News-Record.com

Late last summer, we asked Mark Sutter, our Greensboro city editor, to spend several weeks learning everything he could about the future of newspapers.

Mark is a smart guy, and we wanted him to think deeply about how our newspaper should grow with the changing readership of the Triad.

His vision of the News & Record of the future was exciting. One paragraph in particular grabbed my attention: "The News & Record is an intensely local, community-oriented newspaper and newspaper company. It functions as a virtual town square, operating both in print and in cyberspace. We are a place where our neighbors come to hear the latest local news and share their own news -- big and small. It is where they come to shop and to play; to learn and to laugh. It is where they find out what is happening in the community, and how they can go or get involved."

It's an enticing concept, this idea that the newspaper -- through the product that is delivered every morning and the product that streams into your homes and offices via the Internet -- can become a town square, a trusted place where people gather to hear the news, spread their own and talk about both.

It is more than wishful thinking. We are beginning to build it now. Today and next Sunday, I'm going sketch out what this means.

USA Today has a story on television news' coverage of the tsunami. It quotes Bob Woodruff of ABC as saying that journalists were slow to grasp the significance of the tragedy.

We didn't react fast enough either. While we have played wire service stories about the disaster on the front page since it happened, we didn't do nearly enough to describe the impact on those locally who have friends and family in the region and those who want to help. We had smaller than normal staffing during Christmas week and other stories to cover, and it simply got past us. We're trying to catch up now.

Lex Alexander's report on building our Web presence into a true online public square for Greensboro and Guilford County is here. No big announcements to make about it yet; we're still ingesting.

Comments and responses are coming in on Lex's report for us. Check PressThink, Ed Cone, Hogg's Blog, Gate City, TheShu and maybe others. Thanks for all your ideas and support.

Lex met with several of us here last night, and we talked through the points. Now, we're in the process of determining what our technology will allow, what our staffing will allow, and what we want to do first. We will be ambitious. After listening to the locals, reading Jay Rosen's Top 10 Ideas and "We the Media" by Dan Gillmor, we must.

As we build this town square of participatory journalism, we intend to be open about it, letting you know where we are in the process often, asking for your suggestions and thoughts, and involving you as best we can.

Our friend Val Nieman, author and former editor here who left us to teach at A&T, just missed in her "Jeopardy" appearance tonight. She got $12,000, second place, but fell short of the winner's $26,100.

I'd hoped she'd wear a News & Record or Aggies shirt -- she didn't -- but she acquitted herself well. She was poised and gracious and came on strong in the end, particularly on the science questions, of all things.

The Final Jeopardy answer in the 1920's nostalgia category: "A poor couple window-shopping a diamond bracelet at the store inspired the song "I can't give you anything but love."

Here's the question:

We're starting to build the town square. This from Jeri Rowe, editor of Go Triad: "We’ll improve the book and our Web site in a variety of ways to make it a place where people feel comfortable yacking about the arts and entertainment scene around us. I think of it as a cyber and print version of Fisher’s Grille on a Tuesday night, a time when the blues transforms this cool neighborhood spot in Greensboro into a place where many locals juke and howl."

Jeri describes a variety of efforts to improve the magazine, to involve readers in the content and a "funky" advisory board, and to change the Web site to "create a conversation meant to break down the artificial walls that often separate readers and journalists."

Sound familiar?

I'm running so behind. I've wanted to write about this for two days now. Julia Duin, chief religion reporter for The Washington Times, bemoans the lack of religion reporters at the nation's newspapers. In this essay posted at the Poynter Institute Web site, Duin says, "Those of us who've been on the religion beat for a while know there's fear and loathing of religion among many gatekeepers who call the shots on newsroom staffing. Partly because they attach insufficent importance to the subject, they often fail to hire the best person for the religion beat."

We've had a religion reporter ever since I've been here (20 years this month. Aack!). Nancy McLaughlin has covered religion for us for the past couple years. She did not have previous religion reporting experience, as Duin suggests religion reporters should have, but she has brought a nice style and intimacy to our coverage. The beat is so large that, if we had the resources, we would have a second reporter helping out. As it is, she has more stories on her list than she can get to.

