News-Record.com

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years. Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually newfangled newspaper actually exists."

Now that's scary. Talk about high ambitions. How about High Anxiety?

Actually, the article in Editor & Publisher is nice. (But it's behind the newspaper trade journal's subscription wall right now.) Aside from a few minor factual errors -- Greensboro has six colleges not three and Doug Clark is an editorial writer not a conservative Op-Ed columnist -- it seems on the money. At least, the reporter got my quotes correct. Don't know about Roch's or Ed's. We haven't revamped our Web site yet -- the article says February, which was correct at the time I was interviewed. Now we're looking to launch this month. (Hands clasped together in a prayer appeal.)

The article doesn't break new ground; the crux of what we're doing and what E&P writes about has been covered here or at The Lex Files over the past few months. But it's always helpful to have an independent reporter do a take.

The largest omission in the story is contextual and it's my fault. Our Town Square initiative has a lot of cooks, including major roles by Managing Editor Ann Morris, Greensboro City Editor Mark Sutter and online editor Michael Fuchs. In effect, the staff started this wave of innovation, and I'm rolling with it. Blogs are being created because staff members want to talk with and connect with readers in new ways. Same with Podcasts. Other things are in the works. Ann and I are primarily trying to enable it.

I hope the E&P writer is correct. That will mean we have served our readers and citizens and journalism well.

The course that information takes twists and turns sometimes. Occasionally, truth gets bruised along the way. This is one of those times.

On Tuesday, we reported on the accident that claimed the lives of two students at Southeast High. Wednesday, we quoted a Highway Patrol spokeman as saying that alcohol was found in the wrecked SUV. That information surprised reporter Allison Perkins, and she asked him a couple different ways about it to make sure she had the story right. The spokesman said he did not know whether any of the teenagers in the car had consumed the alcohol, and we quoted that, too.

Throughout the day, we received e-mails and phone calls from people upset that we had mentioned the possibility of alcohol being involved in the accident. We heard from people who claimed to know "for a fact" that a bottle had been found in the car, but that no one was drinking, or that the bottle belonged to someone else. We heard from the father of the driver who quoted doctors as saying that his son's body showed no signs of alcohol. The Highway Patrol hasn't confirmed that finding, yet.

And then we heard from another Highway Patrol spokesman that, in fact, no alcohol was found in the SUV, and that the earlier statement was incorrect.

Should we have published the story on Wednesday saying that alcohol had been found in the car? A Highway Patrol spokesman said they were investigating whether alcohol played a role in the deadly accident. We knew it could be painful to friends and family. But given the intense interest in the story, we felt we couldn't ignore it. As we discuss whether to publish news that may be hurtful or cause discomfort, the question that starts and ends the discussion is this: "What is the public service value of this information?" If the answer is insufficient, we don't publish.

We thought there was value in the information. There are many questions surrounding this accident that readers can only guess at and speculate about. As a worrisome parent of teenage drivers, I thought of some. Readers called us to ask others. Some of them, granted, aren't any of our business. Others may never be answered. But two teenagers are dead, and a community mourns. Many people ask why? Perhaps presenting a complete picture of the accident would help prevent similar occurences.

Some readers told us that we should not report anything until we know everything for sure. With an apparently definitive statement from the Highway Patrol, which is normally as reliable as you can get, that alcohol had been found, we had no reason to believe otherwise.

Our challenge is tell the truth and minimize harm to innocents. In stories such as this, that's difficult to do. I regret the Highway Patrol gave us incorrect information. And had we taken a close look at the accident report, in which alcohol is not mentioned, we might have pushed back harder on the spokesman.

Most of us at the paper connected with the story are parents. Our hearts go out to the families of all the teenagers in the SUV. It's truly a parent's nightmare to lose a child so young and so full of life in such tragic circumstances.

Update: Greensboro city editor Mark Sutter reminds me that our long-standing policy on fatal accidents is always to include whether alcohol was involved and whether victims were wearing seatbelts. We include the answers without fail. "That is specifically for the public service value of it -- that people die needlessly because of those two factors, and we need to make people aware of it."

We have many valuable journalists here whose names rarely if ever appear in the newspaper, but without them we'd never get a newspaper out.

