News-Record.com

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

Doug Fisher, the University of South Carolina journalism professor who enlivened several discussion sessions at ConvergeSouth this past weekend, has posted his thoughts on the event:

What ensued was a robust discussion about why the News & Record, arguably one of the new-media leaders in the country, especially in opening its online site to the community, still does not have comments on stories. Editorial page editor Allen Johnson noted that comments are on letters to the editor and launched into a litany of the problems the newspaper has with even that, let alone expanding it (a list I suspect could be duplicated at most any paper in the country):

* Not enough time or bodies to moderate them all. Some letters to the editor get 100 or more responses. There's no way to deal with that kind of volume on stories.
* The newspaper's software, a proprietary system, does not have the tools to do it. (For instance, even the inability to have a "report inappropriate content" button.) Lex Alexander of the N&R noted that it takes six to seven years "between the time we dip our toe in the water and tools become available."
* Reporters are talking about it in the newsroom but it "seizes us up" (that last from Joe Killian, one of the N&R's more tech-savvy reporters). There's the time to respond, etc.

The response from those there, who represented a large swath of the blogging community in Greensboro: Let us help you. We'll help police the site and turn in the trolls and flamers, if you let us. We'll help you try to work around your software, if you'll let us (after all, the software brain trust in Greensboro is pretty deep). We think you are important -- so important that we'd like to be involved in how one of the main information organs in our community grows and adapts. We don't particularly want you to die, but if you don't listen to us, we'll move on.

First Observation: If you listen really closely, you'll hear a lot of that. Newspapers have a wonderful opportunity. Their communities realize the challenges they face. They want to help. But this is a limited-time offer. We're squandering it by treating readers as some kind of product to be "captured" and even, it seems in some cases, almost as the enemy, ready to jump ship. If we can get over the psychological barriers and learn to work with our audience as partners, the possibilities are tremendous.

Second Observation: What we heard from Robinson and Johnson reinforces the notion that newspapers remain mired in their legacy as manufacturing operations in a world where news is now a service, not a product. Heck, it's reflected in the language we use. Even at ConvergeSouth, we were talking about newsPAPERS instead of talking about newsROOMS. Mere semantic difference? No, a critical orientation. (Emphasis in original)

I heard the same thing Doug did on Saturday, and the first thing I need to say is: We hear you. We hear you, Doug, and we hear you, Citizen Will and others who spoke Saturday of strengthening the bonds between the N&R and the community.
We understand the value of what we are being offered, we understand that the offer is for a limited time only, and we're going to take you up on it.

I spoke today about how to do so with John Robinson, with News & Record Interactive head Kathy Lambeth, and with a number of other key people who work for one or the other.

Long story short, in January we plan to hold a meeting here at the paper of key N&R news and technology staffers and anyone in the community interested in working with us to address some of these specific technological problems.

We'd do it sooner, but because we want this meeting to lead directly to action, we're first getting our ducks in a row for 2007 budgetwise (departmental budget hearings are going on as I type) and in terms of technological problems and priorities.

At the meeting, we'll go down that list item by item and see whether anyone in the community has the ability and willingness to help us tackle each one. Responsibilities will be assigned, target dates set for completion, and then the meeting will break up and we'll get to work.

We haven't set a firm date for the meeting yet, but in the meantime, if you think you might be interested in coming, please e-mail me. In addition, if you have specific suggestions for technological improvements to the site, please include them, and I'll see that they get to the people who are preparing our priority list for such improvements. (I've begun my own list, based in significant part on some things suggested at ConvergeSouth.)

Obviously, this is not a huge concession on our part, and I don't want to make it sound that way. It's just the opposite, in fact: We'd be nuts not to accept your offer of help. In an e-mail to me earlier today, JR acknowledged that we "stalled" this year in developing the site, emphasized that we must regain momentum in '07, and said this approach fits well with the plans of both the News and the Interactive departments to do so.

I look forward to it.

You might have noticed that the hamster in the exercise wheel who powers our Web site has stopped running our main site, News-Record.com, is down at the moment.

I will refrain from unnecessary snark in pointing out that we're heading into, quite likely, one of the Triad's busiest news days of the year, what with the president's visit and all.

Our tech folks currently are involved in ... well, intense discussions with our vendors, inasmuch as this has been a recurring problem.

More news as it becomes available.

Sigh.

My colleague Joe Killian has an excellent post up at his personal blog on what he calls the "fissure" that leaking of the RMA report on the Greensboro Police Department has created within the Greensboro blogging community.

Journalism - even on a much smaller scale than this - is full of really tough decisions. The options are often lousy. What you think you should do and what you feel you should do aren't always the same thing - and what you can do legally often complicates even the choice between those two. At better papers editors, publishers (and in this case at least) lawyers make these decisions together, and they do it after years in the business making decisions like this, weighing the ethical concerns and seeing the outcome.

