News-Record.com

We've hired Laura Hinson as page designer for the Sports section. Laura comes to us from the Durham Herald-Sun, where she was lead sports designer for three years. Nice work samples here.

After my mother-in-law died a few years ago, my wife, children and I stood in the receiving line at the visitation, greeting her friends. A man spoke to my 10-year-old and then moved to me. He shook my hand, told me that my mother-in-law was a fine woman, and asked, "You're the editor of the paper, right?" I said I was.

"You have just ruined the comics page," he said.

We had recently dropped a few of the old standbys -- Apartment 3G, Snuffy Smith and Andy Capp, I think -- and replaced them with newer strips.

"You really need to bring those back or I'm going to have to cancel my subscription."

What made it interesting is that two other people used that occasion to tell me the same thing. From that I learned three things:

Fire breaks out at school around 2 p.m. Students evacuate. Fire departments respond. Media descend. The story of the destruction of Eastern Guilford High School is shown live on television and told live on Web sites, including ours.

We're 10 hours from publishing the paper, but by 6:15 p.m. and certainly by the late news everyone* knows the sound bite: Eastern High School is engulfed by fire. No one is killed. Lots of questions remain.

For us, the questions are: What story do we report? How do we produce a paper that explains what happened, puts it into context and tells what's next? How do we advance what people already know? Asked more pointedly: How do we stay relevant in the new media environment?

The mustache is mostly associated with wrestling fans, porn stars and men over 40, Mr. Della Valle says in the film.

Allan Peterkin, author of "One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair," explains that the mustache has always been identified with what he called "the three F's: fops, foreigners and fiends." In other words, men who are extremely well groomed (including gay ones); men from Spain, Italy or Latin America, and men who are portrayed as untrustworthy or demonic.

"Historically, some very dark figures wore mustaches," Mr. Peterkin said. "Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, and most of the images of the devil have mustaches."

From the NY Times.

Ten months after I shaved my mustache, people -- men with facial hair mostly -- still tell me I should grow it back. But while some of your comments indicate you see me as a dark figure, I'm not a wrestling fan, porn star and don't want to be seen as just another old guy over 40 (even though I am).

For a smile, here's my look with the mustache:

Perhaps inspired by Xark's Internets operation, a friend, not Dan, sent me his rendition of a news operation in two forms:

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

My newspaper column

Newspapers are more than ink on paper these days. They are also more than words on the computer screen.

We've been experimenting with video online because it is a new, vital avenue to expand our journalism beyond the printed word.

The opportunity is clear: More and more people are watching video on their computers, and it's as natural as reading the morning newspaper over breakfast.

It hasn't escaped our notice, either, that YouTube.com, a video-sharing site that sold last month for $1.6 billion, has become one of the most visited sites on the Internet in less than two years.

A lot is being made on journalism sites about a look at the relationship between newspaper redesigns and circulation trends. The quick thought is that redesigning the package doesn't turn a downward trend upward.

Circulation, of course, is affected by all sorts of factors from news to price changes to population fluctuations (you can see the snowbird spikes in the Orlando numbers every spring), so there really aren't any firm conclusions you can draw about a redesign's effect from these numbers alone.

So true. When we planned our paper's redesign -- introduced in April -- we didn't expect to see circulation growth from that alone. The design makes navigating the paper easier. It makes the paper more attractive and compelling. But it doesn't disguise weak or dull content. It's the content that we must make relevant and indispensable. That's the challenge we face every day.

Perhaps just to show how ornery they really are, representatives of the KKK left one of their fliers providing voting advice on my driveway this morning, Election Day. It was wrapped around a couple pages of The Rhino, and included the disclaimer "The attached newspaper/magazine is for weight purposes and should not be considered an endorsement of either; this flyer, The Knights Party or WWW.KKK.COM."

Thanks, but I voted early.

I should have posted this earlier, but sometimes I just miss the ball.

Our team coverage of Election Day started this morning with regular updates, observations and reflections at Inside Scoop. News updates throughout the day here.

Biggest surprise (to me) so far: Turnout isn't light.

Other sites across the country are doing this too; here's a collection of some posts.

I worried about Thursday's paper when I left tonight. It's a great news day with a heavy load of local and national news. We are writing about the bonds, why they took a dive and what's in store next. We have a piece about a good bit of change that went missing from VF. Eastern Guilford opening at GTCC. A follow-up story about Diane Bellamy-Small. A lawsuit.

