News-Record.com

My newspaper column:

We like it when you refer to the News & Record as "our newspaper."

We want the paper to represent you and reflect your values.

One way we can do that is to publish your stories and help you get the information you want.

Two months ago, in an effort to break up the seemingly daily diet of bad economic news, we asked you to send us your stories of the random acts of kindness you've encountered. So far, we have published more than 50 of them in a feature we call "The Good Stuff."

Most of the stories have been about simple good deeds that, honestly, the person doing them didn't think twice about.

That's what makes the deeds so special. They have confirmed what many of us have known for some time: The Triad is filled with generous, good-hearted people.

Tell us some more. Send your stories of random acts of kindness to me or 200 E. Market St., Greensboro, NC 27401. Please include your address and phone number in case we need to contact you.

We also want to help you with your consumer problems during these tough economic times. We have started a new feature called "Ask a Reporter." If you wonder about something, tell us and we'll try to get the answer for you.

For instance, we've answered questions about nonprofit groups that help families of mentally ill patients; about newspapers for the blind; about guardrails on Interstate 85; and about random drug testing of city employees.

Send your questions to Teresa Prout or call 373-7154. As above, please include your name and a phone number.

If you have a suggestion for a story, send that along, too. Your good ideas make "our newspaper" better.

My newspaper column:

Thank you for your comments last week about our consolidating all the news into one section. They will help us to work on improvements.

Today, I want to explain the second half of our newspaper’s reorganization.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, we are combining the Sports and Life sections. That means that today and tomorrow, your newspaper will have two parts: news and editorial in the first section, and Sports and Life in the second.

Combining the sections saves money, allowing us to keep our expenses down during this national recession. As with the consolidation of the news sections, we don’t expect any significant loss of sports or features content. But it will be organized differently.

Every Monday, Sports will lead the second section, followed by Life. Sports comes first because news from the world of sports on Sundays demands it. So many dramatic events — golf tournaments, NASCAR races and NFL games — end Sunday and deserve priority placement in the paper.

On Tuesdays, we’ll switch that around. Life leads the section. The features section has the paper’s second-highest readership, behind the news section, and we respect that readership loyalty. Meanwhile, the number of sporting events that demand “front page” treatment is much lower.

We know these changes may take a little time to get used to. Through it all, our commitment to bringing you the best in local news and information is as strong as ever.

Give us a call at 274-5476 if you have questions

I've written about the news section consolidation here before so I think regular visitors know most or all of this already. Still, this is what I wrote in the newspaper today:

I want to introduce you to a new organization of your newspaper.

Beginning today, the front section and the Local section will be combined so that all of the news content is in one place.

The section consolidation affirms our guiding philosophy that we're a local newspaper first. Local news will be the first thing you see when you pick up your News & Record.

As Publisher Robin A. Saul wrote Sunday, we're making the change to conserve newsprint. But we don't expect much of the content you value to be lost in the shuffle.

On Wednesdays through Saturdays, you will receive a News section, a Sports section and a Life section (or Savor, as it's called on Wednesdays). You also will get Go Triad on Thursdays and Triad Cars on Saturdays, as you do now.

The most significant changes are these:

* Local content fills the front page and the next several pages of the first section. National and world news will follow. Obituaries appear just before the editorial pages in the back of the section.
* The weather package is on Page A7 today. We reduced it in size by eliminating the maps and world temperatures. The meteorological data remain.
* The Business page is moved to the back of Sports. We removed some indices from the stock chart, but none of the daily stock listings.

We took pains to drop only content that is readily available in many other places.
Sunday's newspaper will not change; you will get both a front section and Local section on Sundays.

We plan to make a few other changes on Mondays and Tuesdays, and I'll tell you about those next week.

Give us a call at 274-5476 if you have questions.

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When features editor Susan Ladd asked you to tell us what you would say to President-elect Barack Obama, she knew it would strike a positive chord.

