News-Record.com

The Fox8 morning host just told listeners to check the newspaper for sales during this weekend's tax-free holiday.

A reader writes:

Concerning the news about Ruffin Hobbs' death:

It just didn't seem necessary.

This is the offending reference: "Jones said a neighbor found Hobbs' naked body about 9 a.m. Monday at his home on McBane Mill Road. He appears to have hit his head on his stone front stoop, and a subsequent autopsy revealed a broken neck and a fractured skull."

The bulk of my response:

I understand your concern. That's actually why we did not make a big deal about the fact that he wasn't wearing any clothes. Had we wanted to titillate, it would have been in the first paragraph rather than the sixth. We included that detail because we thought it was unusual. So
much about the story is unusual -- the doorway opening into space, the cob webs, and, of course, the death itself -- this, to us, was just another piece.

How about you: Was including the detail that Hobbs was naked when he plunged to his death helpful or unnecessary?

Every week we ask a question of our Reader Panel to help us improve our journalism

This week we asked if they followed coverage of the Guilford school system and what stories we should be writing about education. The question was pegged to the school board hiring a new school superintendent.

Most of the respondents said they were very interested in school information and gave us a bunch of good ideas to pursue. But these two comments were my favorites:

I am deeply troubled over (school system) management and feel the new super is a joke. I hope the N&R will do more objective reporting on the system and not just parrot Guilford County Schools propoganda.

Followed by this from another person:

Give Mo Green a chance before skewering him in the paper, please.

Have a great weekend.

Forrest Brown, one of our best editors and page designers back in the day, and who later went on to papers in Austin and Charlotte, is moving to CNN as an editor later this month. He says he'll have his hands in everything: stories, slide shows, TV crawls, video captions, e-mail alerts, blogs, etc.

That's the good news. The bad news is that his shift is 7 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. As good as he is, I doubt he'll be doing that for long.

My newspaper column

Previous post and discussion here.

Is the National Enquirer a legitimate news source?

When the tabloid publishes a story impugning the reputation of a national figure without clear substantiation, how should mainstream newspapers handle it?

When does an allegation, fueled by the inevitable Internet dogpile, hit its tipping point and become worth publishing simply because so many people are talking about it?

Those are among the questions newspapers have wrestled with for the past 10 days.

The national figure in question is former Sen. John Edwards. The story reported so far is sketchy at best, but the Enquirer alleges that Edwards is carrying on with a woman, not his wife. The tabloid reports that its reporters found him leaving a hotel room in Beverly Hills at a time when my mother always said nothing good ever happens. The paper also said he is the father of the woman’s child.

The problem -- for us, at least -- is that no evidence supporting the affair or the paternity has been published.

On occasion, readers tell me that they don't like our comics selection. Not funny, is the common refrain, although one group thinks that Zits, Get Fuzzy and Pearls before Swine are terrible, and another group says that Ziggy, Family Circus and Beetle Bailey are snooze inducing.

Today we upset both by republishing last Monday's strips. (How can you tell, I asked one caller, who was not amused.) Tomorrow, we'll publish today's correct comics and Tuesday's, doubling either their pleasure or their pain, depending.

As I've often noted, while we journalists spend most of our time on the journalism, an abundance of readers want the regular things -- horoscope, comics, bridge -- that we add no value to, other than delivering them to their homes. That should tell us something.

Both Gerald Witt at Inside Scoop and Mark Binker at Capital Beat have announced and solicited for Voterspeak '08, a weekly online conversation about news and politics. You might think there is no reason for me to promote it here, too. You would be wrong.

I know that readers of this blog are politically engaged and would love to participate with us and each other. Just in case you don't read Scoop or Capital Beat, well, now, you won't miss this opportunity.

Numbers for July blog readership are in. Normally, letters to the editor is the most visited site, and it was in July.

No. 2, though, is a newbie. Not only is it not a blog, but it is a single blog entry. And not only that, it is a blog entry from last November. And one more not only: it has more page views than the next three blogs combined.

What it is? Here's a hint: I'm not a monster...I'm just ahead of the curve.

Answer.

* Headline refers to this.

Steve Smith slugs Ken Lucas.

"I feel like what happened was a blessing in disguise," Lucas said. "This is something I think has brought this team closer together."

A new team-building exercise!