And then we have the little thing about the power shift in Washington and then this: Am I out? You betcha. Do I like it? Nope. Will Bobby be good? Oh, sure.

News everywhere. Gotta love it. But there's not enough space on A1. In our new world, local trumps. Yet, we still have readers who rely on us to help them understand the proportionality of the news. The Democrats taking over the House isn't on the front page? After all this, Rummy is gone and he's not on the front page? What's wrong with you people?

We went with a heavy local emphasis in keeping with our belief that local is our niche. Yet, I can hear the boomers -- and I'm in that generation -- complaining already.

There a scene in a movie -- "The Firm," I think -- in which an important fax comes in, slides off the holder onto the floor and rolls under the table unseen until it's too late. A form of that happened to us last night.

After being unable to reach Council member Dianne Bellamy-Small through every means we could think of yesterday, reporter Margaret Banks filed a story for today's paper. Last night, Bellamy-Small faxed a statement to us and other media in which she denied being the source of the RMA report that was published on Greensboro101. But no one here saw the fax until this morning.

We've fixed that process.

Meanwhile, Bellamy-Small continues to say that the News & Record can "clear" her of being the source. We cannot, of course. The relationship of the document posted on 101 last month -- and the basis of the latest RMA investigation --and the one we obtained six months ago is indeterminate, to say the least.

The story continues.

One of my favorite media thinkers, Alan Mutter, did a "quick analysis of reader reaction to the tsunami of election coverage that just crested over us. The study suggests there is a major disconnect between what editors want to print and what readers want to read."

I suggest otherwise.

He looked at the most e-mailed stories from newspaper sites on Wednesday, the day after the elections.

Of the 24 stories in the sample, fully two-thirds had nothing whatsoever to do with the election. Only five (20.8%) contained election results or analysis. Only three (12.5%) dealt with the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld in the aftermath of the vote.

The non-election fare ranged widely from a no-knead bread recipe in the New York Times to the follow-up on an investigative report in the Los Angeles Times to a USA Today story about a naked man arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.

Art Director Bob Williams sends along this observation from Christy Mumford Jerding, editorial director of the Freedom Forum, who writes about newspaper front pages at Newseum.

After giving appropriate play to these big national stories, The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y. dove into a nasty bit of local politics. Several residents got a lesson in Godfather-style communication when they awoke to find dead fish on their properties. Someone "who apparently took satisfaction in Tuesday's sound defeat of the city charter amendment" pulled the stunt to send a signal to the charter's supporters. The fish, one of which was pictured on The Post-Star's front page, were wrapped in newspaper and rubber bands. The Post-Star did not note which newspaper served as the wrapping.

The front page is here.

Your smile for the day.

This pseudo flow chart made Romenesko, which meant that people are suggesting changes and additions. They are all dead on. Some selections:

* "Get coffee" should be the size of South America.
* "Birthday cake" deserves its own box.
* As does, "Forget about visuals until the last minute."
* And "Build fantasy football dynasty."
* Editor at ASNE and managing editor at APME.
* Newsroom publishing system breaks down and IT is called to reboot. Twice. Three times.

I'm sure more will be added throughout the day. Read them here.

A blogging courtesy to our friends over at Hogg's Blog. David is Mr. All-Things-Grimsley-Football, but he doesn't have the best angle on last night's game. That goes to his daugher, Josie, who took a wonderful photo (the sixth in the series) and sent it along to us. Josie, an oboe player in the band, is paired with staff photographer Joe Rodriguez, who has been published in numerous national magazines. Good company.

If you want us to publish your photo, send it along.

Dave Winer poses an interesting model: If a reporter wants to plant a foot in the future and burn some bridges with the past, a simple project would be to build a network model for who gets quoted by which reporters at which publications.

I'm sure we play favorites sometimes. Reporters learn who is accessible, gives good quotes and has a position that conveys authority. They become comfortable with the source and turn to him/her when they need someone to provide context or commentary. I'm not talking about public officials who are legitimately quoted as part of a news story.

Some years ago, a reporter told me that a good trend piece had to have a quote from a professor. That gave the piece gravitas, he said. Never mind that the story was about hot pink hot pants. I once "banned" photos of an academician at Guilford College because we published 11 items about him -- with the same mug shot every time -- in one seven-month period.