She was thinking we might get 100 responses. After all, he has inspired millions with his ideas and rhetoric.

Think again. We got more than 350, some of which you can read in the Life section today.

At about the same time, we asked you to send us your photographs so that we could use them as part of a special edition on Inauguration Day.

We were nervous, though, because we needed at least 150 mugshots to create a photographic mosaic in Obama's image. That's a lot to ask when people are so busy with more important matters over the Christmas holidays.

Oh we of little faith. You sent us more than 470 photos.

Here's a preview only for readers of this blog!

My newspaper column

These are tough times for people trying to hold onto their jobs.

These are tough times, too, for businesses as customers keep a tight grip on their pocketbooks.

The newspaper isn't immune to the economic downturn. When you make your living primarily from local advertising, you feel the pain.

Like most businesses, we’re trying to keep our expenses down, and the effects are noticeable. The paper is smaller, with fewer pages on some days than we've seen in years.

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As many of you know, our Wednesday, Nov. 5, front page featured a full-page photo of President-elect Barack Obama under the headline "Obama Triumphs."
That issue sold flat, plumb out. The last time we had a sellout was Sept. 12, 2001.

Because of the demand, we put the front section back on our presses that evening and ran off another 12,000 copies. Some people came by and bought copies fresh off the press. On Thursday morning, our lobby was packed with people buying copies. One man bought 200. We sold out of those, too.

On Saturday morning, we distributed a full-page commemorative poster of Obama in the paper. That edition sold well.

One thing has bothered me about the discussion of the distribution of the "Radical Islam" DVD. Some of those papers explaining their decisions to distribute the DVD to readers suggest that not doing so is censorship. And that they are erring on the side of free speech.

Of course, it's not free speech. It's a paid advertisement making the case for one side of a complicated, controversial issue. The papers will distribute the other sides, presumably, if they can come up with the money to pay for it. But most likely, the papers will not publish their information because the other sides won't take out ads.

As for censorship, not distributing a paid advertisement is not censorship. Newspapers decide not to publish information every day. Most of the time we call it news judgment. Other times we call it lack of space. We never call it censorship...particularly when the information is readily available elsewhere, as it is in this case (on YouTube).

Just saying.

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Related posts.

Ted Vaden of the N&O presents another view.

Last weekend, dozens of newspapers across the country distributed a controversial DVD called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" with their advertising circulars.

We weren't one of them, and I want to tell you why.

First, some background: The documentary raised the hackles of religious and political groups. Among other things, it shows Muslim children being encouraged to become suicide bombers and draws numerous parallels between radical Islamists and Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

It has been called inflammatory and hateful. It’s also been called "one of the most important films of our time" by a CNN commentator.

The DVD has been distributed as a paid advertisement in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Wall Street Journal and the St. Petersburg Times, among others. In North Carolina, The Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer in Raleigh delivered it to readers.

My newspaper column

I was at the doctor's office last week, and we were talking about the newspaper.

He said he liked the newspaper, but -- almost everyone has a "but" when talking about the paper -- he had a suggestion: Do a better job with subject-verb agreement.

"None takes a singular verb," he said. "Too often I read: 'None are.'"

The hearts of retired English teachers everywhere soar. But this isn't a column about grammar. I am definitely the wrong person to write that one.

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Now that the Republican and Democratic national conventions are over, the political campaign has officially started.

Oh, you thought it started a year ago? You ain’t seen nothin' yet.

There's no question this is a historic election; every presidential election is. But this one is stacking up to be as exciting as any in recent memory.

We plan to treat it that way, too.

Two weeks ago, I asked members of our reader advisory network what they wanted to know about Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama. The answers from 100-plus people who responded were direct.

"Their stands on specific issues," one wrote. "Economy, health care, education, natural resources and Social Security."

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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:

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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.

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Last Sunday, we published a gripping story about the firefight in Afghanistan that killed or injured at least 24 American soldiers, including two from the Piedmont Triad.

