Otterblog

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

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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.

Close readers of OTTERBLOG will remember a post sometime back about the confusion over what to call Mumbai, formerly Bombay.

A similar debate is raging—journalistically speaking—over Burma/Myanmar, the site of civil unrest and protest in Southeast Asia. The Journal calls the country Myanmar, following Associated Press style, but not everyone agrees. This is a nice column from the Boston Globe on the controversy that gets at much of the tangled history and the power of names.

Interestingly enough, the U.S. government apparently doesn’t recognize the new name. Here’s the entry in the CIA World Factbook, easily one of the most useful sites on the Web.

One of my favorite road names in all of North Carolina is off Interstate 40 just outside of Raleigh. It’s Jones Sausage Road. And like most good road names, there’s a story behind the name. It’s the place where they make sausage. Or more properly, Slim Jims. The Jones comes from the Jesse Jones brand of hot dogs, one of the original products in the business ... but that’s another story for another day.

Slim Jims are not the best things in the world for you, but they can be pretty tasty in the right situation and state of hunger. All this processed meat nostalgia is courtesy of a great little piece we had in our sports section today on a football player named Keith Newton. He started at WSSU, wasn’t particularly focused, then left school. He ended up at the Slim Jim factory in Garner, turning meat and what have you into beef jerky and Slim Jims. He realized this was a tough way to make a buck and is back at school. A job is a job, and I believe that all professions can be noble callings, but Newton’s descriptions of the inner workings of the Slim Jim empire are a little Upton Sinclairish. Not saying I am going to swear off the occasional meat snack, but I may think twice. As a former political reporter, I’ve always subscribed to the old saying (often attributed to Mark Twain) that “Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.” I’ve watched my share of laws being enacted but haven’t had a tour of the other end of that adage.

And speaking of food that isn’t particularly good for you ... yes, the Dixie Classic Fair starts tomorrow. Very exciting. Love the fair. Wish it was 10 degrees colder, but not a whole lot you can do about it.

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A reader could fairly construe that we here at the Journal have an obsession with all things herpetological. In the past month or so, we have published stories about the search for hellbender salamanders in Watauga County, a lost iguana in West Salem, and today’s expose on an alligator that wound up in Lake Katharine.  I won’t speak for the rest of the newsroom, but I plead guilty to my interest in lizards and such. Moreover, the world is a scary place, and story about our interaction with the wild are a nice change from the mayhem of the day to day. I don’t expect a series on reptiles of the Triad, but if you get a picture of a huge snapping turtle that’s backed your dog into a corner, give me a buzz.

On a more serious note, we published a serious look at the restructuring of HanesBrands and the financial and personnel measures that companies use to measure success. This is a anniversary story of sorts, and on occasion, I think that we may do too many of these look back/look ahead stories. But my preference is to err on the side of doing these pieces. Newspapers are often called the first draft of history, and history is at its most simple, recounting what happened during a particular time frame.

Here’s a little art for the OTTERBLOG community. A week or so ago, Scott Sexton wrote a column about a guy named Curtis McCullough who is running for president. Mr. McCullough wrote me a nice note and included a political cartoon he did. His art skills are a little rusty, but I’ve seen worse.

And finally, your OTTERBLOG on video. Let me know what you think. I apologize for rocking back and forth like Norman Bates’ mother. It’s my rolling chair. Probably why I’m in front of keyboard and not a camera. Enjoy.