I just contributed $25 to help an effort to hire a journalist to fact-check the political advertising in a San Francisco election this November. What's the San Francisco tie? I don't know and don't care.

I donated because I'm interested in how this microphilanthropy in journalism will work. Basically, this is using a social network to generate small donations -- a lot of small donations -- to pay for a piece of journalism. Given the evolution/revolution in journalism and business models, $25 is a small price to pay to see how it works. Consider it an investment in the future.

Donate here. Or, for a better explanation, check out DigiDave.

When I first wrote about Twitter last December, 46 people in Greensboro had Twitter accounts. Today 232 do.

Five-fold growth in eight months. Back in December, I was questioning the tipping point. No more.

Time to dive in and learn. On Monday, I activated my account, have posted 25 tweets and am actively growing the list of people I follow. After reading this, I discovered our news feed was broken. Fixing, fixing.

There is robust, real-time discussion among real and virtual friends and colleagues. Some is inane, but much is informative, provocative and helpful. Depends on who your friends are.

The immediate impact? That's where I learned about this. Another person I was following needed some photo help in Greensboro. How would I have known about either otherwise?

As we learn here, this questionJeff Jarvis suggests news organizations ask fits:"How do we go to where the people are with what they need and how do we enable them to do what they want to do?"

Join me.

Jim Young, who has covered sports for us since 1999, is going to become editor of ACCSports.com, the companion Web site to the ACC Sports Journal. (Don't bother going there now. It's under construction.) "Jim will provide daily analysis and commentary and learn first-hand what a challenge it can be to work with writers," wrote his editor, Joe Sirera.

Jim is a winner of state press association and national sportswriting awards, and is a regular SportsExtra contributor. As Joe wrote in his announcement to the staff about Jim, "His intelligence, humor and uncanny ability to quote lines from any 'Seinfield' episode will be missed."

"Existing home sales down in the Triad" -- News-Record.com

"Triad existing home sales down 18 percent" -- Biz Journal.com

"Triad home sales increase in second quarter" -- DigTriad.com

And they're all accurate!

For the heck of it, we'll try to take another tack in the newsprint version.

Bam, just like that I got the privilege of paying another $100 to the second person to complete the New Year's digital challenge. Last week, it was Melissa Umbarger. Today it is reporter Gerald Witt.

Gerald is a host of Inside Scoop and is in the midst of planning this.

Down $200 and it's still a great investment.

Elon University has announced a one-year master's program in interactive media.

Students in the full-time, one-year program will learn to create and deliver text, graphics, audio, video and other content through a variety of media channels including the Internet and mobile devices. In addition to producing interactive content, students will study theories of communication and audience analysis.

It seems to cover the bases. I like this line in the story on the Elon Web site: During Elon’s four-week Winter Term, students will participate in a domestic or international fly-in to gather content for a special team project designed to serve the public good. (Bold is mine.)

Admission seems to require a 3.0 grade point average as an undergrad. I got my B.A. 30+ years ago. With grade inflation, you think my 2.25 would equal out to a 3.0 in today's environment?

Got an early jones for the Wyndham? Go here.

Johnny, we hardly knew ye!

But why did he wait to man-up about it? It wasn't to bury the news value under the fireworks of the Olympics opening, was it?

Update: Rex Hammock describes the 9 (or 10) steps to a political scandal. You decide what step Edwards is now on.

Saturday update: How N.C. newspapers played it.

As an indirect footnote to the premature Philadelphia Inquirer hubbub, we don't see much evidence that newspaper readers move to the Web or Web users move to the paper.

Today's example: We published the Edwards story across the top of the front page of the newspaper. (It had been the lead story on the Web site since mid-afternoon Friday.) Included on the front page was a prominent promo encouraging readers to visit a forum on the topic to voice their opinions. So far this morning, only one person has left a comment, and there's no indication he did so after reading the story in the newspaper.

OK, it's Saturday morning and most people, unlike me, have a life so perhaps they haven't had the time to comment yet. Or perhaps they don't care about the topic enough to comment, which is hard to believe, given a dinner party discussion I heard last night.

But this level of response isn't unusual. When we promote specific online content in the newspaper, we don't normally see a huge increase in traffic to the Web site.

Some of it is educational, letting folks know what we have and how to find it. It's still early for some to truly understand how helpful and dynamic the Web is. Some of it is that we're promoting content that is either of marginal interest or narrowly focused interest.

