News-Record.com

Not as I do.

Our corporate parent, Landmark Communications Inc., has donated $1 million to the American Red Cross for hurricane relief.

I'm proud to be part of a company that steps up.

The original plan was to send one of our reporters down with a local Red Cross volunteer team to chronicle the relief efforts through the eyes of Triad helpers. As we talked about it, though, we realized that we would be putting the reporter in a tough ethical spot: she would want to help those she saw as much as -- and probably more than -- she would have the need to write with the traditional journalistic detachment.

Heck, we can get plenty of stories about the relief efforts from the wire services, we decided. But if we sent a reporter as a volunteer to write what she saw and did and felt, we could contribute a special angle to your understanding of the tragedy down South.

Amy Dominello, who reports on growth and development issues for us most of the time, is going through the required Red Cross volunteer training course today and will write about that in tomorrow's paper. We hope she will be dispatched to a Gulf state site early next week.

We don't know how long she will stay; we'll determine that when she gets down there. We're also unsure how she's going to file stories -- that, too, will have to await her arrival. (In case you're wondering, we are paying her way and we're not taking the place of another volunteer.)

We like the opportunity to help our neighbors in a direct way and to help tell the story of what's happening to you. As stodgy, traditional journalists, it's rare we get to participate in both worlds. (And yes, I know I'm using the universal "we" when Amy is doing all the heavy lifting.)

Update: Well, I've just been told that late Friday night, the Red Cross called us back and said that Amy could not both volunteer and write about her experiences after all. Seems it is against their privacy policy. So she's going to be a traditional reporter there with, we hope, a group of local volunteers. I think we could have worked around the privacy issues pretty easily, but no go.

Tim Porter passes along Tom Rouillard's "Top 10 Reasons for Still Reading a Newspaper."

A few selections:

3. I can read my newspaper while standing, while eating, while riding a bus.

9. If I drop my newspaper, it doesn't break. My addendum: I can also throw my newspaper across the room when the editor angers me and it doesn't break.

You have others?

The Chicago Tribune is a long way from our little citizen journalism site, YourNews. At least, that's what I used to think.

On Aug. 31, Lex posted citizen journalist Lori Wilson's three-paragraph story about her children and a friend selling lemonade to raise money for hurricane victims. She wrote:

Banks Wilson, his sister, Avery Wilson, and their neighbor Clay Millsaps raised $71.29 in one evening. The money will be turned over to a fund-raising effort at the Wilsons' school, Brooks Global Studies Extended Year Magnet School.

Three days later, the Chicago Tribune wrote a story with this "nut graf:" In Illinois and across the country, millions of Americans have watched a catastrophe unfold along the Gulf Coast and tried to do, in big ways and small, whatever they could to help victims of one of the nation's worst natural disasters.

Two paragraphs later, the writer said: On a smaller scale in Greensboro, N.C., Avery Wilson, 7, and her brother Banks, 10, said they raised $74.45 at their lemonade stand in the Historic College Hill neighborhood. "It seems like people care a lot about what's happening down there," Banks said.

The Greensboro kids get another 5 paragraphs at the end of the story, too.

As Lex said, it "looks like YourNews has served as a tip sheet for the Chicago Tribune."

While we're on the topic of hurricane relief, you can help us get the word out on local efforts. Know of local folks who are extending a helping hand to hurricane victims? Please let us know.

Community Editor Betsi Robinson elaborates: "Anything is game -- kids raising money through a lemonade stand, a hair salon donating its profits for a day to the America Red Cross, a resident flying south to help victims first-hand, school classes organizing collections -- we want it."

"The only catch: People & Places -- where we plan to publish these -- circulates in Guilford County only, so the news must be about folks from here."

For the sake of equal time, Tim Porter -- and now I -- posts one of his reader's "Top 10 Reasons for Reading a News Site."

