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... but when you spend it like this it's not what I'd call relaxing. But it's over and I'm back in the office, working hard.
But you're all, "Like I care." You're all, "Bummer about your dad and all, but you must MAKE ME LAUGH!" So, because I indeed must make you laugh, and because cats + stuff = funny, here's a site for your entertainment pleasure: StuffOnMyCat.com. My favorite one is the one of the tiger.
... because God forbid I should commit any, you know, journalism or anything:
I'm actually working on other things today, but Diane Lamb, ace director of our News Research Center, just sent me a copy of an e-mail containing some potentially interesting/useful news resources, which I'm happy to reproduce here (if I can get the HTML to work):
Because of both the nature and the timing of the London bombings yesterday, Tim Porter writes, daily newspapers were pretty much useless:
Stories, photos, audio and video reporting on the horrific bombings in London fill the airwaves, top the web sites of news organizations and occupy the attention of the blogosphere. The front page of the Times is dominated by a photo showing a throng of Londoners cheering for the city's successful Olympic bid. How sadly outdated it is today. ...The first-day story no longer belongs to newspapers - and hasn't for a long time. It isn't even the property of professional journalists any longer.
Porter's post is accompanied by a photo, taken by a London Underground passenger with a cell phone, of another rider with a cloth over his face. He continues:
It was taken by Adam Stacey, a passenger on the "Northern line, just past Kings Cross" some time after the bombing on that train and uploaded to a moblog (then picked up by the BBC.) Terrorism made Stacey a victim; technology made him a reporter. ...The participatory nature of the news coverage of the London bombings - from photos on the BBC to Flickr, from blogger Norm Geras and to David Carr in London (posting in Samizdata) - erases the line between those affected by the news and those who cover the news.
In a world of digital empowerment and reflexive communication, we are all reporters.
But is there still a role for newspapers to play? Emphatically, Porter says, but they should be providing "everything but the news":
I want the type of reporting that professionals can still do better than citizens, but also pointers to the best of the citizen work:Context: The history of terrorism in London and on the European continent.
Update: What happened to the Madrid subway bombing suspects?
Local: What are the safety measures on the New York subway system? On BART in the Bay Area? How have they changed since the Madrid bombing? What money is involved? (This is local relative to the daily papers Porter reads; he lists them elsewhere in the post -- Lex)
Geography: A large, data-rich info-graphic of what happened (which is so hard to read online).
People like me: London is filled with American tourists. Tell me their stories.
Debate: An op-ed page devoted to liberty vs. security. (I think that's a false dichotomy, a trip-and-fall into the common journalistic trap of presuming two, and only two, distinct "sides" to a story. But, yes, some sort of enlightened opinion writing from a variety of viewpoints -- Lex)
Voices: The words and images of those who were there.
So: How'd we do?
There's quite the debate going on within the journalism community as to whether New York Times reporter Judith Miller should have been jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury. I say yes on substantive grounds, no on procedural grounds. Let me explain what I mean below the jump, for those who care.
UPDATE: See the update at the bottom of the jump.
From an e-mail just sent to the News Department from colleague Nate DeGraff:
Scott Simon's interview with superstar courts scribe Eric Collins will air on NPR's "Weekend Edition" tomorrow morning between 8 and 10 a.m. They'll chat about Eric's stories on whether witnesses should be allowed to swear in on the Quran before testifying. The interview was recorded this afternoon."I probably sound like an idiot," he said. I didn’t disagree.
No word on whether our young friend will attempt to show off by referring to himself as the News & Record's "legal affairs correspondent."
That Nate. Such a warm, affirming guy.
You can listen to the program on local NPR affiliates WFDD (88.5 FM) and WUNC (91.5 FM), or on the Internet here.
I'm about to walk out of the office for the weekend, but as it stands right now, we will be launching our redesigned site sometime Monday morning -- early enough to catch a lot of people still at home, we hope, but late enough that we can have plenty of staff here to deal with any significant problems.
The URL will be the same: http://www.news-record.com
This will be what is called a "soft launch," meaning we expect some ragged edges and not everything that's supposed to be up will be at first.
In particular -- and this obviously is a big disappointment -- before we can enable comments on all stories, we're going to have to figure out a permanent policy on whether and how we're going to require users to register. As JR has mentioned, the problem of abusive and/or obscene comments, particularly at our Letters blog, might require a more forceful solution. That problem relates to the redesign because the company that created our new system has never created a registration system, the tech folks tell me.
In the meantime, stories will be accompanied by links to our existing online discussion forums for news, sports and other subjects.