But most of it, I think, is that the audiences for each form are different and simply gravitating to what they know and prefer.

Given the tabloids' well-earned political reporting credibility, I guess the red-faced mainstream news media has some new stories to follow:

And this one:

DEMOCRATIC presidential contender Barack Obama is caught up in a stunning new scandal as investigators scour the nation for a secret love child, political insiders reveal in a blockbuster GLOBE exclusive.

Greensboro City Council member Dianne Bellamy-Small normally declines to speak with our reporters face to face or by phone. She will accept faxed questions and answers them sometimes. Less often do we get her responses before deadline.

She has agreed to be interviewed one-on-one face-to-face for our Sunday 10Plus Q&A feature. If you would like to submit a question for the interview, please do.

Last year when I wrote this column about my younger daughter, HPU's president, Nido Qubein, asked if he could send copies to every incoming freshmen.

I suspect that Sunday's piece by Nancy McLaughlin will have similar clip-and-save impact. Of course, the intended audience, incoming college students, may not read it in the paper. Not because they don't read the paper as much as by the time they are finished with high school they have had their fill of advice from adults. We will depend on a parent or a well-intentioned older person to stick it under their noses.

In my experience as a student and as a parent of two students, the clergy has good advice, even if some of it the students will probably need to learn on their own.

Below is a factoid that didn't make it online, for some reason:

In the comments thread of this post, Ted asked: I was wondering if you thought an online only newspaper for Greensboro would work, both editorially and in terms of making money. (Read the whole comment.)

I answered that I thought it would be risky. Then, upon thought, I posed the question on Twitter. Got some good Twittered and e-mailed responses from smart people saying that, yes, an online only news operation can work, serve the community and make money.

Steve Yelvington questioned that there would be many professional journalists -- Ted's idea is to use professional journalists -- who have the skills and business sense to pull it off. I think there are.

I'm just not sure that the Guilford County marketplace is ready to support it yet, and I refer to it that way to include both users and businesses. But that yet is in bold for a reason. I know there have been/are attempts at making a go with news sites in the area. Want to weigh in?

Related: "The core audience for news just isn't that big."

Because the part of the Greensboro blogging community I engage with most is politically minded, I pass this along from Politico as a way to make money doing something you enjoy: This is your chance to tell Politico readers about important political stories in your backyard -- and earn $100. All registered Politico members are invited to submit news (not opinion) articles about political disputes, trends and ideas that you believe should be on the national radar.

The emphasis is mine.

Thanks to Jay Rosen on Twitter. I asked Jay what he thought "should be on the national radar" meant. He responded: You know how editors ask reporters to "localize" national trend stories? They mean the reverse, I think.

A chance for fame and fortune, folks.

Is it police abuse or is it a proper arrest?

I'm talking about this video.

The citizen video of an arrest at Smith Homes is out there for anyone to watch. When, if ever, does it become news? If it is a proper and justified arrest, should the newspaper bother to write about it? Is it fair to the officers and the victim to publish an article about it, identifying both?Does it take on its own life simply by being recorded and posted on YouTube? Does the newspaper give it more weight than it deserves by writing about it?

Those are some of the questions that come to mind watching it. The police commanders our reporter spoke with had seen the video but noted nothing untoward in the actions of the officers. As of yesterday, no complaints had been filed about the incident.

We have not written about it because, other than the video of the arrest being available online, there doesn't seem to be much real news involved. But as citizen journalism continues to grow, newspapers and TV stations will continue to grapple with these sorts of questions. At least, I think we will.

Fox8's report last night.


Update: They acted appropriately.

Chancellor Stanley Battle of A&T gave one heck of an opening day speech today that should have inspired students and faculty, but the community as well. It inspired me.

That story is being written and I'll link to it when it's there. Meanwhile, he referred to newspaper coverage when he came to Greensboro a year ago.

I walked into the middle of a storm. Everything about this university was being questioned... the way we conducted business, the way we handled our business, our business practices... We had had negative news stories published about us in the local paper 16 times --stories that also made the Chronicle of Higher Education and Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

I haven't counted; I'm impressed he did. It sounds bad, but as he readily acknowledges, A&T had issues. I hope that he agrees that they should have been written about. As he notes in his speech, A&T has cleaned them up.