2. Anywhere I travel, my news site goes with me. It doesn't pile up while I'm away.

5. My news site doesn't just have sections -- it's customizable, and it shows my wife and I exactly what we're interested, separately.

10. I can read my news site in a light breeze.

Again, you have others?

Want to know what the N.C. Press Association thinks of the recent General Assembly activities? Nah, I don't either. But the Press Association's lobbyist recounts the news media's wins and losses on matters of public records, public access and newspaper taxes here.

Amy Dominello is on a bus to Meridian, Miss., right now to volunteer with the relief effort and to write about what she sees and feels.

She'll be filing for the newspaper every day. We tried to figure out how she could blog her report, but Meridian -- 200 miles northeast of New Orleans -- has little power and spotty phone lines. She was hardly in position to do much blog posting or talking with readers. If she wasn't reporting, she was working the relief effort. If she wasn't writing and figuring out how to get the story out, she was sleeping. So we passed this time.

She'll be with local volunteers of the N.C. Baptist Men's group for six days. It's a different kind of report for us. She'll help serve hot meals to those in need, and she'll help us see what she sees there. Keep an eye out for her stories and let us know what you think.

Interesting piece in Ad Age in which four designers were asked how they would rethink The New York Times for the 21st century consumer. (Reg. req.)

Lucie Lacava: Today's Times consumers buy it for the title and not for the look, but the next generation have grown up with loud media -- everything is loud and tells you what it is. The Times gives readers little sense of what's inside. That needs to be clearer, because younger readers are used to briefs and the particulars being spelled out to them on the Web.

Pelle Anderson: Some of the changes in newspapers I foresee within 10 years: The size will have shrunk from broadsheet to tabloid, then to half-Berliner or A4; the number of pages will be very limited, and the pages packed; white space will become scarce; there will be no stock market listings in print, these will be displayed on the phone, in real-time; newspaper/phone/PDA/wireless laptop will be 100% integrated; e-mail and SMS tailored to the individual reader/subscriber will be very important; bloggers will team up with newspapers, and vice versa; borders between "professional" writers and "amateurs" will (thankfully) become increasingly blurred, and newspapers brands will become less important; short info will beat long, personal views will beat objectivity.

Matt Williams, who covers Greensboro City Hall, is going to take a two-year leave of absence to train to fly jets in the Air Force Reserve. After "hopscotching" -- his word -- around the Midwest to train as a pilot, he'll serve part-time with a reserve unit out of Seymour Johnson in Goldsboro. His last day is Oct. 26.

Matt says: It was a great opportunity for me to pursue something I've always loved -- flying -- while contributing the same way my grandfathers did 60 years ago.

Matt has been one of our pioneers in blogging, in putting audio online and in computer-assisted reporting. He's irritated city officials with his reporting on hockey and the coliseum, among other topics. At various times, a few city council members even refused to talk with him. (Although the mayor's dislike of the newspaper pre-dates Matt.) But his work has helped our readers understand the workings of government and how the city actions affect citizens.

I don't want him to go and I'll be happy when he returns in two years, but I'm proud that he's going to serve our country.

Erika Bolstad, who covered crime for us in the late 90s, is now with The Miami Herald and is one of the lead hurricane aftermath reporters on the ground. Her story -- a shared byline -- ran on our front page yesterday.

We've gotten a few complaints today about the use of the term "refugee" to describe those people evacuated from the Gulf coast. I've been unable to find a recent "refugee" reference in the newspaper itself, but I may have missed some. I have seen it used in wire stories on our Web site, though.

A dust-up over refugee references gained steam when Jesse Jackson condemned it, saying it has racist connotations. President Bush later agreed that it was the wrong term to use.

Others including The Chicago Tribune (reg. req.), the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and plenty of bloggers have weighed in.

The dictionary definition of refugee is One who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, or religious persecution.

Evacuee is a person who has been evacuated from a dangerous place.

