Otterblog

If you’ve lived in this area for any length of time—say, more than five minutes—you know that people take their college athletics seriously. Very seriously. I frequently believe there are readers who do word counts on our coverage of Wake Forest and compare it with UNC or Duke or whatever.

We got an interesting e-mail this morning from an irate reader blasting us for not having an advance on the ACC Track Championships starting at WFU today. His theory was that our sports department is run by UNC grads who look for an opportunity to ignore everybody else.

We know who our home teams are (WFU, WSSU and ASU), but we also know that fan loyalty and interest cross county lines. And I’ve found that often the harshest critics of athletic teams are the reporters who went to those schools.

For those keeping score, here’s the rundown on universities attended by our sports staff, starting with our sports editor: Florida Southern, Duke, UNCG, Wake Forest, UNC, High Point, Lees-McRae, USC, Radford, Georgia, Bowling Green, Miami of Ohio, Averett, ASU, Florida. We have four folks who attended UNC, not that surprising considering it has a large and well-regarded journalism program. Tied for second place, with two apiece: Wake Forest and Bowling Green, home of the Falcons.

There’s a lot of police lingo that floats in and out of newsrooms. One of these is the word “mugshot,” which as I’m sure you all know is slang for the photo of a person taken at the time of their arrest. They are rarely flattering photos. Over time, for newspaper purposes, the word mugshot has also come to mean any small, tightly cropped photo of a person that we run, regardless of whether the story has to do with crime. It’s just a picture of what they look like.

We run a lot of mugshots, crime-related and not. We ran four this morning on our front page. Two had to do with the increasingly nasty battle in the GOP primary for the 31st Senate seat once held by Ham Horton. The others were the booking photos of the two deputies arrested in Davidson County and charged with second-degree murder in the death of an inmate.

Why do we run mugshots of people charged with crimes? The flip answer is because we can. But that’s wrong. The reasons have to do with the role of a media that is independent of the government and our responsibility to bear witness. It’s not about shaming people. But mugshots—particularly of those charged with crimes—are snapshots, and they give us some inkling into who people are. It’s the newspaper as window and as mirror.

For all its success in economic development, from Dell to pharmaceuticals, North Carolina has never landed the silver tuna: a car factory. As the foreign car makers have set down roots in the mid-South auto belt, away from Detroit and its unions, North Carolina has been a perennial bridesmaid. BMW got past us to S.C.; Mercedes went to Alabama. Nissan to Mississippi, etc. etc. It can give you a bit of a complex.

Now come

that Toyota, which is poised to overtake GM as the world’s biggest car company, is looking at Greensboro and three other states as a site for a car plant.

Potentially big news and big money. Reporting on incentives is tricky business. The folks involved don’t want to discuss anything, but the public input that is part and parcel of the incentives process requires openness. Invariably, the deal makers gripe that that publicity kills deals. But it doesn’t. We went through this with Dell, and it’s virtually impossible to find an instance where reporting on a reputable company that wanted incentives sent that company to another site.

Worth a read: The Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Print journalism’s annual salute to itself. It can be self-congratulating and a little excessive, particularly in this era, but some of the work is outstanding. I recommend the series in the

With all the sturm und drang over immigration reform, it’s easy to forget the other demographic pig in a python that is changing our country. That is the graying of America and Forsyth County

. Old people are among the fastest-growing group in the nation, and their numbers will swell in coming years as people who are old live longer and us baby boomers join the group.

Huge policy implications. Huge moral implications. Huge financial implications. And it intersects with the immigration issue, as you are probably aware if you have been in a nursing home recently. Many of the people who take care of our elderly are immigrants, and compassion and treating the elderly with dignity transcends their legal status.

The power of mulch. Community is where you find it. And sometimes it’s hard to recognize. But it was there in the line for free leaf mulch on Saturday at the city leaf dump in back of Reynolds Park Rec Center. Pickup trucks as far as the eye could see. W-S’s skyline off in the distance. A fraternity (and sorority) built around the pitchfork and the wheelbarrow. Not half bad.

Today is the first day for so-called “early voting.” I will get on my soapbox here and tell everybody to vote. I don’t care who you vote for, just so long as you do. Higher turnouts mean more legitimate results, which mean a more confident and more connected government.

You can tell from our coverage that we’re in the thick of the political season, with lots of candidate profiles etc. But anybody who thinks politics is deadly dull ought to read our front page piece on the

. It’s like the West Wing as written by Seinfeld. Mitchell was trying to prove that he lived in Howard’s district, and the State Board of Elections cut him off at every pass. It’s all about details. Where he used the most electricity. Where he kept his toothpaste. Where his dog lived.

The saddest thing in the whole story was Mitchell’s attorney denying that the dog was a pet. It was just a stray, he said. “The dog just showed up.” Ouch.

Friday trivia: Our

shows a woman in Kenmare, N.D. with a U.S. 52 road sign next to her. Here’s the question: U.S. 52 and U.S. 421 intersect in downtown W-S. Where else do they cross paths.

Click

for the answer.