As for his to-do list, he included this paragraph:

We will break free of constricted modes of thinking so we can respond to new challenges and opportunities without limitations and we will aggressively tell our own story. We will not allow ourselves to be defined by others. We will assertively court the media to publicize the positive things that are happening at North Carolina A&T and we will continue to enjoy strong and positive support from our alumni and our various public constituencies by making them active, involved participants in this campus community.

I say hear, hear.

I think.

I hope he means that A&T will be more open with all of its communications. We don't have difficulty getting information about stories that reflect positively on the state university. I have written often about A&T's opacity.

But A&T squeezes information that doesn't reflect positively tighter than the leash around John Edward's neck right now. I hope that Chancellor Battle's speech is a statement that that is in the past. After all, when a fire breaks out, you stop what you're doing and pour water on it. You don't wait until you're good and ready to find the hose.

As a state-funded university, A&T is accountable to its students and faculty, and to taxpayers and the public. When bad news comes, A&T's M.O. -- as with any tax-supported institution -- should be transparency.

I know that Chancellor Battle wants the university to define itself rather than, say, the newspaper. But I'll take a stab anyway. A good start would be a place that is supportive of intellectual freedom, the open inquiry of ideas, and following information wherever it takes you.

(Thanks to Brian for the tip.)

Whenever anyone scoffs at blogs, calling them a pit of gossip or the ranting of nutcases, I always point to examples their power and goodness. I have another example.

Our story.

Want to know something about the Triad?

Here's a start.

Thanks to all the staff, but particularly editor Janet Brindle Reddick, designer Jennifer Burton and researchers Diane Lamb and David Bulgin.

Seth Godin writes about the wisdom of bullying someone into a sale. He finds, of course, little wisdom in it.

The flaw in thinking is this... the people you most want to sell to won't respond well to this. The people you most need to spread the word, the people who are the best partners, the most loyal customers -- they blanch in the face of bullying. They walk out.

I often have people try to bully me into this or that, pushing for news coverage or expressing dismay about something we've done. I listen and explain. Sometimes, when appropriate, I apologize. If the bullying persists, I wait for a pause and say, "Does this approach with people usually work for you, because, I gotta tell you, it ain't working for me."

That usually changes the direction of the discussion. (Unless it is an attorney and they redouble their efforts.)

The nation's most prestigious journalism award for features and lifestyle reporting is the Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards. (I don't know how it became the most prestigious. It just has been for the 30-plus years I've been in the business.)

So, I am delighted that our Life section won first place in general excellence this year.

Judges comments:
The News & Record entertains and informs in its lifestyle section. From the significant story about the church members who moved into a neighborhood to be better able to serve their neighbors to a story about online gamers, the content is reported and written well. The photographs are excellent, and the design reaches out to readers by using impact and organization. The content is largely local, and it is supplemented by local columnists.

Winners in other circulation categories included the Washington Post and the Kansas City Star. Nice company.

Congratulations to features editor Susan Ladd, assistant editor Mike Kernels, day desk chief Kim Stacks Mills and their staffs.

Morgan Josey, who has covered education for the past couple years, is moving to a new assignment: developing a comprehensive "green" site to report news, commentary and interaction on environmental issues.

Called Greening Guilford, the site has been around for awhile. Morgan developed the blog on her own based on an intense passion for the environment. She proposed expanding the idea into more than a personal blog as part of our innovation process, and here she is. Our loss on the education scene is our gain in the environment.

She'll explain further.

N&O Editor John Drescher quotes reports that the National Enquirer's going rate for info about John Edwards and his affair was $50,000.

You can shake a lot of tree with that kind of money. Bring down a lot of nuts, too.

A letter to the editor:

I am a faithful reader of the online version of your publication every day. I receive the "News & Record Update" via e-mail each day and enjoy feeling the most up-to-date in the fast-paced world of "right this minute" online news.

However, I was very disappointed when I opened my e-mail yesterday and saw a headline under sports that announced Shawn Johnson as the gold medalist in the balance beam, when the event would not air for the first time on television until later that night. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I have enjoyed being able to watch the Olympics with anticipation of what will happen despite the 12-hour time difference. I was extremely disappointed to have the result "spoiled" for me. Can we not act as though the event hasn't happened until it airs on television?

I don't think it was written by an NBC executive, but I suppose it's possible.

