News-Record.com

Recently I was walking TALKING with someone locally and mentioned that there was a local group working to make sure poorer communities in our area had Internet access. At the time, I was offline and couldn't remember exactly what the group was doing, or who was involved, but I knew I had the info in my e-mail at work and I promised to put the person I was talking to in touch with that group.

So now I'm back at work and I have the info handy. Unfortunately, I've completely forgotten whom I was talking to about it. I've gone back through my calendar, e-mail and other stuff to try to jog my memory and I've come up blank. I'm pretty sure the occasion must have been social since I have no record of this in my story notebooks. But I don't have that many social engagements, and I'm still coming up empty.

So if it was you -- or if it wasn't you, but the subject interests you and you think you might want to help -- please give me a shout and I'll hook you up with that group.

That'd be me. A few quick things on my radar (and by all means feel free to let me know what I'm missing):

• Because of my unfortunate indisposition (and trust me, you don't want to know), I missed the Friday news conference regarding upcoming public discussions of the Truth & Reconciliation report (my colleague Tom Steadman's story is here).
  
• I'm trying to get details nailed down regarding the legal clinic for military veterans that N.C. Central University has talked about opening at its law school. As envisioned, NCCU and UNC-Chapel Hill laws students, supervised by lawyers, would work with veterans on their claims for government benefits at no charge to the vets. I don't have confirmation yet on specific details and began playing phone tag with NCCU's legal-clinic director before my illness.


• I'm beginning a look at vets' efforts to get help for post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm just dipping my toes in, but I've been fascinated by the case of an area man who survived a Vietnam War incident, long classified, that was sort of the Viet Cong "Guns of Navarone."


• Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net is up and running. I'll need to take more of a look at it before I'll have anything useful to say, if, indeed, I ever do. Meanwhile, it has initiatives related to tomorrow's elections here and here that you can take part in (if you hurry).


• Gannett, the country's largest newspaper chain, will be imposing citizen journalism on its larger papers from the top down. I need to find out a lot more about this. I will admit to a fair bit of up-front skepticism only because the approach seems to mirror a pattern I've seen in Gannett's news-coverage initiatives: push direction down hard from the top in a way that seems to read the words but totally miss the music, so to speak. In the meantime it's entirely possible that an erstwhile colleague who has spent quite a bit of time in the belly of that particular beast will, I hope, offer some specific details and some quality perspective on the effort.


• Relatedly, here's one example in which newspaper, community and the nature of a specific story came together to produce the kind of citizen journalism that so far we've only been able to dream about:
  

  
  Consider what the nation's largest newspaper publisher, Gannett Co., is doing at The News Press, its paper in Ft. Myers, Fla.

  Earlier this year, News Press editors and reporters began hearing that the sewer district in nearby Cape Coral was charging residents as much as $28,000 a year to pay for new residential lines. In an experiment, it asked its readers online and in print to "Help Us Investigate!"

  The response was overwhelming, said Cindy McCurry-Ross, the paper's senior managing editor. Readers sent in tips, and a key audit document. The result was a journalistic win--a drop in sewer assessments--as well as a potential business enhancement: Traffic on the Web site soared, giving ad salespeople ammunition to take to clients.

  "It was a frenzy,' McCurry-Ross said.

• I'll be covering Tuesday night's City Council meeting so that Margaret can cover the city bond referenda. I haven't seen the agenda yet -- I'm running over in a bit to pick up a copy because the online link isn't working -- but I understand it's heavy on rezoning hearings.

Josh Jennings: Not a real candidate. But his ads are really funny.

And, seriously? Please vote tomorrow. If you're, you know, eligible and all. Otherwise, not so much. Thanks!

Ex-journalist Nancy Nall has as good a description as any I've read of what it's like to work for a small or medium-sized American newspaper on Election Day. She nails the details right down to the company-bought pizza in the newsroom.

Problem is, because I'm covering the City Council meeting so that Margaret, normally your intrepid city-government reporter, can report on the bond referenda, I'll be over at the Melvin Municipal Office Building and Nail Salon from about Pizza Minus 3 Hours until around 11.

This is tragic.

I’ve offered a bounty of free soda to anyone on the city desk who will save me four slices of Meat Lovers and/or Pepperoni 'n' Mushroom. The only response I got was from the government editor, Eddie Wooten, who’s running a marathon on Sunday and said he’d fight me for 'em because he's carb-loading.

Being reasonable, I said I’d rip his arm off and beat him over the head with it to get those slices. But I also pointed out that because he’d be lighter and be getting blood transfusions and IV fluids between now and Sunday as a result, his time should improve and so everyone's a winner.

For the first time since -- no kidding -- 1978, I'm going to be somewhere other than in a newsroom or in front of a TV on a federal-election night. Massive issues are at stake locally and nationally, and I’m gonna be in a room with no wireless [to clarify, the room might or might not have wireless -- I don't know -- but I almost certainly will not], listening to a discussion of the merits of Office-Institutional vs. Commercial. Granted, 360 or so nights out of the year I'm perfectly happy to do this because I'm a policy nerd like that. But Election Night is not one of those nights.

But that's why I get the big bucks. Or, as Nance says, "Small-market journalism is a study in self-debasement." Not that I wasn't already pretty debased before I even got into this racket.