Blogging - both because it's a new medium without any real hard and fast ethical rules taken up by many different people with many different motivations and because it is (like politics) a pursuit for which no experience is considered necessary - is bound to bump its head on these things as people use it for journalism. And, because it's a medium that doesn't require collaboration on decisions like this, because it's a medium in which people can do whatever they'd like with information and present it as best suits their views and ends, something this big was bound to cause a fissure in the blogging community.

I think a lot of local bloggers who got involved with the RMA report really got their first taste this weekend of how excruciating some of these decisions can be. I've never argued that journalism is rocket science, but I've also been struck by the number of people who seem to think that pro journalists do without a second thought the kinds of things we often actually sit up nights over. Sometimes there are no good choices, and if we sometimes seem excessively prone to defend a bad choice, it's usually only because all the other choices are much, much worse. Being in that situation is not a good feeling; it makes even some longtime pro journalists literally sick. I think some local folks got their first taste of that feeling during the past few days. I hope -- and please understand I'm saying this without spite or schadenfreude -- they found the experience educational.

I refuse to second-guess any local blogger's decision on how he or she has handled, or declined to handle, the RMA report. (For the record, I have not been involved in the N&R's coverage of the report, nor, at this point, have I read any of the report.) But I want to highlight one of Joe's points: Blogging as a medium doesn't require collaboration; a blogger with information can act unilaterally. Bob Steele, an ethicist at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, wrote a column years ago called Ask These 10 Questions to Make Good Ethical Decisions. At least three of those 10 questions imply that making the best decision on an ethical conundrum simply cannot be done unilaterally:

5. How can I include other people, with different perspectives and diverse ideas, in the decision-making process?

6. Who are the stakeholders -- those affected by my decision? What are their motivations? Which are legitimate? ...

10. Can I clearly and fully justify my thinking and my decision? To my colleagues? To the stakeholders? To the public?

(I also highly recommend Steele's "Guiding Principles for Journalists." As I've often said, anyone can function as a journalist; Steele's work describes how some of the best journalists function.)

I hope and trust that all those who have had a role in the past few days in deciding whether or not to disseminate the RMA report will review Steele's work now, if they have not already -- not only to see whether there was anything they could or should have done differently but also so they'll be better able to grapple with the ethical issues the next time something like this happens.

Because, as surely as I'm sitting here typing and you're sitting there reading, there will be a next time.

From our IT folks:

On Oct. 13, we will be eliminating the use of Instant Messenger at the News & Record for security reasons. Unlike our own email, which is protected by anti-virus software, IM is not protected and presents a security risk to our network and data. Other organizations, such as the Norfolk and Roanoke newspapers, have already gone ahead with this security precaution.

I am sorry if this is an inconvenience for you, but growing security concerns demand enhanced security efforts on our part.

I've probably used Instant Messenger more than most staffers, beginning back when I was in features and found it the easiest way to get in touch with some of our freelancers quickly when I was editing their work. But security is security, and we've long known that our systems are a tempting target. So what can ya do?

On Monday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, in conjunction with Elon University, will release a report called "The Future of the Internet II." (The first such report, released in January 2005, addressed likely technological developments related to the Internet within the next decade.) In it, almost 750 technology experts and futurists were asked to agree or disagree with eight statements describing situations that might exist in 2020 that are affected by, or could have ramifications for, the Internet.

I had lunch and spoke Wednesday with Lee Rainie of the Pew Center and Janna Anderson of Elon University's School of Communications, the lead author of the report. You'll find a story in Monday's N&R, and online you'll be given the text of the same statements studied by the report and have the chance to register your own agreement or disagreement with each prediction (and to explain your thinking). We'll also have a link to the full report online, so that you can review not only the survey results but also -- and this might be the most interesting part -- some participants' individual responses to questions.

The report is under embargo so I can't share any details, but I will say this: I read one part and immediately thought, "Soylent Green ... is people!" But I'm weird like that.

Look for the package on Monday.

Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor who has begun a citizen/professional journalism partnership called NewAssignment.net, announced today that he has gotten a $100,000 grant from Reuters, which will make it possible for him to hire an assigning editor (or wrangler, or whatever they end up calling the position).

This is a huge deal -- someone's putting real money behind a national partnership between professional journalists and interested lay people to produce quality journalism.

As it happens, Jay Rosen is speaking here at the N&R on Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 4, and that event is free and open to the public. That's particularly fortuitous in light of the fact that he won't be able to attend this year's ConvergeSouth, so if this subject interests you, please plan to attend.

Ted Stevens has 'fessed up, but he might not have been the only senator to have put a hold on the bill that would create a searchable online database of federal spending: Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia also remains a suspect.

