Otterblog

During a seven-day stretch, from last Monday to Sunday, we ran two major front-page stories about sports issues. The first was on the Davis Cup coming to Winston-Salem. The second, this Sunday, was about Toyota’s entry into Nascar’s Nextel Cup Series.

There was a time when the newspaper was very segregated editorially. That is to say that the front page was for national and international news, the local section was for local news, and sports news stayed on the sports pages.

The world is more complicated today, and stories are more nuanced. There’s a lot of bleeding between issues. I don’t consider myself a huge Nascar fan, but I appreciate the courage and nerve it takes to run around a track at speeds that make most of us pass out. And as a a news person, I realize that there are a lot of facets to most sports stories. Nascar, for example, is a huge business, and there’s a worthy debate over whether it is a sport first and a business second or vice versa. Which is how a story ends up on the front page and why every other commercial on TV seems to be for a pickup truck (Interesting aside, The Charlotte Observer also had a Toyota-Nascar story on its front page Sunday.)

New Blog: There is another new blog in the JournalNow family. It’s called Style File. And true to its name, it’s about style and fashion. The bloggers are Mary Giunca, who covers neighborhoods, religion and housing issues, and Stephanie Stallings, who is our newsroom’s administrative assistant and a sometimes reporter. It would not be a stretch to say that most journalists—this one included—are not overly concerned with these matters. So we rely on the wit and wisdom and fashion sense of people such as Mary and Stephanie to keep us straight and point out when we’ve crossed the line between casual Friday and bathrobe Saturday. Here’s the link: http://journalnowfilestyle.blogspot.com/