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Closing the loop?

As if "oh, it's over"?

mark, if anything, this is the JUSTIFICATION for my earlier remarks.. which you chose to not even do a story about.

now, I wonder if you will? no.. actually I guarantee you you WON'T.

or, if you do it 1) will appear buried in the B section and 2) certainly will NOT have the same play and visibility as the fawning "Edwards hires web genius" story.

seriously, Edwards was a fool to hire this pair and it's now news.. but it won't be at the N&R.

one key question: would Edwards have been so kind if the pair had criticized Islam?

lest we forget, here is just one example of Ms. Marcotte’s non-maligning posts, courtesy of National Review:

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?
A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

Now, go ahead, Mark.. think of some reason not to run the story and please come back with a nice, long explanation -- forumlated by talking it over with your lawyer, I mean, editor...

you should have written about these two MUCH earlier -- like last week.

you would have seemed smart. but now... not so much

Jim:

Obviously, I’m not in the business of trying to win you over. But I will summarize, one last time, for anyone else who might come across this comment thread:

• We wrote about Matt Gross, Edwards’ senior internet strategist, because he lives in Greensboro and is therefore local to us.
• Neither of these two ladies has terribly strong local connections, therefore they don’t make as compelling a local story.
• Just because I (or another staff writer) hasn’t written about this directly does not mean we haven’t run something in the paper about them. I would be surprised if somewhere in the A section from the past few days we haven’t run a wire story or two about all this. However, being that I’m in Raleigh and typically see the paper on a 4-day time delay, I couldn’t swear to that.

I understand that you think this is a really big deal, that these two ladies bring great discredit to the Edwards campaign and say something profound about who he is as a candidate. I understand that in the echo chamber of the conservative blogsphere, this is all the rage and that it has gotten so noisy that political writers for mainstream media have now written on it.

Good. Fine. Everyone knows the story now. What I would have written really wouldn’t have been much different from what any of the other MSM types have done. At the end of the day, I somehow doubt that whether Edwards wins or looses will have much to do with this episode.

What have I been doing instead? In the past week I’ve written stories about the death penalty in North Carolina and local officials’ connections to the debate, the possibility of conservatives (including local legislators) getting certain pieces of legislation through the General Assembly, a potential change to the age at which Kindergarteners will go to school in North Carolina, and a few other stories that are cooking for this weekend and on down the line. All of those are stories that either would not have been done or would not have served our readers as well if I didn’t get to them.

That, in a nutshell, is the calculus that goes into our story selection. Sometimes it’s painful, but it’s how we do things. When spend our limited time and resources where we believe we can ad value and be most relevant to our readers.

But even after all that, I bet you still disagree with our choices. And that’s fine. You can come by here and rage and call me stupid and do whatever else, and as long as you don’t cuss in your comments or otherwise violate our community standards I’ll leave them up. Really, I’m happy to be over service if it makes you feel better. You want something covered and it’s not getting done and that makes you angry and I completely get that.

As open as the News & Record is to suggestions from the community, and as much as we like to hear from you folks, sometimes we’ve got to set our priorities and execute. At the end of the day, there’s no way those priorities are going to jibe with those of every one of our readers.