The circumstantial evidence is compelling. Byrd is the only one of 100 senators not to have publicly taken a position on the bill or at least denied having held it. Moreover, his history as one of the all-time kings of pork-barrel spending (recounted, among other places, in Brian Kelly's excellent 1992 book "Adventures in Porkland") would have made him a prime suspect from the git-go.

Call it citizen journalism. Call it distributed journalism. Call it a blogswarm. Call it what you will, but there's one United States senator with legislative blood on his/her hands, and a whole bunch of bloggers and blog readers, from across the country and across the political spectrum, who are trying to identify him/her.

Seems there was this bill, co-sponsored by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn and Illinois Democrat Barack Obama, that would have let anyone with an Internet connection do some serious scrutiny on federal spending. Just one problem:

The measure had been unanimously passed in a voice vote [in July] by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and had support from heavy hitters such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. It was on the fast track for floor action before Congress recessed on Aug. 4 when someone put [an anonymous] hold on the measure.

Now the bill is in political limbo. Under senate rules, unless the senator who placed the hold decides to lift it, the bill will not be brought up for a vote.

Who is the senator who is preventing a vote on this legislation? We don't know, but Porkbusters.org, GOPProgress.com and Josh Marshall's TPMMuckrakers.com have been trying to find out. The latter site has asked its readers to contact their senators and get them on the record as to whether they were the senator who placed the hold on the bill and is keeping a running tally of what all the groups involved are finding. (Both North Carolina senators have denied being the culprit.)

UPDATE: Looks like we have a prime suspect (though not a confirmed culprit) in Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, godfather of the $223 million "bridge to nowhere," who might have been motivated by Coburn's (unsuccessful) attempt to kill the aforementioned boondoggle. Coburn publicly accused Stevens days ago, but because only a small local newspaper in Arkansas reported it, no one knew at first. But Stevens is only the most likely among five senators who have yet to rule themselves out as suspects.

UPDATE: Stevens 'fesses up. Finally.

So: Anybody have ideas on how we can do something like this locally?

While a few of us discussed citizen journalism last night, Contributing Reader Richard Papier was committing some to mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. (Mike Grossman, our director of new-media content, posted the story and produced the slide show, and a darned good job he did, too.)

6:30 p.m. in our auditorium.

We're at 200 E. Market St., between Davie and Church. You can park in our lot (enter on the Church Street side) and come into the building via the glassed-in entryway on the Church Street side just to the right of the truck-loading area. Security will show you to the auditorium.

Let's talk about what's happening locally, what we'd like to see happen at ConvergeSouth, or whatever else is on your mind.

Among confirmed participants will be Mike Grossman, the N&R's director of new-media content.

Jordan Lenter does.

Share your thoughts about New Orleans and the anniversary of Katrina at YourNews.

I'm pleased to announce that Jay Rosen, a New York University professor and one of the leading thinkers on newspapers and the Internet, will be speaking here at the News & Record at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4. Jay encouraged us to throw this session open to area bloggers as well as N&R staffers, and I'm pleased to do so.

If you're not familiar with Jay, you can peruse his Pressthink blog here. It has become one of a very few must-read sites for those of us wrestling with how newspapers can adapt to the Web and form partnerships with their audiences. He also has begun a new project, NewAssignment.Net, which, with seed money from Craigslist.com founder Craig Newmark, will experiment with national news stories to which local bloggers will contribute reporting and expertise. (More info here.)

Jay led a well-received session at last year's ConvergeSouth, and we're particularly fortunate to get him because he says he probably won't be able to make this year's ConvergeSouth.

So come if you can. I'll have more details later on subjects, logistics and so on. We hope to see you here.

Reminder: We'll be having an open discussion on citizen journalism starting at 6:30 p.m. Monday here at the N&R, 200 E. Market St. You'll want to come into the parking lot on the Church Street side of the building (or you can park in the metered spaces on Market, which do not require money after 6 p.m.) and enter through the glassed-in security desk just to the right of the truck-loading area. Security will direct you to the auditoriums.

If you're planning to come and haven't already let me know, please leave me a note in the comments or e-mail me so I'll know how much to get in the way of munchies, etc.

I hope to see you there.

"When fans embrace your meme, embrace your fans."

"Snakes on a Plane" topped the box office last weekend, although it was such a weak movie-going weekend that that's not saying a lot by Hollywood standards.

But where "Snakes on a Plane" is concerned, Hollywood standards aren't the story.

This might be one of those rare films whose opening-weekend gross -- barely $15 million, which the first "Spider-Man" probably took in in one hour -- ends up being utterly irrelevant to the effect the movie has on the culture and the loyalty it engenders in fans.

