News-Record.com

An editor asked me this morning why we were not giving this homicide of the A&T student the same visibility in the newspaper we gave this homicide of the UNC student body president.

Stories about Eve Carson's murder in March were on the front page a couple times. Stories about Derek Hodge have been on the Local front.

Both deaths are tragic for all the reasons you can think of. But for both philosophical and procedural reasons, the two were not judged the same way when we're putting the paper together. At least, that's how I responded to the editor. Here's why the difference in the coverage:

* Eve Carson was student body president and held a variety of high-profile positions within the university community. She was a mover and shaker who made news often by the things she did well before her murder.
* Her murder went national quickly, creating an interest in the story well beyond the Triangle or even North Carolina.
* A murder in "idyllic Chapel Hill" seems less common and therefore more newsworthy than one in Greensboro.
* The Chapel Hill police held regular news conferences and were relatively forthcoming with details and progress. That's not how Greensboro police do things.
* The case moved fast. Homicide of student then photos of suspected perps then arrests...all over the course of a few days. The progress created a sense of momentum.

But Hodge was a student at a local university, which carries a lot of weight here. Should we raise the visibility of his case?

Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic has an interesting post about what he calls an online mugging by another blogger.

What bothered me about Mr. Haber's post was not its insults (a couple of which were funny) but that he repeated a discredited accusation made by an ethically-challenged journalist about my reporting without having sought my comment. I called Haber to complain. He said: "I just wanted to promote your new blog." ... Then he said that, while the Observer "does reporting," the blog for which he writes "is a looser, more fun kind of way of writing things." Fun, in Haber's view, includes slander.

It has always been a curiosity to me that some bloggers feel no responsibility to ask for information or an explanation before they write something negative about me or the reporters here or the newspaper. The responsibility then falls to me or someone else here to correct the record or at least present an explanation for what we're being accused of. Of course, that requires us to know that the post has been written in the first place. (And for sure, it is not just me or the paper; there are some public figures and other bloggers who get reamed without being contacted for comment. I can only speak for myself.)

Most recently, one blogger headlined a piece saying we had censored his comment. Actually, our spam filter snagged it because it had several links in it. When I read his post, I suspected that had happened and resurrected the comment. I explained what happened on his blog and asked him to change the headline, and he graciously did. That's hardly slanderous and isn't a big deal. But it was factually wrong and could easily have been explained and fixed. I'm not linking to him because in the past he has asked me via e-mail for a comment about an issue he was interested in.

We aren't difficult to reach. Writing a fuller, fairer piece seems a reasonable motivation. It brings the blogger more authority and credibility. It would make the local blogosphere a more inviting, civilized place. Is that just the traditional journalist in me?

I'm just getting to the late Doug Marlette's novel Magic Time. Doug was a Greensboro native, and we met and talked many times. I'm embarrassed it has taken me so long to read this novel of newspapering, race and the South.

While I have never met an editor like this, I love the description:

When Carter appeared in his office, Callahan leaned back in his swivel chair behind an antique mahogany desk stacked with newspapers. He lowered his smudged glasses and peered at Carter with pterodactyl eyes. Callahan was like something out of The Front Page, with his ill-fitting suits, coffee-stained ties, salt-and-pepper buzz cut, and matching day-old stubble. He spoke in a steady stream of U.S. Marine Corps-honed profanity and the jaundiced aphorism of the fourth estate. "I was born in the middle of the night," he would mutter in disgust over some politician's lie, "but not last night." His brutal candor was legendary. He once described a recently elected Miss Ellis County as "so ugly she could haunt a nine-room house from across the street," unaware that she was the niece of the society editor who was proudly showing him the photo running in her section. Carter had thus far dodged Callahan's standard retort to bad copy: "He couldn't write shit with a turd in both hands."

Callahan bounced his right knee up and down like a jackhammer as Carter stood in the office, making his case. When listening to a story pitch, Callahan would always take a deep drag on his cigarette. The cigarette was like an egg timer. You had only as long as he could hold the smoke in his lungs to spit out whatever you had to say. In the event of an unnecessarily long verbal drumroll for a story idea, Callahan would shoot smoke through his nose and, alluding to the loquacious circus ringmaster who oversells his star attraction, say, "Bring on the dancing bear, son, bring on the bear."

I have heard editors talk about bringing on the bear and not being born last night, but never with such style.

My newspaper column

Every other week, I gather the newspapers at home, slide them into a brown grocery bag and drop them in the recycling bin.

Thousands of you do the same. In fact, 9,493 tons of newsprint were processed through the city of Greensboro’s recycling center in 2007. While the News & Record didn’t make up the total tonnage, my guess is that we had the lion’s share.

That's good, too. Recycling is not only an easy habit to acquire, it is civically important.

There once was a time that environmental activism earned you the name "tree hugger," which was often used derisively.

Three links to advice:

1. When to post: This isn't the worst time to post items on the blog, but it is close. At least according to one study. According to Connecticut software developer Jake Luciani, "between 1 pm and 3 pm PST (after lunch) or between 5 pm and 7 pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 pm PST on the weekends -- nobody cares."

