Otterblog

What is a family newspaper to do when the most important research coming out of the big, flashy medical center down the street involves .... repairs to the male anatomy? The story Tuesday about research at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine involving the laboratory growth of erectile penile tissue, or EPT, is one of those text-book examples of the fine lines newspapers have to balance. It was the lead story on Wired.com that day as well ...

One email we received spoke for others and took issue with our decision to put this story on the front page. The writer wrote: today’s “front page news” about rabbits and the repair of their little malfunctioning penises really sets the bar even lower.  In a world this large and complex that is the best thing you could come up with for the front page?  Think again.  A significant advance in the treatment of cancer or AIDS - okay - this article - I don’t think so.

We struggled a bit in our discussions about how to present this story. It’s clearly a front-page story. It’s research from here that is groundbreaking and has the potential to impact thousands of lives. If it were about the ability to grow heart valve tissue, there would be no discussion. It only comes into play because the research is related to ... sex.

From my perspective, to bury the story because we don’t want something sexually related on the front page is a disservice to the research. The better tactic is to not be ashamed of it, but to be discreet in the use of graphics, to watch the bad headlines and be upfront that this is research and it’s related to that most intimate of ailments.

Let me state for the record that I love Election Day. Even if I wasn’t a journalist, I would love it. But the two combined is like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of the Constitution. They just go together. Free press. Free elections.

This has been a difficult campaign for us to cover, because of the lack of mayoral challenger to Allen Joines. There are certainly spirited and important campaigns in several wards, but there’s a lack of a larger city-wide narrative, despite big issues swirling around like the leaves. And there’s not a lot we in the press can or should do about it. Despite what people think, our goal isn’t to create controversy where none exists. That said, one of the jobs of newspapers (and other media) is to help people make sense of what’s happened. The Why of the Five Ws. And so, it will be interesting after tonight to try and figure out what’s happened throughout this electoral season, where change was evident in the primaries and whether that push continued into the general election.

Now many people say if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain. If that were so, our lives would be a lot easier. Me, I tend to think that complaining (or its more refined cousin “dissent”) is part of our national fabric. So, the I voted sticker isn’t required to gripe. But that said, people are fighting all over the world for the right to vote in free elections and then to read about the results in a free press. So take advantage of both!

Back from a few days off. Batteries charged. Phasers set to stun ... I’ve devoted a couple of entries to redesigns. Here is an ombudsman’s column from the Washington Post about their redesign.

Although the scale is different, the Post is facing many of the pressures, both financial and cultural, that the Journal faces. And they are also responding with some bold changes and tweaking similar to what we did/do.

The Post is an interesting newspaper. Although it reads in many ways like a national newspaper, a la USA Today, the NYT or the Wall St. Journal, it is essentially a local buy, with the overwhelming majority of its subscribers in the DC area. And because the biggest local employer is the federal government, and the businesses and institutions that feed off it, there’s an incredible amount of news that appears to be national but for their audience is really local. In that sense, their strategy is somewhat similar to our’s. Not identical, but similar. News organizations can each define local differently, but there is an increasing focus on this as the most important part of the information wheel we can provide readers.

I am still digging out from answering letters and emails from readers about our redesign and our commitment to covering the news. What I’ve tried to tell people is that we’ve put local news first, are trying to write and cover as much as possible, and that—all things being equal—when something has to give it will be nonlocal news. One of the areas of greatest concern has been local business coverage. I have a deep interest in this subject. I came to the Journal as a business reporter, covered the closing of the AT&T plant, the sale of Piedmont Airlines, etc. So I know how important business news of all stripes is to this community. Our story today that is a curtain raiser of sorts on Targacept is the sort of journalism we are trying to do more of. Anticipatory rather than reactive. Now, obviously on big breaking stories, such as Dell’s announcement last week, we can’t anticipate, but there, too, we’re assuming that most people know the barebones by the time the newspaper hits the driveway, so we are pushing the basics on to the Web and concentrating our efforts on providing context and depth that our reporters can provide.

Good read: Lots of folks have been to Biltmore House, America’s largest house, as the marketers say. And they know that it’s somehow associated with the Vanderbilt family, and they were a dominant family in 19th century America. That was about the extent of my knowledge. I’m about halfway through The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T.J. Stiles. Epic it is. A staggering tale of brute force, hustle and one man’s ability to see around transportation and financial corners. 

The news in our community is sad right now. Two officers shot. Another man dead. A computer plant is closing. These are not happy stories by any stretch. But they are stories that demand to be told, and they are what newspapers do very well. The whole story. The context. The sweep. The facts. It takes a lot of work to get it done and yesterday was a day when our newsroom responded—as it always does when big events happen.

Hard work matters, of course. But so does instinct. A case in point was yesterday morning. Laura Graff, one of our reporters, was coming in a bit late as she had worked very late on Tuesday making sense of the city’s records on the baseball deal. She was driving north on Peters Creek Parkway when a whoosh of police cruisers came barreling south. She pulled a U-turn and followed them to the Bojangles’. She was on the property before they put up the crime tape and was essentially sealed into the scene and unable to leave. So we had key and exclusive access to many of the people who watched this tragic event unfold. If she had left a few minutes later, it would already have been cordoned off. Now, in hindsight, it seems obvious that anybody who’s in the news business would have the same instinct. Yes and no. Sometimes the gong hits later, too late. You know how people are in their cars. They’re drinking coffee, talking on their cells, thinking about what’s on their plate. It’s easy to just wonder about something and catch up with it later and then tell someone, “yeah, I saw them all racing down Peters Creek ...”

I thought we did a great job on our coverage. It wasn’t perfect. It never is. But we got all that we could—through hustle, smarts, luck and following our gut.

