Otterblog

So, I spent a few days last week backpacking in the Shining Rock Wilderness near Asheville. An incredible place and a chance to unplug and unwind. On one of the days, we ran into a family of dayhikers, and while we were chatting with the father, the daughter was carrying on a conversation with nobody in particular while she worked her cellphone. “I just updated my status. Still lost in the woods. LOL.” she said. Then her service conked out, and you could feel the energy being sucked out of her.

That image has stayed with me, because to me it speaks to the very heart of our new age of information and connectivity, how we process information, how we provide it, how we form communities and what we feel is relevant. Clearly, this girl felt that her friends needed to know right now that she was “Still lost in the woods.” Whether her friends cared was irrelevant. And when the tether was cut, she felt truly lost, stuck only with her parents.

Now, the prescription for what ails her isn’t a newspaper subscription (although it’s a good start.). But the move to instant communication and information has a cost. Observation is an art. And if you are looking down at the keys, you are not looking up at the trees. Sometimes we have to stop typing and gather our thoughts.

I came across an interesting story the other day about the journalist who is responsible for the crisis in the United Kingdom over the expense-account abuses by members of parliament. She’s an American who started the undertaking as a bit of a lark, to see how the country’s new Freedom of Information Act was working. It took her years to get these documents.

There’s a similar issue going on in North Carolina, involving former Gov. Mike Easley, who is the subject of investigations into his travel records and whether his trips were a) properly recorded and b) a source of potential influence. It’s both important and moot. Important because he’s a former governor. And moot for the same reason. The question I keep getting over and over is “Why didn’t the media do this while he was in office?” Good question. The reason is simple. The records were locked away, And Easley declined to release them, citing security reasons. And even with that hurdle cleared, there is no timetable stipulated in the state’s public-records law for the release of documents. It just says “as promptly as possible,” which can mean many things to many people. Gov. Perdue released the documents, which is good, but it will be worth seeing what happens the first time she gets a request for documents as sensitive as these involving her own administration.

Long weekend: I rarely write about the advertising in the paper, but I couldn’t help but notice the big full-page ad for rebates on purchases at the ABC stores. I think that’s a first. I hope all of you have a good Memorial Day. Enjoy some good times with your friends and family. And take time to remember why it’s called Memorial Day.

I have been taking phone calls the past few days, asking us to not refer to swine flu as swine flu. Instead, we should call it just the flu or by its scientific strain name, H1N1. The reason, the callers suggest, is that the name unfairly targets pork as being unsafe to eat, and therefore all the hog growers in North Carolina and elsewhere are going to get slammed.

As I’ve noted in the past, words matter, and the names we call things matter. But it’s tricky territory when you start renaming things that are in the vernacular because you don’t want somebody to get hurt. Some folks have suggested calling this the Mexican flu, because Mexico seems to be its epicenter. I can’t say that’s a solution; it just shifts the problem. And among scientists, who tend to be pretty blunt about using the right word, swine flu is, or at least was, the shorthand they were using.

That said, I did a brief survey of some media to see how they were referring to the flu. Here’s what I found, particularly in terms of headlines: Fox goes back and forth between swine and H1N1. Same with CNN, NY Times, and the two newspapers that are closest to hog-farming epicenters, the Fayetteville Observer and the Des Moines Register. Many use the phrase, “so-called swine flu.”

Here’s some more background from an AP story on the shifting name issue:

Dr. Edwin D. Kilbourne, the father of the 1976 swine flu vaccine and a retired professor at New York Medical College in Valhalla, called the idea of changing the name an “absurd position.”
The name swine flu has specific meaning when it comes to stimulating antibodies in the body and shouldn’t be tinkered with, said Kilbourne, 88.
That’s not what government health officials say.
“We have no idea where it came from,” said Michael Shaw, associate director for laboratory science for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Everybody’s calling it swine flu, but the better term is ‘swine-like.’ It’s like viruses we have seen in pigs, it’s not something we know was in pigs.”
On Wednesday, U.S. officials not only started calling the virus 2009 H1N1 after two of its genetic markers, but Dr. Anthony Fauci the National Institutes of Health corrected reporters for calling it swine flu. Then on Thursday, the WHO said it would stop using the name swine flu because it was misleading and triggering the slaughter of pigs in some countries.
Another reason the U.S. government wants to ditch the swine label is that many people are afraid to eat pork, hurting the $97 billion U.S. pork industry. Even the experts who point to the swine genetic origins of the virus agree that people can’t get the disease from food or handling pork, even raw.

Back story: We’ve gotten tons of comments about Rep. Virginia Foxx’s statements on the death of Matthew Shepard. In our story, Rep. Foxx cited as her sources an article in the Washington Times and a report on ABC’s 20/20. I couldn’t find the Times story, but click here for the ABC story.

Two solar observations this morning.

One of my favorite magazines is a little publication from Chapel Hill called the Sun. It’s hard to describe. Vaguely Buddhist always comes to mind. Less political than the Nation. Defiantly unglamorous. And perhaps a template for all that ails the news business. The Chicago Reader, once one of the great alt-weeklies in our country, has a good story on the Sun and what we can all learn from its ad-free model of journalism. And by we, I don’t just mean me. But really all of us, the providers and consumers of media. Sort of the anti-Google. Not that Google is bad or anything, but it has a big paddle that pushes the water in the bathtub in one pattern, and we’ve come to expect that and not question whether the water can move in other ways.

My run this morning took me down Chatham Street past Hanes Dye and onto Northwest Boulevard. It is not the prettiest stretch of road by any definition, but it has its own charm, particularly when things are still quiet and soft in the dawn. The moon was going down just as the sun was rising up and the birds were chirping and in this season of liberation and rebirth the world looked pretty good. Not perfect. But pretty good.

I was on the treadmill this morning (no jokes, please), flipping channels. On FOX News, the story they are keying on is from Chapel Hill, where there is a controversy over the UNC libraries not having a Christmas tree this season. I’m not going to get into the politics or the merits of the debate, but what really interested me was the fact that this story was big in North Carolina last week, and now it’s made its way into the national news cycle. Seems like it took a fairly long time to make its way to this bigger platform. I’m always interested in the path that news takes from one place to another.  From a news standpoint, this is a perfect story for national news: public unversity with a (real or perceived) liberal bent; debate over political correctness; questions over the interpretations of religious freedom, and the middle of the holiday season.
I will tell you that the university is getting slammed on this, and my guess is that it has one or two news cycles left.

Our story the other day on Allan Louden, the WFU debate expert, was a great read, and also very illuminating about how the Internet has changed journalism. If you’ve ever done a Google search, you know how everything gets bunched at the top. Same way with experts. So Louden is now a certified expert, and you can tell he’s an expert because if you do a search you get 100,000 hits. Not too shabby. Hits mean more interviews, which mean more hits. The Web fosters legitimacy, and on and on it goes.

A similar thing is happening with a story that Sean Mussenden in our DC bureau did a week or so back on Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s visits to North Carolina. It is getting a tremendous amount of play on the Web and in other outlets for two reasons. First, it was a great piece of original reporting, i.e. legwork + context. Second, the Dole-Hagan race has turned out to be a sleeper and bellwether, and so lots of journalists are scrambling to catch up on it. Here’s a New York Times story on the race, and here’s a segment from NPR. Both quote our story.

Elsewhere:

The haiku contest
on the stock market is done.
Winner named Friday.

There’s enough news/commentary etc. from our little patch of printed paradise that I rarely feel the need to write about somebody else’s newsroom. Today, I will make an exception.

The News & Observer is running a story on the retirement of Pat Stith, its longtime investigative reporter. Pat is the real deal, and it’s not overstating things to say his reporting has led to a better North Carolina. Journalists like the phrase “end of an era” and so we throw it around like a Frisbee, but this is one of those occasions where it truly applies. Pat came to the N&O before Watergate, and he leaves at the moment in time when the public-service journalism that he has embodied is under pressure like never before.

I am glad that I was never the subject of one of his investigations, but I can tell you that one of Pat’s most remarkable traits is his generous spirit. I feel fairly safe to say that if I called him up in the middle of the night and needed a favor, he would try to help me out. And he would probably do the same for the folks whose misdeeds he has so able uncovered for nearly 40 years. That’s just who he is. We’ll miss his work.

A quote you don’t see every day. In Wednesday’s paper, we used a rock ‘em/sock ‘em presentation to highlight the fight between Novant and WFUBMC over hospital plans in western Forsyth/Eastern Davie. That story hinged on differing interpretations of what Novant said at a hearing this summer. Today’s story was far more brutal. In 20 plus years, I can’t recall a CEO ever speaking of a competitor in the same community with the vitriol that Paul Wiles used to refer to his counterparts at WFUBMC. Here’s the quote: “I have never seen an institution lose its moral and ethical compass the way N.C. Baptist Hospital has under the direction of board Chairman Steve Robertson and acting President Donny Lambeth.” That is harsh.

There’s a funny little microclimate that exists on Spruce Street, right outside the Journal newsroom. Essentially, what happens is this: wind quite often gets funneled through the street because of the GMAC building and the Journal building acting as cliffs of sorts. And so it was yesterday afternoon, when the mother of all cloudbursts dropped in to town. Just about everybody got up to look out the window and see the rain and the wind howling and bending the trees. Truly a sight. I was living in Florida in 1989, but several people said that this is what it felt like when the tornado hit back then.

I had three immediate questions on my mind. 1) Are any more trees in my backyard going to get blown down? 2) How wet will I get when I eventually leave the building and make the mad dash for my truck? and 3) How are we going to cover this storm?. The answers for 1 was no. The answer for 2 was very. Here’s more about 3.

The problem was that we already had a strong centerpiece for our front page, on the earnings collapse and planned layoffs at Wachovia. That story had to run. So did the weather. Designing pages is hard work, and it’s difficult to put two centerpieces on the same page. So we kept Wachovia where it was, and moved our storm coverage to the local section, where it could get better display. What wsa interesting about this storm was just how localized it was. Many intown neighborhoods are abuzz today with the sound of chainsaws and chippers. Others were left nice and dry. So for many people, it was a non-story, except the pleasure we all seem to get looking at pictures of downed trees.

Lots of people made our coverage work: editors, reporters, copy editors and designers, but the true heroes were our photographers. They were out there in the middle of the beast, taking photos that we posted even before the storm ended. It’s a whole different level of wet, doing something like that.

Some more info: We carried a story today about the stunning biodiversity in Great Smoky National Park. Here’s some more information about the range of life in the mountains to the west of us.

Winston-Salem is by no means the biggest town in the U.S. or even the state of North Carolina, but I am always amazed at how disproportionately we figure into important events. Take this morning’s story on Jim Black’s plea. The news angles are both Winston-Salem (or at least Forsyth County) centric. First, the whole deal that brought the former speaker down was an alliance between him and former Rep. Mike Decker.

Second, and more interesting from a trivia standpoint, is the origination of the Alford Plea, which allows a defendant to plead guilty without admitting guilt. As we wrote, it originated with a case in Forsyth County.

If you want to read the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alford opinion, click here. It’s very good.

When I stepped outside this morning with the dog to get the paper, there was a little nip to the air. The dew was heavy. The leaves were rustling. All signs pointed to one undeniable truth: The Dixie Classic Fair is back in town. So today, at least for this post, we’ll forget about journalism per se and I will give you five reasons why I love the fair.

1) The agricultural competitions. Where else do people square off over who has a better sweet potato? One of my most cherished possessions is the ribbon I won in 1994 for a decorated gourd. Not quite the Pulitzer Prize, but it’s up there.

2) The crowds. We all live in a fragmented society. You can spend your whole life in Forsyth County and never get to Walkertown or New Sherwood Forest or anywhere in between. The fair is one of those great seas of humanity, where you get to see how different and alike we all are.

3) The crafts hall. I am always amazed at the talent there. From the kiddie LEGO displays to the incredible carvings and cheesy photographs of waterfalls and sunsets, it is all great.

4) The Midway. The water pistol races, the knock the bottles down tosses, the ball in the bucket game. They’re a testament to American hucksterism and the idea that everybody else is a sucker except us. And where else can you pay $2 and

something that costs $1.

5) The food. You need to pace yourself so you can eat twice. First, a hotdog and some pinto beans at one of the church or community stands, then out into the larger world of sausage, funnel cakes, kettle corn, deep-fried twinkies and cotton candy. Don’t forget the bag of peanuts for the ride home!

Got a fair story? Let me know. Happy Friday.