Some quick thoughts for a Thursday:

1) Words matter. The title for yesterday’s hearing on immigration was “Gangs, Fraud and Sexual Predators: Struggling with the Consequences of Illegal Immigration.” Not hard to figure out where this group of elected officials is coming from. Complex problem. And despite what people say, complex problems demand complex solutions.

2) Politics matter. It’s hard not to look at the picture of Erskine Bowles on our front page at his installation as president of the UNC system without thinking that for much of the last five years he spent a great deal of time wanting to do another job. i.e. be a U.S. Senator. My guess is that he will do better with the politics of the state education bureaucracy than he did with voters. It’s a different constituency, and one that plays to his strengths.

3) At the end of the day, it’s the votes that matter. Bowles and U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, who brought the immigration hearing to W-S, know that. So does Bucky Covington, who was voted off the American Idol island last night. Long hair and a nice smile can take you pretty far, but not to the finish line.

Community takes a thousands forms in this day and age. We orient ourselves around where we live, around the schools we attend, the teams we root for, the politicians we like (or dislike), even the barbecue we eat.

In some ways, all communities are equal. It doesn’t matter who we commune with as long as we commune.  In other ways, they’re not. I think that geographic community is most important, because face-to-face conversations with our neighbors builds a better world (No, this is not going to be a sermon ...).

That’s my interest in the

, and a reason it’s on our front page today. Community centers seem a bit archaic today. I mean, does anybody really go these sorts of places? Well, as the folks in southeast Wilkes told our reporter, yes, they do. And these centers house memories.

It’s true that a fire doesn’t kill a memory any more than a fire destroys a sense of community. But the absence of a physical structure makes it harder to contain those memories and community. They spread and scatter. It may be the same amount of community, but it’s harder to know it’s there.

A week or so back, I wrote about the Duke Lacrosse case and the power of images

. As most of you are aware, there have some been dramatic new developments in the case: the players’ lawyers say that DNA tests done by the state SBI lab refute the notion of a sexual assault.

Not all sexual assaults leave behind DNA and conversely the absence of DNA doesn’t automatically make prosecutors drop cases. Darryl Hunt can attest to that. But in this day and age, with skeptical jurors and CSI overloads running through our brains, it makes it very difficult for jurors to convict without forensic evidence.

If you believe the players’ attorneys—who are some of the best and best-connected criminal defense attorneys in the state—this case is over. Maybe. Maybe not. What does seem clear is that the events of that night are much more complicated than have originally been reported. And this raises some interesting issues about media responsibility in a 24/7 world. There has been intense pressure to publish and broadcast and post on this case for the reasons I wrote about last week. If you take the sexual assault off the table—assuming for the purpose of this discussion that it didn’t happen—is there still a story about piggish and racist (but not criminal) behavior by a bunch of college jocks? Yes, but it might not make the national news.

What should the media do? Our car doesn’t go in reverse, yet based on what’s happened so far some of the earlier reporting is way too breathless. So this is yet another reminder that most issues—sexual assaults, wars in Iraq, peace in the Middle East, immigration—are much more complex than the providers AND consumers of news want to admit. Neat and tidy works for kitchen cabinets, but little else.

I’m no stock-picking guru—and this is neither an endorsement to sell or to buy stock—but with all the navel gazing about the quality and durability of Winston-Salem’s tech sector

, the clearest indication may come this Thursday, when Targacept has its long-awaited IPO.

This follows on the heels of last week’s announcement regarding organ-tissue regeneration done by researchers at Wake Forest University.

Targacept is the company spun off from RJR in 2000 that does a lot of ground-breaking research on nicotine and has been working to find pharmaceutical uses for nicotine in treating diseases of the central nervous system. It cut a huge deal with AstraZeneca in December to help with the marketing and development of its products.

The stock market, as many companies find out much too late, is unforgiving and unsentimental. It cares less about the past than the future and is obsessed with expectations. And it also has a herd mentality. Money follows the leader. Targacept’s success as a publicly traded company may not be THE barometer of Winston-Salem’s tech economy, but it will be a measure worth keeping your eye on.

There is the dizzy-bat contest and the pizza yell, but for sheer depravity at a minor-league baseball game, nothing quite compares to the Frozen T-shirt contest.

Two contestants are given a T-shirt that has been soaked wet and then frozen. The object is to put your T-shirt on first. It ain’t easy. The basic tactic is to beat the ice out of it by banging the block against the roof of the dugout. Yowza.

I witnessed my first—and hopefully not last—FTS contest last night at the season opener of the W-S Warthogs. Hogs won 4-3. The back story is that the city is still trying to figure out how to get a

, and it doesn’t appear that we’re much closer than we were a year ago.

It’s all about money. Billy Prim, formerly of Blue Rhino and now of Primo Water fame, would like his Warthogs to be downtown, but there’s still a gap between the cost of a stadium and what he wants to put up or borrow.  Greensboro’s spiffy downtown stadium was essentially built without public money, courtesy of a grant from the Bryant Foundation that picked up half the cost. Without a similar gift, it’s hard to imagine a stadium here getting off the ground free of the taxpayers. And so here we are.

I like Ernie Shore field. It has a good vibe and

, along with the view of the Whitaker Park skyline. It reminds me of who we are in W-S. The question of course is whether that’s also what we want to be.