That's partly because "Snakes on a Plane" is as high-concept as even Hollywood gets. ("High concept" is a Hollywood term of art meaning a movie whose theme and meaning can be made clear in one sentence.) The title told you exactly what you were going to get -- and that was so essential to the film's appeal that when discussion arose of renaming the film during production, star Samuel L. Jackson, who had asked to be cast in the movie after hearing nothing more about it than the name, threatened to walk away from the project unless the original name was kept. From the git, the film didn't even pretend to have any pretensions.

And it certainly didn't hurt that Jackson, who has been American Filmdom's Baddest Dude for more than a decade now, so quickly and publicly embraced the project. The man has cool to spare.

But the people who made this film happen also did some very smart things. Their whole approach to the pre-release part of the film's life cycle has been to engage the potential fan on every possible level. Not only did no one drop any dumb copyright-infringement lawsuits on fan sites, director David Ellis stopped by the site after premiere night to thank fans for their support. They marketed T-shirts through CafePress, a company that caters specifically to bloggers. They sponsored contests through Yahoo that led to bloggers being invited to review the movie. And on and on.

None of that showed up in the opening-weekend gross. But I bet it shows up in coming weeks ... and when the DVD is released ... and at "Rocky Horror Picture Show"-like midnight screenings for years, perhaps decades, to come.

Via Jay Rosen comes word of the first nationally organized effort at "distributed" journalism: an examination of Congressional spending "earmarks," pork-barrel spending tucked into the Labor/Health & Human Services appropriations bill.

A coalition of news organizations, nonprofits and individuals will be trying to track down the source of every one of the 1,867 earmarks in the bill -- each with an average value of $268,000.

That's a lot of pork. And that's also just one appropriations bill out of about a dozen Congress must pass every year.

Rosen has background at his blog, PressThink, here. And if you want to get involved, you can. From an Examiner editorial on the project:

Check out the earmarks for your state and then call your congressman and ask if he or she sponsored any of your state’s earmarks. If the answer is yes, ask why the congressman’s name isn’t on the earmark. If you recognize the institution designated to receive the earmarked tax dollars, call them and ask them what they intend to do with your money.

Then email us at info@examiner.com with the subject line “Earmarks” and tell us what you found out. The Examiner will be asking more questions about who got the earmarks and why, so your information could be very important. You will be part of an army of citizen journalists determined to shine some much-needed light on spending decisions made behind closed doors by powerful Members of Congress.

Your grandchildren, whose national debt will be smaller as a result of this work, will thank you.

UPDATE: Because the last time I looked at a state budget in any detail, was back in the Stone (i.e., pre-computer) Age of 1991, I asked our Raleigh-bureau reporter, Mark Binker, whether this approach would work with North Carolina's budget. Here's what he said:

Lex:

I would say no for a couple reasons:

• Earmarks in the state budget don't come about like federal earmarks do. Once the budget gets fairly close to a final draft, you know they're there. The exception are the "slush-fund" earmarks of those a few years ago, which aren't enumerated anywhere. A federal earmark, as odd as this sounds, is ensconced in a committee report that's not part of the main legislation that gets signed into law. (Yes, that means a lot of earmarks COULD be ignored, but they seldom, are.)
• In this year's budget there's no question of who sponsored what. Raleigh legislators had to put their names to the pork they requested in the form or separate bill filings...it made writing about pork up front easy...and at the end of the day they didn't get a lot of pork this year.

But he did have some thoughts on what else we might apply this to at the state/local level, and we're going to explore that subject in more detail.

UPDATE: Ed calls it The Boston T-1 Party, which is great except that it's not really based in Boston. I guess if it's based anywhere, it's the Examiner newspapers' D.C. bureau, but then on this medium, physicial location is so 20th-century ....

After our last community discussion of citizen journalism, back in June, everyone seemed to want to do it again. So let's do it again. I've reserved an auditorium here for 6:30 p.m. Monday, Aug. 28.

Admission is free, although if you would, please leave a note in the comments or e-mail me to let me know you're coming so we'll have enough chairs (and maybe some snacks 'n' drinks).

What should we talk about? That's your call. I'll throw out two suggestions:

• Although I'm listed as a discussion leader for this fall's ConvergeSouth and am happy to be the person who calls the session to order, there's no particular reason why I should lead the discussion. I think a group of Greensboro folks talking about their hopes and frustrations in this arena would be more useful, to themselves and to Converge attendees who ain't from 'round here, than anything I could say.
• Leonard Witt has some thoughts here on what can, should and does go into successful citizen-journalism efforts. What do you think? Is he on target? If so, what would a Greensboro cit-j model that followed his prescription look like?
  

But that's food for thought, not dictation of an agenda.

So: Two weeks from tonight, 6:30 p.m. Be there.

Our YourNews submission portal was temporarily disabled earlier this summer by our move to a new hosting vendor and some related technical problems. But it is back up and ready, nay, eager for your submissions, so bring 'em here.