Once the new site goes live -- and for any newbies, you'll know because our banner across the top will be red instead of green -- please e-mail any comments, concerns or questions here.
And cross your fingers.
The new site is up.
For the second time this morning, in fact. One of our vendor's servers was a little glitchy the first go-'round.
Look it over and tell us how you like it.
One point we mentioned earlier about this change probably bears repeating: As part of this transformation, unfortunately, all older links to N&R article online will rot. There's nothing we could do about that. The good news is that in this new system, once a story gets a link, that link should be permanent, which was not always the case under the old system.
When someone asks you why you didn't include a News & Record newsroom Webcam in the redesigned Web site, sort of like the Bourbon Street Webcam in the New Orleans Times-Picayune's site, the correct answer is probably not "Because we thought all the nudity would be offputting."
But that's just my opinion. JR might differ.
It's hard to parody something that parodies itself, but Chris Pirillo manages the trick quite nicely. Caution: flying toenails!
Why'd New York Times reporter Judith Miller go to jail rather than give up a source? So we would still be free to continue reading news like this, apparently:
A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House now says its official position is not to comment on the case while it is under investigation by a federal special prosecutor, said Mr. Rove had gone about his business as usual on Monday.
Can you imagine what would have happened to the country if the Times hadn't used an anonymous source to provide that information??
We had a meeting this morning of most of the people involved with our Web-site redesign to assess feedback (ours and yours) and discuss some of the changes we want to make based on that feedback. As we said, this is a work in progress.
Probably the most notable change will be to the rectangular area now headed "News & Record Multimedia." To address what many of us thought was an insufficient emphasis on the elements of our site that are part of the Town Square initiative, we're going to make that area sort of Town Square Central, with a logo and links to blogs, podcasts, multimedia presentations, and links to where you can read or submit items for YourNews. That last element currently is missing entirely from the home page -- D'OH!!! -- an oversight that was noticed right after the beta site was posted but somehow fell through the cracks during revisions.
We will also be adding a Town Square tab to the row of tabs you see near the top of the page -- News, Sports, Money, etc. Yes, that's redundant, but we figure that where elements of the Town Square are concerned, redundancy is a Good Thing.
Those are the headlines. There also will be some minor design and/or technical tweaks, such as setting up a rotating "Featured Blog" on every subject tab. And, of course, the overall design of many existing pages still has to be changed to conform to the style of the home page. That will be a rolling process for the next several weeks. But the tech folks hope to have all the work on this "punch list," if you will, completed by late August.
The key issue to come out of the meeting for more study and discussion is whether and how to implement registration for people wishing to comment on the blogs. (This has been a hot discussion topic here and elsewhere on our site.) There'll be more to report on this after more discussion takes place.
And, finally, the key question: Yes, the red banner at the top of the page (which, if you'll look carefully, is tied into a red-based color scheme that attaches design elements of that color to parts of the page that we're especially trying to emphasize) is going to stay. I was mentioning this to our brand manager, Ed Williams (whose job, among other things, includes overseeing the additional promotion of the site that we have in the works), and he said, "Better red than dead!" Of course, he has been saying this ever since I've known him, which is 18 years and change now, so I'm not quite sure how much to read into it.
The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission will hold its first hearings from 2 to 9 p.m. Friday and from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Weaver Educational Center, 300 S. Spring St. in downtown Greensboro.
Those sessions will be recorded for later podcast/download from our site.
Paul Chesser, whom readers with long memories might recall as an occasional guest contributor to our Religion pages in the mid-1990s, reaches a nationwide audience today with a guest column in The Washington Times defending the careful, judicious use of anonymous sources to expose government wrongdoing.
I'm not a huge fan of anonymous sources in stories. I've tried to avoid them and have required my reporters to try to do the same. But sometimes, there just is no substitute.
According to this page, I'm supposed to be having ideas.
Man. This job just got a lot harder.
When we launched the Town Square initiative, we indicated that a revamped Web site would be a big part of it but that there would be other aspects, too. We're now ready to start talking about one in particular, and because the person leading that effort, Community Editor Betsi Robinson, doesn't have a blog (yet), I'm letting her borrow mine to tell you about it:
A few days ago the Community News Team here at the News & Record met to talk about an exciting new project we are planning in Summerfield. Some of you may have heard about the new community page and Web project we hope to launch in September. In June we hosted two "Backyard BBQs" to find out what residents in your community might like to see included in such a project. Your feedback proved extremely helpful, so now we're getting down to the nitty gritty.Soon we'll be contacting churches, schools, civic groups and neighborhood associations in Summerfield to find people interested in becoming "community correspondents," people willing to write short stories about what their groups are up to and snap photos at community events. You know, the civic club's latest effort, the Little League championship, the church mission trip, the neighborhood park project, the school play. We figure you know more about what's going on in your community than we could ever hope to.
