Otterblog

I was out of town a few days last week—more on that in a second—so when I read the Saturday paper I was reading it as a reader, not as a person who knows the back stories on a particular story. And when I read the front-page piece on the high-school sweethearts and the restraining order, my immediate reaction was: Why are we naming these students? Yes, there’s a restraining order against the former boyfriend, and there is a simple assault, but still… They’re high-school kids, 17 and 16. It seemed to me that the particulars of names was less important than the larger theme, how adult issues, such as domestic violence, keep getting thrust into our school system and forcing hard choices. My thought as the reader was that I don’t know these students, so their names are meaningless to me.

I talked with the reporter this morning, and what Dan told me was that naming them was unavoidable and impractical. The father of the girl essentially held a news conference, and the former boyfriend showed up—or thereabouts—to refute his actions. In a sense, they made it a public issue with names. Still, this is one of those instances where I wonder what happened to modesty on the part of parents. Our world is one big Jerry Springer show…

I was in Washington last week for the Associated Press Managing Editors conference. As you might expect, it’s not the cheeriest time to be at an editor’s conference. That said, it’s not all gloom and doom. The sense I got was that the days of hoping for smoother sailing are gone. The new reality is here to stay, and everybody is dealing with it, rather than hoping it goes away. The realities are: 1)continued financial pressure and their impact on news gathering and 2) the end of newsrooms as gatekeepers of information.

Washington is a city being remade before your eyes, but there are still plenty of institutions around. I managed to eat at one Friday morning. Jimmy Ts on Capitol Hill. Tin ceiling. Great waffles. Decent coffee. My guide for the meal says that Howard Coble is an occasional diner as well ...