2. Dave Caolo on 5 ways to improve your blog. I need to take his advice. I fall down on each point.

3. Darren Rowse on 9 essential questions to ask yourself before you write. No. 8 -- Could I give this post a little more time before publishing to 'mature'? Would coming back to it tomorrow help me to add depth to it? Good idea. See ya.

While it has been exciting to live through the past two weeks as the two Democratic presidential candidates have discovered that there are voters in North Carolina, I must admit that a small but rapidly growing part of me is so done with the candidates and their families visiting the state.

A day hasn't gone by in the past two weeks in which an Obama or a Clinton haven't been in the state. (With the Clintons triple-teaming us, I can well imagine how Tyler Hansbrough feels in the paint.) We have Bill in Reidsville last night and Hill in High Point today. We even have John McCain in Winston on Election Day, for goodness sakes. (I'm sure he's getting good advice about where to campaign, but I hope he isn't expecting his visit to get much play in the Wednesday papers.)

I know from the crowds they draw that people love the face time with the candidate. It is an exciting time to be a voter whose vote in the presidential primary matters....at least if you are a Democrat. But for a newspaper, how many times can we write a story about Bill visiting Greensboro or Elon or Kernersville or Reidsville? (He says he has the rural tour.) Chelsea is good for one story, but she doesn't say much that's newsworthy. She scarcely spoke to the media during her visit to the Children's Museum. Even though Hillary was at Guilford College Friday afternoon, we put most of our efforts into her appearance in Raleigh later that night. We wrote: Earlier Friday, Clinton gave a speech at Guilford College in Greensboro. Her talk touched on many of her regular themes, including making college affordable, improving health care and pulling soldiers from Iraq.

Given that their stump speeches are much the same, what do we have to report? And the coverage gets the candidates' faithful all riled up. (Actually, that happens regardless of where the candidates are.) We didn't cover the former president in our area last night, but we will be the candidate today. And we don't know yet whether either will be in the state to celebrate a victory tomorrow night.

Personally, I'm trying to keep my eye on the prize -- the potential for more people than ever participating in the democratic process by voting.

Lenslinger has more. What all this simulated momentum has to do with governing our great land I ain't so sure, but if I wanted to manufacturethis kind of clamor I'd go back to pimpin' American Idol. They got w-a-y cuter interns.

Joe Killian posts a couple photos on Decision 2008 of the extent to which some Hillary fans will go. (And Joe has a nice little riff about the music played for the candidates.)

Traditionally, newspapers shy away from giving last-minute controversial political statements high visibility on Election Day. Certainly not on the front page; probably tucked inside the paper, if we publish at all. We're old fashioned that way. Several reasons:

* The statements often cannot be vetted in time
* Publishing on the day people vote risks giving the statement more influence that it deserves
* The "other side" doesn't have much time to respond to the "hot" story

If I could do it over again, this story would have been inside the paper today. (It was on the Local front.) A week ago, an article about two school board members urging voters to vote down school bonds would have been worth notice. Today, it violates at least two of the reasons above. Unfortunately, they successfully played us. It's not a mortal sin; more of a low-grade venial one. Still.

Allen has more. Right now this feels wrong, like a political sucker punch..

Want to hear the straight talk on McCain's Straight Talk Express? Mark Binker taped it in all its 25-minute glory today.

Be prepared to listen to sausage being made.

Charlotte, Raleigh, Winston-Salem and Asheville papers all put stories about the cyclone in Myanmar on their front pages this morning. So did many of the newspapers around the world. From the Newseum's front page analysis of the day's papers: Numbers make the difference. Yesterday, when the death toll stood at 350 for the cyclone in Burma (aka Myanmar), a few U.S. dailies carried the story on Page One. Today, with the guesstimated toll in the multiple thousands, it's Page One news on an international basis.

We published a promo on the front with a small photo, but put the story on page A9. A reader questioned that news judgment.

Certainly, playing the story on Page One was the safe bet. I know 10,000 deaths anywhere is tragic and big news. Yet I read about it online yesterday. The story was played prominently on the evening's network news programs yesterday. That story got even older -- and worse -- overnight and today as the death toll is now estimated to be more than 22,000.

We try to publish stories on Page One that are new to readers and/or have a direct connection to their lives. We want stories to be fresh and to avoid repeating what people have seen online or on television all day. Our election package today isn't necessarily fresh information, but it has a direct connection to citizens.

For the record, Myanmar isn't going to be on the front page tomorrow, either.

Wednesday update: Scott Karp has a somewhat related piece about redundant news stories that is well worth reading.

A caller wanted to know why we didn't identify the race of the voters we quoted in our presidential primary stories.

Specifically, he wanted to know whether all of the people we quoted supporting Obama were African Americans. (I'm being kind: He said that he knew they were because they "sounded" like it.)

Racial profiling?