We're not looking for professional journalists here, just folks who care about the community and want to share news with their neighbors.
The cool thing about this project is that it will be much more than a special page in the paper each week featuring news about your community. Most of what we'll offer by way of news and photos will be posted first on the Web, with the best of what we get appearing in the printed News & Record each week. And we'll have columnists and community bloggers you can converse with.
We hope you'll say yes when we call asking for your help, or point us in the direction of someone who will. The success of this project depends mostly on you. We’re simply providing the forum. We hope it will be the start of a great partnership.
This Summerfield initiative will be duplicated in other parts of our coverage area. Our goal is more inclusive, authentic journalism. We know you want to get your news into the paper. So do we. This is just one more way in which we can do it.
Betsi will be getting her own blog soon so that she can talk with you about this project in more detail. For now, if you're interested in getting involved or have questions, click on the link above to send her an e-mail.
News & Record reporter Allison Perkins has been spending some time in Iraq. This week she and I had three telephone conversations on her trip, which was primarily to report on a Greensboro-based Marine unit now stationed west of Baghdad. The audio files from our telephone conversations are now up, both as streaming audio and as podcasts for download, here.
I wasn't exactly prepared to be the person talking with Allison, so I didn't have a list of questions to ask her and was pretty much just winging it.
The sharp-eyed (or sharp-eared) among you also will notice that the quality of the production ain't the greatest. (Herb Everett is our resident News podcast expert, but he has been on vacation this week.) That's OK; I think what you'll hear will whet your appetite for the stories, photos and video Allison will begin filing this weekend from Kuwait.
Audio from this past weekend's Truth & Reconciliation Commission hearings is now up here in both downloadable and streaming formats. It's not as neatly indexed as I'd prefer, but that was the tradeoff for getting the files up (relatively) quickly.
One week (well, actually, eight days) after the launch of the redesigned site, here's what our tech folks are focusing on, according to an e-mail I received today from techie extraordinaire Charlie Stafford:
In related developments, Mike Fuchs, Herb Everett and I are now set up to create new blogs without the involvement of the tech folks. We will begin doing so as soon as the new blog templates are complete, probably early next week. This change gives us more freedom and flexibility to add to our blog stable while freeing the tech folks to do more complex work.
We continue to welcome your feedback on the site, particularly if you have spotted something that doesn't work or thought of a feature we ought to add.
Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest owner of radio stations and also the owner of many outdoor concert amphitheaters, argued in court this week that a lease with a Florida state agency of its $23 million Ford Amphitheater means that amphitheater legally should be immune from noise ordinances and exempt from paying property taxes.
Still, it was a creative argument -- given the tightness of a lot of Clear Channel stations' playlists, creativity isn't the first trait you might associate with the company -- and as the first article shows, the facts weren't quite as clear-cut as you might think.
The judge urged both sides to settle quickly, so I've got a suggestion for a settlement: Clear Channel can have government status if it agrees to government oversight, sets itself a government pay/benefits scale, and returns 100% of its profits to taxpayers.
Just a thought.
... on a couple of fronts.
First, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has reached a $10M settlement with industry giant Sony BMG and has the industry's biggest other players in his sights as he singlehandedly tries to stamp out "payola," the practice of bribing radio stations to play particular records. Good luck with that, but it's always good to see record moguls have to lawyer up. (During my time in the music/radio bidness, I had decent relations with most record-company promo reps, primarily because I always felt free to tell them when a record just plain sucked, but had nothing but contempt for the way they treated bands I knew.)
But the bigger danger to the industry might be ... wait for it ... Wal-Mart. Chris Anderson at The Long Tail, combining research of secondary sources with in-person visits, describes how record sales are constrained by America's largest retailer, which sells about one-fifth of all the recorded music Americans buy in a year. Some notable observations:
He concludes, dead-on: "It's the paradox of plenty: a mile wide and an inch deep may look like everything at first glance, but in a world that's actually a mile wide and a mile deep a veneer of variety is not enough."
... our new blog template, that is.
Comments welcome. Kudos to Charlie Stafford and Stephen Paschall for their hard work. Complaints to me.
