines to be upset. But change is good, and my hope is that you will give these new strips a chance. I’ll talk more about this on Monday. Please read our Sunday story.

Sorry for the late post. Much of today was spent with a colleague who is leaving the Journal. David Rice is our senior Raleigh correspondent, and he’s moving out of journalism to take a job as a media/government consultant with a Raleigh law firm. A big loss for our paper.

David was a pro in the highest, best sense of the world. He probably knew more about state government—all of state government, including the nitty gritty that nobody knows about—than anybody I’ve ever met. A great memory and mind for detail. A love of bad jokes. A cell phone attached to his ear. A relentless reporter.

Anyway, that’s the circle of life at newspapers and other enterprises. Many newspapers have moved away from coverage of state government. The Journal has moved in the other direction. We expanded our government coverage a few years back. The reason is simple: the decisions that affect our lives, from taxes to education and health-care policy, are made in Raleigh, and state government functions best when an independent press is down there, hanging out in hallways trying to figure out what the politicians are doing with your money and your rights.

 

So I took a call this morning from a person—and I don’t think they were a Carolina fan—questioning our decision to put the hiring of Sidney Lowe at NC State on our front page. Their general beef was that there’s a war in Iraq, gas prices through the roof, world coming apart, etc. etc. etc., and putting a story on basketball on A1 shows a further deterioration in the cultural compass that once was America.

It’s a good conversation point.

There’s a lot of thankless tasks in journalism. The front-page budget meeting isn’t one of them. It’s a dozen or so bright people talking about the next day’s paper. It’s not a democracy, but sound reasoning beats a fiat every time.

So why Sidney Lowe. It’s a no-brainer for us. One, he has what we call a great story line: He’s part of the once-glorious hoops past of the school. So he’s coming home. Two, he has ties to our city through his wife. Three, basketball is important. It’s what people care about. And it’s not just winning or losing. Sports is a huge business and part of the vast Education-Industrial Complex.

There’s a part of me that wishes people cared about basketball less and about Darfur more, but that’s not the world I live in.

Stories are like vegetables. You can’t make people read anything just by putting it out there and saying it’s good for them. That doesn’t mean most-common denominator journalism or giving up on stories that are important. But it does mean the balance between what people want to know about and what they ought to know about.

First things first: I was wrong. I said last week that Gloria Whisenhunt would come in second place in the 31st Senate GOP primary. She came in third, after Pete Brunstetter and Nathan Tabor.

The lesson from this race, to my way of thinking, is the clout of the immigration issue. Tabor rode it hard and, at least at the outset, established himself as THE candidate who would fight hardest on this. His campaigning pushed Brunstetter to the right as well, but with no general election, Brunstetter won’t get punished or reminded of those positions much anymore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Nathan Tabor eventually ends up in the seat now held by Larry Brown in the state house, but that’s another story for another day.

Election nights are crazy in a newsroom. A lot of pizza. A lot of waiting. Then cramming it all in as quickly as possible.

Newspapers such as the Journal spend a lot of time and resources covering politics and candidates. Does it make a difference? Yes. Some quick examples. John Garwood lost a GOP primary in the 45th Senate District. We’ve extensively covered his nonvote that allowed the lottery legislation to pass. The Turpin brothers in Stokes County lost in the GOP primary for county commissioner seats. Growth and school funding issues have been at the center of our coverage there. Allen Whitaker lost the GOP sheriff’s primary in Davie County. We’ve detailed problems in his department for the past several years.

This isn’t to say we have reporting agendas to get rid of candidates. But issues matter. Even—or especially—when there are low voter turnouts.

We’re in the midst of working on coverage regarding today’s protests regarding changes in our nation’s immigration policies. It’s a big, sprawling event, and it speaks to some of the internal debates in newspapers about the news value of protests.

We tend to shy away from publicity-seekers, and staged events are often particularly dry. In addition, there’s a bit of the bomb scare in all of this, i.e. we don’t cover bomb scares normally, because of the belief that covering them leads to more bomb scares. But when thousands upon thousands of people do something in a coordinated effort to draw attention to an issue, it becomes news just for the sheer bulk of it all. Anything large enough eventually acquires its own gravitational pull and can’t be ignored.