UPDATE: We've posted online the Oct. 24 letter from the nonprofit's outside accountant and the subsequent letter from the nonprofit's treasurer. Links can be found at the online version of the article, here.

A few tidbits I didn't have room to include in the print edition:

• When the state audits a grant recipient, auditors typically meet with the grant recipient afterward to go over questions and concerns before writing up the report. For whatever reason, that didn't happen in this case, and no one I've talked to so far can tell me why. Amelia Parker said the nonprofit sought a face-to-face meeting with auditors after it received a copy of Auditor Les Merritt's Sept. 29 letter to the Department of Cultural Resources, which originated the grant, but had been unable to get one scheduled before Merritt's letter was posted on the Web on Tuesday.
• This fact is particularly important in light of the fact that museum officials insist they have documentation for all expenses covered by the grant money. Because I have been denied access to the state's work papers (at least for now), I can't independently verify or disprove the museum's claim -- I'd have to know what the expenses the state thinks were undocumented were before I'd be able to determine whether the museum actually has documentation.
• I'm sure anyone looking at the state's letter online was particularly intrigued by the notion of "big-screen TVs." But, as Parker said, we're not talking about something you could go pick up at Best Buy. We're talking about plasma screens for interactive audio/video displays -- specialized equipment. It's being stored in Sit-In Movement Inc.'s current administrative offices, up Elm Street from the museum site. And, yes, the storage is climate-controlled.
• One other big-ticket item that was purchased in '04 when February 2005 was still the planned opening date was a quantity of structural steel for the building renovations. Richard "Skip" Moore, president of the Weaver Foundation, speculates that even with the cost of storing the steel offsite since its purchase, steel is so much more expensive now than it was in '04 that the museum might still be better off financially in this regard. Not having precise figures available, I don't know whether that's true, but it's a possibility I hadn't thought of.

I'm writing a story for the weekend that looks forward in light of Tuesday's defeat of bonds for the museum renovation. Any new information I gather about this audit in the course of writing that story, I'll try to include or else blog here. After that, I'm not sure whose coverage responsibility the museum will be.

So former New York Times reporter (or Bush-administration mouthpiece) Judith Miller was actually presuming to lecture the rest of us this past weekend on journalism ethics.

It is to laugh.

Now, to be absolutely, positively, scrupulously fair to Miller, she's quite right about increasing levels of secrecy, and corresponding decreases in the levels of freedom, in this country. In fact, the country's voters spoke rather loudly last Tuesday to the effect that they get that and want to do something about it.

But I had to laugh at this:

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don't post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

While she advocates a federal shield law to protect mainstream journalists from divulging their sources, she doesn't favor extending that to bloggers who don't follow the standards and ethnics of the journalism industry.

Still, she wouldn't restrict a blogger's right to publish online. She said some bloggers have been invaluable in uncovering government flaws.

"I'm glad to welcome them as long as they agree to the standards," she said.

Tell me, Miss "I was proved f------ right": What exactly are the standards?:

On September 7, 2002, Miller and Times reporter Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed "Bush administration officials" who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."[4]

Miller added that "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war." Although Miller conceded that some intelligence experts found the information on Iraq's weapons programs "spotty," she did not report specific and detailed objections, including a report filed with the US government more than a year before Miller's article appeared by retired Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, Houston G. Wood III, who concluded that the tubes were not meant for centrifuges.

Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

Miller would later claim, based only on second-hand statements from the military unit she was embedded with, that WMDs had been found in Iraq. (NYT; April 21, 2003) This again was widely repeated in the press. "Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun," Miller said on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "What they've found is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the programs, who knows them, firsthand, and who has led MET Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions." This story also turned out to be false.[5]

On May 26, 2004, a week after the U.S. government apparently severed ties with Ahmed Chalabi, a Times editorial acknowledged that some of that newspaper's coverage in the run-up to the war had relied too heavily on Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles bent on regime change. It also regretted that "information that was controversial [was] allowed to stand unchallenged." While the editorial rejected "blame on individual reporters," others noted that ten of the twelve flawed stories discussed had been written or co-written by Miller.[6]

Miller has reacted angrily to criticism of her pre-war reporting. In a May 27, 2004 article in Salon, published the day after the Times mea culpa, James C. Moore quoted her: "You know what," she offered angrily. "I was proved f------ right. That's what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, 'There she goes again.' But I was proved f------ right." This quotation was originally in relation to another Miller story, wherein she indicated that trailers found in Iraq had been proven to be mobile weapons labs. That too was later shown to be untrue.

So tell us, Judy: Is it OK if the bloggers lie the country into a war, like you did, as long as they correct their misspellings?

Actually, strike that. I'll tell you what: In the unlikely event we who are still in the business of trying to report stuff instead of making stuff up need your advice, we'll beat it out of you. Otherwise? Just. Shut. Up. Our jobs are hard enough as it is.

Cable network C-Span has launched "Viewfinder," a way for people to contribute video to the network's Web site.

On Sunday, I published an article on concerns about whether or not the federal and state governments will be able to deal effectively with an expected jump in the number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and related mental problems.

The article noted that Gov. Mike Easley had convened a summit on Sept. 27 of professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds to discuss how to ensure that returning veterans get mental-health and substance-abuse services they need, and that a report from that summit was due Monday to Carmen Hooker Odom, the state Secretary of Health and Human Services.

That report was released this morning; you can read it online here.