UPDATE: Well, here's one complaint: Where's my header graphic? :-)
UPDATE: Wow. THAT was fast.
I recently received an e-mail, which I apparently trashed without meaning to, from a woman asking whether there was any place one could write to get a soldier serving in Iraq as a pen pal. Since I didn't know where to respond to the writer, I'm posting the answer here.
I e-mailed Allison Perkins, who just filed this wonderful series of stories, photos, audio and video from Iraq. Here's what she said:
For security reasons, the Pentagon does not allow letters or packages marked "to a U.S. soldier," which used to be the easiest way to get a penpal. The only way to do it now is to actually contact a unit and have a name before you write them. I will email some of the guys here and the pao [Public Affairs Officer] and see if they want to write. Otherwise, the reader is kind of out of luck, unfortunately.
On the bright side, I can't imagine that in any unit of company size or larger there wouldn't be at least a few people eager to get mail, even if it's from strangers.
I'll keep you posted on what Allison finds out.
You also might want to visit AnySoldier.com, which can match people up with service people seeking pen pals. Read the "About this site" and "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ) tabs thoroughly first, however.
Bob Cauthen, in his first post at Corante.com, has some things to say to the Big Mainstream Media of which he once, via the San Francisco Chronicle, was a part:
Memo to mainstream media: You don't get to blog.You have a publishing apparatus. So you don't get to blog. You have a broadcasting apparatus. So you don't get to blog.
In case you missed this the point while you were reading up on youth slang, I'll repeat it for emphasis. You. Do. Not. Get. To. Blog.
Not that you won't try. Currently, there's a rush among traditional media outlets to get into that wicked bitchin', snaps inducing "blogging thing." Almost all of these efforts are agonizingly misguided.
Buzzword compliance is a big deal in traditional media. Unfortunately, in America, media leadership is marbled with mediocre minds. And, like loneliness, mediocrity craves company.
Publishers, editors and broadcasters feel precisely naked if they are not participating in the trend of the moment. They yap about innovation and then simply shamble along, following the lead of others. That's why editors love editorial fads. If one person makes a mistake he or she gets blamed for it. If everyone makes the same mistake, it's an industrywide experiment. No blame. Safety in the mind-numbed crowd...
My first thought on reading this was, "'precisely naked'? As opposed to what, 'approximately naked'? Speaking of 'mediocre minds' ... "
My second thought was, "And just who died and left you King of All Blogging, [expletive]??"
We're not doing what we're doing to be trendy. We're doing it whether anyone else does it or not. In fact, we don't care whether anyone else does it or not. We're doing what we're doing because we think it might be the only way for us to stay in business long-term as an independent journalism operation. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
Moreover, although our blogging is what got us a lot of the initial focus, blogging has never been an end in itself for us. It's a tool, a means to an end. We'll use it as long as it works, "works" being defined as "helps us toward the above-stated goal." And because Bob Cauthen has no earthly idea what might or might not help us toward our particular goal in our particular market, and because this is still a semi-free country, he doesn't get to say who blogs and who doesn't.
Indeed, if blogging has any rules, the first rule is that you don't make rules for blogging.
Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine.com adds:
You are trying to import the worst traits of old, big media -- exclusion, snobbishness, the closed club -- to citizens' media. And it is most unbecoming, especially since you served in both worlds. ...... to say that someone should not blog? That is importing the very worst of old media into new, creating a closed society. ...
How much better it would be if you took your experience working for (cough) big media and (ahem) blogs and suggested how your former colleagues should approach this new and wonderful world. Instead, you slam the door in their face and then stick your tongue out at them from the other side.
This is how bloggers get a bad reputation. This is how journalism got a bad reputation. We should know better.
Ever since strumming my first guitar at age 11, I've prided myself on being reasonably well-informed about pop culture. Even as I weaned myself from network TV, got married and had kids, friends such as Tony have, sometimes inadvertently, kept me reasonably plugged in, and, of course, in recent years I've had all the Internets to help with the task, as well.
But I've finally stumbled across a pop-culture curiosity I've been unable to crack, so in open-source fashion I'm asking you for help. What does this mean?
I've seen it in the form of bumper stickers on the backs of cars, but it's no state, national or navigational flag that I've been able to find. The cars I've seen it on have been driven by people of all races and many apparent nationalities. I've seen it as a decorative front "license plate." I've even seen it as a car magnet in the shape of a six-pointed star, but with rounded points, so that it looked more like a sheriff's badge than a Star of David.
So can anyone help me out here? This is driving me nuts.
Thanks.