Otterblog

Like a lot of mid-sized cities in the world, Winston-Salem is often interested—to the point of obsession—in how the rest of the country, and particularly the decision makers in places such as New York, view our patch of ground.

We’re a town built on cigarettes and underwear, now a financial and healthcare center, and in some circles equally well known for the delectable downfall of the hometown doughnut company. It’s easy for writers to wallow in symbolism and metaphor.

So in rumbles The New York Times, with an

overnight guide to Winston-Salem

. It’s part of a series they do on 36 hours in places that are usually what might politely be called “second-tier” travel destinations.

The good news: their 36 hours in the city didn’t start out with the advice: spend your first two-and-a-half hours driving to Asheville ...

But on a serious note, the city comes off pretty good, if a little precious and sanitized.  The author’s tour captures some of the heart—if not a lot of the soul—of Winston-Salem. Their restaurant choices are pretty good. All in all, a piece the chamber and tourism folks will be happy to clip, copy, save and mail.

commuters.bmp

Before my brain has woken up on Sundays, I like to do the easy puzzles in the paper. My favorite is the “six differences” on the back of the comics section.

Here’s a puzzle for Friday from this photograph (found by clicking on the commuters link above). I got it from a man named Juan Giner, who is an extremely smart and well-traveled consultant—not always a dirty word—with an outfit called Innovation Media Consulting. He spoke with myself and several dozen news types on Wednesday. Look at this photo—taken in the 1950s—and then imagine all the ways the photo would likely be different if a photographer went to that same station today. There are at least six differences.

They are: More women. Not just white men. Nobody would be wearing a hat. Everybody would be talking on a cell phone ... and for the purposes of our discussion, there would be far fewer people with a paper tucked under their arm.

Giner’s message to all of us journalists wasn’t one of gloom and doom. Just a reality check. The center is always changing. As soon as you get comfortable with a center, it moves to the edge. There is more clutter in the world, more choices. If people don’t want to wear fedoras, then selling fedoras is a tough way to make a living. Better only takes you so far. At some point, you have to be better AND different than your competitors.

Oh, yeah. There was a sixth difference. The photo would be in color!

I’ve had the chance to read the Times-Dispatch

in Richmond the past few days. It’s a mid-sized metro about twice the size of the Journal. We’re both owned by Media General. They have a fairly new publisher and a new executive editor, and it’s very interesting—particularly in the print edition, to see the changes both large and small that they are bringing to the paper.

Newspapers are unwieldy organizations. They’re steeped in tradition, and they are not known for the nimbleness. Change comes slowly, and it can often seem that in this time of reader inattention, stagnant circulation, this little thing called the Internet that we are simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Maybe. Maybe not. The T-D is arguably one of the most traditional papers in a traditional state. But it looks and feels different. Some stuff—the ads on section fronts—I don’t like. But other things I do. Most signficant is story selection and editing the paper for readers and their busy days and diverse interests. My favorite story I read the past three days was about the

mating process of salamanders

in a neighborhood in Richmond. Monumental? Of course not. But it was very entertaining and very informative. And to get to that story, I found myself wondering what else quirky and interesting and relevant might be there. I found a lot. So it worked on a couple of levels.

Does a salamander turn a battleship? Nope. But newspapers can’t be just about what happened yesterday. They’ll survive by telling people what they don’t know. Whether about major issues or the dating habits of amphibians. That’s where the steering wheel is found.

Up in Richmond for a conference with other folks at the company on the future of news, newspapers and digital media. We’ll talk more about that at a later date ...

But driving up here and eating lunch here yesterday got me to thinking again about a question that I’ve pondered for a long time.

What is the dividing line between sweet tea and unsweetened tea. Richmond—a clearly Southern town—is an unsweet kind of place. Henderson, N.C. is sweet. Your thoughts on where the boundary is? This might not be as burning a question as the line between Lexington and Eastern N.C. BBQ, or the brown egg-white egg belt in New England, but it’s still one of those random thoughts that bugs me in the middle of the night or on a long drive….

Numbers matter. And it’s always interesting when two groups look at numbers and draw different conclusions and observations from the same set of facts.

Take our

story this morning about Carver High School, which is on a watch list from Judge Howard Manning, who is presiding over the so-called Leandro case.

By Manning’s reckoning, Carver is a failing school, and one that he is threatening with closure. He looks at the percent of students at grade level. Local school officials say the world-famous declaration yeahbut. The raw figure is less important than the trend line, which they say shows that Carver is climbing, albeit slowly, out of its hole and making improvements.

Carver will be an interesting test case if push ever comes to shove. The Leandro decision began with poor, rural schools challenging the state’s funding mechanism for schools. Then the state’s largest urban districts, such as Forsyth, joined in. There is plenty of poverty here, but there are also tremendous resources that are not available in poor, rural school districts. If Carver can’t make it, the future is pretty uncertain for schools across the state.

Quick note: Did you ever think that the words

I.M. Pei and NASCAR would be used in the same sentence? I didn’t. But they are, courtesy of the planned NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Tough week for Atlanta. First, BellSouth getting bought. Then losing this tourism plum.

As we head into the primary season ahead of the mid-term elections, it’s time for politicians and those who watch politicians to start paying attention to the numbers.