Some folks, primarily Sam Spagnola, raised some questions in this thread at JR's place about my approach to covering Greensboro's truth-and-reconciliation process, and about my work blog in general. JR asked me to address them. I've done so, but my response ran kind of long, so rather than posting it on his blog as a comment, I'm posting it here as a separate thread and will link to this from JR's blog comments when I've done so.

First, if you're here you probably already know that one of the things the News & Record is trying to do with its Town Square project is to explain more about how and why we do the things we do (which is what we mean by "transparency"), via our blogs as well as by other means. That's key to understanding this whole discussion. If by some chance you are NOT familiar with what we're trying to do, please read my original report on the subject for some essential background.

Next, if you want to follow along at home, understand that the post from my blog from which Sam Spagnola has pulled most of the quotes in his comment at JR's place was intended to supplement the stories I wrote for the print edition about the gathering here in Greensboro of truth-and-reconciliation groups from across the U.S. and from four other countries. As are many blog posts, this one is a hybrid of reporting and analysis, along with some thinking-out-loud-type questions about what I've seen and heard. There are even a few personal opinions in there, albeit not as many as Sam thinks and certainly none that I think impair my ability to report fairly and accurately on the TRC.

I'm going to address each of the passages Sam quotes individually, then conclude with some more context. Bold passages are quotes from my original blog posts; italic passages are Sam's comments on the passages. My response to Sam follows in regular type.

But the most important, the one that most makes truth-and-reconciliation projects necessary, is the fact that in every culture there are two communities -- them that has, and them that don't -- and the first group invariably is willing to use violence to keep the second group in its place.

This is clearly an opinion about not only the value of the commission but a political statement about class.

No, it isn't: It's reporting what the seminar participants were saying, which fact becomes clearer if you read the paragraph immediately preceding the graf Sam quotes: "Today's story mentioned that the various truth efforts represented at the convention have noted a number of common experiences and observations, despite their differences of geography and language and the varying distances back in time of the respective events they are investigating."

***To those participants***, that fact was the most important. I have no idea what the most important fact is. I'll grant for the purposes of discussion that their statement was a political statement about class, but it was theirs, not mine.

"There are arguments from a number of religious and philosophical backgrounds that seek to justify that arrangement -- Ayn Rand's Objectivism is a big one out here in the blogosphere, for example -- but sooner or later they run up against both religious and secular notions that we share a common humanity and that to a certain, significant extent, the problems of one portion of the community are the responsibility of us all."

Ditto on the opinionation. This goes beyond context into political philosophy.

This isn't opinion so much as a simple, factual observation, recognizable by anyone who spends a lot of time in the political blogosphere. I'm not arguing that one school of thought or the other is right or wrong; I'm simply pointing out that both schools exist and are often used in blogging, and that they conflict. Sam is welcome to offer any evidence he might have opposing that assertion.

I included that observation because, in my professional opinion, based on firsthand observation, the statement is a bit of context essential for understanding some -- not all, but some -- of where the vehement disagreement about the nature and value of Greensboro's truth-and-reconciliation process is coming from.

"Another is the demonization of the truth process by those involved in the oppression, or their successors/descendants. Here in Greensboro, there's at least a small group of people -- I've heard from some personally in my short time covering this process -- who seem categorically unwilling to accept even the possibility that those involved in this process are sincere or that any good can possibly come from what they're doing."

"Demonization" is not a characterization? "...of those involved in the OPPRESSION..." Believing there is "oppression" is not an opinion? It certainly seems like he is lockstep with the T&R Commission on that. How can he be trusted to write objectively if he has already drank the proverbial "Kool-Aid"?

The first sentence Sam quotes is a general observation about the historical events that led to the creation of the groups that sent representatives to the Greensboro gathering. It is not about Greensboro specifically. Moreover, it is an observation made by ***convention participants***, not me. I'm simply relaying it -- reporting it -- in this blog post. And certainly, oppression has been documented beyond a reasonable doubt in South Africa and Wilmington, to name just two examples off the top of my head.

The rest of the passage is a related point: Irrespective of the facts, some people in Greensboro have gotten in touch with me to say what I've described them as saying. These people's communications suggest they neither know nor care what the facts are. "Demonization" might strike readers as a subjective description of what they have said to me regarding the truth-and-rec process. But in my professional opinion, it's also a fair and accurate description.

"I think some people, like former dictator Augusto Pinochet, ought to rot in prison for the rest of their lives no matter how decrepit they are now, just to serve as examples for others at any level of government who might be prone to sanction state violence or other state-sanctioned human-rights violations. But seeking only retributive justice, I'll grant you, won't make future episodes less likely, and it does little or nothing to address the problem of making one community out of two groups, oppressors and oppressed."

Note how that paragraph started with "I think..."

