Otterblog

We are covering an immense tragedy today, the death of four young people in a car wreck off of Yadkinville Road. If you go to the bottom of the story, you will find a running dialogue of comments that is startling. Boiled down, it is this: Some writers think the ethnicity of the victims explains the deaths. Others think that is beyond cruel. It is the megaphone and the microphone unleashed among the population.

Our policy on these sorts of comments is to tread lightly. Offensive is a difficult word to describe in a way that garners broad agreement. From time to time, we do remove comments. But generally, we don’t.

I find some of the comments offensive, but there is a conversation that nonetheless is worth having. I’m sure there are folks who think this isn’t really a conversation, but rather various anonymous folks talking and typing past each other. And that’s true to some extent. But the alternative is not to have them at all. And that’s a worse alternative. I’m interested in your thoughts on these online dialogues. They are a staple of online news stories now—everywhere. It’s the media, w/o the filter.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect story than the piece we ran Thursday on the Wilkes County man who caught a state-record catfish on his granddaughter’s Barbie fishing pole after she ducked out for a few minutes to—as he says—“go potty.”

In the news biz, this is called a “talker,” and it’s the sort of story that quickly finds a home at the bottom of page 1. It has all the elements: quirkiness, family love; struggle and happy ending.

We ignore these stories at our own risk. Yes, there is a lot of serious news in the world. Some of it is incredibly sobering and painful and distressing. The Arctic ice is melting. South Ossetia, a place that many of us didn’t know existed, is the latest flash point in the world. People are excited about gas at $3.50 a gallon. On and on.

As I’ve said before, the goal is balance. I love serious and important news. But a Barbie rod and a 21 pound catfish. It is a story that everybody can relate to. If you do a Google search for Barbie and fishing, you get 4 million hits. Now, not all of them are our story. But you’d be surprised—or maybe not—how many times this story has traveled electronically around the world.

More naming issues: This is a follow up from an earlier post about what to call things. As we’ve reported, the NC School of the Arts is now UNC School of the Arts. That’s a mouthful. And it doesn’t exactly fit in a headline. So, one shorthand is its initials UNCSA. But saying U-N-C-S-A takes too long. So the acronym we use is Uncsa, pronounced UNK-sa. And my guess is that despite many people’s efforts to the contrary, that is going to become how it is known. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather and about the precision with which we write about the weather. In one sense, hot is hot. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether it is 98 or 101. But one number is a story, and the other is a standalone picture. The way we decide that is by finding out the exact temperature. Thermometers are like clocks. There are good ones and bad ones, and even the good ones don’t always agree with each other.

Most weather stories have two parts. The first is what happened. Did it snow. How hot was it. How much rain fell? etc. The second is trickier. It is the forecast. What’s it going to be like tomorrow, this weekend?

How weather gets collected and collated and communicated is sort of a tricky business—and it is a business. The Journal essentially has three providers of weather information. Our weather page is produced by Accuweather, which bills itself as the largest private weather service in the world. They’re out of State College, Pa. But there’s also a local insert from Fox8, the television station in High Point that we have a news-sharing agreement with. The third entity is the National Weather Service. They are the collector of much of the raw data that feeds all these other sources. Typically, everybody is in pretty strong agreement about what happened, mainly because they’re all pulling from the same pot of info, even if they don’t always attribute the data to the NWS. The forecast gets a little trickier. It’s sort of like doctoring a recipe. The National Weather Service puts out a perfectly good forecast. What the private weather services do—and often do pretty well—is interpret the forecasts based on local knowledge. It’s very rare that they say black when the NWS says white. What happens more often is that they say it’s going to be a darker shade of gray than the NWS forecasts.

We ran into a problem the other day when trying to produce a graphic on what the weather would be like for Tuesday. The problem was that we got the information for the forecast from the NWS. It conflicted slightly with what Accuweather and Fox8 were predicting. Our graphics editor asked whether we in essence wanted to have what amounted to two different forecasts in the paper, even if they only disagreed by a degree or two. So, we pulled it at the last minute.

I’ll be honest. I understand the need to know what the weather might do, but there’s something magical about waking up to a snowstorm that you didn’t know 5 days out as going to arrive.

Water, water everywhere: I took part today in a blind taste test of bottled and tap water to see if we could taste the difference between all the stuff being hawked and guzzled out there. Surprising results. Look for the story in our living section in the next week or so…

One of the great things about the English language and our highly mobile and interwoven society is the way words and phrases travel and make their way from the sidestream to the mainstream. I was reading a story yesterday in our sports section about an Olympic sprinter and it had this passage:

For sprinter Walter Dix, the epiphany came when he was 9 years old and playing street football.
A “big kid,” four years his senior, challenged him to a race. A mismatch, some figured. Not so much. Dix beat him by a lean, which was the moment that Dix and those in his Fort Lauderdale neighborhood realized just how freakishly fast he was.