I asked our style maven, Jim Denery, about our usage. He said: We started using "evacuees" about a week ago, after the term refugee started to draw attention in the national media. We decided that since refugee is usually associated with religious or political persecution, evacuees would be more appropriate. In cases where displaced or homeless fit, we're also using those terms.

Is the distinction important? To some, certainly. We're interested in being precise and, putting aside whether racism is involved, evacuee seems to be the more accurate description.

Allison Perkins returned from three months in the war-torn Middle East last Tuesday.

On Wednesday, Amy Dominello left to report from hurricane-hammered Meridian, Miss.

Both reporters broke new journalistic ground for us, filing reports about events far from home but about people close to our hearts.

In many ways, the world has become our community. The national news is local.

Doug McGill, a journalist in Rochester, Minn., calls it "glocal journalism," a concept in which every community is connected to the larger world "by strands of mutual influence, interdependence and direct causality."

For some time we've been told to focus on local news because it is where we can make the greatest difference in the lives of our readers, and it is where we can distinguish ourselves from all the other competitive media.

At the same time, we've been told that we need to target a younger audience, an audience that wants highly customized news and information and knows how to find it.

Meanwhile, that same audience tells us newspaper researchers that it wants more national and international news coverage in its newspaper.

To win, we must be intensely local, but at the same time have a prominent dose of national and word news.

We've been talking about how to satisfy these needs, which seem contradictory on their face. They aren't, of course.

Techcrunch lists the Top 10 things you can do to get blogged. It's a list to guide companies on how to get bloggers to write about their products. The list applies equally well to companies who want to get their message out in newspapers.

7. Be descriptive. Tell me what your product does immediately in crisp and interesting prose that is FOA (Free Of Acronyms). FaceBook is a social networking site for college students. Pandora is a music recommendation engine. See? I need more details down the road, but give me something to hold on to before you jump into the cool way you've implemented ajax into the FAQs, or whatever.

10. Don't be a Jerk. If someone just won't write about you, move on to another blogger. Don't heckle them. If someone does write about you and you don't like what they say, deal with it by sending an email or leaving a clarifying comment. Don't attack. Other bloggers will see it and avoid you like the plague.

We didn't win the mucho grande prize in the Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism, but we were in very fancy company. The winner, chicagocrime.org, is a cool site and one that we should do here, if the police records are available, which I sort of doubt.

We did take home $1,000, which I suspect the newsroom will give me dozens of ideas for a proper home. And I got to hear Jimbo Wales and Michael Kinsley go at it for a while. Wales, by the way, is scheduled to be at ConvergeSouth.

I was honored the N&R is mentioned in the same news release as these other sites. But I told the group that we aren't innovators here anyway; we're survivors simply trying to find new ways to reach new and current readers with our journalism.

In Tuesday's paper, we published a photo on page A5 of three soldiers using a latrine on their base in Afghanistan. We've gotten several complaints about it, including this one:

Could you please tell me what justification you had for publishing the picture titled "Duty Calls." What little dignity and privacy our soldiers are afforded in a war zone was totally breached by the AP photographer, and you only highlight your lack of professional journalism by running the photo.

I can't defend the photo (nor can I find it online to link to). From all the photography we get from Iraq, we should have chosen a better, more relevant image.

The only good news out of this: People do read the inside of the paper.

AP is starting a new multimedia service to appeal to 18- to 34-year-olds called asap that people in that age demographic say is pretty cool.

We are buying it. Ironically, I'm not sure how soon asap will be integrated into our site, but it will be worth the wait.

If I hadn't seen the prototype myself, this paragraph from the AP's press release defining the meaning of asap might cause me to doubt the service's hipness:

asap, pronounced "a-s-a-p" with the connotation of "as soon as possible," is a new product designed for use with every news format, including the Internet, wireless, newspapers and niche publications. asap's words, pictures, sounds, moving images, blogs and audience-participation features aim to entice the 70 million 18-to-34-year-olds in the U.S. into becoming the next generation of news consumers by drawing them to AP's member sites.