Not that that will stop us from giving her more responsibility. Nancy is going to start blogging religious, faith, values and spiritual issues in a few weeks. She'll write about controversial issues as well as providing notes about faith-based activities in the area. Look for it under its working title, "The Front Pew." Ideas for topics of interest? Post them here or send them straight on to Nance at nmclaughlin@news-record.com

Chris Wallace, a graduate of A&T in 2003, signed on with us to cover community sports.

He has been in our pages before, as a sports stringer. He is the former sports editor at A&T's campus newspaper, the Register, and he worked as an intern at the Lexington Dispatch. He also has helped some sports teams, including the Panthers, in media relations roles.

He's got great community ties. He has been a teacher at the Hayes-Taylor YMCA; he helped with the National Youth Sports Program; and he has been a tutor with the Black Child Development Institute in Greensboro.

Chris will be covering the multitude of community sports in the Triad. Please welcome him.

As soon as he's finished with a couple of stories, Lex Alexander will begin designing and building our new Web presence fulltime following the open source journalism model.

His report was comprehensive, and we want to do much of it. We asked him to focus first on bringing down the artificial barriers separating the newspaper from readers. His initial efforts will be to develop interactivity, forums, communities of place and of interest. He's going to help us develop more staff and reader blogs, and bring on more citizen content, stories and photos. We're looking at many other sites to learn. I like the OhMyNews model. We'll see.

We're also exploring ways the newspaper and the online world can complement each other, feeding content to each other and playing to the strengths of each.

There are some recommendations we can do quickly. Others will await our new publishing system, scheduled for launch in mid-February. Still others will require navigating through the treacherous waters of business imperatives. Among others, we have a daily newspaper to put out.

We had an interesting discussion about how much to reveal here. The traditional model -- don't tell until you launch -- had proponents. But under the idea that we're pursuing revolution, not evolution, we've decided to put it out when we know it, and even when we don't know it. That probably means we'll over-promise and certainly means we'll make mistakes. Stuff happens. And stuff can be fixed and improved.

We know you have high expectations. So do we.

So, Lex, get those stories finished and get started!

Paul Janensch, journalism teacher at Quinnipiac University, wrote a column in the Hartford Courant (via Romenesko) saying this: "If it's OK to show us images of dead Indians, Sri Lankans, Thais and Indonesians killed by a giant wave, then isn't it OK to show us images of dead Americans? We see virtually no images of Americans killed in Iraq. The U.S. government will not even allow us to see images of flag-draped coffins of American soldiers. Why is that? Do we think that only Americans deserve privacy in death?"

In fact, we have a policy that the editor or managing editor must approve publishing photographs of dead bodies. We carefully weigh the compelling public interest in displaying the photograph with an awareness of our readership's discomfort at seeing the face of death at the breakfast table. We have published photographs of victims of the tsunami on the front page. I asked our photo director, Rob Brown, about Janensch's column.

"I think that we are judicious in our display of any dead bodies, foreign or domestic, and when we do show dead people it's because it helps tell the story and convey the magnitude of a desperate situation.

"I agree that the information and photos out of Iraq are controlled too much by the U.S. government, and I think it's because the war would be a lot more unpopular if people were to see the grim images of dead and wounded soldiers more frequently. We do run these types of images when the news warrants."

Last week, I wrote about our plan to transform our newspaper and Web sites into a virtual town square where people meet to hear, tell and discuss the news -- the news about the world and about themselves.

That is one leg of our 2005 planning. The other is best summed up this
way: Think young. This will also change both how the newspaper looks and how it reads.

Before you choke on your Pop-Tart and conclude that I've watched too much SpongeBob, listen up: Thinking young is a mindset, not a chronological mile marker. Whether you're 18 or 80, you will like what
we mean. The newspaper must become more vibrant, fresher and filled with more passion and new ideas.

The result: A newspaper that will be better written, more interesting to read and easier to use.

I, too, welcome Greensboro City Council member Tom Phillips to the blogosphere. He joins at least two other locally elected officials who blog, Council member Yvonne Johnson and Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen.