The battle against about 200 Taliban insurgents in eastern Afghanistan's Kunar province was, at its core, about American tenacity and courage. It was all the more personal to Piedmont Triad readers because Army Cpl. Pruitt Rainey of Haw River died there and Sgt. Matthew Gobble of Thomasville was injured.

We had written about Rainey and Gobble earlier in the week, but this story of the battle was different. And it is worth noting how it came to be published on our front page.

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The last issue of TV Week, our weekly television guide, was delivered Saturday.

Beginning next Saturday, the daily listings in the Life section will feature more channels and expanded hours to help you decide what to watch.

The daily list will include 62 channels, an increase of 14 and equaling the number in TV Week. We are also expanding the time frame for which we list programs, from 9 a.m. until midnight. Currently, the daily listing runs from 8 p.m. to midnight. Sports events on television will be on the daily listings grid and are on page C2 in the Sports section.

We continued to publish TV Week as long as we did because we know that some of you rely on it. But the tipping point came as its readership continued to decline, its cost continued to rise, and on-screen cable guides grew in popularity.

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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.

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.

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"Who are you going to vote for?" is almost as common a question in my household as "What's for dinner?"

With the May 6 primary looming, it is a darned good question. Not only are dozens of presidential, state and local candidates vying for your attention, but Guilford County voters must decide whether to approve a total of $671.6 million in bonds.

It can be a daunting, frustrating time for even the most engaged citizen.

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On July 20, 1909, one of the headlines on the front page of the Greensboro Daily News was: "Milk and water proper drinks for children; Educational department issues bulletin for use in schools; intoxicants and tobacco are poison to them."

Before you roll your eyes, remember this: it took 56 more years before the legislators required the Surgeon General's warning on cigarette packs.

The headline across the top of the Greensboro Record on April 3, 1936, was "Storm death toll reaches 12; more than 100 suffer injuries in catastrophes." A powerful tornado devastated downtown the night before.

On Feb. 2, 1960, there are 18 stories that started on the Record's front page. None of them referred to one of the most famous acts in Greensboro history: the sit-ins at the local Woolworth's. That story appeared on the front page of the second section.

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You notice there isn't any color on the front page of this section, and that the weather page is in black and white.

If this were a construction site, we'd have a sign up that reads: "Excuse our dust. We're renovating to serve you better."

We're in the process of rebuilding our 32-year-old press. I won't bore you with the gory details but it is not unlike replacing a major appliance in your home part by part while still expecting it to operate day-in and day-out.

Essentially, it means that some of our press units will be offline periodically through June. Occasionally pages that are normally in color won't be. We hope to keep that to a minimum.

The result will be a cleaner look so we think the momentary "construction dust" will be worth it.

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It was an eventful week down at the Melvin Municipal Building, a.k.a. Greensboro City Hall.

The City Council held a special meeting to discuss the city manager's performance. The city manager keeps his job but gets a list of issues to fix. Citizens hear a bit -- just a bit -- about problems involving the Fire Department and Parks and Recreation Department.

Everything began coming to a head two weeks ago when the city told reporter Margaret Banks that a Police Department memo she asked for didn't exist. Two days later, blogger Ben Holder and The Rhinoceros Times published what they said was that very memo.

She then asked for another Police Department memo, which the city said it had but could not legally release. Holder and The Rhino published that memo, too.

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I first encountered the work of Jim Schlosser when I interviewed for a reporter's job at the News & Record in 1984.

An editor asked what I thought of that day's paper.

The best story in the paper, I responded, was on the front page of the local section. It was about an old Oshkosh advertisement painted on the side of the Belk department store downtown.

The editor smiled. "That's Jim Schlosser. He's the best we have."

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In 1964, Frank Batten Sr. owned two newspapers in Norfolk, Va., and was focused on buying the Greensboro Daily News, The Greensboro Record and WFMY from the Jeffress family.

Batten, who went on to build a billion-dollar media company -- Landmark Communications, which now includes dozens of newspapers, two television stations and the Weather Channel -- said it wasn't exactly a standard transaction.