Marian Cowhig, who has been a copy editor here for five-and-a-half years, is one of them. Unfortunately for us, she's leaving to take a job at Pace Communications as copy chief for Teradata Magazine. While it's a good opportunity for Marian, it is our loss. She wrote one of my favorite opening lines in a job application: "Some people measure success in dollars and cents. I measure it in points and picas." (That's copy editing lingo.)

Her boss, news editor Teresa Prout, said this about her: "A Northwestern University grad, she has developed into a strong editor and a major contributor to the desk in many, many ways. For the past couple of years, she has been responsible for recruiting and hiring our copy desk intern. She has done an excellent job, leaving behind a recruiting process that we will continue to use for years to come. I thank her and I look forward to watching her progress in her career."

The Houston Chronicle, WRAL-TV, The Oregonian, The News & Observer and USA Today have called me over the past week to talk about blogging. Not for a story but to pick my brain -- what little crumbs are left -- about our experiences online.

All of the interviewers seem to be trying to figure out how to make the case to introduce blogging to their sites. I can't say that I'm particularly insightful. This isn't rocket science. I talk about interactivity, about transparency, about new readers, about complementing the journalism we offer in the paper with more depth and breadth. I encourage them to tell their bosses to learn about it first before judging, to ignore what they think they know, based on what they've read in the mainstream press (after all, you know how we are).

In the end, Ed Cone is right. There is nothing we're doing here that cannot be done -- and improved upon -- anywhere else. It simply takes a willingness to experiment, to let go of some control and to engage. Oh,yeah, and to decide that reaching readers precedes reaping revenue.

Anything else I should tell them?

No column by me this week. (Pause for wild cheering.)

We do have some wonderful stories. Try this one by staff writers Margaret Moffett Banks and Matt Williams: "The city of Greensboro holds second mortgages on 24 privately owned low-income apartment complexes, many of which have never earned money and likely will be unable to repay the city when the loans come due."

And even though the outstanding loans are in the millions of dollars: "City leaders ... say that providing affordable housing to poor people outweighs the financial risk of lending for apartment managers who have little ability to repay the loans."

Also: Staff writer Tom Steadman reports that North Carolina's restricted driver's licensing program for new drivers has dramatically cut fatalies among 16-year olds. But teenagers are still four times as likely as older drivers to become involved in deadly accidents.

And for every parent who has a 15-, 16- or 17-year-old thinking about college -- I'm one -- staff writer Bruce Buchanan tells you what you need to know about the "new" SAT.

Oh, and a certain basketball tournament at the Coliseum might make its way into the paper.

With all the talk -- criticism, actually -- about the ethics of journalism and journalists, two academics, Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri and Renita Coleman of LSU, have written a book about it titled "The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics."

At the risk of sounding self-serving, I offer this excerpt about the book from Michael Miner's column, just to stir things up: "Journalists were given a 'P score,' which measured the percentage of the time they were guided by 'universal ethical principles.' Their average score was 48.68 -- placing them well behind seminarians and philosophers and slightly behind doctors and medical students. Yet journalists were ahead of every other group Wilkins and Coleman found P scores for.

"In descending order they were dental students, nurses, graduate students, undergrads, accounting students, veterinary students, enlisted navy men, orthopedic surgeons, adults in general, business professionals, business students, high school students, and prison inmates. At rock bottom, with a P score of 20.0, were junior high school students."

Who says we're sophomoric?

My friend Ted Vaden is the new ombudsman at The News & Observer. Ted was my boss 20 years ago when I was a reporter at the N&O. After a stint as publisher at The Chapel Hill News, he's back in the fold. He wrote a column today on the Raleigh newspaper's policy on anonymous sources. It mirrors ours.

Ted says: "It's a finger-in-the-dike proposition to protect one local newspaper -- and its readers -- from information that can't be verified. The N&O does a respectable job of that with local coverage and a better job than most newspapers with the wire service news it doesn't control. But unfortunately, until the standards upstream are better, the paper still needs to come with a warning label: Let the reader beware."

We haven't won a Pulitzer Prize, and we won't win one this year. It's not something I think much about, although it would be a wonderful honor because it would mean we all could drink champagne in the newsroom in the middle of the day. The Charlotte, Raleigh, Winston-Salem and little Washington papers have won in recent years. (I don't know if they drank champagne, but if they didn't, they should have.)