But I have sampled it and shown it around to hipper people. If the prototype is typical, it'll be popular and useful.

Just for fun, Kit Seelye in the NY Times story (reg. req.) yesterday on asap contains this interesting paragraph: A prototype also included a photo essay on vendors of street food in cities around the world, a piece that highlights The A.P.'s global reach. While bloggers often write about domestic events, rarely do they venture out to report firsthand on the outside world. The A.P.'s ability to do this could underscore for readers the strength of traditional news organizations that can afford to base reporters around the world.

The bold is mine. The statement -- which my blogging staff and many of you might contest -- is hers.

Several weeks ago, Marilyn Forman Chandler, executive director of the Greensboro Jewish Federation, contacted me about the possibility of someone on this year's Interfaith Mission trip to Israel sending occasional columns for publication.

We could look at that, I said. We could also put everything they wrote online with comments enabled so that a blog-like conversation could occur.

So it is.

Jan Capps and Jill Wilson have agreed to file columns from Israel and to respond to comments as they are able. Forty-four people from Greensboro of three faiths -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- left on Sunday. The trip is a spiritual journey that results in a deeper appreciation of other religions and a closer community connection.

Visit and give them some feedback. I think they are there for about two weeks.

As much as I hate to admit it, I guess jw is right: we seem to have problems with photos. At least this week. For the second day in a row, I'm apologizing for not publishing the right photos. Today we should have published the photographs of all five winners and finalists in the Guilford schools Teacher of the Year contest. Instead, in this morning's story, we only published three photos. And they weren't the top three winners!!!

Photos of all five finalists were e-mailed to us, but as they moved through our system, only three showed up, thanks to a technical problem and a communication lapse. We -- and the school system -- got a lot of calls complaining that we didn't show all the winners, even though they were named in the story. We're running the photos of the two people omitted tomorrow and publishing a full story and photographs in People & Places Sunday.

Compounding the issue in this case is that the winner of the High School Teacher of the Year is from Dudley and, as bad luck would have it, his was one of the photographs left out. We're often accused of having a bias against Dudley -- unfairly, I think; every high school in the system thinks we have a bias against it. No bias here against Dudley or Kernodle, where the other finalist teaches. We simply screwed up.

Read The Chalkboard's post here.

Y'all know that we've been struggling with ways to raise the level of discourse on the letters blog. Our next step: Beginning Sept. 26, those who want to comment must register with TypeKey, meaning that you need to have a legitimate, working e-mail address. This will allow us to contact commenters directly if we feel they are abusing the forum.

We're hoping that less anonymity in making comments will engender more accountability.

See Allen's explanation.

As we continue to tweak the site, we've changed the Town Square box on the home news page slightly to include links to national and world news, and to some of our special projects. We wanted to make these links easier to find.

While I'm here, I want to make another pitch for you to check out the Greensboro Interfaith Mission's reports from Israel. Contributing reader Jan Capps:

We began our day with a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee.

Great line. I'd keep reading.

A woman sent me an e-mail today asking a simple question that I get asked pretty often:

Why does Friday night high school football get so much ink and Friday night high school soccer get so little?

There is just as much good high school soccer being played as there is football and yet soccer merely gets a scoreboard mention while pages of edit are devoted to football.

She is right. I'm the father of a high school soccer player and there is some very fine soccer being played here. Dozens of high school seniors graduate with soccer scholarships in their pockets. I wouldn't be surprised if Guilford seniors get more soccer scholarships than football scholarships. Yet, our coverage of soccer pales compared with football. And I suspect tennis and cross-country parents would say that our coverage of their sports pales compared with soccer.

Welcome to our world: All sports aren't created equal.

Also known as my Sunday newspaper column:

You may not have noticed, but a revolution is going on in Greensboro, and you have a chance to join it Oct. 7 and 8.