I suppose we could have posted a spoiler alert on the e-mail, but who would have thought of that, given that the e-mail news alert is designed to bring you the news?

Business reporter Dick Barron has started an e-mail newsletter that comes out at 4:30 p.m. weekdays and wraps up the day's business news. Called Biz Bytes, it includes breaking news about jobs, economic development, corporate moves and markets. It also features local executive achievements and people news.

Dick told me: "The idea came when I was thinking about ways to expand business news into the online platform with the basic resources we have. I know that we have national and local competitors that do this kind of thing, but nobody has the combination of deep local coverage plus full-scale national and international business news and market charts. We have all this stuff easily available in one form or another. All I had to do was aggregate the information and provide a design and some commentary that would integrate it.

"My other motivation was that we can offer far more content than people see in the print publication because space and emphasis just don't allow us to give it a showcase. Our major stories always get good play on the front page. But this would be another venue for the smaller achievements that people have, plus a spot for me and my colleagues to do a little commentary about stories of the day."

Sign up here.

Because blog readers and writers love to gush over and trash restaurants and clubs, TV personalities and radio shows, and theaters and galleries, please consider voting for your favorites in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

It's easy and when the television ads start appearing promoting "the most popular newscaster in the Triad" you can claim that your vote counted. Or not.

For several weeks, I have marveled at the daily media speculation over the running mates of Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain. Why waste so much time and manpower on a guessing game that would become news eventually anyway? Particularly, when the guessing game so often turns out wrong?

Juan Antonio Giner tracks the speculation and false reports, with Drudge reporting Obama-Bayh, the Wall Street Journal reporting that it's Tim Kaine, Warren Buffett picking Sam Nunn, and the Chicago Tribune and David Brooks getting it right.

As a bonus, he includes a front page for Hillary lovers.

Until yesterday, all the speculation was a non-story. So why spend all that energy chasing it?

We started The Joke's On You in January 2007. (The blog came later.)

In the feature, artist/humorist Tim Rickard draws the cartoon and readers provide the caption. It's not an original idea; other newspapers have a similar feature. Parade magazine went so far as to steal an idea from us. Well, seriously, I doubt it was stolen; it's just remarkably similar.

Anyway, the Evansville Courier-Press has debuted a feature with the exact same name. And to their credit, they credit us for the name. I only wish they had linked to us, too.

The title, "The Joke's On You," is shamelessly stolen from a newspaper in Greensboro, N.C., that does the same thing. We like the idea so much that we sought out a cartoonist to do it here.

I asked Tim his thoughts: "They stole the idea from us. We stole the idea from the New Yorker. That shows that we have much higher standards."

Sports columnist Jay Mariotti has quit the Chicago Sun-Times.

Just back from Beijing, where he covered the Olympics, Mariotti said in a phone interview that he decided to quit after it became clear while in China that sports journalism had become "entirely a Web site business. There were not many newspapers there." He added that most of the journalists covering the Games were "there writing for Web sites."

Mariotti is contentious so other factors may be involved. (He's staying as a commentator on ESPN, so he's not entirely moving to the Web.) Yet, there is some truth in what he says. And not. (The Olympics is a weak example in making the argument that sports is entirely a Web business. When the events happen 12 hours early, the Web is the best place to get the info. That doesn't happen in the world of American sports -- or Chicago sports -- often.)

Still....

Many sports fans go directly to the Internet to check scores, get in-depth reports and chat/argue about their teams and players. For them, particularly the intense ones, the newspaper doesn't add much. Sports is a natural for the Web where opinions and interaction are easy and abundant.

But there are many more casual sports fans -- I'm one -- who are interested in sports, but not so much that we haunt the Web sites. The newspaper's sports section provides an overview and taste of that day's action and topics; I can go online to get more, if I want, which isn't that often.

It's the challenge that newspapers must address, and many are: As the audience has more choices, how do we help people get what they want when and how they want it? For some, it's digital; for some, it's paper. For many, it's not much. The point: It's not either/or; it's "and."

Over the past few days we have tried to direct our newspaper coverage of the Democratic National Convention forward, focusing as much as what is expected tonight as the speech that was on television last night. For instance, this is the story that we have on the front page today. It's less about the Bill and Joe show and more about the historical significance of the Obama nomination.