Anyway, here are the leaked finalists in two takes, according to Editor & Publisher, which has a huge qualifier: "Although these can't be absolutely confirmed, our information in the past has proven to be remarkably accurate. We have checked some of these selections with editors at some of the respective papers, who confirmed that they had also heard, through the grapevine, that they had reached the finals."

It looks like having a hurricane gave some of the papers a leg up, although it's a fate I don't wish on anyone, except maybe Pedro at South of the Border. The largest papers seem to dominate in many categories, such as national reporting, international reporting and beat reporting.

All that said, I'll always believe that we have some contenders on our staff. Several photographers are top drawer. (I believe we published at least one of the purported photo nominees: the one of the haggard Marine with cigarette.) Lorraine Ahearn is as good as any news columnist I've read. Some of our feature writers best work holds up well. (I'll let Allen sing the praises of our editorial staff.) We continue to work on our public service reporting, not to win a Pulitzer Prize, but because we think it's an important role for the newspaper to play in a community.

And because it might give us a legitimate reason to drink champagne in the middle of the afternoon.

If you don't routinely read The Chalkboard, our blog on local education issues, you might want to visit it every so often. A post there now holds the record for number of comments on News & Record sites at 132 and counting. First posted on Feb. 28, the most recent comment came yesterday. The item is about how the Guilford school system is doling out federal money, but the discussion quickly centered on the competence of Superintendent Terry Grier and the school board.

This blog actually held the previous record, at 86 comments, on a post prior to the November election about an e-mail from Republican HQ. I'm delighted to cede the title.

I don't normally rechannel news releases here, but I'm going to make an exception because this is cause close to my heart -- public policy.

Local bloggers -- could be Greensboro101, but the release doesn't explicitly say -- are holding an instructional forum on blogging literacy at 10 a.m. March 19 at the Nussbaum Center, 2007 Yanceyville St. The 90-minute forum is open to elected officials, prospective candidates and policy-makers and is intended to introduce public servants to blogging and provide them with one-on-one instruction to learn how to set-up and write a blog.

It's free and registration is required. Register online at www.onlinegreensboro.info or call (336) 288-2245.

I don't flatter myself to think that many teenagers read this blog -- the ones who live in my house certainly don't, to their eternal detriment when it comes time for their inheritance. But perhaps some parents of teenagers do, so here's this update on our recruitment drive for budding journalists for our teen page.

"Applications trickled in in the beginning, then on Feb. 26, 27, 28 and even March 1 and 2, I received a mailbox and an e-mail box full of applications," Amy Joyner, who will edit the page, told me. "It's a wonder I didn't shoot myself last week, given all the death-obsessed, teen-angst poetry I read.:)

"Actually, some of the poetry, the essays, the letters and the school newspaper articles were very good. And a few were absolutely great. I saw potential in every application. But there's no way I can manage a staff of 120 teenagers. I'm going through the applications again and choosing the 60 or so best. I hope to have the field narrowed by the end of this week, so I can schedule the first meeting with the teens on an upcoming Saturday."

In the I-wish-I-had-written-this category: Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman at NPR, writes about vicious e-mail from listeners and gives some tips about how to ensure your correspondence is considered, rather than deleted.

The title of the piece is "Is it too late to ask for some e-mail etiquette." It's never too late to ask, but I fear it's too late to expect. An excerpt"

"AM talk radio and cable television slugfests have given many the sense that this is what journalism should be. It isn't. Opinions -- even strong opinions -- are necessary and important. But opinions without facts only leave us intellectually and informationally impoverished.

"Like Gresham's Law in economics (bad money devalues good money), bad journalism makes people suspect that all journalism is corrupt. When we claim that we are not corrupt or biased, it is then suspected that we are in denial or must be adept at hiding our biases.

"Hence, I believe, the angrier tone toward today's journalism"

Over the past year, we've focused on the look of the newspaper. That's paid off in several ways, including this one: The Society for News Design announced today that Doug Harris, our chief sport designer, won an Award of Excellence in its annual contest.

Doug's entry in the sports news category was the front page of our 2004 Super Bowl coverage of the Panthers-Patriots game. "Combining bold typography and Lynn Hey’s telling photograph, Doug produced a striking page that is a classic example of minimalist design and maximum impact," says Bob Williams, our design director.