It’s been three weeks and change since we did our redesign, and as with all such launches, the devil is in the details. We’re making adjustments as we go. Some are more noticeable than others. First, national/international news. Readers have notice more national news on our front page. Not every day, but more of a presence than we started out. The idea is this: locally focused/globally connected. And we’re trying to carve out more space for these stories. We recognize that readers’ desire of local news doesn’t mean the absence of non-local news. We’ve known that all along, but we’re trying to be more deliberate in that presentation. We’ve adjusted some type faces to make them stand out better against newsprint, which is not always as bright white as we would like. And we’re looking for ways to get more color inside our front section.

You’ll continue to see us tweak this look, much of it in response to the suggestions of readers, much of it out of our desire to keep improving what we do.

First things first. I apologize for the absence. I was on vacation for a few days, and then yesterday was Yom Kippur, which is the day of atonement and the end of the High Holy Days that mark the start of the Jewish New Year.

I will not launch into a sermon here, but Yom Kippur is an extraordinary holiday, built around atoning for one’s sins and moving forward in a positive and progressive manner.  And so it is with that spirit that we go forward with OTTERBLOG. It is an extraordinary time of change for the media industry, for newspapers, for the Journal. On my end, I’ll try to be more constructive and less dismissive, and I would hope that as users, you can help me raise the level of debate and discussion on this site.

Now, catching up. Frequent poster David asked last week about how we select high-school games to cover. I spoke with Phil Hrichak, our sports team leader, and here’s what he sent.

“At the high-school level, we try to cover what we think a general audience has the most interest in.

In conversations with coaches and ADs, and from our collective experience, that’s football and basketball.

From there, we try to cover as many of the Forsyth County teams as we can early in the season, then focus on teams that are doing well, inside and outside the county.

Beyond the so called “revenue” sports, we look for stories and notes of interest for features and notebooks. We’ve had some criticism about lack of coverage of regular-season Olympics sports, and we’ve discussed it but haven’t found a solution to keep people happy.

Phil says that all things being equal, he’s reluctant to expend resources providing extensive coverage to a volleyball match, soccer game or cross country meet that has no reach beyond the particpants and their families. He says that waiting until playoffs start and the stakes get higher seems a better use of those resources.

“One example, I spent four years at cross country, indoor and outdoor track meets. No one without a child, grandchild, brother/sister participating ever attended, despite some pretty elite talent for this area. That trend seems to hold.

We have been trying to target coverage of more non-football events, but my goal once we start is to stay consistent, rather than cover something once “just for the sake of covering something.” Right now, the best way seems with playoffs.”

Phil also noted that space, or news hole, doesn’t have a shelf life. In other words, if we stopped covering football on Friday night, we can’t take that news hole and devote it to Wednesday night. It lives in the moment. The larger point of this—of course—is that covering a lot of sports and a lot of schools takes a lot of decisions.

I’ve probably talked in some fashion to more than 100 people since we launched our redesign on Monday. Calls are still coming. I’m encouraged by what I hear so far. Yes, there are a lot of complaints, but many people also seem to appreciate what we are trying to do in terms of local news.

The biggest single area of concern had nothing to do with the mix of local and national news or the font changes or the headline type. No, it had to do with our decision to eliminate the bridge column.
For the record, let me state that I don’t play bridge. Hearts. Spades. The occasional hand of rummy. Sure. But never bridge. So, the simple argument is that we killed something just because I didn’t like it or care about it. Not so. There are lots of things I’m not crazy about, and we still run plenty of copy on these subjects. The bridge players we talked with said it wasn’t a big deal. Apparently they are in the minority. Our staff probably talked to more than 100 bridge players, and these are passionate folks.

So, here’s the (re)deal. Bridge is returning, beginning Monday.

This is a good example of fixing a mistake and listening to readers. It doesn’t mean we’re perfect or any such thing. Far from it. But it does show that we’re smart enough to realize when we’ve made a mistake.

We got a tip on Friday that there was a case of swine flu at a local school. The tip never made it into print or online. We made our decision based on an email exchange with Dr. Tim Monroe, the head of the Forsyth County Health Department. He said his assumption is that H1N1 is throughout the school system, and that his agency isn’t investigating individual cases. In other words, from his point, to say school X has had a confirmed case would give the impression that school Y is flu-free and that’s not the case. He thinks pople need to go about their lives taking precautions on a global—rather than localized—basis.

From our published reporting, it’s pretty clear that swine flu is making its way through the community. From the newsroom’s standpoint, we don’t plan at this time to write about most individual cases. But we would write about a death from swine flu or from an outbreak that caused a severe disruption to some aspect of our community, whether a workplace, a school or what have you.

There are other ways to look at this, of course. One argument would be that we are withholding information that people need to know, that a student at a school may have had this disease. But if you take the approach that there’s likely a student at every school that’s been exposed, then you can understand where we are coming from. Information without panic.

We started a new blog this week. It’s called Prep Forum, and its principal author will be Mason Linker, who is our prep-sports writer. If you go to high school sports in this area, you’ll invariably run into Mason. He knows everybody—coaches, athletes, ADs, etc. High-school sports is a tough beat. The competition is keen, but the athletes are true amateurs, and so the bluntness and the like found in college and pro coverage is absent.

Our hope is that the blog becomes a place for news/information that might otherwise not get in the paper and for back stories on the world of high-school sports.

Separately, one of our premier reporters retired this week. Janice Gaston started at the Journal in 1969, right after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill. She was a features writer for all of her career, and she wrote some incredible touching and vibrant stories about people dealing with change and tragedy. Her skill was in balancing the right combination of empathy and professional detachment, and she sweated the details in her pieces. A good journalist and friend.