Otterblog

Several bloggers, including my friend Lucy Cash at Life in Forsyth, are criticizing the Journal for its decision on publishing a special reprint of our election results front page that is only available in single-copy sales, rather than in the papers that go to subscribers.

It’s still a free country, and they have the right to criticize. And it’s all well and good to have conversations and disagreements about what we should have and could have done. My personal belief is that it’s a bit of a tempest in a teapot. I wasn’t part of the decision on how to reprint, but from what I’ve been able to glean, the logic was as follows: Subscribers got the real thing, the actual paper printed on Nov. 5. Many folks who buy the paper one day at a time didn’t, because we sold out. So this was something for them. The subscribers’ anger is that they are loyal and they should be rewarded for their loyalty with the special reprint. That makes sense, too, although from my standpoint, the real thing is more valuable and intrinsically historical than a reprint.

Now, the mop up. I think the symbol for the day after elections in America, or at least in American newsrooms, is the empty pizza box, slightly greasy on the bottom, still redolent with that amazing aroma of half cheese, half cardboard. Lots of them stacked around here today.

First things first. How’d I do. I wrote yesterday:
As for predictions, here are mine. North Carolina will pick McCain by a slight margin, but Obama’s coattails will be enough to carry Perdue and Hagan to eke out wins. Obama will win national popular vote 52-48, and the electoral vote in the low to mid 300s.

I give myself 3.5 out of five. Not too shabby.

The press and the larger MSM have come under incredible scrutiny/criticism this election for being in the tank for Obama. And that by the selection of stories we covered or ran or chose not to cover or ran we essentially gave the campaign to the Democrats. I think that’s a convenient explanation that deflects blame and responsibility. I was watching FOX last night (less graphics than CNN but better analysis) and Karl Rove was talking about the Obama win, and even if you think that he is evil incarnate (I don’t), you have to respect his understanding of politics and campaigning, and he was just in awe of Obama’s machine, its discipline, its work ethic and focus. Yes, the tide of discontent with the current GOP administration was running with the Obama camp, but Rove’s point was that Obama just pounded this puppy home.

It’s fair to say that press coverage by the Journal made a difference in two races. Our story on Sen. Elizabeth Dole and her relative absence from North Carolina was not done on behalf of Sen.-elect Kay Hagan, but it became a key piece of her attack against the incumbent. Similarly, our column that outlined the sweet deal that Rep. Walter Church, a Democrat from Burke County, received when he got a speeding ticket in Forsyth, was probably a reason in his loss last night. I don’t mention these as bragging rights or as notches on our belt, but just to say that if you wonder how reporters make a difference in campaigns, these are two pretty good examples.

I’ve mentioned it before, but one of the coolest sites out there is by the Newseum, and it shows newspaper front pages from around the world. Updated each day. Getting a lot of traffic, so be patient.

A crazy last few days, most of it spent in the Richmond area, as our company tries to figure out the direction of the media business in 2009 and beyond. And I apologize for not posting ...

Anyway, Election Day is here. Short voting line at my polling station this morning. Does that mean something? Drizzly day. Does that mean something? There has been so much analysis and uber-analysis of this race that it makes your head spin. Conventional wisdom is out the window at this point. The only things left to do are to vote and to count.

As for predictions, here are mine. North Carolina will pick McCain by a slight margin, but Obama’s coattails will be enough to carry Perdue and Hagan to eke out wins. Obama will win national popular vote 52-48, and the electoral vote in the low to mid 300s.

I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again…So no Dewey/Truman jokes please…

Covering elections is always crazy, and along with the preparation of who’s covering what and making sure all our editorial ducks are in a row comes the most important question ... Who ordered the pizza. I’m serious. A bad pizza experience is something that can live on for months/years. And from the attached message below from the News & Observer, you can see it is not confined to the Journal. For the record, we have no slice limits ...

From: “Susan Spring”
Date: November 3, 2008 11:46:07 AM EST
To: [Raleigh News & Observer staff]
Subject: Pizza etiquette

I want to remind you that pizza will be provided tomorrow night ONLY for
those working on elections. Please be polite. If you are working elections, you may have up to TWO slices. Thank you in advance for being considerate.

Susan Spring
Director of Newsroom Operations
The News & Observer
(919) 829-4860

A message from executive editor John Drescher a few hours later:

There will be no two-slice limit Tuesday night (although if Susan Spring chases you with a knife in her hand, you are on your own). And anyone who is here can partake.

Election Day is a week away. Or is it? As our story this morning makes clear, early voting has changed all the rules. What’s not clear yet—and may not be clear or not be able to be clear—is whether early voting changes the outcome. Does a two-week or three-week voting period change the composition of the people who vote and therefore the results?

Early voting is also changing journalism, and it has forced us to consider when we run stories. Traditionally, the goal was to get everything done before the Sunday before Election Day. But the start of early voting creates another deadline. It’s very likely that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the voters will have cast ballots before the official Election Day. We have tried, not always successfully, to use that as a guide. This year, that’s been easier said than done, as the campaigns here have been wilder than anything in recent history. That’s forced us to spend more time reporting the spot news, the events, the rallies, the ground war, and less time on set pieces. And one thing hasn’t changed. Our sample ballot will appear in Sunday’s paper.

