News-Record.com

Oops. (Via Romenesko.) We were one of those papers.

Course, that presumes this story is true.

We hired Michelle Jarboe today as a business reporter. She graduated in May from Chapel Hill, after serving as editor-in-chief at The Daily Tar Heel. She starts with us after her summer internship at The Roanoke Times is completed. She's also interned at Ladies' Home Journal and the Birmingham Eccentric. We've spent some time filling this position with the right person; we think we've found her. Selections of her work are on the Web.

I've finally added a link to ConvergeSouth onto the blogroll. Thanks to Sue, Ed, Allen, Ben, A&T and others, this conference in October will be a national event.

The journalism -- MSM, citizen and participatory -- all-stars will be in attendance. Most of the national folks who've influenced our thinking here -- Gillmor, Rosen, Congden, Wales -- will be there. Exciting stuff. Please come.

Last week, as part of a presentation/conversation I had with 50 college newspaper editors at a conference at UGa, I prepared a list of 10 media blogs that journalists should read. The list was primarily to help bring them up to speed on what was happening in the world of media, present and future.

So, now there's this meme whipping around the Web concerning 10 blogs I would take to a desert island. My list doesn't exactly follow the rules, but then there are no rules. This is a media list, rather than a personal one. (Otherwise I would list 101coconutrecipes.blogspot.com). It also excludes citizen journalism sites because I didn't see a need for those newspaper editors from around the world to read the sites listed at right.

Here goes, in no special order:

Romenesko -- If you want to know what's what in the world of newspaper journalism, this is the place to go.
PressThink -- Jay Rosen skates to where the puck is going to be
First Draft -- As does Tim Porter
BuzzMachine -- As does Jeff Jarvis, although he sprinkles lots of other tangy spices into the mix.
Dan Gillmor -- His book, "We the Media," was so influential on me that I couldn't leave his new blog out even as I find it less compelling.
Blogspotting -- Two BusinessWeek online reporters blogging on all sorts of media and business and marketing topics. Great tone.
Editorsweblog -- Its subtitle: Practical issues and real solutions for working editors. Need I say more?
Reflections of a Newsosaur -- Alan Mutter. Smart guy.
Spokane Spokesman-Review blogs -- Ken Sands & Co. are leading the newspaper pack in new and innovative things. It's hard to keep up. (In the college papers' list, I had News & Record blogs here. I switched it out so you wouldn't think I was sucking up to my own staff.)
Word Up -- Any list without the insightful musings of Ed Cone would be lacking.

What am I missing? (Sorry, a few bricks shy of a load is already taken.)

Amy Joyner, who used to be a business reporter for us and now is a writer of business books AND editor of our soon-to-debut teen page, recently published a book about eBay titled The eBay Millionaire.

That book has been chosen by Michelle Singletary, a Washington Post columnist who writes a personal finance column that we publish on Sundays, as her August Book of the Month. Amy will chat online with Singletary and anyone else at noon Aug. 25 at www.washingtonpost.com.

Congratulations to Amy!

Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times wraps up the environment facing newspapers -- all media, really -- in this commentary a few days ago. It is on point.

But the one-two punch of her hectic lifestyle and expanded choices means Sherer has little time for media that isn't available when she wants it, dealing with subjects she specifically cares about. Media experts call it an on-demand attitude. And it is irrevocably changing the face of today's media.

Ever wonder why cable TV news seems to be a growing morass of true-crime stories, conflict-driven talk shows and endlessly repeated minutiae? Or why mainstream media seems increasingly focused on a shrinking niche of consumers and their very specific political/social interests?

It all ties into a growing trend among consumers: an impatience with media that doesn't speak to their specific needs immediately.

Deggans concludes that these trends hurt newspapers because we offer a wide variety of information, "forcing every customer to wade through some things they don't like." Niche is the way to go.

The broader journalism world is grappling with the same issue we are on abusive comments at blogs. Robert Scoble wrote a few days ago that he was sick and tired of being hammered with negative and rude comments on his blog. He said, "I'm not having fun anymore. It's time to take some time away from the blog."

Now Poynter Institute has asked journalists how they deal with it personally -- given our ability to attract mean-spirited comments -- and what the right thing is to do about them. Comment here or there.

I deal with it by trying to stay on point and disregarding the personal attacks. Sometimes it works; sometimes a margarita works better. Meanwhile, our registration system is coming. That probably won't be enough, but as a first step, it will help.

If you missed our special section "Honoring Our Veterans" in today's paper, go back and find it. It is worth saving. (It's tucked amid all the advertising circulars.) You can view the pdf here. It's an exceptional effort honoring the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII.

Packed with photos, history and memories, the section pulled me back to a time when things were, well, different. It's a reminder of the debt of gratitude we owe those who came before us.

I liked Rabbi Fred Guttman's essay: ...I feel a great sense of gratitude towards those who fought for freedom. They have bequeathed to my generation and the generation that followed a world that although not perfect, is a world wherein the forces of Nazism and Fascism were defeated.

However, in addition to this tremedous sense of gratitude, I really wonder how good a job our country is doing in remembering the achievements of those who fought. Do our young people sufficiently understand what occurred?

See a slide show, photo gallery, remembrances and local medal recipients here.

Thanks to our special sections staff, and particularly Ned Harrison, a WWII vet and regular columnist for us, who pulled much of it together.

We've gotten a handful of complaints about a photograph we published on page 34 of Go Triad last Thursday. The photo was of a gray-haired woman stretching out before a 5K run at the Bar-S-Ranch in Reidsville.

The hitch: The Bar-S-Ranch is a clothing-optional kind of place and the woman took the optional part pretty liberally. She wore shoes, socks, a runner's registration number and that's it. But with judicious cropping, no body parts that might traditionally be considered prurient were visible.

We published the photo because it was tasteful, occurred in a public event tp benefit a charity -- the Monroeton Volunteer Fire Department -- and, well, was worth a smile.

Oddly, we got no complaints that I'm aware of for a photograph on the front page of the local section last Sunday of men running in the same race. (A ribbon marking the course appropriately obscured whether they were wearing running shorts. Or not.)

Much discussion in the blogosphere about Margaret Moffett Banks' article on the efforts by the International Civil Rights Center and Museum to raise money from corporations.

The major objection is that we hurt the museum and the city by identifying some of the corporations approached. Some bloggers agree with museum officials that publicity could stifle potential donations. For the good of the project and the city, the thinking goes, we should have acceded to the wishes of the museum and not published the names, even though we knew them.

Withholding information that we think is of interest to our readers is not what we do. And believe me, we get the request not to publish "for the good of the city" pretty often. But one of our guiding principles is that the more information citizens have, the better decisions they can make about issues that involve them.

But I wasn't here last week. John Nagy, the editor in charge of the story, explains the thinking.

Melissa Umbarger, a designer on our night desk, is a veteran cook. And fortunately for us, she's also a veteran blogger. Now she's blogging about cooking in our newest blog, Mel's Kitchen.

I'm always experimenting and learning what works and what doesn't. And this blog will basically be just that -- experimenting and sharing with you tips and tricks (and a few recipes) I've picked up along the way, along with my thoughts about what goes on in the kitchen.

She wants this to be a conversation about cooking. She knows the best way to create good meals is to learn from each other. So weigh in with her and enjoy!

Even though it's still summer and you have better things to occupy your mind -- and I don't even want to consider what those things might be -- we want your help.

The municipal campaign season has officially been open since last Friday. We know who is running for election for city and town councils in our area. Soon their yard signs will be littering the sight lines on the thoroughfares of our great cities.

So, tell us what's on your mind. Yes, we know you can ask Sandy, Tom, Don and Ed directly, but there are many other candidates who aren't blogging. What do you want to know and what do you want us to ask about? Tell us at Inside Scoop.

(If you want to send a more private communication, send an e-mail to Matt Williams or Eric Swensen.)

Update: Oops. I omitted Diane Davis from my list of candidate bloggers above. Thanks, Hardy.

Update 2: Links to all the blogs of candidates and elected officials in the area are here.

Our friends at MediaBistro -- OK, I don't have really any friends there -- have created a reading list of books about the media. It's one wonderfully eclectic list list, too. I've only read about a third of them, so I have my fall reading cut out for me. It's a bit New York-centric -- "Hard News" by Seth Mnookin is mentioned more than once. I'd add in "We the Media" by Dan Gillmor, simply because it moves the ball down the field.

Via Romenesko.

I got this cool e-mail from a reader having trouble with the delivery of his News & Record. Normally, I cringe at these sorts of correspondence because they indicate the worst kind of system failure: someone wants our newspaper and we aren't getting it to him.

But this guy, as you'll see, is my future.

When my paper did not arrive I sat with my morning coffee and pondered why I could not go upstairs and read my News & Record online. After all I could check my e-mail, whip out a few early morning replies, read my son's blog, update my blog and read the paper at the same time.

I am also writing to tell you that perhaps with a little incentive, I could use a notebook and wi fi access, I will give up the paper paper. Isn't there the technology to make a newspod, an inexpensive little device that I could have in my breakfast place and might even be portable to the bathroom that would permit me to read the paper 2010 style!

Now, it's possible this writer is jerking my chain to get his darned paper to his house by 5:30 a.m. But he's exactly right about wanting the interactive paper that's more of a flexible LCD that updates and refreshes like a Web page. And that is portable so that he can take it from the breakfast table to the bathroom.

I've no doubt that will be available because there has already been experimentation with precisely that. It wouldn't surprise me for a commenter to say that it is available already. This is precisely why we're experimenting with different ways of delivering news and information to readers, including podcasting, which is now being pooh-poohed in some parts of the blogosphere.
But I can only hope that newspapers -- in particular, this newspaper -- will be among the first adopters. And I'd bet it occurs before 2010.

In the meantime, I passed his e-mail to our circulation department and assured him we will do better on his delivery.

Did you know that there's an old dynamite safe visible from South Elm Street?

Did you know that Richard Nixon was turned down for a job in Greensboro when he was a Duke law student in 1937?

Did you know that Richard's Wild Irish Rose was born here?

I learned all those things and more in this year's "Discover the Triad," the 168-page magazine inserted into today's paper. Designed as a year-round resource for residents, it is packed with virtually everthing you need to know about the Triad. The annual calendar alone is worth the price, but it is complemented by lists of churches, schools, golf courses, parks, swimming pools, galleries, clubs and theaters, among others. Need advice on where to take a business client for lunch, your wife for your anniversary or a place to eat at 2 a.m.? It's there. So are the histories of towns and counties in the region, a look at the economic climate and lots of ads.

It's an amazing effort by our entire staff. Particular recognition goes to editor Tom Taylor.

Link here.

We started a new weekly column this morning about being young and single in the Triad. (Yes, I lose out on both counts.)Called Vexed in the City, this week's column is written by staffer Amy Dominello. It's outstanding.

But now, I have bigger problems. The club has become more crowded, filled with young men who apparently think it's all right to grab you from behind and start "dancing" with you.

Most of the rest of our night was spent giving each other the "help me" look and pulling each other away from these gentlemen. If we weren't at a dance club, I would have used my pepper spray on them and called the cops.

Right out of the box, it's a hit. The online version has comments enabled, and she's gotten a dozen or so already, not counting several e-mails sent directly to her.

Interested in trying your hand at it. Send ideas or submissions here.

On Wednesday, we published a package of photos of three children eating watermelon on their front porch. The kids are cute, and the photos depict them as intent on devouring the melon on a hot day. I enjoyed remembering doing the same thing years ago. The headlines said: "Sweet snapshot: enjoying one of summer's many treats;" and "A slice of life."

The rub is that the children are African American, and some people thought the photos were derogatory, playing against offensive Jim Crow images.

We anticipated that. Editors talked about the photos and the stereotypes Tuesday evening before publication. They decided that the images were worth showing — that far from being derogatory, they were joyful and portraying a summer ritual — even as they risked upsetting some readers. There was certainly no intent to offend anyone.

I've talked with a few dozen people -- white and African American -- about the photos since Wednesday. Some said they were offended. Others said they were not, but could understand how the photos could bother people. One or two took the position that it would be discrimination against the children NOT to publish the photos. A few African Americans gave me a confused look and said they weren't aware of the loaded imagery.

Amid the debate about whether this is closet racism or political correctness run amok, I naively look forward to a time when the stereotypes are not such raw memories. Until then, staffers here will continue to talk about a photo's emotional message, trying to balance the value of the image with readers' sensitivities. Did we make a mistake? I invite you to join in the discussion.

Nothing gets the juices flowing like a good photo of a naked woman.

Week before last, we got some juices flowing, all right. We published a picture of a gray-haired woman without a stitch on as she stretched out before a 5K race at the Bar-S-Ranch in Reidsville.

Well, she wasn't completely nude; she wore shoes, socks, a runner's registration number and eye-glasses.

But the Bar-S-Ranch is a clothing-optional place, and by no means was she alone in her choice of attire. With judicious cropping of the picture, no body parts that might be considered prurient were visible.

No matter, according to some of our readers.

"I am all for freedom of the press," one letter writer said, "but don't publishers get it? There is a segment of the population that is pretty tired of sensationalism for sake of advertisement or just for the sake of print....Granted, this picture is mild compared to some, but are there no limits or boundaries at all for our communities?"

And another:

For months, newspaper editors across the country have gotten e-mails questioning why the media haven't reported the progress being made in Iraq in getting power grids back up, in foreign embassies opening, in getting schools started and the like. The good news from the war, so to speak.

Kit Seelye of The New York Times writes about a meeting between newspaper editors and editors at The Associated Press trying to answer those questions. (Reg. req.)

The wire service explained some of the problems reporting from what one media organization describes as the most dangerous place in the world for a journalist.

"Other editors said they get calls from readers who are hearing stories from returning troops of the good things they have accomplished while there, and readers find that at odds with the generally gloomy portrayal in the papers of what's going on in Iraq," (Mike Silverman of the AP) said.

Indeed, we do.

Silverman promised an overview article on the war's progress every 10 days. He also said that AP has reported much of the information the e-mails complained was omitted, but he acknowledged that "details had been buried in articles or the articles had been overlooked." (Seelye's paraphrase.)

An overview every 10 days won't solve the coverage problem, given the polarization the war has created, but it can't hurt. I just don't know what took the AP so long to address the issue.

Because of our interest in local news, we don't publish much in-depth coverage from the war zone most days. (This being an exception.) Our daily reports tend to cover the day's casualties, the progress of the new constitution or what was won or lost. That, coupled with what they get from television, satisfies most people's news appetites. Those interested in more detail will get it from the Internet in something closer to real time.

I know that some readers on both sides of the political dividing line would like us to publish more news about the war....so long as it meets their litmus test. I won't promise that. However, we will find a home for AP's overviews of the war if they shed light on conditions in Iraq.

A few weeks ago, our summer interns and some of the younger journalists in our newsroom got together to brainstorm ways we could attract more younger readers to the paper. Their list, which runs five pages of bulleted items, isn't all that dissimilar to this CBS News list, except in the ways that television and newspapers are different.

I was on vacation during our session, but I got the report and am delighted with the suggestions. Before I get to those, though, there's this interesting insight from one of the CBS interns.

In at least one case, the brass was more enthusiastic about innovation than the interns were. "Podcasting was a big deal to them," said one intern. "That's because podcasting just came out on ABC and NBC.... That's just a tiny little thing to us. That sort of showed us that they would rather hear what they were already thinking."

Can't speak for CBS, but we were looking for ideas that we hadn't already been thinking. And we got a lot of good ones.

Naturally, many of the suggestions from our group pertained to increasing our content directed to 20-somethings. Add more humor. Add more helpful advice. Add more serial stories and first-person writing. More informational graphics. More controversy. Less dispassionate writing.

Some ideas counter what older readers tell us; the younger journalists want more more sports stories on the front page, not fewer. Some ideas we're already working on.

My personal favorite: Write smarter, not dumber.

Here are the raw notes on the brainstorm. And when I say brainstorm, I mean these are a list of ideas, not yet edited or evaluated.

Market America is a multi-million dollar business headquartered in Greensboro. It uses thousands of distributors to sell the company's cosmetics, nutritional supplements, cleaning products and other items.

The company just held its 13th annual convention at the Greensboro Coliseum, and, to the dismay of some attendees, we didn't cover it. One person wrote a letter to the editor that we published today.

A company officer wrote to me:

"In a time when the Triad is competing with large cities such as Las Vegas to keep the furniture market, and when Market America's convention could quite possibly move at the end of its contract, I would think an event such as ours would rank high on your list of stories to cover. As a paper that has publicly staked its survival on covering local news, the News & Record has neglected its repsonsibility to its readers and the citizens of the Triad by ignoring our event. Don't your readers deserve to know not only when the City of Greensboro or the Coliseum do poorly but also when we all do well, as in the case of our convention?"

Former News & Record staffer -- actually, we were the Daily News then -- Rochelle Riley weighs in on the Judith Miller imprisonment. (Via Romenesko.) Rochelle is now a columnist with the Detroit Free Press. Where's the outrage, she asks.

She's not in jail for war coverage. She's not in jail for revealing classified information. She's in jail for Robert Novak and Karl Rove.

We screwed up an advertising insert from the Guilford County school system in this morning's paper, and our mistake makes the school system look bad. I regret that.

The one-page advertising flier, involving Carolina Kia and Carolina Hyundai, Oldies 93, Guilford schools and the newspaper, promotes "Safe Drives, Safe Buses, Safe Kids," a student safety program.

The flier is written as a letter under Superintendent Terry Grier's signature. Unfortunately, when someone in our advertising department reproduced the letter, he introduced grammatical and typographical errors into the text. We made those mistakes, not Dr. Grier. He shouldn't shoulder the blame for them.

We're planning to run a correction in Saturday's paper and publishing the correct letter next Wednesday. We're in the process -- may be finished by now -- of pulling the inserts out of single copy racks now. (Update: that should read pull the inserts out of the copies at the car dealerships.)

A few of our bloggers have posted about our Town Square tab off the front page. On it we've collected our blogs, forums, podcasts, YourNews and other multi-media journalism we've done. (We appreciate all the hard work tech guru Stephen Paschall put into it!)

It's a step.

We've spent the past seven months-and-change learning and experimenting. Some things have worked. Some haven't. The technology end hasn't gone as quickly as we've liked. (It's not a people problem. It's a resources and technology problem.) But we've used the medium to extend our journalism in new ways. We've been able to hear more directly from and speak more clearly with readers. We're going to start new staff blogs that are less newspaper-related. In all, this has been a wild, wonderful ride.

But it's only a step on a longer journey.

Most of what we've done has been generated by our staff. The next step is to expand the citizen side of this effort, which is admittedly weak now. The Town Square is envisioned as a place where your voices and your reporting are featured more prominently. We're working to develop online communities for the towns in the Triad, beginning in Summerfield. We plan to promote YourNews more broadly so that you will send in reports of news -- big and small -- that you see happening. We expect to develop communities of interest, too.

In January, when I first wrote about our intentions in the newspaper I said this: We intend to build a Web presence that invites readers in to share the news they know and engage in the civic discussion. That will take a variety of forms, but, if we do it right, you will be able to come to our site and find the news of the day, featuring our reporting and stories from other newspapers and from other citizens. You will find bloggers and forums about cities and towns throughout the Triad.

Essentially, the site will become a true marketplace of information and ideas.

That's still our destination, and we're going to get there.

The executive editor of The New York Times has written a letter to the editor -- which, not surprising was accepted for publication -- complaining about a cover story about the media by Judge Richard Posner in the Times Book Review.

The letter appears tomorrow. A story about it is in Editor & Publisher. Too bad editor Bill Keller doesn't blog. Heck, he doesn't even write a newspaper column.

I don't know Keller, but I like what he writes and enjoyed his correspondence with Jeff Jarvis some months ago.

He's not the only one who didn't like the Posner piece. Me, I just thought it was overly simplistic about the motivations and challenges facing newspapers.

I planned to write this column about the new weekly page for teenagers we are introducing Thursday. Then I realized that in the rush of summer, I have failed to tell you about several new features in the newspaper and online.

So, before I move to the teen page, here's a brief description of some of our new stuff:

* Jim Rosenberg, a self-described smart aleck who also happens to be a funny, graceful writer, has a column in the Sunday Life section. I won't call it a humor column because that loads it with unnecessary baggage -- writing funny is harder than it looks -- but Jim brings a uniquely skewed view of the world to our pages. This week, for instance, he writes about the many things there are to do in Greensboro. I assure you it ain't the mayor's list.

Jim is director of knowledge management for Charles Aris Inc., an executive search firm in Greensboro. One of these days I'm going to ask him to write a column on what a director of knowledge management is.

* Vexed in the City, a weekly column about being young and single in the Triad, runs in Life on Fridays. (Rosenberg's suggestions in his column today likely will not make a future appearance in the Vexed column.) The writers will address dating, relationships, careers, diversions and just about anything else that fits. The first column, about the experience reporter Amy Dominello had visiting one of the downtown dance clubs, received two dozen comments after it was posted on GoTriad. This week Katie Reetz writes poignantly about what it means when your parents reclaim your childhood bedroom after you've moved away from home.

After we got a little national publicity for our blogging efforts earlier this year, one of the first people who contacted me was Michael Arrieta-Walden, public editor at The Oregonian in Portland, Ore. He wanted to know how it worked and how we did it. In fact, his question about our blogging practices led to this list.

Now he writes that Portland is moving full-steam toward serving readers in different ways.

We want to take advantage of advances in technology and journalistic practices to make sure that we're engaging readers in as many ways as possible. Hear, hear.

His column also briefly notes how different newspapers, including us, have pursued citizen and participatory journalism differently. Next stop for us? Something along the Rocky Mountain News' YourHub.com model, I hope.

It's all speculation now, I suppose, but it will be interesting to watch what happens to FOX8 news, if anything, now that Roger Ailes is chairman of the Fox Television Stations. Jack Myers of Media Village and Jeff Jarvis speculate.

From Jarvis: Imagine a local news operation that actually says something. You may or may not agree with what it says but it sure would be new for local news to break out of the tapioca haze it's in.

Not sure that's true locally, but I'm hardly the typical viewer.

Maybe Lenslinger can clue us in?

I'm thinking about writing my newspaper column on how we cover the war. Whenever we publish a war-related story on the front page, I get letters and e-mails from readers saying that our placement of that story suggests we're supporting one side or the other. And every letter about the war we publish gets enormous response.

Any issues you want me to address?

I was at the baseball stadium Monday night -- love the place -- and was surprised by the announced attendance: 5,645. (For those of you who've been, the Cobb salad won.) Although the capacity of the place is in the neighborhood of 8,500, the park wasn't close to being two-thirds full.

The next day, our box score referred to the "paid attendance." I asked our baseball writer, Bill Hass, whether it is possible to get actual attendance figures. He responded: "They don't release that figure -- nor does anyone else these days in colleges or the pro ranks. What they're doing is reporting tickets sold. A pre-sold ticket -- i.e., season ticket holders, large group sales, skybox renters -- is money in the coffers, whether or not that person actually shows up."

I understand that higher figures equate to perceived greater success and that so much of sports is driven by marketing. But the part of me that believes that words actually mean something has trouble with the term "paid attendance." To me -- and to the dictionary -- attendance means the number of people present, not the number of people who intended to be present.

I know this is not a big deal. As Bill says, everyone does it, and it's been reported that way for years. (Bill says we're one of the few newspapers that calls it paid attendance.)So I'm not faulting the Grasshoppers for being part of the crowd. I like the team, the game and the stadium. But I also don't like to be told it's raining....when it's not.

A look at The 'boro, our page on Thursday created by teenagers for teenagers. Dig the illustration by Michael Lees, a senior at Weaver Education Center.

Here's what got left on the cutting room floor of my softball Q&A with page editor Amy Joyner for my column.

Jim Denery, one of our copy desk chiefs, sends out copy editing memos to the staff from time to time. This one is built on the work of Frank Fee from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. This is from Fee's "44 Tips for Greater Accuracy: How to avoid mechanical/objective errors in your newspaper."

Here are a few that seem apropos. Any grammatical or punctuation error is mine, I assure you. Jim's comments are in parenthesis:

1. Always be sure to see each character in type -- spaces, too.

(I'd say this is most helpful in working with cutlines, although it sometimes gets down to body type. For example, it can be tough to tell in (our publishing system) whether a single quotation mark is being used correctly in abbreviating a year or decade, such as "the '90s." Go to layout view and blow that up as big as you can to check.)

Amy Joyner, editor of The 'boro and former business reporter here, is interviewed today by Michelle Singletary in an online chat. She's busy.

The questions about the war coverage by the Associated Press continue, and AP's apparently listening. The news agency has released an FAQ on its Iraq coverage.

Q: Do the AP -- and other media -- focus too much on violence, ignoring reconstruction efforts and political developments?

However, the violence in Iraq is indeed central to the country's future -- and simply can not be ignored.

Not exactly what The New York Times said in its account of a meeting with AP and newspaper editorial page editors. And it doesn't answer all the questions about war coverage, such as the ones some of you have posed here, but I suppose it's a start.

And the FAQ does include this handy line: Send an e-mail to AP's feedback vehicle for the public at info@ap.org

Bradley Johnson, who wrote about business here back in the 1980s, just e-mailed with a story tip. He's in LA, serving as "editor at large" at Advertising Age. Impressed, I asked him what editor at large did.

I made up "editor at large" -- I'm doing a mix of editing, reporting and editorials writing, and I figured an ambiguous title would keep everyone confused. :-)

Funny, but sharing that title are James Brady, the guy who writes the celebrity column for Parade; and Bob Garfield of On the Media.

Brad's also been around, including a stint as editor of American Demographics.

David LaFontaine of Online Journalism Review conducts a provocative interview with Bob Cauthorn that puts newspapers in their place, and rightly so. But more than that it states some truths that are hard to read and harder to refute.

Cauthorn challenges editors like me to do a better job understanding the intelligence of our readers and serving them with courage and integrity. (Before reading the Cauthorn interview, it would be helpful to read the companion piece on the 4,100-circulation weekly Point Reyes Light, which stayed afloat thanks to donations from readers who wanted it to continue publishing.)

Cauthorn says: Our public wants us to survive. Our public wants us to thrive. Our public wants newspapers that matter. Our public is leaving us because we are chasing them away with a stick.

The lesson of Point Reyes is that tough investigations, indepth local reporting and caring intensely about the good of the reader on the street wins. Wins both readers and journalists. (There are many differences between the Point Reyes and Greensboro markets, but the core lessons are the same.)

The power of blogs and a lesson in responsiveness from our friend -- even though we've never met -- Jon Lowder.

Finally, I'm once again bowled over by the power of blogs. Think about this: the guy who wrote the article never interviewed me. He got a substantial part of his story from something that I wrote, so he didn't have to interview me because my thoughts were out there for the world to see.

And think about this: something written seven months ago by a guy sitting in his home office in a pair of sweats has impacted two public companies, in whatever small way, over a seven month time span. Now multiply that by however many thousand of people who are out there writing away and you have a very interesting phenomenon.

For the record, we're not a public company in terms of Wall Street, but we are in terms of readers and responsibility.

Update: Should have said it was all based on this post.

Melissa Turner, who has been a features writer for a year or so, returns to our night copy desk so that she can attend college in forestry during the day. (She's an outdoors person.) While we hate losing her as a writer -- she is outstanding -- we gain her skills of precision and inquisitiveness as a copy editor.

As we search for her replacement, Carl Wilson, a calendar editor, administrative assistant and all-around irreplaceable guy, takes over the Short Order column on Wednesdays. Here's what he says about that: I'm a confirmed "foodie" and "chilehead." I've always been more comfortable in the kitchen than any other room in the house. While other guys are watching football on Sunday afternoon, I'm perusing the food channel. I love to eat out -- or used to. As the father of a 6-month-old, I figured I could live vicariously through the column. I hope to broaden the perspective of the column to include new angles on restaurants in our area, to go into the kitchens of a few of them and to keep tabs on new trends in food service in the Triad.

Send food and restaurant news tips to Carl.

We're going to transfer Rockingham County reporter Kory Dodd to our High Point office where she will cover cops and courts. Kory has done an excellent job in Rockingham, and we look forward to her tenacity in High Point.

We've also hired Jonathan Jones of The News Leader in Staunton, Va. -- the city where I was born -- to cover north High Point. He also has worked at the Carroll County Times, which is also owned by Landmark Communications.

We've strengthened ourselves everywhere. It was a pretty good week.

According to the most recent findings of the 11th Annual Euro RSCG Magnet Survey of the Media, done in partnership with Columbia University, the majority of journalists are using blogs to do their work, despite the fact that only 1% believe blogs are credible.

Have I ever been in a minority of 1% before? I don't think so.

But around here, not keeping up with what Cone, Chewie, Hoggard, Wharton, Gate, Polinsky, Eakes, Holder and others is irresponsible, and we don't like to be irresponsible. (Sorry, guys, for some reason, I can't insert links in this post any more. Suffice it to say "those guys to the right.")

We'll confirm what they report -- we do that with all publications from which we get ideas and lift information -- but that doesn't mean we don't believe it. The world of journalism has changed, and I'm amazed that more reporters haven't realized it. The bloggers on this blogroll -- and others -- have good information. Dan Gillmor and his "my-readers-know-more-than-I-do" mantra applies to them. They have good information, and it's pretty easy to separate the facts from their opinion.

OK, sometimes we don't like what they have to say when it pertains to our work, but we read it and think about it and try to get better. And no question about it, they beat us on some stories. Some of them are doing a good job, best I can tell, on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Take your beating and get on with it, I say.

Oh, and there's this tidbit, too, in the report:

Reporters' commitment to maintaining their own credibility has never been stronger, and has perhaps skyrocketed due to the desire to rebuild the media's credibility. Indeed, the growth in reporters who are excruciatingly careful in fact-checking their stories is startling -- 93% of journalists reporting being so in 2005, compared with just 59% in 2003.

I guaran-damned-tee you that's the truth.

So far this morning, two readers have complained about the A1 promo blurb to our Life section that says,

"Health to the Chief
An exam the president can ace: his physical"

The article in Life (not posted) describes the president's health and general fitness level. It starts this way: President Bush, who joked about having been a C student in his college years, continues to ace his annual medical exams. His most recent checkup portrays the president as the very model of a baby boomer who will reach his 60th birthday next July. He works out six times a week, his resting blood pressure is a healthy 110/64, and he has lost eight pounds since last year. In sum, his doctors reported, "the president remains in the 'superior' fitness category for men his age.

The illustration is a take-off on the child's game, Operation.

In comments here, "christspeak" says the cartoon makes Bush look like a buffoon. "Is that what you think of Bush? What do you think at least half your readers will garner from it? You wouldn't be chasing away readers, would you?"

I received a call from a woman who didn't identify herself complaining that we played the lottery story over the New Orleans tragedy on the front page today. A lottery opponent, she cited that placement as evidence of our left-leaning bias. She apparently didn't get far enough into the paper to read the editorial about the lottery, a position that this newspaper -- along with many Republicans -- has maintained for many, many years.

For the record, virtually every other major newspaper in North Carolina packaged the two stories as we did.

Update: Ed Cone weighs in.

For the first time in the past few years, Greensboro Mayor Keith Holliday made a speech at the State of the Community luncheon and didn't bash the media. Sort of.

"Many of you have heard me dwell on the importance of displaying a positive image for Greensboro and I make no apology for that position. Our opportunity to accentuate the positives and downplay the negatives is, in my opinion, just plain good common sense. I have been accused of media bashing in the past because of the effect the state of media relations has on our city's P.G.A. (Positive Greensboro Attitude) and image. Rather than comment on media relations, I will simply leave that to each of you to decide for yourself."

Why he felt the need to single out one industry that he wasn't going to bash, I couldn't say.