But what is large enough? 50,000 people on the Capitol Mall in Washington is little more than a blip. But put 5,000 people in Greensboro, and it’s on the front page. So there’s a great deal of relativism in what becomes news.

There are those who argue that covering protests gives too large a voice to people who have a complaint against the government. I disagree. Protest and assembly are vital parts of our democratic system. It is just a fact of life that most of these rallies are against the powerful. That’s why it’s called a protest. But that said, when 5,000 people gather locally to support a government action, we’ll be there.

A quick plug: Tony Flint, a friend and former colleague of mine, has written an articulate book about development, called

This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America

, published by Johns Hopkins press. It’s a well-done overview of how we got to this point of exurban McMansions, long commutes and disfunctional communities.

 

 

There are a lot of things that make newspapers unique. First on the list is this: we routinely anger our two main sources of revenue, i.e. readers and advertisers. Sometimes we do both at the same time. That’s a twofer. Do we go out of our way to do this? Nope. But it comes with the territory.

That’s the situation we’re in right now with our restaurant critic, The Dinner Belle, who wrote a less-than-glowing

review

of Dudley’s on the Park. The owners didn’t like it, so they’re conducting a little flier campaign to try to unmask her. Which I guess is their right, even if it’s a bit juvenile.

Restaurant critics have a tough job. A bad review can hurt a restaurant, maybe even close a restaurant. So there’s all that rah-rah “help the local economy stuff”. Which leaves a newspaper with three alternatives. One is to take the Lake Woebegon approach: all restaurants are above average. The second is to not review any of them. The third is to only write up reviews where the restaurants would get good marks. None of these work for me. It’s an abdication of our responsibility to inform.

The two scarcest resources people have these days are time and money. What good critics do is tell people what they think are wise investments of those resources. Do we expect people to agree with critics every time? Of course not. That would be boring.

What I ask of the paper’s critics is simply this: Be honest, be open-minded, be professional, be prepared, be entertaining. I know the Dinner Belle. The Dinner Belle knows food. And if you go back and read her reviews, you will see that she is extremely diverse in what she likes. She’s not anti-downtown, or anti-suburbs, or anti-sandwich shops, or anti-steakhouse etc. To me, that’s a signal that she is focused on what she finds when she walks in the door.

 

 

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.

Stuck in Philly yesterday waiting for a flight. I’m a loyal consumer and I try to buy/fly local, but the economics of the airline industry are such that it was still considerably cheaper to drive to RDU, fly to Philly and rent a car and go to NYC then to fly out of PTI to LaGuardia ... Anyway, during my stay, I read the Inquirer, once one of the great metro papers in America, and now on the auction block looking for a buyer.

But there was an interesting collection of pieces in their Insight section that attempted to answer the question:

Can we live without newspapers?

Not surprisingly, the three answers were yes, no and maybe.

The yes and no answers are a bit simplistic in my book. Maybe recognizes the profound opportunities and perils of the digital age and also the unique properties of a newspaper, which are these: The organizational clout and resources to tackle big issues, and a way to distribute the material in a way that gets people’s attention. It’s true we lack a monopoly on either of those attributes, but we have clout.

Take our Sunday story on the

economics and numbers behind the proposal to build a trolley in Winston-Salem. A pretty good piece of public-service journalism. Could a blogger do that same story? Of course. But how would he or she tell 100,000 people that they had done it. That’s a lot trickier. At least for now.

If you ever want to get a scary, close-up look of what happens when big business meets big government, take a look at the Master Settlement Agreement

between the cigarette companies—RJR, PM, et al.—and the states’ attorneys general.

It’s an amazing document, one that we’ve written about and will continue to write about for years to come.

The latest battle

is over the major cig companies’ claims that their market share has dropped so their payments ought to drop as well.

There’s a lot of money at stake. One clue: The state allocation percentages of exhibit A. The shares are calculated out to 7 percentage points.  N.C.‘s share is 2.3322850%. 

LAX and the NYT: Interesting piece in

Slate

magazine about how the New York Times has been covering the rape charges involving members of the Duke Lacrosse Team.