This is the perfect storm of mid-term elections, because we have a president who is barred from re-election. Come Nov. 8, the attention shifts quickly to 2008. Everybody is jockeying for position and for momentum to get them into position.

One way to get a sense of the electorate is to do a poll. In North Carolina, Elon University has captured a nice little niche in this market with its

Elon University Poll

. The university has done this for a while, and it’s earned a reputation for nonpartisan consistency.

So what can we make of poll numbers that show the

president’s disapproval rating at 52 percent

in the southern states that embraced him so strongly in November 2004? A lot and not a lot. Disapproval ratings are notoriously squishy. Americans are a hard bunch to please. A disapproval rating is not the same thing as a referendum and doesn’t mean that a working majority of voters in the region would now vote against him if given the chance.

But what it does show is that with the right candidates, Democrats have some openings. For Republicans, it means more counter-punching and trying to frame the debate on terms they can win, regardless of the president’s approval rating.

The other day we wrote about some students hanging out in front of a cement sculpture. Our reporter on the piece, who is very conscientious, realized her mistake. It was more than likely a concrete sculpture, cement being a part of concrete.

The larger question is this, outside of the

Portland Cement Association

(yes, such a trade group exists), does anybody care about this distinction? Cement and concrete are essentially interchangeable in most people’s vocabulary, and many, many folks use cement when they really mean concrete.

Journalism is like that. We can be very persnickety about rules.  Our copy desk in particular is an army of smart folks who value precision. For example, most people just say Sheetrock. We don’t. We say wallboard, Sheetrock being a brand of wallboard. Or this morning, we had a brief about man killed after his car hit a utility pole. Many people might say telephone pole and not care whether it’s really a power pole, a telephone pole or both.

Rules about language and grammar are important. They seem less important today, with the lingua franca of the Internet and the idea that if we’re all sending messages from our BlackBerrys, our thumbs don’t have time to mess with punctuation.

I disagree. In the end, language is about communication and communication is about being understood. Precision leads to understanding. Language evolves, of course. But concrete is forever.

Does it matter if our elected representatives live in the districts they represent? On the surface, that seems like a no-brainer. Of course it does. If you live in a community, you’re more likely to know its problems and potential and the people who make it so.

We have two residency issues involving politicians going these days. The first, involves former state Rep. Frank Mitchell, who is challenging Rep. Julia Howard in the Republican primary in the

79th House District

, which is made up of Davie County and parts of northern and central Iredell County. Howard claims Mitchell’s true address is in another section of Iredell. She hired a private eye to find out. The whole thing seems sad and funny at the same time.

Then, there’s Vernon Robinson, who is running for the

13th Congressional District

, another of our ink-splattered districts. It stretches from Eastern Wake County into Guilford County and across the northern tier counties. Robinson doesn’t live in the district.

Federal candidates don’t need to live in the districts they represent as long as they live in the state. Robinson’s residency problem is strictly a political one. Mitchell’s residency is right now a legal problem, but it is ultimately a political problem as well. Even if he prevails and meets the legal threshold for residency, Howard is likely to pound him in the primary about where he hangs his hat.

Repeat after me:

Homer. Marge. Bart. Lisa. Maggie.
Religion. Speech. Press. Assembly. Petition.

We carried a funny little story today that said Americans are more likely to be able to name members of the Simpson cartoon family than the freedoms spelled out in the

First Amendment

.

Is that really surprising? Quick. Name the four Beatles. Now name the four presidents on

Mount Rushmore

(answers at the end.)

It’s easy to view this as yet another sign of American boorishness, but I think the lesson is a bit more subtle. Knowledge is power, but it’s also currency, and we know what we think is worth knowing and has value to others. For better or for worse, apparently most people think a working knowledge of an animated sitcom is more valuable than a working knowledge of the Bill of Rights.

But the truth is that it doesn’t have to be either/or. We have big brains, and ideally we should know about the Constitution and the Simpsons, the Beatles and Mount Rushmore, Hip Hop and Hiroshima. The counter argument is that one group represents enduring American values and history and the other is just music and culture, fads and fashion. Yes and no. At some point, culture that matters changes history.

Answers: From left to right, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln

Most small towns in rural Iowa are all pretty much the same. Town square, fading business district etc. So I remember how bizarre it was when I drove through Fairfield, Iowa last summer and saw all these restaurants selling Indian food. The reason: It’s home to the Maharishi University of Management, formerly Fairfield University

.  These are the transcendental meditation folks who used to own lots of property in eastern Watauga County and had built a meditation center there called Heavenly Mountain.

I thought about them this morning because of our story on

what’s happened to the land

. The TM connection is gone, and the property—all 6,000 acres—is going to be developed as a huge mountain resort with more than 1,000 homes.

It’s hard to get your arms—literally and figuratively—around how big 6,000 acres is. So here’s the deal. It’s a little more than 9 square miles. Picture a square with each side being three miles. It’s huge.

In much of the mountains, development and tourism are the top industries. And second and third homes for the wealthy are on some levels almost perfect for county governments because the homeowners pay a lot in taxes but don’t require much in the way of services such as schools. It’s why Dare and Currituck counties on the coast, for example, have some of the

lowest tax rates in the state

.

But you have to wonder about what the gating of the mountains means in the long run to our collective heritage and our sense of ownership in the wondrous resources North Carolina has to offer.