Otterblog

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.

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Our coverage of the battle over the future of the Tourism Development Authority has stirred up a ton of comments. There’s a lot of anger out there, and as with many fights involving anger, it seems to me that personalities are often driving the policy and politics. This has been a difficult story for us to cover. Not from any emotional or personal involvement, but because of lots of whispered agendas and the like that people on either side expect us to print without checking them out to our satisfaction.
On the one hand, the TDA is not the most important agency in town. It pales compared to the schools, or the sheriff’s office or DSS. But a couple of million dollars is a couple of million dollars, and there are good lessons for journalists and the public about paying attention to these minor agencies, the money they spend and the bang they get for that buck.

Our story today on Ribfest was a delight. It made me hungry. BBQing is one of the great American arts. There are a few basic techniques and then a jillion variations. In the interest of sharing, here is what I consider to be the best all-purpose meat rub out there. It is from Field and Stream magazine. I don’t know where one gets juniper berries, so I just leave them out. Enjoy.

As Columbo would say. One more thing. Close readers of OTTERBLOG know about my affinity for the great state of Iowa. The floods out there are catastrophic. I’ve attached the front page of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, which is a very good newspaper. This is one of those iconic pictures and layouts that says it all.

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.

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One of the most important parts of our newspaper is the obituary section. The obits are one of the first things I read every morning. It’s a good way to learn about little tidbits of the community, enjoy some incredible accomplishments of ordinary and extraordinary people, and lament the fact that people had much cooler names way back when. Yesterday, there was an obit of a gentleman named Peter Smits that caught my eye. In the notice, it mentioned a story written about his family on Christmas Day, 1949, a few months after they moved to the United States from Russia.

I’m always interested in how we covered stories in the past, so I had our crack news research department find the story, and I’ve attached it above. It’s a little difficult to read, but not impossible. And it’s a good story, filled with strong passages and nice phrases. What struck me was how similar many things are in terms of stories about refugees making their way in a strange land, and also how much has changed. For one thing, most of the stores mentioned are no longer here. In addition, the reporter notes how the Journal bought the family a hat, gloves and a basketball as part of their shopping spree. A thoughtful gesture, but one that seems a little at odds with the more distant approach to coverage that dominates today.

Finally, a staff departure. Phoebe Zerwick, our state editor and an investigative reporter of unparalleled accomplishment, will be leaving the Journal. Her last day is today, as she embarks on a career as a free-lance writer. Phoebe has been a good friend and colleague for 20+ years, and I’m happy that at least one of those parts will remain after today. Her work on the Darryl Hunt case, the Kalvin Smith case and a host of other important pieces of public-service journalism—from race relations to infant mortality—have left an indelible mark on this paper and the community.

We’ve gotten some calls today about our front page, which featured essentially two main stories, one on the selection of a new police chief in Winston-Salem, the other on Barack Obama clinching the Democratic nomination for president. The gist of the complaint is that we downplayed the historic nature of Obama’s victory. I agree, and I take responsibility for the page design, which came together during discussions yesterday afternoon.

Not a disaster, by any means, but with the clarity of hindsight, this was a milestone and achievement that should have been noted with greater presentation oomph. As many readers know, we’ve been trying to straddle the delivery of local news (which we do better than anybody else in this market) and national news (which is important but can be found everywhere.) Most of the time we get it right. This time, as Borat would say, not so much.

On a related note, the import of Obama’s nomination is that he is one election away from being the nations’s first black president. A thoughtful reader asked about this, posing the question whether we should refer to Obama as black, since his mother was white. In his view, it’s equally valid to call Obama white. I believe this question was asked with journalistic honesty, not malicious intent. Racial identification is a tricky business, and for me, a white man, to try to understand it all is likely a stretch. But from my vantage point, black is the proper way to go for several reasons. The most important one is self-identification. Unlike some celebrities of mixed race who have taken pains to not be in column A or column B, Obama as far as I can tell has always identified himself as black, even though he acknowledges and loves the family members on his mother’s side. How people choose to refer to themselves is important and to me seems to be the way—within reason—we ought to refer to them.

We’ve talked from time to time about the dangers of photoshopping, i.e. adding “content” to a photograph that wasn’t there in the first place. Here’s the latest, and it involves Jocelyn Kirsch, the young woman from Winston-Salem who is in trouble with the authorities in Philadelphia for various ID theft and related charges.

There are all sorts of rules about creating photoillustrations, essentially the merging of a photograph and artistry (beyond the photograph itself). One is that it ought to be labeled as such. In this case, the newspaper did, but I’m told it was in teeny-tiny type. But I think more importantly, when a photoshop result looks like reality, as opposed to fantasy or the like, it is something to be avoided on serious subjects, such as crime and punishment.

Yes, this Bonnie & Clyde tale of young lovers in Philly is good stuff, but that’s not an excuse for lowering the standards.

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 lunch today with Donald Reaves, the newish chancellor at WSSU. Smart guy. Tough job. He’s trying to increase graduation rates and academic standards, while not hurting enrollment figures and alienating key constituencies of the university as it grows. In addition, Reaves (most recently at the University of Chicago by way of Brown U.) replaced a popular chancellor who had the advantage of being from, as they say, “around here.” Joining us was Sigrid Hall-Pittsley, who is the interim head of marketing and university advancement. Not surprisingly, much of our conversation focused on the Journal’s coverage of WSSU.
Generally, I think it’s good. Like most things, it could be better. But I think the hallmark of our coverage is that we do cover it. In many places, HBCUs get only limited coverage, or coverage that is driven by crisis and scandal. Like most big institutions, WSSU hasn’t been immune to these stories. But that said, we cover WSSU as a legitimate institution, a major employer and a taxpayer-supported university.
And as I told Chancellor Reaves, our sports coverage (which is a big part of coverage of any university) is unparalleled. That’s due to the work of John Dell, who mastered CIAA athletics and, presumably, will do the same thing now that WSSU is part of the MEAC.

An addendum: A friend of mine read this post and thought it might be interpreted that I was saying that WSSU should be grateful for its coverage. I apologize for that inference. There’s no expectation of gratitude; it’s not above and beyond the call of duty. It’s just what should be done.

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I don’t do much reporting these days. I do meet a lot of people and I speak with them about coverage, both general and specific. But as far as attending news events and writing up stories, that happens rarely. But every once in a while I like to go an event and watch it myself, rather than absorb it through the discussion with reporters and editors and the stories that ensue.
Last night, I went to the public forum where the four candidates for police chief were interviewed by members of the community.
Our story is here.
I purposely didn’t sit with our reporters and editors who were there, but instead took a seat in the back to sort of watch the whole thing as a member of the public, rather than a journalist. It was a messy democratic process, but a democratic process of sorts nonetheless. The nice thing about going to an event that you’re not covering is that you don’t have to take notes. You can just absorb it all and not obsess about the exact quote a person said.
One of the things that impressed me this morning when I read our story was how spot on the coverage was. I occasionally hear comments and complaints from readers that our version of a meeting or event was as if the reporter was at another function. But we got this one right. If I had been telling a friend about the hearing and I had 20 inches to do it, what they wrote and what we read is what I would have said.

Two other things:
First, have a safe and happy Memorial Day. In between the burgers and the pain at the pump, remember what it is all about.

Second, I’ve attached a photo taken a few weeks ago that I found somewhat amusing. I call it crossroads, and you will see why.