The revolution -- don't worry, it's bloodless -- concerns how people communicate with each other, and receive and pass news and information. You can get a ringside seat at a hands-on multi-media conference called ConvergeSouth addressing these issues at N.C. A&T State University.

You should attend if:

* You are interested in how citizens are seizing the power of media and communication.
* You are interested in civic affairs.
* You think you have no voice and you want to be heard.
* You want to hear first-hand why Greensboro is at the forefront of new media communities.

If that's not enough, consider this: it's free and it's going to be fun.

Last week, I asked Sue to read behind me on the rough draft of this column to make sure I didn't make any factual mistakes. As you might expect, she improved it. Thanks, Sue.

*****************

Ed was the source for us to get onto this story. He e-mailed me about it yesterday, and I threw it onto the pile at our Saturday city desk. Taft picked it up and away we went. Thanks, Ed. (We'll get that placeholder headline fixed, too.)

*****************

I watched Sheriff BJ Barnes interviewing Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen on community access yesterday. (I have no clue how old the interview was.) BJ told Jeff that he would eventually become a blogger, too. Let's encourage him. The High Sheriff is articulate, direct and could shed a great deal of light into criminal issues that concern many people in the county. As an added benefit, Barnes is a powerful figure in Republican circles, and there's a lot he can contribute to the civic discussion. C'mon in, Sheriff.

Breea Willingham was a reporter who worked in our High Point office in the mid-90s. Look at her now.

I got three e-mails -- between 10:07 a.m. and 11:39 a.m. today -- from different men expressing interest in more football coverage of new ACC schools. Two of them specifically mentioned Virginia Tech.

An excerpt:

Can you please explain why the News & Record continues not to provide representative nor adequate coverage of Virginia Tech while both the High Point paper and the Journal in Winston-Salem do? The Winston-Salem Journal was even forward-thinking enough to do a feature story last year when Virginia Tech rejoined its old Southern Conference brethren and became a full member of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Another:

Is it due to lack of revenue that your paper cannot give adequate coverage to the greatest conference in the country. We are fortunate to be the home of the ACC & we have many citizens working diligently to build the ACC Hall of Champions in Greensboro. How nice it would be if Alumni & visitors from Fla & New England could open your paper & see that, in case you were not aware, the Atlantic Coast Conference now extends beyond Tobacco Road. For years you have chosen to focus on the big four in NC with your sports coverage. What a service you could do for the Conference, Greensboro & your subscribers from the other member institutions if you could see your way to broaden your coverage.

We clueless fathers of teenagers need all the help we can get. Here is some, and it is OK to tell your own teenagers about this.

This originated on The 'boro, our new page for high school kids in the Thursday paper, but we have more features online, including where to find the dress for you, where to eat and what to do after the game. Bear in mind that these were researched and written by teenagers, not by starched-shirt, funless adults.

This also represents our first effort at a moblog. We're asking for your photos of homecoming games, couples and celebrations. Send them here and we'll get them posted. View them here, although there aren't any posted yet.

Citizen photo galleries are popular online, and we expect this to be only the first of many on our site. It's only natural that homecoming is fertile ground for a gallery of community photos. I can just imagine the critiquing of hair styles and dresses that will go on.

Molly McGinn, a reporter in High Point a few years back, left us to write for Kindermusik, whose world headquarters I can see looking out my window. But I didn't know that she'd come back into our pages as a singer. In his "Last Call" column on performers at The Green Bean, Patrick Egan says this about her:

Molly McGinn was my Green Bean Idol, though. Her songs and voice occupy that quiet-beauty territory that can seize the noisiest crowd's attention. Something about that smoky near-whisper, pure and without affect, floating over honey-dipped guitar, rang true with the most honest emotion, manifest in the twitching legs she couldn't silence. She's fantastic.

Ahem.