It is our first SND award in eight years and only the second time we have won for a page design in this tough worldwide competition. Bravo!

Some personnel announcements: Mike Kernels, who has been a features writer for us for two years, has been "promoted" to assistant features editor. (I put promoted in quotations because it is arguable that attaching editor to your title is a promotion.)

Mike is taking Sally Buffalo's place. Before he came to Greensboro, Mike worked at Port Folio Weekly magazine in Virginia Beach and for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. Between the Virginia and N.C. press association contests, he's won a total of 16 awards since 1998. My only regret is that we lose him as a writer.

And some more musical chairs: I've told you about Eric Dyer, our Raleigh reporter for five years, moving to Greensboro, and Mark Binker, our Guilford County reporter, taking Eric's place in Raleigh.

Now we are going to move Nate DeGraff, a business reporter for the past year, to cover Guilford County. Covering the commissioners is like watching pro wrestlin': you don't know where the show ends and the wrestling starts. But Nate covered government with the Burlington Times-News before he came to us so he'll do fine.

This week has been deemed Sunshine Week by journalists and open government groups who want more openness, access and freedom of information in government operations. It is an interesting coincidence that The New York Times ran a big spread Sunday on the federal government distributing "news" reports to local TV stations.

The federal government's efforts to close off access to records is well-documented. Our interest is more local. Government officials often pose our requests for documents and access as obstructionism. We're simply being "nosy;" they know what is best. Case in point: Try to get elected officials to talk specifically about incentive packages to private businesses. Won't happen. They announce a public hearing will be held, without giving the name of the company involved, and then vote on the incentives package immediately after the hearing. The reason? The company requested anonymity. The general public has so little advance notice that it hardly has time to weigh in on the merits.

Our belief is that the best government is the most open government. The more information citizens have about how their government operates and why decisions are made, the better they are able to decide if that government -- its employees and elected officials -- is serving them well.

Citizens must know if their tax money is being spent wisely and if government is dealing with the issues they want addressed. Open access is vital to good government.

Training of our online "power users" -- those folks like Lex and Michael Fuchs, the news-record.com editor -- begins today. They are going to learn the ins and outs of our new publishing system. Why care? Because it means we're just days away from launching the new system and redesigned site.

Update: Some unexpected challenges encountered in the training, and I've been told that "days away" may be too optimistic. But soon.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its annual report on the state of American journalism.

There's much here, and I'm still working through it. It includes a recap about credibility and circulation declines. Some of it we know:

"What was called journalism is only one part of the mix, and its role as intermediary and verifier, like the roles of other civic institutions, is weakening. We are witnessing the rise of a new and more active kind of American citizenship -- with new responsibilities that are only beginning to be considered. In this new world, we continue to believe journalism is not becoming irrelevant. The need to know what is true is all the greater, but discerning and communicating it is more difficult."

Some of which we're glad to hear:

"The rise in partisanship of news consumption and the notion that people have retreated to their ideological corners for news has been widely exaggerated."

Some of which we're working on:

"The evidence, as best as it can be collected, suggests that the newspaper industry is taking the same cautious, pay-as-you-go approach to creating the new journalism of the Web and specialty publications as it took a generation ago to investing in trying to attract new audiences to the main print edition."

More later. Editor & Publisher has a report on the report.

In 1969 and 1970, Guilford County was captivated by a high-profile murder case involving two business associates, Gloyd Vestal and Angelo Pinnisi. Vestal owned Vestal's Florists and had a stake in the King's Inn. He also owned several motels in Myrtle Beach with Pinnisi, a partner in an insurance company. After a nine-day, standing-room-only trial, Vestal was convicted of murdering Pinnisi. He ended up serving five and a half years in prison.

Vestal passed away last week. In an article about his death, our local history writer, Jim Schlosser, noted the murder trial in some detail. As a result, he has heard from a number of people questioning why we included the information about the murder. The story was in the distant past and bringing it back up hurt the feelings of the family, many people told him.

Like many other newspapers, we charge for obituaries that are written by family members or funeral homes. This practice allows survivors to say what they'd like about the deceased. His family submitted a paid obit. On occasion, when someone of note dies, we publish what we call a news obit. Jim used the death of Mr. Vestal to revisit the crime.

Chip Scanlan of The Poynter Institute wrote a column about obituaries. Here is an excerpt that applies here: "A definition: An obituary (the root of the word is 'obit,' the Latin word for 'death')is a news report of someone's death, often with a biographical sketch of the deceased. Think of an obituary as a capsule biography published after a person dies.

"'That's what an obit is supposed to be -- a picture, a snapshot. It's not a full-length biography, it's not a portrait. It's a quick picture," observed Alden Whitman, who specialized in obituaries at The New York Times and was famously profiled by Gay Talese in "Mr. Bad News," a 1966 Esquire profile. In a rich report from last summer's Fourth Great Obituary Writers' Conference, New Yorker writer Mark Singer offered this elegant definition of the form: a "completed cycle of accomplishment or notoriety, concisely wrought."

A good news obituary identifies a "defining line, an insight into the heart and soul of the life," one obit writer told Singer. I don't know that the murder conviction was the defining line in Mr. Vestal's life. But to the community, it is certainly a part of how he is remembered. To exclude it from a news obituary would have been as inappropriate as omitting what he did for a living.

What we do causes us to hurt people's feelings. It is not something we take lightly; we have numerous discussions every day on a variety of stories about sensitivity, compassion and tone. Yet our core purpose of seeking and telling the truth demands that we tell the story as completely and honestly as we know it.

The walking bridge between the newspaper and our blogs has a few boards missing. No surprise there; we're building the bridge as we go along.

Two separate posts have addressed topics of interest to readers who either don't believe in blogs -- yes, that's what one man told me -- or who don't have computers. They want to read my explanations for why we did what we did on some controversial stories, and they can't get to it online.

I hadn't planned to use my newspaper column to write about the fatalities of the Southeast High students or the obituary on Gloyd Vestal. This blog seemed the perfect place to address the questions in a timely and interactive way. But the dismay some readers have expressed with our articles coupled with the level of frustration they've felt at being "out of the loop" is persuading me to change my mind.

In this time of changing media, I continue to learn about how people use the newspaper and how firm their convictions are about what should and should not be in it. As we endeavor to return to the days of being known as "our paper" rather than "the paper," I like that.

A few e-mailers have accused us of disrespecting Dudley High School basketball because we published a story on the day of the state championship game about a former player who transferred from the school. Here's what one reader said:

"Where's the "Gate City" love? At a time when the local newspaper should focus on motivating the home team to a state title, staff writer Kellie Dixon chose to focus on Prince Bowden, a player that quit the team and moved away. The article was a deliberate attempt by Dixon to foster negativity around a successful team. The only Greensboro team to make it to the State Championship game, gets a front page story about a former teammate who abandoned the team for selfish reasons. It was poor timing and distasteful for the paper to run the article the day before the championship game. This was unfair to Dudley's basketball program to be distracted with such nonsense while preparing for a title game."

I'm guessing this is a one-day online reader and not a newspaper reader. We published beau coup stories about Dudley's run to the state championship and on Sunday, the day after they won it, a photo and story on the victory took up well over half of the front page of the Sports section.

I understand the complaints, though. The article we published Saturday about Prince Bowden leaving the team was less about Dudley's march to the championship and more about one young man's struggle to find his place. In the end, it sounds like both he and Dudley are better off. Here's how it starts: "PITTSBORO -- Prince Bowden expected Dudley to return to the state championship game. The senior hoped the Panthers would. After all, most of those guys are his friends."

In any case, the story hardly seems as if it was a distraction, as Dudley won its second state championship.

So many elected officials are blogging that we've add a link to their sites from the left side of our home page.

Why add them to our site, but not others? Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenthiel write in The Elements of Journalism, "The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing." My hope is that elected officials will use their blogs to help us.

Politicians blogging is an exciting and welcome prospect, one I've commented on before.

In case you missed the AP story in the paper today, the News & Observer yesterday wrote about efforts by local government to sue those asking for public records. The story says that "lawyers for local governments and the University of North Carolina are talking about pushing for a new state law allowing pre-emptive lawsuits against citizens, news organizations and private companies to clarify the law when there is a dispute about providing records or opening meetings."

A great quote from Amanda Martin, an attorney with the N.C. Press Association. "Imagine that your daughter is part of a new busing plan, and you go and ask for a copy of the plan. They say, 'You can't have it -- and we're going to sue you for asking.' "

As a proponent of open government and as a representative of a news organization that has sued local governments, my position is probably clear.

What a wonderful opportunity for our Greensboro City Council members who are blogging to weigh in.

Here are a couple places the News & Record is being written about today.

The first, on the Associated Press Managing Editors site, is an article about recent "best practices" of newspapers that have emphasized recommendations of The Readership Institute. Aside from the comments about us, I'm intrigued by this from Fort Worth: "Editor Jim Witt has rethought the Fort Worth Star-Telegram with his well-publicized all-refer page one on Sundays and Mondays. But the change goes much deeper, with a fresh approach to content designed to make younger readers feel smarter and give them things to talk about. My favorite: 'Do I Look Fat?', their weekly health and fitness section. Did you know that if you drink one extra 12-ounce can of soda per day, you will gain 15 pounds over the course of a year? And that 20 minutes of daily in-line skating will burn it off? See: you're smarter and you've got something to talk about when you go home tonight, thanks to the Star-Telegram."

The second is from Mark Glaser of Online Journalism Review. As you may recall, Glaser's description of the media company he wants to work for inspired me. His piece is entitled "How to succeed as an online journalism editor." (It doesn't help that Lex's mug shot is at the top of the page!:))

From Dan Gillmor: "This is going to be a process of mutual discovery. People will learn from each other's moves, which is kinda cool." True that is.

And: "Even if 'pure' bloggers sneer at the mainstream media's stutter-steps toward blogs and citizen media -- and would laugh at a set of guidelines for editing them -- the newspaper companies feel this is their best chance to grab a younger audience and survive in a world of dwindling circulation."

Wait a minute. Y'all are sneering?

Each time we write about the arrests at TIMCO and the issues surrounding the ease with which illegal immigrants can get driver's licenses in North Carolina, readers write to correct our terminology.

"Your use of the derogatory and inaccurate term 'illegal' to refer to undocumented immigrants is offensive and erratic," is pretty much how it goes.

Here's what the Associated Press Stylebook, which is the guide we use, says: "illegal immigrant: Used to describe those who have entered the country illegally, it is the preferred term, rather than illegal alien or undocumented worker."

From A Dictionary of Modern American Usage: "The usual and prefererable term in (American English) is illegal alien. The other forms have arisen are needless euphemisms and should be avoided as verging on doublespeak. The problem with undocumented is that it's intended to mean 'not having the requisite documents to enter or stay in a country legally.' But the word ordinarily means "unaccounted for," which is a benign-sounding word when referring to one who has crossed a border in violation of the law.

It goes on: "Illegal alien is not an opprobrious epithet: it describes one who is present in a country in violation of the immigration laws."

From Wikipedia:
"An illegal immigrant is a person who either enters a country illegally, or who enters legally but subsequently violates the terms of their visa, permanent resident permit or refugee permit....There are a number of terms that refer to illegal immigrants. The terms undocumented immigrant, and illegals are roughly synonymous, while illegal alien includes those who do not intend to settle in the country, and undocumented worker includes legal residents and even citizens with defective papers who may or may not intend to stay in the country."

We avoid the term "alien" for the same reason that The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage recommends: "Illegal immigrant is the preferred term, rather than the sinister-sounding illegal alien."

The one exception in our stories is in quotations: State and federal officials often refer to illegal aliens. We don't change their quotes.

We've published two letters to the editor about our coverage -- or lack of coverage -- of the annual re-enactment of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

Leading up to the two-day re-enactment, we published information in the newspaper about the event on Feb. 24, March 3, March 9, March 10 and March 11. (The festivities ran March 12 and 13.)

We published a photo in the Monday, March 14, paper, but not in the previous Sunday paper. We could have sent a photographer to the event on Saturday, as one writer suggested, and perhaps we should have. But our photo staff was already stretched, covering the ACC Tournament in Maryland. Knowing that we were going to photograph the second-day of the re-enactment, we decided to send a photographer on Saturday to the District Friendship Camporee at Camp Guilrock in Browns Summit. His four photos of Boy Scouts ran on B1 Sunday.