The DNC has also not been the lead story on the front page, unlike most of the larger newspapers in North Carolina. Today's front page:

Our aim is to treat the Republican National Convention in similar fashion.

What we believe is that presidential politics in August is a bit like NHL hockey here. A small number of people care intensely, and a large number don't care at all, knowing the big event is two months away.

But we are apparently swimming against the media tide, if reports are true that 15,000 journalists are covering the two conventions. I wonder how many of those 15,000 are from media outlets that laid off people in the past year. I'm thinking a lot. (Here's a report on what they're all doing there.)

Anyway, do you want more/different coverage?

Columnist Glenn Chavis has written his 200th "weekly" column for us. (More about him here.)

In recognition, his first editor, Ed Williams, and his current editor, Cindy Loman, created a mock front page for Glenn that, in keeping with newspaper tradition, makes fun of as many people as possible. So I won't reprint it. It does include some Glennisms, though.

We can't depend on others to write about our heritage.

Just because it wasn't around when you were growing up, doesn't mean it never existed.

I never will understand why people need and refer to certain celebrities who they have never met as role models

I use the terms colored, Negro, and black in every story that I write. It makes no sense to use African American when talking about something that happened in the 1870s.

We are looking forward to 200 more.

Robert Niles has some good advice, and it makes me cringe.

If you call your readers stupid for reading the content in your newspaper, don't be surprised when they quit reading your paper altogether.

He's referring to an L.A. Times article about readers of the comic strip, "For Better or For Worse." I don't know that the writer is actually calling them stupid as affectionately poking fun at them. Or maybe with them.

Sad, isn't it, when you can't really tell what the writer's point is in an article.

Still, Niles is right. It's one thing for a newspaper reader to make fun of the stuff in the paper; heck, it's his right. It's another thing when it comes from the newspaper itself. If I were a "For Better or For Worse" reader, I'd be chagrined.

I say all this because, apparently unlike the Times, we are canceling the strip beginning Monday because it is going into repurposed reruns. Our practice is not to publish reruns. So, despite the strip's popularity, we're going to let it go. I expect some pushback, too. Happens.

How interested are you in reading anniversary stories about Sept. 11, 2001? If you are, what angle(s)?

Lifestyle changes? Security concerns? Economic impact?

Our community was directly touched with the death of flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw. Interested in an update on the family?

Bloomberg's accidental premature publication of Steve Jobs' obituary makes me wonder: Are obituaries obsolete?

...In the print world, with rare exceptions a person's death was the only occasion that would justify the publication of that person's life story. But the Internet has changed the way we deal with time, just as it has collapsed space. Everything is available now ... and that isnt limited to reports of recent events.

-- Steve Yelvington

The modern obit writer may serve the subject better by amassing a collection of suitable links: to a biography, video interviews, best writings, most famous quotes, etc. Yelvington may be right: The traditional obituary is already in the grave.

-- Steve Outing

I have great respect for Steve and Steve, but I think they're off target on this one.

Eventually, I suspect, an obit of links will do the trick. But we're not close to it yet.

If the Steves are talking about canned obits of celebrities and newsmakers, fine. But the other 99% of the people who die aren't Google-able. Or if they are, information on them and their life is hard to find and, once found, is incomplete. I know. I've tried it on the people on our obit page today. In addition, many of the people actually interested in reading obits are the core audience of newspaper readers.

These days, someone -- whether it is the newspaper or a family member -- needs to write up an obituary about a person's life.

Update: In a subsequent Twitter exchange, Yelvington suggests creating basically a people wiki of the area's population. The entries grow and mature as the people do. "Write 'em up while they can still enjoy it," he said. I like that.

Howard Weaver at Etaoin Shrdlu gives us photographic evidence of the strict -- to say nothing of uncomfortable in so many different ways -- frugality at newspapers around the country. In this case, it is captured by our friends at the News & Observer.

My newspaper column

Editorial Page editor Allen Johnson discusses a variety of changes to the editorial pages in his column on page H2 in the Ideas section.

The one change I want to emphasize here is the addition of "Doonesbury" to the comics page in the Life section. Beginning tomorrow, "Doonesbury" replaces "For Better or For Worse." We're dropping "For Better or For Worse" because the cartoonist is beginning to repurpose previously published strips.

We know that the strip is popular, and we will miss it, but we publish original comics, not reruns.

In other news about the newspaper: