Otterblog

I am sorry for the haphazard posting the past week. I was in Greensboro at the Center for Creative Leadership, which was an incredible and eye-opening experience. I learned a lot about myself and how what we intend to do and what others perceive us as doing don’t always jibe. And, as with a lot of these group endeavors, you become quick friends with people whose best asset is their willingness to unflinchingly help you be a better leader/manager/person

Now, onto the news.

First, the redesign of JournalNow, the host of OTTERBLOG and the Winston-Salem Journal’s online face. A long time coming. The goal was to create a more graceful site, with a better rotation of news and pictures that is easier to navigate. We’re interested in your thoughts, so please let me know the good, bad and the ugly.

Second, the primaries. Our story this morning on small-town North Carolina highlights the battle for blue-collar votes. We’ve got two weeks before the May 6 primary. It is a scramble out there, particularly if Sen. Clinton wins Pennsylvania tomorrow. What I’ve been pleased with regarding our coverage is that we have worked hard to get into issues, not just the personalities of the candidates. I’m not so naive to think that personality doesn’t matter, but at the end of the day we’re electing a president, not a first friend.

How’d we get that shot: Our photo on Saturday morning that showed Sen. Clinton in Washington Park filming a commercial was the result of luck and hard work. Luck, in that one of our journalists lives on the street where the ad was filmed. Hard work, in that our photo editor Walt Unks is pretty darned good with a long lens.

The story of Eng and Chang Bunker is one for the ages, as our story this morning made clear.

The phrase Siamese twins is now considered pejorative, and rightly so. The preferred word is “conjoined.” But what I find so fascinating about the Bunkers and this history is that the name was appropriate for them. They were twins—of a fashion—and they were from Siam, now Thailand. And their life, from Asia, to the carnival life, to country gentlemen married to sisters in the mountains of North Carolina is an incredible journey.

Historians, writers and filmmakers have been wrestling with the Bunkers—metaphorically speaking—for years. And there is a whole body of work about them. Darin Strauss’s Chang and Eng is an imagined narration by Chang of their life together. I don’t know how much of it is true, but it is a lyrical novel.

Blue Ridge Country wrote about the Bunkers some time back.

But for my money, the best thing I’ve seen recently was a piece in June 2006 in National Geographic on the Bunkers and their descendants, who now live in and around Mount Airy.

Getting some recognition: Our Raleigh correspondent, James Romoser, scored an exclusive yesterday, with an interview of Barack Obama and his regret over remarks that seemed to denigrate small-town, rural America. The story went viral, and we’ve got something like 5 pages of comments on JournalNow. Incredible. Another example of how the Web is changing politics and political reporting.

Michelle Obama is just leaving Winston-Salem State as we speak/write/blog. Pretty powerful speaker. I’m not sure when the sea change happened with spouses campaigning so actively for their better? halves. I guess to some extent it’s been going on for years. Nina Totenberg of NPR fame has a book out about first ladies and their value to the team, but my sense is that the overt and persistent politicking is a fairly recent phenomenon.

It raises some interesting coverage issues. Our approach so far has been that the candidates themselves are bigger news than their spouses. No surprise there. But with essentially four weeks until primary day, we could see numerous trips to Winston-Salem from the candidates and their spouses. One of the things that I find interesting is how much attention Winston-Salem is getting. I think that’s a bit unusual. In the past, many candidates were content to hit Greensboro and let that be it for the Triad, the idea being that PTIA was a convenient gathering place for the TV trucks and press types and you could hit several birds with one stone. I’ve often thought that Winston-Salem/Forsyth County is politically different than Greensboro/Guilford, and the candidates apparently think so as well.

Good read: On an unrelated topic, the Pulitzer prizes were announced yesterday. Lots of good stories/articles. For sheer enjoyment, here’s the winning features entry, about an experiment involving a world-class violinist and a DC train station. It’s looooong, but very funny and meaningful.

Update: OTTERBLOG was wrong. It’s Cokie Roberts, not Nina Totenberg who has the new book out about first ladies. Sorry about that.

Email-retention policies are not the sexiest three words in the English language. They’re not even the sexiest words in the English language of bureaucrats, but there’s a battle/skirmish being waged in Raleigh about how the government stores and keeps email. Here’s the link to Gov. Easley’s release on the matter. The background is that a press person at DHHS was fired after a series in the N&O about woeful mental health care. On her way out she said that the Easley administration was telling folks to delete their email. Easley folks said no, then others came forward to say yeah, sort of.

Email has become a treasure trove of sorts for reporters. Most newspapers have set up systems with local governments where they routinely get the email of city manager or the like just forwarded to their inboxes. We love it. Public officials don’t. Lots of reasons why. First, it’s a pain separating out email that is considered a public record and those that aren’t (such as email involving personnel). Second, the use of email is too pervasive. It is the way we communicate, and so the amount of email on a particular subject can be huge. Third, people say things in email that they wouldn’t say over the phone or in person or in an OFL (old-fashioned letter).

I think that everybody in the state has conceded that emails are public records, so the real question is how to manage and disseminate them to the public (whether the press or otherwise). It’s costly (both time and money). Nobody probably wants to read every email that Gov. Easley writes, but the idea of having 10 mm state of north carolina emails flood your inbox everyday is a little overwhelming as well. As with all large amounts of data, if you can’t sort, you’re lost in the woods.

If I was a betting person, I would look for legislation on this in the 2009 session, when a new governor and a new General Assembly try to figure out what makes sense in a digital age with a public looking for transparency in government.

Ah, democracy. The smell of it is in the air. A heady mixture of barbecue, promises, and the fumes of all those campaign buses. Close readers of OTTERBLOG know my great love of the state of Iowa, and now we are getting a chance to experience what is old hat out there.

That said, the WAY that Sens. Obama and Clinton are campaigning here is different from what happens in the early states. Less retail, more wholesale. Or maybe less Mom n Pop and more big box. Pick your metaphor. To date, the candidates have kept their appearances along the great Megasprawl known as Charwinsalgreenangle, other than the obligatory stops in Fayetteville, for the whole military thing. You’re not seeing the one-on-one/small towns that’s expected and de rigueur in Iowa and New Hampshire.

As our story today made clear, Obama appears to be trying to look past the primaries and go after McCain already. Clinton, on the other hand, is trying to prevent a stampede, particularly by so-called superdelegates. Her camp seems to be of two minds whether North Carolina is a must-win. Our main political reporter, James Romoser, has all the goods on his blog, Trail Mix.

Clinton will be in Winston-Salem today. We have an interview scheduled with her, and what I think is kind of cool is that we dropped a little box in the paper and online soliciting questions that people would like us to ask her. We’ve received about two dozen, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, there are some inappropriate ones about blue dresses and the like in there, but for the most part, they are thoughtful, policy-related questions asked by voters across a wide spectrum. This is a great example of how the digital and non-digital (analog?) newsrooms work together.

Now, what about Sen. McCain? I’d love him to come to Winston-Salem as well. In the past, neither nominee has campaigned much in North Carolina after the conventions. It’s been sufficiently and reliably Republican that neither candidate has wanted to spend/waste time here (other than those fine debates at WFU...). From a public-policy and journalism standpoint, I would love that to change, but we’ll have to wait and see.

There’s that great scene in Casablanca, where Capt. Renault is shocked to find there’s gambling going on at Rick’s.

I feel a little of that misplaced energy this morning, after Sen. Barack Obama’s speech on race yesterday. Love him, hate him, just don’t care for him. It’s hard not to be impressed by the pain and power in his speech. Over the past week, I get the sense that many white Americans have been shocked, shocked, to find out that a) Barack Obama is black, and b) that he goes to a black church; and c) that he has a black minister who has preached on controversial and potentially divisive topics, particularly when seen in a short video snippet.  Was I shocked?  Not really. Still, the harshness of the preacher’s rhetoric was jarring and a little unsettling.

And if Obama ends up as the Democratic nominee, you will see these clips again and again through November.

The mix of race and politics on which the Democratic primary will now likely turn is familiar ground to many journalists in North Carolina. Some of the overtones and undertones of this primary are reminiscent of the 1990 primary between Harvey Gantt and Mike Easley. In that campaign, which I covered a lifetime ago, Gantt did an effective job—at least in the primary—of courting a sufficient number of white voters, while sewing up a huge majority of black voters. Obama hasn’t quite done that, but he’s deftly managed the calculus of the sprawling primary schedule.

Obama is in Fayetteville and Charlotte today, giving speeches, a reflection of the renewed interest in North Carolina’s primary voters. See James Romoser’s Trail Mix blog and our story this morning for more details on that.

This is a very fluid story, and what I will be interested to see as the day wears on, is whether Obama’s talk in Fayetteville, which is supposed to be a “major address” on the War in Iraq (now in its fifth year) can fight its way through the more provocative story that features the endless video clips of the Rev. Wright.

So ... We’ve left the corn and the snow and the granite and the flinty New Hampshireans and the taciturn Iowans for the rest of the country… Nevada, where the casino workers are the third rail of politics. Michigan, and its post-industrial funk, and South Carolina, site of John McCain’s 2000 Waterloo and John Edwards zenith in 2004… There are a lot of dynamics in both races. Once again, last night, we saw the dangers in polling. Most polls showed Obama out ahead, and so that became the story line. But Clinton ended up winning. Were the polls wrong? Or did voters make up their minds very late. My guess: a little of both. If this keeps up, maybe North Carolina’s primary will matter.