Not so much. Everybody is saying it these days. And now it has made its way into the great American newspaper as that most useful of phrases: The quick and snappy transition sentence. It does two things well with only three words. First, it bursts the bubble of the intended outcome. Second, it establishes the writer as a hip person in the know, not a stuffy, tradition-bound, gasp, print journalist,.

Not so much fever, at least in my world, began in earnest after Borat came out. But the phrase has been around a much longer time. Here’s a great piece on the history of not so much. As the story points out, the inflections in the saying have hints of Yiddish, the original language of the smart aleck.

New search engine: Just when Google has invaded every pore and fiber of our being comes a new search engine. One of my co-workers sent me the link to cuil.com last night, and in the interest of research I am going to use it for a few days to see how well it works. Its founders came from Google. And yes, it is pronounced “cool.”

Cuil update. Good-looking, not so good-working. The results don’t seem to jibe with how my brain works (no jokes, please). I think we all want search engines that think how we think. In other words, if we had the brain capacity to store all this info, it would be categorized by our version of the Dewey Decimal system. Case in point. This morning, I was trying to get the conversion from cubic feet to gallons. So I typed in those words to cuil and got page after page of nonsense. Did the same thing with Google. Got a bunch of links that all had the info, as well as a standalone figure. For those playing at home, it’s 7.48 gallons to a cubic foot. With some other searches, I’ve been quite pleased, but many seem to be a bit off the mark. Will keep trying, as I like the way the searches are displayed. Hopefully, the intuitive aspect of it will improve.

Every afternoon, I get what is called a “Site Catalyst Report.” It’s a listing of the top stories on our Web site, based on page views. It’s pretty interesting to look at, because you get specific insight into what stories readers are reading and what ones they aren’t. And because it measures page views, it’s precise. Newspaper circulation works differently. We print and distribute 80,000+ copies, and our assumption/belief/spin is that readers read the whole thing, front to back.

Online, it is different. Those sorts of assumption don’t exist. It’s all targeted. We know which stories readers looked at, and which ones they avoided or failed to see. With this knowledge comes power, the power to tailor content (and advertising) that seems to fit better with what readers want. It creates the framework of a marketplace, where each story lives and dies on its own merit, rather than getting swept along with other more important news. It’s what many people have been arguing for with regards to the printed paper: Publish what people want to read, not what you think they want to read.

The flip side is that journalism isn’t a popularity contest. Based on the Site Catalyst Reports, it’s not infrequent for stories that we thought were important to get ignored online. The brutality of the online bazaar would lead you to the conclusion that we ought not to run these stories. Nobody is reading them, so they’re a waste of everyone’s time. Someday, it may come to that. Not yet. The fact is that one of our tasks as journalists is to bear witness to stories and issues that people ought to know about. It’s true that the emphasis on writing/reporting for readers is pushing us to rethink what we do and how we approach stories, but once you make decisions based solely on page views you end up spending all your time outside with your finger in the air, trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing.

Like everything else, there’s a balance. I think it works best like this: Find stories that readers are dying to read, and run them next to stories they ought to read. They come for the circus and stay for the lecture…

It’s amazing that after all these years we are still running into new ethical gray areas in journalism. Here was yesterday’s issue: We posted a short story early in the afternoon about the double homicide off of Coliseum. Our online stories allow comments. One of the first comments was from a woman who said she knew one of the victims. If you read our comments, you know that the identity of the commenter is a little squishy. People often use screen names. In this case, it was—I think—Angelina1. Anyway, if you’ve ever posted a comment on journalnow, you know that it requires registration, including an email address. So we had this woman’s address. And the question was, whether it was proper to contact her and see whether she wanted to talk with a reporter about her friend. Our Web site has an extensive privacy policy, which spells out a lot of things, but doesn’t exactly say whether your email address can be given to a reporter. I talked with our attorney who helped draft the policy, and it was his opinion that legally we were allowed to contact this person. From an ethics point of view, we didn’t. Our reasoning was as follows: the comment was made with the expectation of privacy. Now, that’s not a rule going forward. It’s how we looked at this particular case. If it was a life or death situation, i.e. a killer on the loose etc., we might see things differently.

But this shows the mingling of the online and print worlds in ways we couldn’t imagine. I’m going to do some research on this—time permitting—and see what other news operations do in this area.

I’m also interested in your thoughts about the proper course of action.