My hope is that, as public servants, they embrace the potential before them, and they use their blogs to further the principles of democracy, and develop the sites as places to give and get information and knowledge. What a wonderful way, for instance, to illuminate the council's thinking on a contentious issue or perhaps reveal some of the civic conversation that takes place behind closed doors.

I also hope that they realize a site's potential to inform their own positions (Phillips's motto "Never in Doubt" notwithstanding). Imagine, for example, asking citizens via a blog what they think of another strip shopping center north of Pisgah Church Road, what they think of the city subsidizing the hockey team, what they think of paying incentives to attract a private company. The possibilities are endless.

At the newspaper, we have particular interest in Phillips. He is known as a straight-talker who charts his own course, and, last I checked, he refuses to talk with our City Hall reporter, Matt Williams. Tom doesn't like the way Matt frames his articles and thinks that Matt gets it wrong too often. Fair enough. That opinion is his privilege. Now, through his blog, he can hold a virtual 24/7 news conference, answering questions, setting the record straight and holding a very public conversation. Let's hope he does.

Joe Trippi, in his book "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," has some advice for politicians and institutions (like, say, a newspaper). They include: Tell the truth. Keep up a daily dialogue with your constituents. Build a community. Get people involved. Cede control.

Good luck. We're all rooting for you.

Last year, we published 252 corrections. Not great, but difficult to gauge because we don't have anything to compare it with. Well, that's not precisely true; I could compare it with The Boston Globe's 1,031. It would make me feel better, but it's hardly fair as the Globe publishes measurably more stories than the News & Record. (Several newspapers' totals are here, thanks to Romenesko.)

I'm going to write a newspaper column about this topic, but here's the essence: by far, most of the errors were caused by simple carelessness. Transposed digits in a telephone number. Misspelled names in our sports agate. Misread the date off a news release. We must do better.

We also received 291 responses last year to our accuracy survey. (We randomly mail surveys every week to people quoted in our stories, asking them about the accuracy of the story, headline and photograph in which they were featured.) Of those, 252 (88 percent) noted no errors. Not bad, but we still must do better.

The Independent posts its special report on the changing of the guard at the Durham Herald.

"Metro reporters will be expected to write 10 stories per week under new 'guidelines,' sources in the newsroom say, and the front page will feature three local stories each day," one story says.

While I'd like to get 10 stories a week out of our reporters, I want to get special reports on St. James and Homestead and school hit lists more. (Besides, if I demand that sort of productivity, they might expect me to model that behavior!!!)

And this: Owen Van Essen of the brokerage company that handled the sale of the paper to Paxton "says complaints about the paper's new ownership are unfounded. 'Paxton is a very good newspaper company. You make yourself a little note to do a story about the newspaper a year from now, and I guarantee that it will be every bit as good as it is today.'"

If you can get your hands on it, the dead trees version of the weekly has a great double-truck on the sale, including a Photoshopped photo of a tidal wave about to crash over the newspaper building.

We made a mistake in Thursday's newspaper which we write about today. We said that a 13-year-old Northwest Middle School student had been charged in connection with the so-called hit list found at the school last fall. That was wrong. No student has been charged. We didn't know the identity of the teenager, but we wouldn't have published it anyway because of his or her age. So, to that extent, the human harm has been minimized.

The error occurred because we depended on the exchange of voice mail for the basis of the story. Obviously, the inability to actually talk to a source hinders our ability to ask follow up questions and clarifying questions. It promotes misunderstanding, which is precisely what happened in this case. We should have known better than to rely on it for such an important story.

Some editorial board members at The Philadelphia Inquirer have been calling former subscribers who cancelled their subscriptions during the contentious election season. They're trying to woo them back. Here's the instruction memo on Romenesko.

Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily doesn't think much of it: "It's an oddity of the newspaper business that whenever a paper's circulation goes into a free fall, it's the editor's neck that most often goes on the chopping block."

Later he writes: "Which raises this question: If the editors are doing that, what the hell are the solicitors in the circulation department doing? Maybe writing editorials and running the newsroom?"