Our sources used to be so thin in the black community that we would turn to the same people -- ministers and activists, mostly -- time and time again for a comment about this issue or that trend. I hope we've done better there in recent years.

I'm sure there are people in this category we quote too often, but I'm at an immediate loss to name them. Who are they?

All you're doing is trying to stir things up. The teams are doing the right thing, taking time to thank God. Why do you feel the need to denigrate that and incite unbelievers to challenge prayer?

A caller left that message for me this morning. The issue was this story about praying at sporting events. "Any prayer that a school official initiates or even participates in runs against the high court's ruling, said Wilson Parker, a law professor at Wake Forest University who specializes in constitutional law."

So now you've got the school system all ready to tell coaches they can't pray. Good for you. Job well done. I hope you're happy, the caller said before she hung up (without leaving her name).

I don't think we're happy or unhappy. At least as she means it.

The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer -- now owned by the same company -- published a phenomenal 16-page special section today, "The Ghosts of 1898." Written by historian Tim Tyson, it recounts the race riot in Wilmington before the turn of the century, its roots and historical tentacles.

In the name of white supremacy, this well-ordered mob burned the offices of the local black newspaper, murdered perhaps dozens of black residents -- the precise number isn't known -- and banished many successful black citizens and their so-called "white nigger" allies. A new social order was born in the blood and the flames, rooted in what The News and Observer's publisher, Josephus Daniels, heralded as "permanent good government by the party of the White Man."

The Wilmington race riot of 1898 was a crucial turning point in the history of North Carolina. It was also an event of national historical significance. Occurring just two years after the Supreme Court had sanctioned "separate but equal" segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, the riot signaled the embrace of an even more virulent racism, not merely in Wilmington, but across the United States.

N&O editor note here. Charlotte's here.

On Sunday, we plan to run an overview story that Tyson wrote.

Back in our early days of blogging, there was a healthy debate about what the heck we doing, this mainstream media company busting into the "alternative" media. There was a justifiable fear that we would attempt to corral the discussion and suck money out of the market. Our position at the time was that we'd like to figure out how to make money from it, but that that wasn't our first goal. Our first goal was to use the new media tools to improve and expand our journalism.

As time went on, the discussion died down, although I don't know if the fears or concerns have.

Terry Heaton nails our thinking with a post yesterday: Let this be a lesson to media companies wishing a plate at the table of Media 2.0. The personal media revolution lives and breathes on its own. Your BEST position is one of supporting the life form, not trying to harness or control it. If you can keep your distance, it will reward you in ways you cannot imagine.

We've actually been able to imagine most of the rewards we've gotten. We still want to make money -- gobs of it, as a matter of fact. But dominate or harness? Never did and knew we couldn't even if we had wanted to.

We want to add humor and surprise to our newspaper. It lightens the day's death and destruction, reflects more truly what the world is like for most people, and makes the paper more interesting to read.

Well, MediaBistro has cross-checked College Humor's party school ranking with Editor & Publisher's top journalism schools list. Let's see, I'll just cross-check the top schools with the alma maters of our staff. Auburn, noooooo. Iowa State, don't think so. LSU, been to New Orleans, but not Baton Rouge.

Ahhh, coming in at No. 4, Michigan State. Mark Sutter, a top editor, is a grad of MSU. Figures. But then the rest of the list makes us look like nuns in a "Girls Gone Wild" video.

Hey, we can make that a new hiring criterion!

Suggesting that the destruction of a high school is a universal story, the News & Observer writes about Eastern Guilford High School as the centerpiece of its front page today.

I know that The New York Times, like the rich, is different from you and me, but today's column by its public editor, Byron Calame, surprised me by how different.

I continue to believe that Web users will also value the accuracy, fairness and completeness of the traditional Times coverage of breaking news. Maintaining the standards of a traditional Times story on the Web will help preserve the paper's brand -- as a credible provider of breaking news in the online world.

As top editors ponder how best to deliver the full range of Times articles to the Web 24 hours a day, it seems clear to me that the reporters nailing down important breaking news stories on their beat will continue to need some time to report and think. Expecting them to quickly crank out and keep updating a bare-bones version for the Web could mean that final article of traditional Times quality will be less that it could have been.