By including that piece of information, it would suggest that the individual's race is specifically relevant to how they voted. It may be. It may be because an African American wants a black man to win in the same way that a woman votes for Hillary because of her gender. It may also mean that the voter agrees with Obama's policies because they have seen the world through similar eyes.

I think the discussion overly simplifies a complex decision, and, in some case, tries to affirm our own beliefs about people. Many emotional, intellectual and political factors enter into picking a candidate.

Singling race out seems unfair, unless the voter specifically said he voted for Obama because of his race. An African American may vote for Obama because they support his policies. Put another way, imagine this sentence: "John Doe, who is white, said he voted for Obama because he agreed with him on the gas tax moratorium." What does race have to do with his vote? Nothing.

Granted, we want it both ways. We look at the demographics of voter registration and exit polling. Our first paragraph on the Obama victory story today certainly examined the results through a racial lens: Sen. Barack Obama's sweeping victory over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the North Carolina primary reaffirmed his strength among the affluent and African American voters and set up the final rounds in the bruising contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That tells me more about who voted for Obama and how he won, but not why.

Seth Godin reminds us that William Randolph Hearst built his newspaper empire by understanding that the goal of newspapers is to sell newspapers, not to report the news. That was 110 years ago, but still....

Godin adapts that idea to news Web sites. The product they sell is drama. He makes the point effectively using a screen grab from CNN and big fat green check marks.

I'm not going to disagree with him, either. We do sell drama. We know what happens when all we give the people is spinach. (Those that eat it become strong like Popeye -- OK, a little misshapen, too. Those who don't, well, you have Bluto.) We want to grab attention. We have a bias in favor of drama, which is a nicer way of saying we have a bias in favor of conflict.

I don't see anything wrong with it either. Looking at the CNN example, the headlines don't pander. They don't link to nude celebrity photos or crash diets. As Seth notes, they simply emphasize drama on the political front.

For comparison purposes, our Web front. It probably doesn't market enough.

I have been critical in the past of celebrity news coverage in the paper, explaining that we didn't spend any time and little space on the antics of Britney and Brangelina. Leave that to the Peoples and the Us magazines of the world.

Oh, how wrong I was. Little did I know that we have had nothing but celebrity-dominated front pages for much of the past month

From The New York Times:

Some of the most celebrity-centric, entertainment-obsessed news media outlets have added a heavy dose of political news to their lineups, taking space normally devoted to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and handing it to articles on people known more for wonkiness than sexiness....

Driving all of it, editors and campaign aides say, is the appetite for news on presidential candidates and their families -- people who have transcended politics to become bona fide celebrities. As the campaign stretches into its second year, in some corners it is simply seen as entertainment.

Entertaining, it is.

About four weeks and change until the Citizen Journalism Academy being put on by the Society of Professional Journalists The June 7 session at Guilford College promises to be good. Learn about journalism ethics, media law, public records, new tools and smart writing, among other things. I know two of the session facilitators and they're top drawer talents.

It costs $25. Register here.

As I was channel surfing the local stations watching the weather coverage last night, Fox8 had a crew in the field reporting back about the lightning strikes in the area. After a moment, anchor Neill McNeill in the studio told the reporter and photojournalist in the remote truck to power down so that they don't attract a strike.

I don't know if the crew did; I surfed on. But I bet they didn't.

I have been in Neill's position many times and told working journalists not to get themselves hurt in reporting a story. Pretty much been ignored every time. The drive to get the story is powerful. Reporters and photographers don't go to the scene not to report what they see.

*Running Toward Danger

District Attorney Doug Henderson released a statement late Friday saying he wasn't going to recommend charges against the officers accused of sexually assaulting another officer. With the ongoing Wray case, the accusation of destruction of police records, the Kohanowich case, this has been a rough patch for the department.

My thought: Is no one advising the city on how to restore eroding public confidence in the integrity of the department and how it is run? Is everyone tone-deaf to how this is all playing out among the citizens?

Imagine this scenario: Chief Bellamy and City Manager Johnson are at a podium Friday afternoon. The mayor is standing with them. The chief steps to the microphone.

Good afternoon, everyone. As you know, the District Attorney released his statement that he will not recommend criminal charges against three officers. We respect his decision, but that does not end the case. This has been an embarrassment to the city and to the department where the vast majority of our officers are hard-working, standup men and women who put their lives on the line every single day. We demand the highest standards of behavior and integrity from our officers. We must. The citizens of Greensboro expect it. I expect it. We obviously have not seen it in this case.

Mitch is passing around a document outlining everything we know about what happened in this case. It will be embarrassing to the officers involved. That's too bad, but it is a necessary step. We are not above the law. We must be squeaky clean. After that, I will talk about actions taken as it pertains to the officers in this case, and then I will outline what we are going to do moving forward to clean up the image of the department. I will answer any question you have to the best of my knowledge, but please hold them until I'm finished.

Next imagine this alternate scenario: The District Attorney releases his decision late Friday afternoon, which is the traditional time to release bad news. He is unavailable for comment. The police chief is unavailable for comment. The city manager is unavailable for comment. The mayor? MIA.