A less direct bloodline to the N&R: Laurelyn Dossett, whose photo accompanies the column, is married to Justin Catanoso of the Biz Journal, who used to work here in the 90s.

Ken Sands, managing editor of online and new media online publisher at The Spokesman-Review and a newspaper pioneer at this stuff, takes note of shopping as content on the blog of the Media Center at the American Press Institute.

My favorite might be Bargain Blog at the Greensboro web site. It began in April with a mission of finding "mind-blowing deals." Talk about providing a great reader service...

We do understand that shopping information is valuable content. Props to Mike Fuchs, who, in a parallel life, is our online content editor. He's taking a rare day off today, but you can still read what he discovered about gas prices yesterday.

Update: Other interesting things on the Media Center site: The list of fellowship recipients detail some fascinating and important initiatives in participatory journalism.

Honestly, we expected more phone calls over this story about something called "passion parties."

But we got enough. I fielded one from a nice woman who told me that she defended our liberal "slant" on things -- even though she didn't agree with it -- but she couldn't defend this story about sexual aids. She said that by displaying the article on the front of our Life section we were endorsing the products sold and the behavior those products encourage. We were pandering, she told me.

"Fringe. These are fringe people engaging in fringe behavior. None of my friends would ever use these products. And handcuffs? That's sick." One of the photos accompanying the article was of a woman holding up lined handcuffs.

Whenever we publish feature stories that deal with sensitive topics -- sex, homosexuality, tattoos, drinking, body piercing -- we get complaints that by writing about the topics we're supporting the behaviors. Supposedly, impressionable children read these stories, think they are credible and adopt the behaviors as their own. I understand the point. Don't agree with it, but understand it. (Given what I know about young people and newspaper readership, I admit that I'm excited to hear that children are reading the newspaper.)

We publish such stories for a variety of reasons. Most of the time, they're interesting. Many times, they reflect what a growing number of people are doing. All the time, they are a part of what makes Greensboro Greensboro, like it or not. Often we're asked to ignore topics and lifestyles that might offend people. "There's no redeeming social value in writing about sex toys," one caller said. That's an arguable point, but I didn't press it.

We exercised judgment when editing this story. There wasn't anything offensive in what we published; it is just the idea of it. Newspapers often ask readers to read about new things. It's part of the fun, the serendipity of newspapers. We also consider it part of our social responsibility, to help people learn about things they don't know, understand or approve of.

I have heard from commenters here who think we occasionally wander over the line with some of our content. Would you have published it?

Hurricane, schmurricane. The big news last week for some readers was in the Sports section.

Or, more accurately, was not in the Sports section.

"Why does Friday night high school football get so much ink and Friday night high school soccer get so little?" asked the mother of a Greensboro Day School soccer player.

A Virginia Tech fan e-mailed: "Can you please explain why the News & Record continues not to provide representative nor adequate coverage of Virginia Tech while both the High Point paper and the Journal in Winston-Salem do?"

I received others but these two hit the high points. (Actually I got a dozen or so from Hokie fans, but that seemed to be an orchestrated campaign.)

Beginning last Wednesday, we started watching Rita closely, tracking her landfall. Part of it was because Rita was a brewing news story, getting bigger by the hour. Part of it was because we had a major investigative report on local and state economic incentives scheduled to begin today. What, we discussed, would we do if the two news stories collided on the same day?

Our fundamental instinct is to follow the news. In this case, the breaking news is the hurricane. But the incentives package is news, too. In fact, it's news that was getting away from us. Simply by looking at some of the documentation reporter Taft Wireback had turned up during his reporting, government officials had taken action and his report had been published yet. We felt we needed to get the stories into the paper sooner rather than later.

Managing editor Ann Morris presided over several rollicking debates about how to play the hurricane story, whether to hold the incentives package and how to design a front page so that we could focus on both stories. By the end of the day Friday, there were three options, depending on when Rita hit, where it hit and how bad it was. A final call would be made Saturday afternoon.

