Otterblog

I had to go to the Central Branch of the Forsyth County Public Library last night. The basement is about half empty. Much of the library expansive library collection has been removed. It’s for sale, as our story this morning noted.

There is something incredibly sad about the process. In the quaint old days before the Internet, the magazine archives at the library were the place where I did much of my research. It was an impressive collection. I don’t think we would have been able to report our mammoth history of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., known as Lost Empire, without it. I’ll be honest. In recent years, I haven’t used it as much, but I took comfort in knowing it was there and from time to time killed a few hours researching this or that.

Our information era is a scary place. We have more information than ever available at our fingertips. And with a few clicks you can often get to exactly the article you are looking for. But here’s what I fear is being lost along the way. It’s the art of browsing, and the joy of serendipitous discovery. Of going looking for one thing and ending up completely entranced and captivated with something else.

It’s true that NC Live, which has a vast collection of magazines online, is a wonder. But it’s not a replacement for what was there. The information you get is only the text. You don’t see the pictures. How a story was played. The ad on the facing page, and the really cool story that is just before it.

This is just one more example of how the Web is changing our world and changing journalism. I’ve always thought that journalism is a combination of exertion and observation, learning to recognize both patterns (i.e. trends) and non-patterns (things that don’t look quite right). And as information gets ordered up just the way we asked for it or somebody else asked for it, those skills become harder to exercise.

I had two radio appearances in the past two days, confirming once again that I have a face for that sort of business.

First, I was interviewed yesterday on WQMG by Busta Brown. He was talking about the photo that went with Day Three of our series on The Murders at Grassy Creek (It’s the 5th photo in the slide show). The shot shows Ron Hudler with First Lady Hillary Clinton when he was presenting the official White House Tree to the Clintons. There were two questions. One, were we making a political statement by running that photo? and Two, what was our intent with the two black men who can be seen in the background? To Busta, there was something a bit demeaning about the servile positions of these men. He’s a nice guy and a good and fair interviewer, so I enjoyed talking with him. My take is that A) the series was in the works long before we knew that there was a primary to worry about or that candidates would be in W-S that day, and B) the photo is about Mr. Hudler and Ms. Clinton. We received two photos from the presidential library, and this was the only usable one. The impression or pereception is bothersome, but not enough to not use the photo.

Second, I was interviewed on Talk of the Nation this afternoon by Neal Conan about the disappearance of local movie critics. As some of you may know or still remember, the Journal’s movie critic was let go during a downsizing several years ago. WFDD didn’t broadcast this half of the show, but it’s available online, although may not be available until later in the day. The summary of my comments: Tough decision, but ultimately the best of several bad scenarios. And movie watching and info about movies keeps changing. Citizen journalism includes criticism.

I received a request for help about archiving newspapers. I asked Julie Harris, our research director and library manager, who is an ace at all things regarding preserving the printed word: Here is her response:

It depends on how much newsprint to save, how often the papers are going to be used, and how elaborate you want to be in preserving the paper. Library of Congress has a discussion on preserving newspapers online. It discusses such things as microfilming and digitization but the main items are about preserving the printed paper itself.

Hope this helps.

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.

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.

So, I’m in Richmond for a few days, with some other managers of Media General, looking at the future of our industry and where we are going. Some very bright minds, and some very optimistic minds.

One thing that is clear is that journalists bring a different toolkit to the conversation. Not necessarily better. But different. We tend to be more skeptical, distrustful of power, more wedded to tradition and the power of history to inform the future. So, it’s been a challenge for me to straddle my roles as journalist and manager and stare forthrightly at what might lie ahead.

Some observations so far:
—Users of content are going to determine more than ever the value of that content.
—There is an incredible demand for specific, local content.
—It’s not clear if multimedia content can be monetized at the level that print and broadcasting content has been and is.
—Delivery of content is becoming as important as the content itself.

One random thought, and I’m going to ultimately ask this question of our birding experts when I return to W-S, but ... On my drive up I-85, I saw more red-tailed hawks than I have ever seen in one afternoon. Granted it was over a 150-mile stretch ... but it made me wonder. We think of the return of hawks as a signal that our environment is being healed, but I wonder if there is something out of whack in the prey part of the ecosystem that is driving the hawk increase.

You could probably write an entire book on photo-ethics in the digital age, and my goal isn’t to do that, but I thought I would do a quick follow on last week’s post on the photoshopped eclipse photo that a reader sent us.

I read with interest a story in the Wall Street Journal about a scandal in China involving a photo of a high-speed train in Tibet. Clearly a lot more at stake here than just a pretty shot of the moon and the Wachovia building. What’s also important is the way technology helped break the scandal, both in uncovering evidence of the misdeed and broadcasting the incident itself.

Good news, bad news: The current issue of Wired has a big spread on places with free WiFi. Good news. We’re on it. Bad news. They call our community “Winston-Salem County.” The city’s annexation lust hasn’t spread that far and wide ... Elsewhere in the mag is a great article on the folks who rescue capsized cargo ships. Sort of like Ocean’s 11 meets The Poseidon Adventure. As the Exxon Valdez case makes its way to the the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s particularly relevant.

eclipse2.jpgeclipse1.jpg

One of the phrases tossed around newsrooms a lot these days is “user-provided content.” It’s all the stuff that readers and clickers send us—recipes, requests for recipes, calendar items, business milestones, photographs etc. Newspapers love them. Two reasons. First, they’re free. We don’t pay somebody to write us two paragraphs on Jimmy getting his Eagle Scout award. Second, they appeal to this idea of community, that is to say, by publishing these items, we’re connecting with our readers and making them part of the process, engaging them and all that other feel-good stuff.

I think all of those reasons are good, and I am generally in favor of this process. The trick is to know where the limits are.  The key to UPC is to exercise the same level of judgment and ethics with this material that you do with staff content or wire content. We got a good lesson in this yesterday morning, when a reader sent us what appeared to be a fabulous photo of the eclipse. See ECLIPSE1 above. Everybody got excited. We were ready to post it and to move it into a position of prominence on our home page. Our photo editor, Walt Unks, was working with the photo to tone it more properly and discovered that it wasn’t all it seemed to be. See ECLIPSE2. So, for what will be obvious reasons, this picture got yanked.

One of the interesting things about the new news world order is how stories move through the media, up and down the food chain. Often, it’s difficult to track the stories, because there are so many of them on a given topic, but the case of Dick Vitale—he of YEAH BAY-BEE fame—makes for a good little case study.

As the more rampant college bball fans know, Vitale had throat surgery two months back to repair throat lesions. He couldn’t talk for a few weeks (Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about what a blessing that might be…) But he’s back, and just in time for the thrilla in Chapel Hilla tonight, featuring old rivals UNC and Duke. We ran a story last week about Vitale’s return to the job he loves. I happen to like the guy. He’s funny and enthusiastic and knowledgeable, a good combination in my book.

John Dell, the reporter who wrote the story, said he pursued it because he thought it would be a good idea to follow up with Vitale after his voice went dark at the beginning of the season. Turns out we weren’t the only ones with the same idea. The Tampa Tribune, our sister paper in Florida, had the story two days earlier. Three days after our story ran, the N&O followed with its own piece. And today, the NY Times gets into the act. Tipoff tonight is at 9, so you can hear for yourself.

So, the big question is: What does all this mean? Beyond the fact that ESPN and Vitale know a good marketing/PR opportunity when they see it ....  I think it means a couple of things. First, is that what constitutes news is fluid. Second, original content is in the eye of the beholder. Third, being first is no longer the be-all and end-all for media. It still matters—a lot. But not being first is no longer reason to drop a story. Good writing and analysis also are vital.