Seems to me that it's the responsibility of the editors to talk to readers, particularly disgruntled ones. I want everyone to read the newspaper because it informs the community. It's important. So, when people quit the paper over something we wrote, I'm happy to talk to them, explain our position and listen to theirs. Our circulation department's philosophy is for the news department to put out a quality paper and they will sell it. But I don't know how you put out a quality paper if you don't want to talk to readers and ex-readers. It's part of the job.

Interesting column in Newsweek by a sportswriter who used to cover the Minnesota Timberwolves, but now writes about high school sports. "It's the best job in the business. Many of the athletes and coaches I deal with say something that would shock my colleagues on the pro beats: 'Thank you.'"

Covering high school sports is arguably the toughest job on a sports staff. The season runs 10 months a year, there are dozens of games each week, and the fans are as passionate as any Cameron Crazy. Many sportswriters cover preps only as a form of indentured servitude until they can get a plum college or pro beat, where they report on programs with celebrity coaches and players.

I asked our high school writer, Kellie Dixon, her thoughts. "My reaction is amen. From college, previous internships and here, I've had experience with all of it. Sure, it was a thrill to travel with the UNC women's soccer team, to walk into the Diamondbacks clubhouse, to sit across the table from Bo Jackson in Scottsdale, to shove a recorder in Emmitt Smith's face, and to track Matt Doherty during his impending 'resignation.'

"But I never felt rewarded. By covering high school sports, my work takes on the same significance to my readers that I might feel as a college or professional beat writer, and I'm pleased my work becomes scrapbook material."

Amen, indeed.

Mark Tosczak, formerly a News & Record staffer and now a reporter for The Business Journal, writes about our online initiative in this week's issue, which will not be posted until next week.

The article is on target, except for one thing (although it may just be me). There is a tone of desperation about the newspaper business in it that we don't feel. The News & Record is healthy. Until this year when we stopped telemarketing, we had three straight years of circulation growth. We have every expectation that we'll resume the growth in 2005.

As I've said here before, this is an exciting time to be in journalism. Change and growth is in the air. If we can engage with people better online, we'll go there. If we can involve citizens in the civic dialogue and learn from them, well, here we come. Mark knows that, too, because, although he didn't say so in the article, he's a blog aggregator himself.

This is the third of three newspaper columns outlining our plans for the year. Regular readers of this blog will recognize its ideas.

For the past month, Greensboro has been at the center of a national online discussion about the city's passionate and energized blogging community and, believe or not, the News & Record.

Unless you're a blog reader, chances are you don't know much about it-- and that's probably our mistake -- but you should.

Better yet, I hope you will enter into the conversation.

First, some context.

Bloggers -- so-called because they write Web logs, which are online journals of news and opinion -- have changed the landscape of journalism and politics. They post stories and observations, and anyone with an Internet connection can read them, link to them and comment on them. Blogs put the power of worldwide communication into the hands of individual citizens.

Everyone seems to have gotten to Jon Lowder's post already. I'm flattered to read his opinion of us. We want to be his hometown newspaper. Interestingly, we can't afford a staff of reporters in Winston writing for the News & Record. But with the new dawn of distributed journalism and open source journalism, we're coming to a time where we can get news and commentary from Winston. We're in the process of developing our framework for making it happen. So, welcome to the audience -- although I still prefer calling you all readers; I'm just old-fashioned that way.

We're publishing Nick Sowers story in the paper tomorrow. Those of you reading Patrick Eakes' blog know it already. Believe it or not, we didn't discover it at Patrick's place, although we should have. I read it there, but I was asleep at the switch and didn't say, "Hey, that's a story for us." Instead, our writer, Allison Perkins, got the same e-mail that Patrick did, and it took us awhile to get permission to publish. (You may recall that last Thanksgiving Day, Allison wrote a touching article about Nick's father, Brian, receiving a call from Iraq from Nick.) Bottom line, it seems like a story everyone should read.

To show my respect for getting beaten -- and to direct our readers to future Nick e-mails -- I called Patrick to ask him if we could refer to his blog and the Diary of a Soldier blog in the newspaper story.

As others have noted, it's funny how the contrails of our jets are intersecting.