It did indeed. The first sentence is pure opinion, undiluted. And I stand by it, as I have done previously many times on both this blog and my personal blog. Heck, I'll repeat it here: TORTURE IS BAD. But for Sam to meet the burden of proof required for his criticism to be relevant to my coverage of the truth-and-rec process, he must explain in what way expressing this opinion make me a less capable journalist in general and/or less effective in covering the truth-and-rec process in particular.

The second sentence is opinion, but it is opinion based on two decades of reporting and wide reading and research. As to the first part, that retributive justice alone won't make future episodes less likely, that's a prediction based on history: Governments have done bad things in part because they don't think they'll ever face retributive justice even where mechanisms for it exist (and in many places they exist only on paper). The second part of the sentence is plain fact: Retributive justice isn't intended to bring about reconciliation and it contains none of the elements known to contribute to reconciliation. It doesn't rule reconciliation out, of course, but any reconciliation that results from it is happy accident.

"What are oppressors fighting so hard to keep oppressed from getting?"

(No specific comment from Sam other than to label this opinion.)

As the context (particularly the sentences immediately following) makes clear, this is a follow-up question I would like to have asked the attendees who posited the whole notion of oppressors and oppressed, but didn't get the chance to ask. It's not my opinion.

"I realize that money and power are two obvious candidates, and that dynamic has led some local folks to suggest that Greensboro's entire T&R process is nothing but a smoke screen for the victims of Nov. 3 to seek more money from the city. Convention attendees both local and out-of-town roundly disparaged that notion this afternoon. I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case, at least up to now; certainly, it doesn't look like the kind of work one goes into to get rich."

(No specific comment from Sam other than to label this opinion.)

The first phrase makes clear that I'm guessing but don't know the answer. I don't see anything particularly wrong with doing that in a blog post as long as I'm not trying to disguise my guesses as facts. Other people have made the same guesses, a fact borne out by the suggestions I've heard that the shooting survivors are just in it for the money. I mentioned that fact during my Q&A with convention attendees, and they did indeed roundly disparage it, mainly along the lines of, "If I were in this for the money, then why would I [engage in various activities that hardly look like clear moneymakers and in fact are COSTING me time and money]?" Finally, I report what I have observed (or, technically, haven't observed), with the disclaimer "at least up to now," meaning I haven't ruled out the possibility that such evidence exists.

"Would you not agree, for example, that regardless of your feelings about Klansmen and Communists, the people of Morningside Homes deserved more protection on Nov. 3 than they got?"

(No specific comment from Sam other than to label this opinion.)

First, a little note on blog culture for those following along at home: Sam is now quoting from the comments below the post, rather than the post itself. Dialogue and discussion in blog comments tend to be a little less formal and more freewheeling than do the original blog post on which the commenters are commenting. Now, moving on:

This quote, the question, "Does that make it [the report] completely wrong?" responds to an assertion from Sam in the comments below the post that there was nothing in the report that hadn't been predicted by critics from the outset. He seemed, although I might be overinferring here, to be saying that because the report had been so predictable (to him, anyway), it was worthless. I questioned what I understood him to be saying. In fact I do think that the people of Morningside Homes deserved more protection on Nov. 3 than they got. Indeed, as a longtime resident and taxpayer, I think it is only reasonable for any resident of any neighborhood in Greensboro to expect better protection, under the circumstances, than Morningside Homes got, based on the reported facts. But one would not have to hold that position to raise the questions I did with Sam in the way that I raised them. And again, I think the burden is on Sam to demonstrate how my expressing this particular opinion damages in any way my ability to do my job.

One other observation about this opinion: So far, to judge from local conversations and blog posts, it appears to be the only conclusion in the report around which any kind of community consensus is emerging. So, yeah, it's my opinion, but it's very widely shared. That doesn't prove I'm right. But it does suggest that the same set of facts is leading a lot of people who disagree about a lot of things about the truth-and-rec process to agree on at least this one point, for whatever that might be worth.

"Would you not agree that the long line of questionable decisions and missed opportunities by Greensboro police in the weeks leading up to Nov. 3 constituted a problem?"

Sam: "opinion disguised as rhetorical question."

Well, first, it's not a rhetorical question at all, Sam: Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree, why? Is the behavior of the GPD as documented in the report consistent with your idea of the behavior of a professional, competent, prudent law-enforcement organization?

Second, law enforcement gets warnings all the time about impending violence, whether it's from informants trying to head off a murder or spouses who've been abused before and know they'll be abused again. Yet, as I am sure Sam would agree, most of those warnings don't result in five homicides and ten other felonious assaults in the space of less than two minutes. There are numerous reasons for that, but one is that in my observations over years of reporting, police tend to take certain steps in response to such warnings that they simply did not take before and on Nov. 3, 1979.