Like a lot of folks, I read the Journal on line and in print. I get different information from each medium. I tend to browse the Web site, and do my “serious reading” with the hard copy. Usually, but not always. There’s a whole school of research—emerging and otherwise—about how the Web is changing how we process information. The Atlantic had a good piece on this in the current issue, entitled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”
The answer—of course—is maybe. There’s a big discussion of short attention spans and the battle between surfing and diving. And so on. Google doesn’t make us any more stoopid. We make ourselves stupid…
But anyway, one of the ways that I do think the Internet changes with regards to my media habits is that I am really interested in what other people are interested in. Not to the extent of only following the crowds, but just as wondering about the intersection of my tastes and interests and the rest of the world. So one of the things that fascinates me on JournalNow and on other news sites is the most commented boxes. It’s a check and balance against the wisdom of editors and a referendum—if not a scientific survey—about what our readers like. For example, this morning, there were two important Supreme Court rulings. One was on the resolution of the Exxon Valdez case. The other on the death penalty for rapists. We put the Valdez ruling out front, and the rape ruling inside. My thinking is that the issue of punitive damages has wider ramifications than the handful of capital cases involving child rape (And this is not to diminish the seriousness of this crime in any way...) But based on the comments on our Web site, our readers—or at least those who chose to comment—are clearly energized about this ruling on both sides of the opinion. So this feedback of sorts is instructive and constructive as we make our way through coverage issues and determining the balance between what we think readers are interested in and what they tell us they are interested in.

Summer reading: I just finished an incredible biography about Genghis Khan, who built an empire that stretched across Asia and into eastern Europe. An incredible tale of how to wage war and wage peace after winning those wars. The book is Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world, by Jack Weatherford. 

I am up in Richmond for a few days at a corporate training seminar. We had a presentation this morning about finance, and at the break our speaker was teasing me about reading USA Today. Even all these years later, it’s a paper that still lacks respect. Actually, I’m reading three papers this week. USA Today comes to the hotel room, which is convenient. And the Times-Dispatch is in our conference room, which makes sense since they are the flagship paper of our company, Media General. And I’m reading the Journal online between breaks and when the wireless service is up and running here (A storm last night knocked it out for a while.). It is still an unnatural habit, reading the paper online, but I’m getting better at it and better trained about how to make my way through the site. It’s an organic process. More hopscotching, less A1 to A2 to A3, etc.

One of our facilitators was talking this morning about why he still likes getting the newspaper delivered to his house. It was in the context of thanking our company’s CEO, Marshall Morton, for taking some time to address our group. He said he likes the comfort of the paper. That’s a new one for me. I’ve heard convenience, content, continuity. But not comfort. And he put it in the context of “comfort food,” mac and cheese, meat loaf, etc. That in these uncertain times, comfort is important and an attribute that shouldn’t be overlooked. So some food for thought as the media landscape continues to be redefined before our very eyes.

Today, I am going to channel my inner schoolmarm. Our subject is punctuation, specifically the hyphen.

If you’ve been following the debate over what to name the team that until the end of this season will be called the Warthogs, you know that we have five finalists: The Aviators, the Racers, the Wallbangers, the Rhinos and the Dash. We’ll talk about the first four in a bit, but I wanted to write about the fifth offering from the perspective of someone who makes their living from the precision of words and grammar. I hate it. Here’s why:

The Dash is supposed to a play on the little bar that connects Winston with Salem in our fair city’s name. There’s even a downtown booster group for young folks called the Dash. I get it. It’s hip. It speaks of movement, and a certain Bondlike devil-may-care attitude. It even gives a tip of the cap to our heritage as a conjoined city. Just one problem. Winston and Salem aren’t separated by a dash. They’re separated by a hyphen. What’s the difference? A hyphen joins compound words: good-tempered, double-jointed, Winston-Salem, etc. A dash is more of a punctuation mark. It’s used to set off thoughts in the manner of a comma—although some of us don’t like these clauses—but with slightly heavier emphasis. You can tell they are different characters because the computer keyboard tells you so. Word software lets you create dashes, essentially extended hyphens. This blogging software doesn’t, so I have to use two hyphens --.

Now, you don’t have to be a marketing genius to realize that as a team name, the Winston-Salem Hyphen or Hyphens is dead in the water. It sounds too frumpy.

As we noted in a story on Sunday, the hyphen is causing Winston-Salem all sorts of problems in a digital era. But the answer isn’t to call it a dash. 

What fascinates me about the intersection of technology and journalism is the way in which various tools link and synch in ways that we could never imagine. This Sunday, for example, photographer David Rolfe put together a photo essay and related article on historic bridges in Forsyth County. Working with Paul Garber, our multimedia reporter and a GPS unit, they linked up all the info with a Google map so that you can see where the bridges are, and—more importantly—how to get to each one if you want to take your own look-see. Pretty sharp. What I would call useful interactivity.

What others say: Todd Foster is the editor of our sister paper in Bristol Va./Tenn. He’s a big bear of a guy and a first-class journalist. Here’s his column on the gaffe Andrea Mitchell made last week when Barack Obama visited Southwest Virginia. Yeah, it’s shooting fish in a barrel, but Todd’s subtlety mixes nicely with the sarcasm.