In the theory, and often in practice, the continuous news desk give a beat reporter time to prepare a more complete Times article. The stories from the continuous news reporters appear on the Web site until the articles prepared for the next morning's print paper are made available for online use.

Unlike the Times, we aren't large enough an operation to maintain two separate reporting staffs. But no matter. We've operated under the premise that print reporters must be online reporters, too. Online journalism is the future (and present), and journalists need to understand how to work fluidly in both a digital and print world.

Readers should get the best breaking news report they can as soon as they can. It may be that the "traditional Times coverage" is worth waiting for -- a schedule dictated by print deadlines, rather than reader interests. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it. The world moves at a different, faster pace. Readers will get the information they need wherever they can find it.

Our experience is that online news readers are sophisticated. They well understand that news stories are often produced linearly -- we update with new information as soon and as often as we can. That doesn't prevent reporters from thinking and reporting...it often energizes and informs the efforts.

My wife and her brothers own property next to the Coliseum. Every so often, the city, the sports council or the coliseum manager make noises about buying it. That makes the news. We have a rule at the paper that whenever we write about the property we add a paragraph that says something like, "The property is owned by Susan Robinson and her brothers. Robinson is the wife of News & Record editor John Robinson." I have no inside information or say, for that matter, about what happens with the property. My wife is a former journalist and understands that what becomes of the property is in the public interest. So I'm appropriately shut out.

No, nothing is in the news about the property. This is about disclosure.

Mark Glaser at MediaShift has posed an interesting question: Should bloggers avoid conflicts of interest as journalists do?

Nov. 28 update: Glaser posts his responses here.

Read enough about what newspapers should do to meet the future and the answers are obvious. Go local. Reduce or eliminate all that information that is available so many other places. Open avenues to citizen journalism. Interact with readers.

But the answers aren't embraced by everyone. I got these messages from readers yesterday:

Don't put local news on the front page.

Give us back the world and national news, please.

I'm still upset that mutual funds have been taken out of your paper. Also the price of crude oil.

Some days, being a member of the "media" just flat-out embarrasses me. Three of the lead stories on the morning shows today? Day 3 of Michael Richards embarrassingly racist head explosion, the Ripa-Rosie smackdown and Day 7 of O.J.

I know that there are only so many stories you can do about holiday travel and cooking turkey, but isn't there some news to feature on national television?

Ken Otterbourg, managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, wrote a blog post in which he described letting go five people, including the paper's movie reviewer, Mark Burger, who is also a reviewer on the Two Guys named Chris radio show on Rock92. That decision has gotten some blog play, both good and bad.

We don't have a fulltime movie critic and haven't for years. I don't have much concern about it, either, although some on our staff lobby for one every once in a while. We buy several wire services and they provide many, many reviews. Do we benefit markedly by duplicating their efforts with a local reviewer? I doubt it.

I'd like to take a moment to thank some folks who don't routinely get mentioned here:

* Billy for building community
* Gate for his photos
* Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen for inspiring us to do better
* Cara Michele for inspiring us to be better
* JW for a refreshing voice of realness
* Sue for ConvergeSouth
* Mr. Sun for making me laugh
* Percy Walker for his strangely compelling financial advice
* Sandy for sticking to it, showing citizens and elected officials what transparency. accessibility and decency look like
* Our production crew and carriers for producing and delivering our heaviest paper of the year.
* The journalists -- bloggers and not -- at the News & Record who make this such a fun, wonderful place to work.
* And, of course, all of you who visit, read and talk back.

Dan Gillmor points to the posting at UC Berkeley for a dean of the graduate school of journalism. The third sentence made me smile: The School offers a master's degree program that prepares students for the highest levels of journalism. Most journalists know that a master's degree is about as useful to reach the highest levels of journalism as an Allen wrench is. Oops, did I just screw my chances?

Munir Umrani points to an L.A. Times story about blogging economists. He's thinking that they might have helped him had blogs been around when he was a student. I'm wondering why, with all the professors and instructor associated with the colleges and universities here, more of them don't have blogs. Seems a natural fit, talking about developments in your field. Thank goodness for David. Am I missing others?

Update I: Howard Owens points to a Guardian story on comment spam being generated by humans in third world countries typing in the numbers and letters to bypass spam filters. Hardly a day goes by when this blog isn't attacked by spammers who've gotten past our numerical filtering system. I've banned 389 IP addresses -- nearly 300 of them since May. Now it makes sense.