"I've heard that argument, and although it makes sense on the surface, I'm not sure I buy it anymore."

Sam: " - opinion. If it was purely news, why should it matter whether he "buys it" or not?"

That's not an opinion. That's saying I don't know what to think. It's literally the opposite of an opinion.

"But to make that argument is to presume that these events took place in a vacuum. They did not -- not even the Greensboro shootings, as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report makes clear."

Sam: -argumentative opinion.

First, for those following at home, this passage is from a separate post from the post and comments we've been discussing up to this point.

Second, Sam calls that statement opinion. To me, it's a logical inference based on the information provided by convention organizers about each of the events that led groups to send convention participants to Greensboro.

"Each event took place within a system of antidemocratic repression. Now, the drivers of that repression vary from one instance to the next in terms of their relative levels of influence, but the repression is a constant. By definition, then, class issues are also a constant -- one is either a repressor or a repressee, and money tends to be the demarcator. And in the U.S., class issues and racial issues, particularly in the South, often have been very difficult to tease apart, a fact that has contributed in many instances to the longevity of the repression by dividing the opposition to the oppressors."

Sam: - opinion.

The first sentence factually characterizes the events that led other groups to Greensboro, with the possible exception of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The second sentence again factually characterizes the descriptions of those events. The third sentence is, I believe, factual. Sam is welcome to point to any instances of institutionalized repression in which class was not involved, in which money was not a major demarcator between repressor and repressee, if not THE demarcator.

And the last sentence is an observation of a phenomenon that has played out in Southern politics, at least, for decades. I've been aware of it since I was a 10-year-old in Charlotte listening to the public debate over school busing for integration. Its apotheosis was probably the "hands" TV ad created for Sen. Jesse Helms' 1990 re-election campaign against Harvey Gantt.

Now, at long last, the conclusion and context I promised.

As I noted above, blog posts, unlike newspaper articles, often are a mixture of reporting, analysis, questioning (sometimes for clarification, sometimes in a devil's-advocate role), pondering "out loud," and opinion. I understand that this mixture is disconcerting, at the least, to people who have long been used to the idea that newspaper reporters deal in documentable fact only. And even for those of us who've been reading and writing blogs for years, the idea that some lines that aren't crossed in print can and, in some cases, must be crossed online is a little hard to take and harder still to negotiate.

For better or worse, though, blogging has adopted the ethos advocated by sports-talk-radio host Jim Rome: Have a take and don't suck. In other words, advocate a position and do it well. There are some positions journalists can't, and shouldn't, advocate. But as I try to help the N&R navigate the new world of blogging and interactive media, I figured out a long time ago that "Have no takes at all" wasn't going to get the audience involved with us. The trick is to have takes that don't compromise your ability to report fairly on whatever it is you're covering AND are interesting to readers. How do we do that? We're still figuring that part out, and as with any long-term series of experiments, sometimes we will fail.

And for all our reputation as a national leader in newspaper blogging, we are still experimenting. Still. When I wrote the Town Square report to which I linked above, I wasn't doing any reporting -- I wasn't involved at all in the daily news flow, in fact -- so I had the luxury of hypothesizing about how blogging by a reporter could work without the immediate necessity of making sure it did. Now we're into the lab work, so to speak: I'm trying out on my blog some of the things I thought could work. Sam has expressed some concern about the mix. He didn't make clear exactly why, but I infer -- please correct me if I'm wrong, Sam -- that part of it is that he's simply used to the convention of print reporters dealing strictly in documentable fact and that part of it is that he's also having some trouble telling some of the various ingredients of a blog post apart. That's a legitimate problem, one I take seriously. (For what it's worth, which might be nothing, commenter "bystander" elsewhere at my place says he/she doesn't have much trouble with this approach.)

But I've been blogging for years now, and in that time I've also heard from some people who have chosen to attack my journalistic bona fides not because I've actually done anything wrong but because I've raised questions they didn't want raised, or reported facts they'd rather not have heard (and CERTAINLY didn't want anyone else hearing). I also heard from such people before I started blogging. And I give blog commenters every opportunity to prove they don't fall into this category. One or two have failed the test, but most either show up front that they're serious about constructive criticism or, when challenged, begin offering it.

When I blog about what I'm covering for the paper, I'm trying to give you, the reader, the benefit of everything I can bring to the table on a subject, and to transcend the length limitations and conventions of print, while also doing my best to make clear that some things I bring are more reliable than others, that some are merely grounds for additional reporting, that some are informed opinion and that some are wild-haired guesses. To the extent that someone like Sam, who clearly isn't dumb, can have trouble telling some of the pieces apart, I need to do a better job of delineating them -- and I promise to try to do so.

But if there are questions or issues I think need to be raised and discussed as part of my reporting, then I'm going to do it no matter what aspersions commenters might cast on my intellect, politics, morality, competence or status as a carbon-based life form as a result. That's what JR pays me to do, and I hope readers expect no less.