As he recounts in his 2002 book, "The Weather Channel: the Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon," the deal hinged more on personal values than market values.

"We reached a verbal understanding with the owners, and both parties signed their names to a one-page agreement. About a week later, another qualified buyer offered to pay several million dollars more than our agreed-upon price.

"Even though our one-page agreement would never have survived in court, the owners honored it, and we acquired the papers and station at the original price. I like to think that Landmark would have behaved in exactly the same way had our roles been reversed."

My newspaper column

I am unsure when I finally realized that the true joy in Christmas was more about giving than getting.

I have always loved getting presents, so I may have been slower than most of you to understand how much fun it is to put something under the tree for someone else.

But I eventually got it. Even as I get distracted by the crowds at the mall, the Christmas lights that don't light, and the overall stress of the season, the joy of making someone else's day a little brighter carries me through.

I hope the newspaper reflects that, too.

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My mood was dark as I drove home that day in late September.

Eighteen months after the resignation of the police chief, some people were still arguing about what led to it and whose fault it was. Fifteen months after the report of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, some people were still talking about what to do with it. Mudslinging had started in the Greensboro City Council primary, an election that ultimately inspired 93 percent of the electorate to stay home.

Some people were feeling disenfranchised, while others were disengaged. It was as if the "Greensboro Disease" of negativity to change had reached epidemic proportions.

When I walked into the house, I saw a copy of the Oct. 1 edition of Newsweek with a cover story titled "How to Heal the World."

"The world?" I thought. "How about Greensboro?" The idea for this package was born. We didn't know what we were getting into -- and, honestly, we still don't -- but we believe this is a critical time for the city.

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Earlier post and later post.

I'm no language maven.

I think I'm like many people; I struggled through the spelling and grammar portions of English class, memorizing rules long enough for the test and then forgetting them to provide brain room for the next test.

I'm fortunate that we have crackerjack copy editors who read behind me and our other writers to clean up our grammatical and spelling mistakes, among other things.

Those editors help keep our style and usage consistent throughout the newspaper. As a result, they suffer the lashes of retired English teachers and self-taught grammarians everywhere when we misstep.

But I'll come right out and say it: We make many fewer mistakes in language usage than people think.

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Nothing gets under the skin of an editor like publishing a mistake in a story. A mistake is worse than a missed story or getting beat by a competitor. Getting lectured by a windbag politician is even better than making a mistake in a story.

For the record, the big "important" errors are not the worst. Those are the small mistakes that have the greatest personal consequences: the misspelled names, the wrong dates, the transposition of digits in a phone number. They not only inconvenience people, they disrespect them, too.

That hit home last Sunday when we inadvertently substituted the name of Grimsley High School's second-string goalkeeper for the name of the starting keeper in a story about the boy's soccer team playing in the state championship.

I follow the Whirlies soccer team, and I know the first-string keeper, Will Curtis, and his parents. I opened the Sunday paper, hoping to read about a Grimsley victory, only to stop cold when the story referred to someone other than Will as the keeper.

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If all you read is the front page, you might think that last week was hard on Guilford County high schools.

* A teacher at Smith High School is suspended after insulting and cursing at students.
* A teacher at Dudley resigns after fighting with a student.
* Twelve students at Southern Guilford face suspensions and possible criminal charges for a fight at school.

But admittedly, the front page doesn't paint a true picture of what's happening in the high schools. Elsewhere we wrote about:

* The Dudley High School Thespians performed well enough to compete in the State High School Theater Festival last week.
* The National Honor Society of Northwest High School raised more than $1,500 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
* The Early College at Guilford will raise money for the school at a book fair at Barnes & Noble at Friendly Center Dec. 14.

Those stories were shorter, and we published them in the Guilford Record and the Rock Creek Record, two publications we circulate in Guilford County.

So it is a fair question to ask why the bad news about the schools makes the front page so often.