Ann and I talked at 2 p.m. and decided that we could have it both ways. Rita didn't seem to have the same aftermath -- at least not yet -- as Katrina. Television has provided blanket coverage -- with some interruption for Saturday sports, of course -- so we questioned whether we could deliver much new information about Rita. But we could give you some dynamite news about how your taxes get spent. Here's our front page.

Highlights from the package by Taft and Dick Barron:

* Companies have claimed millions of dollars in "job creation" benefits and other tax breaks in years those firms were laying off hundreds of North Carolina employees and, in some cases, going bankrupt.
* State and local recruiters don't always investigate whether a new project has competing offers from other states or if North Carolina's tax givebacks are really necessary.
* North Carolina officials sometimes fail to disclose the whole truth to their constituents when they unveil projects. Companies don't always create as many jobs or invest as much money as originally touted.

It continues through Tuesday.

We have created our Elections 2005 site. We'll be adding content to it regularly through Election Day, including the profiles of each candidate and each race. So far, we have District 1 and 2 up, with candidate answers to our survey and their finance reports. (At least the ones who responded.)

More to come.

Other interesting local election commentary at Hoggard's and Seymour Hardy Floyd's. (My apologies if I missed you. Please add your site in the comments.) Certainly others will weigh in after tonight's Bloggers Candidates' Forum.

By the way, click here to get a photo of Marcus Kindley with Monday's Inside Scoop column. Marcus seems to think that the newspaper has something against him because he's not on my blogroll. We don't. Really. And you photograph well!

Tim Porter is one of the best newspaper thinkers -- as opposed to critics -- out there. He has a clear and deep affection for newspapers and journalists, yet he insists that revolution is necessary. He understands the imperatives of change and recognizes the difficulties, too. He pays less attention to blame for the past and more to the opportunities of the future.

He has two important recent posts that, for those interested in where we're going, are worth reading.

A couple excerpts:

When media is omnipresent, location has value. When media is overwhelming, editing has value. When media is instantaneous, context has value. When media is spun, truth has value. When media is suspect, data have value. When media is overly professional, amateurs have values. When media is professionally arrogant, authentic amateurs have value.

And:

Journalists in this global "community of communities" have many opportunities, even some with legacy news models. Newspapers will not disappear, but they will retreat into niches of locality (your town news), topic (sports, business, science) or quality (high or low). The mass in the middle will be squeezed out of existence.

And the last two, and most important, points:

Sue asks -- in her own special New York way she is asking -- why we didn't cover the bloggers candidates' forum Tuesday night. On Monday, we published a schedule of this week's forums. The bloggers forum was one of three.

We didn't cover it, or the others, for two primary reasons. First, very little substantive news comes out of forums. As I've read the reports by bloggers there, I still believe that. The structure doesn't lend itself to much light. Candidate responses tend to be either canned or superfluous. Follow-up questions are hard to squeeze in. Given that we've talked with virtually all of the candidates in one-on-one interviews which we use for articles about the races in the paper, we don't get a whole lot out of the forums.

The second reason is that there are so many forums during election season, we need to pick and choose carefully. We could have had a reporter at each forum this week and gotten nothing else out of him (in this case, City Hall reporter Matt Williams.) We choose to let him spend his time working on other stories that might be more helpful to readers.

In an ideal world, one in which we had more reporters, we would staff every forum. We know we're at risk of missing a story when we skip the forums, but, in the end, we've decided that it's a risk worth taking.

Meanwhile, visit Seymour Hardy Floyd for information on the forum itself. Greensboro101 has some audio up, too.

Not to cut into Ed's action, here's a piece from Editor & Publisher about readers desperately searching the Web for Times Op-Ed columns. The conclusion:

The New York Times will certainly have its hands full tracking down all the bloggers who post copyrighted material on their (usually anonymous) sites, a Sisyphean task if there ever were one.