Which do you think serves the public better? Unfortunately, the second one is the one that happened.

Afternoon update: Photographer Joe Rodriguez reminds me that city officials were dealing with a crisis themselves with the aftermath of the tornado, which could address why they were unavailable for comment. We're trying again today.

Sunday update: Today's story here. Can you imagine, five months of paid suspension and an administrative investigation is still ongoing? How tough can it be to crack this case?

My newspaper column

Last Tuesday was an exciting day.

Participatory democracy worked overtime as Guilford County Democrats overwhelmingly endorsed Sen. Barack Obama and the county's voters approved bond issues for schools and a new jail.

Consequently, election stories dominated Tuesday's and Wednesday's front pages.

Do you know what the most-viewed story at News-Record.com on Tuesday was? A murder-suicide out of Union County, which is 100 miles away from here.

A survey in England reports: One in three employees admits they have been to work with a hangover and more than one in 10 has been drunk at their desk, a study suggests.

I'm shocked!

Some occupations are worse than others with regard to drinking and the workplace.

Forty-one per cent of people working in media and creative jobs said they had been to work while still drunk -- four times the average.

Oh. Well, that's more like it.

That's the headline of a United Press story from the March 7, 1951, paper, that our librarian, Diane Lamb, showed me.

Circulation of English-language daily newspapers in the United States reached a record circulation of 54,877,000 copies a day in 1950, N.W. Ayer and Sons new directory of newspapers and periodicals showed today.

The 83rd annual edition of the directory recorded that it was the 11th consecutive year that American daily newspaper circulation has increased and added an estimate that more than two out of every three Americans now read a newspaper every day.

While I'm tempted to call those the good ole days, it wouldn't be accurate unless you were a newspaper owner. Rather, they were the easy days, when newspapers were the only game in town.

More interesting to me were two other stories on the page:
* A work stoppage in the woolen industry threatens to "halt urgently needed expansion of the armed forces." The Army said, "Our new troops must have clothing, blankets and other woolen items."
* "Bakers throughout bread-loving France went on a 24-hour strike today. Forewarned, most housewives bought large supplies of bread yesterday."

Beneath the newspaper circulation story is an advertisement for Karo syrup, promoting "pancakes and hot buttered Karo. Bring 1 cup Karo to a boil. Add one-quarter cup butter, stir, serve hot. Ummm!"

I wonder how many people today use that as pancake syrup.

For what it's worth: Friday morning's storm brought us the most page views of any day since we installed our current measurement system in August 2006. Comparing tragedies, the traffic was a third again higher than the fire at Eastern High School in November 2006. These numbers don't include multimedia (photos, video or audio) so the total is even higher.

I asked Michael Grossman, our online content editor, his thoughts on why the numbers were so high: Typically, bad weather (hurricanes, winter storms -- both actual events and predictions) are among the most viewed. There was a death which may have added more. And it made the national news, which I'm sure helped as we got some traffic from Google, but it wasn't a big chunk of the traffic. I think the fact that there were numerous updates always helps bring people back -- the initial reporting, the city letting some business owners in, several press conference updates, releasing the identity of the man killed.

Compelling news story, constant updating and different types of media. That's a recipe for success. I'd add that we posted virtually the entire day beginning at about 12:30 a.m. and were really cranking it up before most people woke up in the morning to see the damage.

In the old days, when a tornado spun through the region at midnight or thereabouts, newspapers were a journalistic casualty. Because of deadlines, you can't get much of anything into the next day's paper. Your first real coverage comes 36 hours after the storm strikes. I've lived through those days, and I felt forlorn because of the missed opportunity. Big news happens in your town, and you are dead in the water.

No longer.

Now, the worst timing for a newspaper is the best timing for the newspaper Web site. When the tornado struck Guilford County Friday morning, we didn't get anything in the newspaper, but we posted what we knew until about 2 a.m. Friday and started up again at about 5:45 a.m. Reporters and photographers posted news updates, victims' stories, photos and maps throughout the day and into Friday evening. John Newsom, our main online reporter, Twittered.

Meanwhile, because so much had already been written and posted, we could plan the next day's newspaper with much more information than we usually have. We knew exactly what sort of information and visuals we had. We watched television to determine what people already knew and didn't know. We focused our newspaper coverage on giving them new information, providing perspective on how the storm formed and where it went, and showing photographs.

In the end -- now that we have more than one method of news distribution -- it worked out well for both the newspaper and the Web site. (Putting aside the death and destruction of the storm itself.) Had the storm hit an hour earlier, we would have gotten a story into the Friday newspaper and patted ourselves on the back for our hustle. I wish we could have. But, to be honest, I know it probably would have been out of date the moment it landed on driveways Friday morning.

If there are any journalists left out there who don't understand or appreciate the value of taking your journalism digital -- where people can get it even if the paper isn't scheduled to be delivered for 24 hours -- then our experience Friday should be a lesson to them. Readers seemed to appreciate it, too.

Wendy Warren, once a ConvergeSouth presenter and still a cool person, has been named editor of Philly.com. Wendy was an assistant managing editor at the Philadelphia Daily News. More personally, she is the daughter of my friend, Bill Warren, former managing editor of The Roanoke Times.

More on what Wendy is getting into at Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts' blog. Mark knows what he's doing. Wendy knows what she's doing. I have high hopes for the mix.

Newsweek has a piece about professors pulling the plug on students using laptops in their classes. Too much Web browsing; not enough eyes up.

I've spoken to classes in which most students looked at laptop screens instead of me and what I was writing on the board. Imagine talking to a group of people while they were casually paging through magazines. That's how it felt. The non-laptop users were also by far the most active discussers, too.

My conundrum: Because much of what I was talking about involved digital journalism, I didn't say anything about the laptops. I did call on some of the students tapping away, though, just for fun.

We're in our morning planning meeting -- a bunch of hardened, cynical, ink-stained wretches -- talking about what's going on today, including whether we should write about a car bomb exercise drill that local law enforcement is conducting near A&T.

The photo director's walkie-talkie screeches and out comes the voice of one of our shooters who just happens to be on the way to photograph the drill. He reports that a real fire call has gone out from a site at A&T. The photo director looked east out of a window two rooms away and said he could see the billowing black smoke.

In the same way that everyone stops to watch a fire engine pass, everyone in the room looked, and, effectively stopping the meeting, two of us got up, crossed the two rooms and looked straight out the window.

Gotta love the news business.

As it turned out, the smoke we saw was as a result of the drill. Some people who didn't know called it in as a real fire.

There's this idea that newspaper journalists are devoted newspapers readers. From the outside, it's intuitive. Many journalists work for newspapers. Newspapers print journalism. Journalists read journalism. Journalists read newspapers.

But it's been true for years that journalists are just like everyone else. They read whatever holds their interest...plus, if they are newspaper reporters, they read whatever they personally wrote that morning. It has been an open secret for the 30-plus years I've worked for newspapers that some of us do not read much of the paper at all.

That should have told us something then about what we were publishing, what people wanted and how people were spending their time. With the exception of a few places, it didn't.

There are certainly still some obvious lessons there. But the times have changed. Journalists here are younger than our "typical" newspaper reader. They are more wired, have different interests and many "new" ways of getting information. Like more and more people, that they don't actually read a newspaper from cover to cover doesn't mean they aren't informed. They use the Web. And, of course, they are in a newsroom that is focused on news for most of the day. They hear and talk about it so sometimes the newspaper delivered the next morning isn't as new to them as it is to the typical reader.

All that said, I'm thinking that on principle alone a newspaper journalist ought to read a newspaper, but I'm an old-fashioned loyalist in that way.

I was thinking about this after Robert Niles at OJR posted a question about how many newspapers you read each day. The answers in his unscientific poll aren't surprising.

We had a going away celebration for Managing Editor Ann Morris in the newsroom this afternoon. The things normally go like this: We say nice things about the person leaving, tell a few jokes, give the person a mock front page about herself, give her a ceremonial mug (don't ask) and then she addresses the newsroom.

Everything went according to plan, until we got to the part in which she addresses the newsroom. She started by saying that in these times in which newspapers are being downsized and sold, and when good people just want to do good journalism, people need some hope. People need some inspiration. People need music. People need Springsteen. And in walks what she called the East Market Street Band, which begins singing "No Retreat, No Surrender."

In case you were wondering about the state of newspapers, now you know.

P.S. It was a concert of a lifetime. Thanks, Ann, Margaret, Teresa, Jeri, Joe and Mark.

Staff artist/cartoonist Tim Rickard draws a reader-participation cartoon each week called "The Joke's on You." It is popular and readers normally dozens of funny captions. This week, though, Tim raises a more interesting question.

This is his cartoon of May 2.

This is Parade magazine's cartoon of May 11.

Batman and Ironman sitting in a bar in Tim's. Batman and Superman sitting in a bar in Parade's.

Tim's nice about the uncanny coincidence: I don't know what kind of responses they'll get with a national audience, but I'll put you guys up against them any day. We'll compare their best with yours next week. Yes, it's a cartoon smackdown!

As you can read, there are at least 100 submitted captions for Tim's. Take that, Parade.

Arkansas Business is reporting that Wehco Media of Little Rock, which owns the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has asked for information about the News & Record and our sister papers, The Virginian-Pilot and The Roanoke Times.

Key quote attributed to Paul Smith, president and GM of the Democrat-Gazette: Wehco has not made a bid on the properties and is among many possible bidders, Smith said.

Before anyone gets all excited, those of us here don't know about any potential bidders. We do expect that a lot of media companies would ask for information.

Walter Hussman is CEO of Wehco. From his Wikipedia entry:

Hussman sums up his philosophy about newspapers by referring to a statement from his father.

"A newspaper has a number of constituencies. Among those are readers, advertisers, employees, creditors, and stockholders. If a newspaper and its publisher always keep those constituencies in that order: readers first, advertisers second, employees third, creditors fourth, and shareholders last, then the newspaper will do well journalistically and financially, and the interests of all constituencies will be well served."

Monday update: From another story -- "We operate a lot alike," Smith said. "They produce really good newspapers. They're good newspapers in good markets, and I'm sure there’s many, many companies interested in them."

John Morton, a Maryland-based newspaper analyst who has done consulting work for Walter Hussman, WEHCO's chief executive officer, said the papers could represent an interesting opportunity for WEHCO "and of course now is a good time to buy because the prices are down."

"Landmark has generally run decent newspapers, so you don't have to fix a lot of things when you go in there, which is not true of some other companies I could name," Morton said.

The last issue of TV Week, our Saturday guide to the television week ahead, will be delivered May 31. Beginning Saturday, June 7, we will feature expanded listings and expanded hours in the newspaper each day.

We have held out as long as we could with TV Week because we know that some readers still rely on it for their television viewing. But the fate of TV Week reached its tipping point when its readership continued sliding, its cost continued rising and on-screen cable guides grew in popularity.

To help TV watchers affected by this change, we will expand what we offer each day. We will increase the channels listed to 62, the same number in TV Week. We will also expand the hours for which we list programs, from 9 a.m. until midnight. It makes the daily programming grids smaller, which I regret.

We know this change will upset some readers who like the convenience of a weekly list of programs. But that group gets smaller every week. Technology and the marketplace have squeezed TV Week for years. As the number of channels offered on cable ran into the hundreds, the weekly guide simply couldn't keep up. Cable subscribers can get a guide and program description for each channel for days in the future. Others use online services as we provide on GoTriad.com. Finally, many people use the daily primetime listings in the paper.

Meanwhile, our costs to print the TV Week continue to rise. Despite the diminishing audience for the weekly, we kept producing it because delivering a TV book is just one of those things that newspapers do. But we aren't the first to drop it, and we won't be the last. It is a sign of the times.

I have often wondered how newspapers got into the business of promoting the content of a competing medium. I'm sure it was a good idea at the time, as no one else was doing it. Just another reason for people to buy the paper. But in a way, it gives readers a reason to do something other than spend time with the paper. And these days, we don't need to do that.

In exchange for all the years we have promoted television programs, perhaps the television stations will promote what we have in the newspaper to its viewers. ... See how crazy that sounds now? I doubt our friends at WFMY, WGHP and WXII will give that idea much consideration.

Regardless, we hope our beefed up daily listings will be helpful to both the TV Week readers and the people who have always used the program guide in the daily paper.

Ted Vaden, public editor at the N&O, writes about what to call people from a foreign land who are in this country illegally.

Illegal immigrant? Illegal alien? Undocumented worker? Unauthorized immigrant?

Those are some of the different labels and euphemisms that media organizations have come up with to describe the 12 million or so foreign nationals who are living in this country without immigration authorization. All the labels are unsatisfactory in some respect, and they cause fits for news organizations trying to report on one of the biggest issues of our time -- what to do with the people who don't have authority to live here.

I don't know that they cause us fits, but they sure make some readers apoplexic. Wander through the comments on this Debatable and you'll see a sampling.

* THEY ARE ILLEGAL PEOPLE!

* Illegal people? There's no such thing. I wish we could have a conversation about undocumented persons without the mean spirited comments we have on this forum.

* Your euphemism of choice, "undocumented workers," seems an attempt to imply that all illegal immigrants are, in fact, "workers."

Words have meaning, and people should use the right word to mean what they want to say. Names also carry emotional baggage and some people seem to want to load this one up.

Our style book says: Do not use the term illegal aliens when referring to people who have entered the country illegally. Use "illegal immigrants" instead. Do not use the shortened term illegals except when necessary in headlines. That is apparently the News & Observer's policy, too.

What do journalists value that readers don't?

I started thinking about that question as I discussed with another editor whether we should refer from a front page story to an editorial. (Refer -- pronounced reefer -- is journalistic jargon for a brief line of text telling readers about a related item elsewhere in the paper.)

In traditional news ethics, the separation of news and editorial is right up there with the separation of news and advertising. But I wonder how often that separation disregards what best serves the reader. Pointing readers to related content is not dissimilar to linking to other views from the same blog post. It is a convenience, not an endorsement.

But it's not something we traditionally do because of the separation between news and editorial.

What other newspaper traditions do we hold dear but which no longer -- if they ever did -- help the reader? Some of those walls between newspaper journalists and readers have fallen already. We have ads on the front pages of some sections. We publish ad stickers, covering the nameplate of the paper. Editors hate them -- I'm one -- but readers didn't object. (You could argue that those are walls that have fallen between news and advertising, too.)

It wasn't that long ago that we didn't publish news as soon as we knew about it even though we could, thanks to the wonders of online? Thank goodness, that wall has fallen.

What about long, explanatory, "important" stories? We know that all but the very best stories lose readers paragraph by paragraph, but it sure is tough to wean ourselves from them.

"We did that same story last year" is a common explanation for not doing a perfectly fine story. Think first day or last day of school. Allergy season is here. Mother's Day. Is our journalism so memorable that readers are going to recall a story a year later?

Advertising is anchored to the bottom right on the page and never anchored on the top. We have broken with this tradition on occasion.

What else? How else do we stymie those want to use us?

Since the debut of our Monday feature Guilford's Most Wanted on Feb. 18, 16 people have been picked up, the most recent one this morning. That's slightly more than one a week.

That record caused features editor Susan Ladd to suggest: "Maybe we should put Osama bin Laden on that list."

Joseph Schwartz of UNC-Chapel Hill is one of UWire's top 100 student journalists.

He interned as a reporter here two summers ago. UWire isn't wrong.

(Via Romenesko.)

I sat down at lunch during Rotary yesterday, and a member sat across from me and says, "I saw a friend of yours this past weekend."

"Who was that?" I asked.

"A guy I went to Chapel Hill with," he said, drawing it out a few beats. "Walter Hussman."

Coincidentally, Hussman and his company have been a topic of discussion in our newsroom lately.

"Oh?" I asked. (I'm a pretty engaging conversationalist if I do say so myself.)

"Yes. He said he read on a Web site that his company was interested in your newspaper. And he asked me what I thought of it."

"I hope you spoke kindly," I said.

He said he had and then told me what a good guy Hussman is. They didn't see each other in Greensboro, by the way.

(And, separately, this guy has attested to his journalism chops.)

Again, I have no information that the interest of Wehco is anything more than the curiosity you may have when you pick up one of the informational fliers outside a house for sale. I just enjoy the idea that the world is such a small place.

Yesterday Ryan Seals wrote a story about the lack of information from A&T officials on yet another embezzlement case at the university.

I have written several times about A&T's institutional silence on issues in which public accountability should be the first option.

Later in the day, Velma Speight-Buford, chairwoman of the board of trustees, called to express her disappointment that we published the story on the day the General Assembly was meeting on the A&T campus, a complaint I am sympathetic to. She said that the bank slipped up on the job in the embezzlement case.

Still, had someone in the administration been more forthcoming earlier, the story would have carried a different message when the legislators came to town...and the public would have had a better explanation about how public money was allegedly mishandled.

It intrigues me that public agencies -- A&T isn't the only one -- routinely resist explaining themselves to their bosses (you and me). If that position ever helps with the public perception, I would like to hear about it.

Marie Inkenbrandt, who has been with us for 15 years, got married last week. That's the good news.

The bad news is that she is moving to Milwaukee to join her husband.

Marie joined the night desk as an editor and designer in 1993. Since 2004, she has done the same on the day desk.

Blog readers know her for her Scrabble-playing prowess.

You sure, Marie? It's cold up there on the shores of Lake Michigan.

I've been thinking about this letter to the editor by a Greensboro College professor in which she encourages readers and her students not to trust the media.

I teach critical reading skills to my college students. We look at a text and ask ourselves: Who is the writer? What is the writer's purpose? What is the text saying? How does word choice impact the reader? Does the writer succeed? Students realize that all texts have an agenda, no matter how subtle.

Putting aside the vague generalities of what she considers media -- I wonder what she thinks of the stereotypes of the political persuasion of college professors -- it is an interesting letter. I agree with the above exerpted paragraph, but not with her conclusion.

I wouldn't say "don't trust." It closes the door too soundly. Instead, I encourage skepticism. And I don't restrict it to the media. I advise people to be skeptical, period. Here's why: Is the Web "the media"? Is an unsolicited mass e-mail you receive "the media"? Is a friend telling you a story about something he's heard "the media"? There are plenty of examples of each being even less worthy of trust for accuracy than The Onion.

Alan Mutter: A few weeks ago, a story ricocheted around the Internet about a 13-year-old boy who stole his father’s credit card to hire hookers to play videogames with him in a Texas motel. The problem is that the story wasn't the least bit true.

The steady pollution of the web with phony and malicious info-junk could turn an awesome resource for humanity into little more than useless, time-wasting digital flotsam

Think that is out of the ordinary? Here are four other examples.

You can reflect on the e-mail crapola you receive and the stories you hear from friends that you know are bogus.

American Journalism Review has a longer takeout on media bias that is worth reading. It describes the public perceptions, manipulations, industry manipulations and media realities accurately....at least to this biased observer.

Bottom line: Every source should be questioned, no matter how esteemed. Does the story make sense? Sound unbelievable? Photos can be Photoshopped. Video can be tricked. Think Kobe jumped over that Aston Martin? Think again.

That shouldn't bother mainstream organizations, even though it does sometimes. (We try to get over ourselves.) We doubt and question sources that tell us things. Why would we expect you to do anything less? Over time, you will either trust our reporting or not.

As reported by the Baltimore City Paper, freelance bloggers for the Examiner don't actually receive money. In consideration of the Services, you will be provided exposure of your name and the Web Page. You understand that you will not initially receive any other compensation for performance of the Services. (Via Romenesko.)

What is the value of such exposure, if any?

I know that contributors want cash AND exposure, which is only fair. My general philosophy has been that we pay for what we truly want. But that we will also publish content that we don't pay for. The distinction being that you may not buy that $1.25 Coke from the vending machine because you aren't that thirsty, but if someone offers you a drink, you would take it.

In some cases, someone will want the megaphone of the local newspaper to make a point to a new audience. Many times, we can enable that. That's the exposure I'm wondering about.

What is the value of that?

In my house, my wife's morning mood is closely tied to coffee and the newspaper. When she has the caffeine and the paper and ink, she is on her game. When one of the two are missing, watch out.

I hear from a decent number of people that their mornings follow the same trajectory. (I love these people!)

Juan Antonio Giner has been posting photos of this worldwide morning ritual. It's a fun series. He refers to it as a new metric: The future of newspapers depends … on how many people drink coffee while reading newspapers.

(Personally, I'm thinking that he's missing the third element -- cigarettes -- but the tobacco industry has its own challenges.)

Anyway, I'm afraid his is not a new metric but rather it's an old one. This is a ritual that the Greatest Generation and the Boomers have. A part of me wishes that more of X'ers and Y'ers practiced it, too. But there are plenty of inspirational images to go around. The next photos to post, Juan Antonio, are of people drinking coffee and reading, listening and watching the news on their computers and PDAs.

The first management principle I learned 20-some years ago was that you can do just about whatever you want with employees except change their desks and their parking spaces. It's been dead-on over the years, too.

The parking lot behind our building is for sale. We own it and use it for free employee parking. I park there. It makes sense that it would be sold separately from the company. It's not critical to our company's operation, and there is plenty of other parking available nearby.

Since the "for sale" sign went up on the property, newsroom wags have suggested other possibilities, including selling the air rights over our building for a billboard or, perhaps, a cell tower. Also, that we develop it ourselves, particularly as we need a good journalist/cop bar in town. Several have suggested we sell our computer system. One suggested we sell the presses, too, and commit ourselves to going fully digital.

When I told that to someone outside the newsroom, she said, "Wow. Gallows humor."

"Nah," I said. "Newsroom humor."

If all you know about the news media is what you've learned on TV -- which is the case with a lot of folks -- then you have a whipsawed perspective of reporters. On the non-news shows -- oh, maybe the news shows, too -- reporters are either portrayed as ambitious, conniving nuisances or inept, fatuous pieces of fluff.

Last night's season finale of "Lost" suggests that the writers don't watch much TV. (Show synopsis here.) The news media is simply asleep. The Oceanic 6 survivors are a worldwide sensation and become celebrities upon their return. Yet they have concocted a Big Lie about the three months and no news outlet cracks it.

Stick-thin Kate is six month pregnant when she boarded the plane, but she wasn't showing at all? Can you imagine Us or the National Inquirer letting that pass? None of the six ever spills the beans about the lie, despite the fact they don't seem to care much for each other. The crew on the boat that found them know about the lie and don't tell anyone? At least three people who were on the island but not among the official Oceanic 6 are back in civilization, and they don't tell anyone, including a teen-ager who knows the official story is bogus? The bloggers would have a field day with this.

What world are the producers living in? The British tabs don't exist? Inside Edition doesn't exist? Rupert Murdoch would never stand for it.

I'll be watching next season, too. It's just TV.

The latest Yes Weekly story on the libel suit against The Rhinoceros Times and Jerry Bledsoe over his series "Cops in Black and White" has this quote by John Hammer, editor of the weekly.

"I talked with Jerry Bledsoe about the series; however, I took no specific actions as editor-in-chief of The Rhinoceros Times which relate to fact checking what appeared in his series or to corroborate the facts which appear in his series. Similarly, newspapers throughout the country do not routinely corroborate facts they obtain from other news sources, such as the Associated Press, the New York Times News Service or the Washington Post News Service."

Two points:

First, on a story of this magnitude and with these sorts of allegations, the SOP at traditional newspapers is for a variety of editors to review primary source materials. If we are going to publish the story we want to understand exactly what we have....and what we don't have. We want ensure we're fair and accurate. We want consider all the story angles. We may have the story reviewed by lawyers to ensure we stay on the right side of defamation law.

Then, when questions arise about the accuracy and fairness of the work -- as they have with the Rhino's series -- we go back and question the reporter, making sure that we got it right. Given the number of people that have questioned and disputed the work, I'm surprised that John says he "took no specific actions" to check the accuracy of the work he has published for two years.

If he isn't editing Jerry's work, it would be interesting to know who is.

Second, comparing the work Jerry has done with the AP or the New York Times is a stretch. Those wire services have editors, and the newspapers where the stories come from originally have editors. At some point along the line -- usually at the originating paper -- stories are vetted. That said, it is a legally defensible position that the wire service is liable for a published wrong, rather than each individual newspaper that runs the offending story.

If I were Jerry, I would be looking for my own lawyer.