One of my favorite politics sites is called simply The Note. It’s put together by ABC News, and it is an incredible digest of the day’s political news, with links to stories. Like many of these sites, there’s a lot of conventional wisdom floating around. But it’s a good clearinghouse for news and often reasonably entertaining.

I am catching up after a day off on Monday, so I will try to look backwards and forward in this post. First, the backwards ...

We ran a very significant story on Sunday, about the real costs of WSSU moving to Div. I sports, reported by John Dell, our WSSU beat writer. A good, strong piece of enterprise/investigative journalism. From the online comments, you can tell there is still a debate about the wisdom of this move.

There’s an important public policy aspect to this piece, and not just gotcha journalism, which is why we went after it hard. One thing that people often don’t realize is how difficult a story like this is to do. In this case, we faced a lot of reluctance from the university to release its budget information to us. It was only after we filed a formal public-records request for this information that it was released. The important thing is that public-records laws are not some abstract piece of legislation that simply exists on an esoteric level. They’re there to work for all of us —journalists and the public.

Now, the forward ... There are 14 days until Election Day. Biden is coming to Winston-Salem on Thursday, and my guess is that the candidates (both for POTUS and VPOTUS) will have a combined 6-10 visits here between now and then. It’s incredibly exciting that we are in the thick of the race. We have tried our best to give both parties equal presentation on the front page when they are in the state, and we’ll continue that practice. It’s what is fair and also what is news.

Our story the other day on Allan Louden, the WFU debate expert, was a great read, and also very illuminating about how the Internet has changed journalism. If you’ve ever done a Google search, you know how everything gets bunched at the top. Same way with experts. So Louden is now a certified expert, and you can tell he’s an expert because if you do a search you get 100,000 hits. Not too shabby. Hits mean more interviews, which mean more hits. The Web fosters legitimacy, and on and on it goes.

A similar thing is happening with a story that Sean Mussenden in our DC bureau did a week or so back on Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s visits to North Carolina. It is getting a tremendous amount of play on the Web and in other outlets for two reasons. First, it was a great piece of original reporting, i.e. legwork + context. Second, the Dole-Hagan race has turned out to be a sleeper and bellwether, and so lots of journalists are scrambling to catch up on it. Here’s a New York Times story on the race, and here’s a segment from NPR. Both quote our story.

Elsewhere:

The haiku contest
on the stock market is done.
Winner named Friday.

There is a good story in the NY Times today about the decline in statehouse reporters, pegged to the situation in Albany, NY. The story line is predictable. Newspapers are cutting costs and looking at state capital bureaus as one place to save. This is really a print issue. TV stations—save for those in capital markets—have never given a lot of attention to state government news.
This is an unfortunate trend. Less coverage means less oversight. Less oversight means more chance for abuse of power. There are newsletters and blogs and the like that attempt to fill the void, and some of them do a good job, but few approach it with the goal of objectivity.
The situation is not much different in Raleigh. When I covered the legislature in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the press corps was more robust, probably 15-20 journalists. My guess is it’s about a dozen now, maybe (The Journal has one reporter there, down from two two years ago. Prior to his death, my brother-in-law, Art Weissman, was the Trenton bureau chief for the Asbury Park Press in NJ, a state well-known for its “inefficient government,” and I remember him giving me a tour of the place one year. There were probably 40-50 journalists there. Again, no more. There’s still top-quality work being done in statehouses. Just less of it. The holes in the net are bigger and more stuff gets through.
When I think about the interface between technology and journalism and end users, I think of three areas: distribution (how we get the news); aggregation (how the news gets packaged into what we want and what we don’t want) and generation (how news gets created). Technology is really good at the first two, but not so good on the last one, and I don’t think you can repackage the first two into a quality substitute for the third leg of the stool.

Today is already shaping up to be a bear. Wachovia is being bought by Citigroup, and that will have huge ramifications for North Carolina and Winston-Salem. More on that later, as it gets fleshed out.

I’ve been thinking about our political coverage and its presentation. On Saturday, 20,000 people showed up in Greensboro at a rally for Sen. Barack Obama. That’s front-page news, and I don’t need to apologize for or explain our placement decisions. We talk about these things constantly, and we always note that if McCain comes to the state we’ll do the same for him. But here’s the rub: McCain hasn’t come to North Carolina so far. His last visit was during the primary, and it was for a talk at WFU. I haven’t talked with the McCain staff on their decision, but my guess about what’s going on is as follows: He thinks North Carolina is safely in his column, that it may be close, but close doesn’t matter in the electoral college. You win North Carolina by 1 vote or 1 million and the result is the same: 15 electoral votes.
That said, campaign rallies by definition are partisan events, and it’s hard to write about any politician’s rally without giving them some boost (It may fire up opponents as well.). So, there’s the appearance that we are covering the Obama campaign more kindly and generously. There’s no good way out of this. To ignore the Obama rallies seems petty. He’s here, after all, and the reasons why he’s here are politically intriguing. He’s trying to be the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win North Carolina…
The best tactic to me is the one we’ve been doing. Cover the events, and be prepared for the McCain-Palin campaign.

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.

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.