Through the years, we’ve had dozens of exceptional interns come through the Journal newsroom. We’ve hired many of them. They’re bright, young journalists, and because they are so bright and eager, we’ve taken some pleasure in the occasional prank. The best goes like this: We call a reporter over to an editor’s desk and tell them that we’ve just gotten a call that a train has hit a liquor store in Yadkinville. They jump out of their seats, and start making phone calls like crazy. It usually takes only a few minutes for them to learn they’ve been had. Yadkin County has no liquor stores. It has no trains. It’s a great prank, and it NEVER got old.
But now, we have to find a new one. Voters in Yadkinville approved ABC stores yesterday in a referendum (Voters in Jonesville turned them down).
I’m not going to get into an argument about the morality of alcohol, but this is the end of an era (and not just for pranksters). Sometimes, change happens so slowly that you can’t see it. But other times, there is a clear dividing line between the past and present. And the sale of liquor in Yadkin County is one such event. It speaks to the county’s evolution into a more suburban county, more firmly tied to Forsyth than in the past. The Yadkin River is not the Berlin Wall that it used to be from a cultural standpoint. It’s just a muddy river with a couple of bridges.
Good Reads: Why is rebuilding so hard? There are two good articles that explore the problems in the complex redevelopments of New Orleans and Ground Zero. The NOLA piece is in Fortune from a couple of weeks back, and it’s by Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 (an exceptional book about pre-Columbian America ...) and the Ground Zero piece was published in the NYT on Monday and is by a reporter named Deborah Sontag. They are exceptional in their depth and breadth and their willingness to explore the intersection of ego, power, suffering and property. And they make clear that Democracy is a messy, messy process when it comes to dealing with such a huge and emotional undertaking.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
Not a comment, but a question, if that’s OK.
How does the Journal decide which stories on its website will have the “Reader’s Reaction” function available, wherein readers online can post comments? Not all stories can be commented upon, I notice.
Kudos to the two Journal reporters for the awards (in the paper this a.m.)
All questions welcomed ...
The short answer is that the print side and the JournalNow side discuss during our planning sessions which stories we think make most sense for reader reaction based on their topic and relevance. On one hand, you could allow reader reaction on all stories, but it’s sometimes easier and more useful to guide readers/viewers toward a smaller subset and focus the conversations.
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