I appreciate those who wanted more coverage of the anniversary celebration; I well understand the importance of that battle in our country's history. But I think we provided plenty of notice to our readers that the re-enactment was occurring.

At the end of each locally generated story on our Web site, we ask: "Were you satisfied with this story?" If you click no, you can leave a comment, which is immediately sent to me. By far the most common comment is "Not enough information." The second is "Needs a photo."

Agreed and agreed.

The first comment comes with the turf when you're running a breaking news site. We often don't have all the details when we first post. For instance, when two people were killed in a fatal wreck Wednesday, we updated the story several times throughout the day as we gathered more information. We rush to get the news online, even if it is not complete, because it is important for you to know.

The second comment points to two issues. In many cases, we don't have a picture available because we didn't send a photographer to the scene. It doesn't help us, either, that it's difficult to post photographs on the publishing system we're using now and trying desperately to replace.

In any case, rest assured that the comments do not zip out into cyberspace never to be read. I try to answer or get an answer to all that have return e-mail addresses.

I had left the office a couple hours before the bomb threat call came in Friday afternoon. We only had a couple dozen people there at the time, many of them reporters and editors preparing Saturday's paper. They evacuated the building as police searched from top to bottom. Took about an hour before the all-clear sounded. By taking a few shortcuts, the staff was able to get the paper out on time. (In a bit of gallows humor, my wife wondered how the caller got through our labyrinthian voice mail system.)

We had not planned to write anything about the hoax. Our policy is not to report bomb threats unless the public is significantly disrupted or the evacuation is highly visible. If publicity is a motivation for the trouble-maker, we don't want to encourage him or her. However, the evacuation of Piedmont Triad International Airport for the second straight day certainly qualified as a public disruption, and we wrote about that.

The airport. The JP building. The N&R building. Wise decisions to clear the buildings each time. But lots of schedules were thrown into disarray. Flights missed. Work disrupted. Police distracted. I hope they catch the person. I'm sure the jail has a comfortable cot available.

Update: We reported Sunday morning that the Wal-Mart on Wendover Avenue, Four Seasons Town Centre and the Wachovia Building in downtown Greensboro also received bomb threats Friday and Saturday.

First of all, happy Easter.

Easter is the most important day of the year on the Christian calendar, and several other religions celebrated significant holidays in the past week, so it seems to be a good time to write about how we cover religion in the News & Record.

Rich, deep coverage of the spiritual life in this community is a must. Hundreds of thousands of Piedmont Triad citizens consider themselves religious and visit a place of worship at least once a week.

Many of them live their faith, and it guides their daily thoughts and actions.

We have one reporter, Nancy McLaughlin, who writes about religion full time, and, if we could figure out a way to do it, we'd have a second. Bob Burchette writes about religious issues out of our High Point office, but he juggles many other assignments, too.

To cover a region with more than 1,000 congregations, Nancy writes a weekly column, organizes our "Faith Matters" guest columns on Saturdays, and edits the "Five on Faith" survey each week. Online she writes a daily Web log called The Front Pew that draws large numbers of readers and comments.

But her most important job is to tell individual stories of people living through their faith, to reflect on the spiritual life of the community, and to examine through secular eyes the impact that religion has on society.

The Associated Press has discovered Greensboro. In a story picked up by lots of mainstream media Web sites, the AP's Ellen Simon writes about our online Town Square initiative. A quick search shows it on many national sites, including Forbes, Business Week, ABC and Editor & Publisher.

I've already gotten my first fan letter about it, too.

"I've been seeing many stories during the last few weeks on the Greensboro News & Record's 'bold new experiment' in blogging. I've checked it out and frankly, I don't see what the fuss is about. There's nothing at all new or earthshaking about this project. So they have their editors and staff blogging and they set up a lot of reader forums. These are all a dime a dozen in on-line publications and it appears to me the reader participation in Greensboro is no more inclusive than the traditional letter to the editor format currently employed in most on-line editions of regular newspapers.

"A truly revolutionary approach to the blogging phenomenon does exist however at the Detroit News. The format, now well over a year old, has proven successful and engages the readers in a much more meaningful way with the participation of guest 'citizen bloggers' drawn from the community and the linked (and lively) comment section. I suggest the media watchers pay us a visit to see how a truly participatory model creates authentic citizen journalism."