I just did an e-mail interview with Bill Mitchell of The Poynter Institute about what we're planning with the Web site. Violated those cardinal rules of PR-dom. I did it at the end of a tough day when I had other things on my mind, and I did it without someone reading over my shoulder telling me not to be stupid. He said it would be posted Wednesday.

Like The Business Journal, he asked about our business plan we have. My response:

Business plan? We don't need no stinkin' business plan! We're a bunch of journalists doing this, and we're approaching it that way. We figure if we can create good, interesting, dynamic content, then readers will come and will value the site. We leave it to our ad side to figure out how to make money off of that.

I believe that energy around the Web site will naturally drive energy to the newspaper. I know that we're going to mine the Web site and reader discussion and contributions for stories and commentary in the newspaper. There is, to use that lovely word, a nice synergy.

Wednesday Update: Here is the actual interview.

Lex is doing a good job keeping you up to date on our Web progress. We set up a variety of forums today, on local news topics, sports and all the colleges and universities in our area. In fact, we inadvertantly omitted Elon University, and almost immediately got an e-mail of complaint. That's some powerful feedback and just the way we hope this will work. An Elon forum is now up and running. And, I'm pleased to say, we already have some comments going.

We've located it on the home page right about the blogs button and below the breaking news headlines.

This will all look and work better on the redesigned site that's coming up in a month or so. More to come.

You know how sometimes a real newspaper with mock headlines will be used in a major motion picture to illustrate the storyline? At the risk of revealing what high brow taste I have, all I can think of is "Stripes," which used magazines, and "Men in Black," which did it with supermarket tabloids. ("Best investigative journalism on the planet," Agent K told Agent J.) USA Today allows it routinely. On the other hand, some papers refuse to do it, so we get "The Washington Herald" in "The Pelican Brief", even though the typography is identical to The Washington Post's.

Anyway, we've been approached by the makers of "National Lampoon's The Trouble with Frank" to create some dummy front pages. The movie was filmed in the Triad last summer and stars Jon Bon Jovi, Nora Dunn, Estella Warren and Cary Elwes. The movie has to do with a women's hockey team and one of the requested faux front page headlines has to do with a hockey league closing. You think it's a little close to the news at home?

I've written a lot about what we're trying to do at the News & Record, and I've linked to many of the bold new thinkers from whom we've stolen ideas. Let me add another -- Tim Porter -- who describes a marriage of innovation and fundamental journalism with an eloquence and clarity that I envy. It's our destination.

"Can American newspapers find the vision -- and courage -- to break stride from current habits and take the initiative to lead this debate? If so, it will be a difficult transition. By nature, newspapers, and all traditional news organizations, are followers. Something happens, they report it -- a reactionary role that carries over to the risk-adverse reflexes newspapers exercise when presented with challenges. To morph from a position in which newspapers no longer simply observe their communities but actively participate in them requires a shift of mindset from detachment to involvement.

"If interactivity was the keyword of Internet growth of the '90s, then involvement is the media driver of today. Blogging, photo galleries, citizen journalism, political organizing -- all are Internet-enabled involvement at work and at play. As I wrote the other day, newspapers do not have to discard the principles of journalism to take advantage of these shifts, they merely need to reinvent how those principles are put into practice. Newspapers can begin by applying this Chinese proverb to how they approach the people they want to reach: 'Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.'"

So are we. Our newest blog, on religion, faith and the spirit which we're calling The Front Pew, was all ready to go yesterday. Nancy McLaughlin, our religion reporter, announced its launch in her column this morning. Where is it? Don't know. We've found the beta site, but not the one with her first post. We'll get it up asap.

Several good stories coming in the paper tomorrow. Staff writers Dick Barron and Eric Dyer tell more of the Dell story based on thousands of documents released by the state last week. One anecdote, according to Commerce Secretary Jim Fain's notes, tells of Dell about to throw up its hands at the millions of dollars the state was offering and go elsewhere.

"Your taxes are not friendly," Dell executive Kip Thompson was quoted in handwritten notes that record conversations he had with Fain. "Know you're proud, but it doesn't work. ...Never been more perplexed."

"Here's what's most disconcerting," Thompson said, according to Fain's notes, "2,000 jobs -- shouldn't you be happy without any revenue?"

Lorraine Ahearn also follows her column last Sunday about a child with lead poisoning.

The story of 616 Martin St. is a paper trail littered with one failure after another by a system set up to protect children at risk of lead poisoning, which can cause brain damage and even death.

With textbook clarity, all the ingredients for trouble converged on the small frame house on Martin Street: An absentee landlord. A family without the money to move. Health inspectors with limited enforcement power, in a city with no ordinance of its own. Real estate investors who bought and resold the house but insist they had no knowledge of the hazard.

Both are sad and telling in their own ways.

The Front Pew, our blog on religion, faith and matters of the spirit, is up and running. Don't ask me what the problem was. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. (I almost linked here when I wrote "Lord.")

Years ago, when I worked at The News & Observer in Raleigh, signs
adorned every wall admonishing the staff to "Get it first, but get it
right."

Frank Batten, the founder of Landmark Communications, the company that
owns the News & Record, refined that when he said: "First, get it
right."

So, it pains me to tell you that we failed in that goal at least 252
times last year. That's the number of corrections we published.
Realistically, we failed more often than that, but those errors were
never brought to our attention.

Our policy is to correct errors as soon as we know about them. While it hurts to tell you that we published a lot of corrections, it doesn't embarrass me. We want to be diligent and forthright about putting the facts right.

Jim Schlosser, reporter and writer extraordinaire, slipped on some ice on his way jogging Saturday and broke his arm. It is a serious break; he had a rod inserted in his forearm.

We hope he doesn't come back to work until next week so that he can get well on the way to mending, but there is no holding Jim back. He came in Monday, but we sent him back home.

Jim, while we miss your richly textured and highly readable stories, we want you to get well, first.

Updated Wednesday: So, Jim's sitting at his desk right now, threatening to remove his sling so that he can reach the keyboard better. (His cast is up past his elbow.) I talked with his wife, Kathy, last night and she OK'd a half day, but I think she did it because he was going crazy at home.

In tomorrow's paper -- and online today -- we publish a story about an effort to build an ACC museum next door to the Greensboro Coliseum. My wife's family owns the property in question, a fact that we mention in every story in which the property comes up.

This is the full disclosure paragraph: She and I don't talk about her family's plans for that property, and I found out about them when reporter Matt Williams mentioned the proposal to me. To avoid a conflict of interest, I also stay out of discussions on where to play the story in the paper and how to focus it.

Top editors at the paper are going to brainstorm subject areas for online forums and future staff blogs this afternoon. We are adding forums here and have firm plans for future blogs on traffic, photography, business and, of course, editorial. Have ideas? We welcome them. Leave them in the comments.

Update: OK, I'll help jump-start it. Here are some of the top vote-getters: the single life, dining out, racin', shopping, and nightlife. Now, your turn.

One of the mysteries to me is how people can get ideas about the newspaper in their heads and how difficult it is to shake them. This is about one of those ideas. I've heard from three different people in three different conversations that the content of Go Triad, our arts and entertainment magazine, is mostly wire copy.

The only syndicated material in the tabloid are the movie reviews. Everything else, or 95 percent of the content, is local. When we were creating the magazine a couple years ago, Jeri Rowe, the editor of Go Triad, pushed me to hire a movie reviewer. I balked because I thought we could spend the money more wisely. Would a local reviewer be more insightful than, say, Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times? Not measurably. But we did want a local reviewer of the bar scene. So, that's the route we went.

In the meantime, Go Triad is filled with local stuff. This week, the cover is on the Jewish Film Festival. There's this funky new column called Sips, in which two sisters sample and review libations. John Bachelor has a restaurant review. The extensive events calendar, restaurant ads, notes on bands, new CDs, the music scene, Leslie Mizell's theater column and Kim and Jenn's column. All local.

Of course, it bothers Jeri more than it bothers me. But I don't like it when Jeri gets bothered. He gets all red in the face and starts shouting, and I want to keep his blood pressure out of the danger zone.

John Newsom, who has covered Rockingham County, Guilford County schools and higher education as a reporter for us and who, most recently, wrote editorials, has been named our assistant sports editor. A graduate of William & Mary, Newsom is an ardent fan of pro football, basketball, fantasy leagues and racin.' He starts next week. (First, he needs to finish a story on the sit-in anniversary we plan to run this weekend.)

With all due respect to the Associated Press, the name of the newspaper is News & Record (via Dan Gillmor).

To put some perspective on the question of our online business plan, there's this. "Could the continued fast growth of online, still from a small base, together with slow circulation losses and small revenue gains at the mother paper eventually generate a dual business base? Could that in turn support a decently staffed newsroom delivering in both mediums?

"I ran the numbers. Unfortunately, they provide little cause for cheer."

I appreciate the desire for the newspaper's archives to be free. I do, too. But let's calm down for a moment. Many of you are business people, and you know the way business people think. The archives generate decent money. Why is a business person going to give that up? Yes, I know all the reasons. As the new content, higher page views and buzz hits critical mass, things will move along. Give some of us time to get there.

Here's the first paragraph of a sad, outrageous story we're publishing tomorrow: "Almost 100 children tested in Guilford County since 2000 had dangerous levels of lead in their blood -- and there was little health officials could do to prevent it."

Maybe if the county commissioners are actually meeting in Chapel Hill today, they could talk about that.

A reporter with Editor & Publisher, a prominent national trade journal, interviewed me Friday about what we're trying to do online and about the blogging community. (I promise that I gave props to all of you.) But rather than the typical mug shot, the photo director envisions using a photograph of me and several of you! I explained that I didn't know many of you personally and didn't know where you are located. I also explained that there's a cosmetic reason that newspaper people are generally anonymous. (I was much younger when the photo on this page was shot.) To no avail.

If you'd like to beautify this proposed photograph, shoot me an e-mail at the link to the right. We're talking about taking it Thursday or Friday.

My friend and colleague, Allen Johnson, comes out a couple days early. It's officially happening Monday...not that that matters. That's just when the webmasters put his link on the News & Record's homepage. For some reason, when a Word document is translated onto our blog entry page, some of the punctuation marks are screwed up, causing that "scrambled egg" mess where an apostrophe should be. Sorry about that.

I suspect Allen's will vault to the lead in the N&R blog popularity sweepstakes. Here's some red meat for our more conservative readers: "I hope to make the editorial pages more open and less mysterious."

One of the problems about traditional newspaper folk discussing blogging is that they misunderstand it. They try to fit blogs into a box. Blogs are all about opinion. That can be true. They're also all about news, telling stories, showing personality, talking to others.

As I read Ed Cone in the N&R on the blogging and journalism conference at Harvard and Tom Blount's column (reg. required) in the High Point Enterprise, I understand where the traditional journalists are coming from. I was in that place a year ago. Some of the folks on my own staff are worried that blogging will hurt their credibility because it will require them to opine on the news. That's far from the truth, as any read of The Chalkboard or Inside Scoop or The Front Pew illustrates. You simply need to learn about the possibilities of the form, and there are many.

Blog are another way to reach an audience. They can be a news sources, with no threat to journalistic ethics. They won't take over newspapers, but they can pose a threat, if editors let them. They can also be a complement or, as I prefer, another way to make the paper accessible, relevant, interesting and transparent.

In addition to adding Allen Johnson, the N&R editorial page editor, to the blogging ranks, we also introduce Doug Clark, one of our editorial writers who's now blogging at Off the Record. His first foray is about his days at the High Point Enterprise and its owner Paxton.

Editorial will also begin enabling comments on letters to the editor tomorrow. Kinda cool, huh?

Robert Bell, who has been an editor on the city desk for 5 years, is heading to sports to write enterprise stories. Robert has an exceptional writing flair and will seek out those special stories that you won't get elsewhere.

Taking his place is Janet Brindle Reddick, who has been on our copy desk, our night city desk and is currently assistant High Point editor. Janet will lead our criminal justice coverage, among other assignments.

Denise Becker, who has written about business and particularly furniture for us, will assume Janet's spot as assistant HP editor. Denise won third place in the state Press Association contest last year for her series on the impact of manufacturing in China on local furniture companies.

We're lucky to have these talented people who can do different things so well.