The New York Times Magazine has a fashion piece on hats today illustrated by artist Joel-Peter Witkin. He uses Manet's Woman Reclining with the model wearing an Alexander McQueen hat and nothing else except some flower petals covering her nipples. In another shot, he puts a wool garden hat atop a model in an imitation Magritte painting with her nipples replaced by painted reproductions of Venus de Milo.

I don't look at fashion spreads in the Times much because I'm no fashionista so these sorts of artistic illustrations could be common. But I was surprised at the amount of nudity in the spread. In the daily newspaper.

It didn't offend me, but we get comments from readers who are offended by much less than that. I know that our readers aren't the same as readers in Manhattan, but I wonder if the Times is getting calls like: "How can I show this to my daughter?" and "You have to show a naked woman to sell a few hats?" I would. Of course, it had the desired effect on me. I looked at the shots and the hats. (Note to staff members always after me to go further and further: Sorry, but no, we won't do this.)

By the way, I was reading it for the articles.

Continuing with the appropriate-to-publish? theme....

Katie Reetz wrote a story for the Life section today on Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a "non-profit that pairs bereaved parents with professional photographers for free photo sessions of their children who are stillborn or die shortly after birth."

We had some beautiful photos of family members with a stillborn child, and discussed whether to publish them as the main art on the front of the Life section. In the end, we decided that doing so would jerk readers around. The reader would have seen a loving brother and what appeared to be a sleeping baby in the photo and then read that the child pictured was actually dead.

Here is one of the photos we had:

Sports Editor Joe Sirera wrote in the paper today about a new feature we're adding to our basketball game coverage. Called the Court Report, it focuses on analysis and insight of a game rather than the x's and o's. Jim Young starts it on the State-Michigan game.

It's another way we're trying to move the ball forward with our coverage -- like the sports metaphor? -- and tell readers something that they didn't just see on TV the night before. (We will also recap the game briefly and give the box score.) It probably won't satisfy the rabid fan, but they are tuned into the various rabid fan Web sites that can do that. Our goal is to bring a unique perspective to game coverage by staff writers who are there. So a story may be about a particular play that made the difference or about a player who had a whale of a game or the dramatic play-by-play of the last minute of a close game.

We'll keep developing it as we go along. Let us know what you think.

Anna in Northern California asked in a comment what has happened to Chewie's blog? I don't know but I know one of you does.

Update: Chewie posts.

In 2004, Stan Swofford wrote a series about the crack epidemic in Guilford County. A day after the series, we quoted Skip Alston saying that the county should build a long-term treatment center for crack addicts, a facility that mental health and drug treatment officials say Guilford County critically needs.

"We know that's what we need to do," Alston said. "Let's get off our butts and do it." Alston said he's looking for sources of money, including a possible bond referendum.

Two years later, the commissioners agree to do it.

Next October.

I often shake my head over the things we journalists worry about. Today's example: Should we call what's going on in Iraq a civil war? The debate rages with the sort of intensity reserved for whether Michael Richards is a racist. Here are four links, four more, two more, and six more. (All via Romenesko.)

No wonder some readers think we're self-absorbed and out of touch.

Update: Chris Coletta has a somewhat different take. By all means, I say, let's have this debate over the terms we're using in our stories. But I hope the powers that be, while they have this debate, also recommit themselves to explaining the situation as precisely and as intricately as possible.

Part three of this week's appropriate-to-publish theme:

Late yesterday afternoon, our court reporter Jonathan Jones found a search warrant that described an investigation into a possible threat of school violence. As he and others began reporting, editors began discussing where and how to play the story in the newspaper. (We also had a discussion about how to publish online, but I'll save that for another day.)

The storyline is this: Police said that a Grimsley High School student, charged with breaking and entering an Army Navy story and found with knives, swords and a gas mask, "expressed interest in harming students." He also said that he and another student had talked about obtaining firearms. Neither has not been charged with anything relating to perceived threats at the high school.

Managing Editor Ann Morris led last night's discussion:

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, says that by by Google's calculation, a new blog is being created every second of every day. He said that Google now estimates that the average blog is read by one person. (Via Romenesko.)

Three people have told me so far that they are my one. I'm trying to figure out which are the two liars.