Libby
Hillsborough, NC

I exchanged a couple e-mails with Libby, and the tone of her note sounds tougher than she may have intended because she generally likes what we're trying to do. That said, she's right. There are many papers and online sites doing different, interesting things. We're just starting out on our journey and have plans for greater innovation, citizen journalism and reader interactivity.

Frankly, I'm just glad no one has seemed to pick up the photo of me, Matt Williams and Nancy McLaughlin that went with it. They look great. I look like an ugly version of this.

By writing about her exploits on the front page, are we encouraging the mad bomb-threatener to continue to let her fingers do the walking? Are we encouraging copycats?

Those were the major concerns expressed yesterday during discussions about where to publish today's article about the continuing nuisance of bomb threats around Greensboro. And nuisance is too tame a descriptor. While no bombs have been found, lives are disrupted and valuable police time is wasted on what turn out to be wild-goose chases.

Normally, we don't write about bomb threats unless a bomb is found or the public is significantly inconvenienced. We don't want to contribute to someone getting their jollies by the publicity. And we don't want to inspire copycats. Even when a building the size of the Jefferson-Pilot Tower is evacuated, with hundreds of employees milling the streets of downtown, we just note it in a two- or three-paragraph story tucked inside the paper. And we only do that because we think readers might wonder what was going on.

But since 9/11, bombs are getting to be a highly visible, high interest topic. It's become a community matter of discussion.

Welcome the latest blog, Musical Garbage Can. Its owner is Jeff Hahne, who has written and reviewed for the paper and Go Triad magazine for a good while. He's a music fan with an entree to musicians so you'll get a bit more of the inside skinny. For instance, his Q&A with Ashlee Simpson is here. His post on the interview is here.

We've located this one on our Go Triad site, which means nothing to you except it will look a little different, which is a good thing.

As as we get more into podcasts and video, who knows? Great opportunities in store.

Don't tell anyone but, despite a misdirected mythology about the newspaper staff bleeding Carolina Blue, a lot of us here were secretly hoping the Tar Heels would lose Sunday. While it may be politically incorrect to root against a team from North Carolina when no other teams from the state are left, some of us were doing it.

Our personal interest overtook our professional objectivity, I fear.

If UNC wins the national championship on Monday night, we're going to publish a special commemorative section of the team's season next Friday. Last time Carolina won it all, we published a 40-page special section. (For perspective, the entire paper today is 44 pages.) So, while we would celebrate the victory along with all right-minded basketball fans, we also know that it would put a heavy load of work on tough but game group of folks.

It comes amid an already hectic schedule. We're creating a 12-page special section that runs Saturday on the Grasshoppers' and First Horizon Park's opening. Add that section and the UNC section to the fact that we have more people than usual on vacation because of the school system's spring break and it's close to a perfect storm.

But the Hoppers section is cool and will help spectators and those who will never set foot inside the ballpark understand what we now have on Eugene and Bellemeade. As for UNC, Tar Heel fans here can root for the team all they like; much of the work on that section has to be completed this week anyway in anticipation of a victory.

From the AP:

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court refused Monday to step into a lawsuit against a newspaper, leaving the media in Pennsylvania legally vulnerable when they report defamatory comments by public figures.

The Pennsylvania case sets no legal precedent, but want to talk about a chilling effect? I can see the ice forming right now.

What it involves is a newspaper story in which one city councilman was quoted as calling the mayor and the council president "liars," "queers" and "child molesters." The news report was accurate; the allegations were false.

In an area where it's not uncommon for elected officials to call each other names -- offensive, insulting names at that -- this ruling should cause everyone -- not just newspapers -- to gasp. We have always believed that elected officials are responsible and accountable for their words and deeds. That's why we question closed meetings, why we demand access to public documents and why we report what they say. It's vital for good government that citizens know what their elected officials say and how they act, as well as how they vote.

The publisher of the Daily Local News in West Chester, the newspaper being sued, says it quite clearly: "As far as I'm concerned, the public should be able to learn as much as possible about our elected officials and what they have to say about one another."

I'm no lawyer and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night so I'll be consulting our counsel for more insight.