Public access: North Carolina’s open-meetings law isn’t perfect, but it’s all we have in this state, and so I get a little passionate in my defense of the public’s right to be there. Not just the media, but the public, in all its unwieldiness and awkwardness. Last night, as we reported, the city council tried to essentially close a public forum on police-investigative procedures. We made a fuss, but the reason the city wisely backed off its plan was the larger fuss from the public. That’s important. The press can’t find public access alone. And unfortunately, when the public doesn’t push for access, government becomes less responsive and more imperious.

A letter we received the other day:

If the Winston-Salem Journal is going to print promotional ads for John Edwards disguised as news articles three days in a row, such as those by James Rosemer run on the front page December 16, 17, and 18, wouldn’t it be simpler and more honest to run an official endorsement of Edwards on your editorial page?

Or are we to assume that you will be running three consecutive days of free front-page promotions for all the candidates in coming weeks?

We dispatched one of our best reporters to Iowa last week to follow the Edwards campaign and to report on the Iowa caucuses. We even started a blog, although it will morph into more general election coverage as the months go by.

The question of whether our political coverage is too Edwardscentric isn’t just an external question. We’ve had the same debate in our newsroom. I think there are a couple of things going on that explain our reasoning.

1) Edwards is a North Carolinian, and the first serious candidate from the state in years. Plenty of people don’t like him, but that’s neither here nor there. To the nation, he is us, and we need to take his candidacy seriously. Not as a booster, but as journalists.

2) The Iowa caucus is a political lifetime away from the North Carolina primary in May, and our readers can’t vote in Iowa. So us looking at the presidential race through the prism of a local candidate doesn’t really alter the outcome. It’s a way to organize coverage and prioritize our resources. For better or for worse, our state’s leaders decided that NC would probably not be a player in choosing the major party candidates. If by some chance, there is still uncertainty about the nominee prior to our primary, I can assure you we will give detailed coverage of candidates (both Dem. and Rep.) ahead of time.

As we move into full holiday mode, a couple of final thoughts.

My posts will likely be minimal in the next week or so (my gift to you all ...) and will get back into full OTTERBLOG mode come 2008.
Have a safe and healthy holiday with family, friends and --- yes, even enemies.
I appreciate all the comments, snide remarks, admonitions and sound advice this past year.

Thnx

We launched a new political blog today (or maybe late yesterday). It’s called Trail Mix, and it’s written by James Romoser, our Raleigh bureau chief. James is scary smart, and a great observer and analyzer. There are a zillion political blogs out there. We hope ours will be distinguished by its quality of content, not just the sheer quantity of links being dumped onto a site. I hope you will check it out and let James know what you think.

James is in Iowa right now, which is one of my favorite places in this whole big country of ours. It’s big skies and the cliffs along the Mississippi and river towns and corn and campaigning as far as the eye can see. I told James to eat cheeseburger chowder soup wherever he can find it out there, but he wasn’t having any of it. I think it’s one of the great midwestern dishes.

Personnel files: If you read the story today about the conviction of Robert Watson, you’ll note that we have asked for the school system to release his personnel file to the public. Generally speaking, personnel files are not public, but the law allows school officials to release these records in limited circumstances. We think the public-policy issues here are important

speech.com.doc

Yesterday, we were hosts to a group of journalists visiting from the UK. They were in town to look at our editorial system, which is called Content Watch, as a replacement for their current system. CW is what we use to manage files through the production process. They work for a company called Trinity Mirror plc, which is the largest publisher of newspapers in the England, Scotland and Wales. Their titles include regional papers in Birmingham and Wales and the national paper, the Mirror, which has a circulation of well over 1 million, is their flagship paper.

The Mirror’s history is part of the very fabric of journalism. It was the first tabloid newspaper, for many years was the best-selling newspaper in England, and then was taken down by Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. and the Sun. Now it’s one of several tabloids jostling for space and market identity on the newsstands. Wikipedia has a reasonably cogent summation of the Mirror and its ups and downs.

In my conversations with these folks, it’s clear the British journalism is a lot different than that practiced in the U.S. They’re much racier, and celebrity-focused, and because British consumers tend to be single-copy buyers rather than subscribers, they have to make their bones every day. That said, we face a lot of the same issues—the value of print in a digital world, a changed workforce with neither the time or inclination to read, the eternal search for what readers want: today, tomorrow or the next.

This past Sunday, I gave a talk to a group called “The Tankers,” which as I understand it, is a collection of retired and semi-retired university types and assorted friends who are interested in public affairs. They had asked me to come talk about politics and the media. I’ve attached a copy of the speech in a pre-delivery shape. They were a good group that asked a lot of pointed but reasonable questions.