And where I don't know what the answers are, I'm going to say so. God knows I don't know everything. But maybe you know what I'm wondering about at that particular time, or someone else reading the paper or this blog does. That's when interactive media works the way we all hope and expect that it can. And in my current job, I'd be nuts -- and negligent -- not to give it every possible chance to do that.

Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail," which began as an October 2004 Wired magazine article and a blog that has informed a great deal of the N&R's thinking as we continue the Town Square experiment, is officially published today.

To our site's RSS feeds, I mean.

We've got feeds up now for almost all our blogs as well as major content categories, all in one place. I'm not clear on what exactly has to happen behind the scenes to make these happen, but I'm delighted they have. If you have suggestions for other RSS feeds you think we need to be offering, please e-mail me or hit the comment link.

One of the suggestions from participants at Tuesday night's discussion is about to become reality: We're going to start a contest for best reader-submitted photo on our photo blog. Photo editor Rob Brown says we hope to have readers vote weekly, with the weekly winners each getting a small prize and competing at the end of a year for a bigger prize.

More details to come. In the meantime, you can practice by submitting photos now.

I was delighted with the turnout we had for last night's discussion about citizen journalism, particularly inasmuch as I inadvertently scheduled it opposite a City Council meeting at which some key budget issues were to be thrashed out.

I didn't call the roll, but if I recall correctly, attendees included:

• Sue


• Sean Coon


• David Hoggard


• Bruce Burch


• Cara Michele


• Jon Lowder (from Winston-Salem), who also brought his lovely and talented but (as far as I know) nonblogging wife, Celeste.


• Jill Williams, executive director of the now-disbanded Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission


• Ndesanjo Macha


• Tony Ledford, a nonblogging but frequent commenter at some N&R blogs, particularly Letters to the Editor


• N&R courts reporter Eric Collins, who'll be blogging eventually.

(I'm forgetting some people, I know -- I'm sorry.)

I'd love to be able to give you a neat, chronological summary of the discussion. (Even more, I'd love to be able to link to streaming video and/or a podcast.) But because I was participant as well as observer, and my note-taking was haphazard when I took notes at all, I can't do that.

Some points, though, in no special order:

-- We frequently get asked why we don't do X, or whether we have ever thought about doing Y. Regarding Y, the answer is "probably." But the N&R's news department has an appetite for doing stuff online that exceeds available resources. Our department relies on people in another division, News & Record Interactive, who must divide their time between revenue-generating sites for outside clients and news content for our Web sites (and guess which is the higher priority). Only a few of those folks even work with the News Department, and only one (last I checked) worked directly on the kinds of things that make interacting with the site fun and worthwhile. These folks are very talented and work some very long hours, but there's only so much they can do. One way or another, we're going to have to get more programmers for News, and Editor John Robinson knows that.

-- We're struggling, with a very limited promotional budget or other resources, to reach out to people in the community who might want to join with us in reporting stories for print and online. We believe such people exist, even if they're busy with full-time jobs and families and lives. We want to reach out to them, to remove as many barriers as possible that might keep them from participating with us to the extent that they want to. We're open to any and all ideas, although ideas that don't involve a lot of money or technical expertise (see previous point) stand the best chance of being tested first.

-- We understand we need to reach people where they are, even if where they are is offline. One participant, and I'm sorry I don't recall who it was, suggested we put loaner laptops in the hands of people who don't even own computers and ask them to blog for us for, say, a month at a time. A variation on that suggestion: we loan digital audio recorders to people, then turn what they say into podcasts.

-- At least some people are interested in pulling together a group of people who would review and critique local news coverage by various outlets, along the lines of what was recommended in the Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission's recent report.

A number of people had other suggestions for ways in which the N&R might enhance its Web site and/or improve its transparency and interactivity. I won't list them all here, but I took notes and am forwarding them to the appropriate people here in the building.

Finally, a number of people asked that we meet again soon. I'm looking for July dates now and will post here when we've got a date set. I will definitely try to avoid scheduling opposite City Council meetings, as I inadvertently did last night, as well.

If you were there, feel free to jump in below with anything you think I overlooked.

One last reminder: The N&R and local blogger Sue Polinsky are co-hosting a get-together at 6:30 p.m. tonight at the News & Record, 200 East Market Street, at which we'll be discussing citizen journalism in general, and possible news-reporting partnerships between you and the N&R in particular. We haven't had a huge number of people say they'll come -- I think my current head count is 10, plus whatever other N&R staffers can drop by -- but some of those who are coming are accomplished bloggers and/or online activists who I'm sure will be bringing good ideas to the table.

It's free, and we'll have some munchies and soft drinks.

You can park for free after 6 p.m. at the metered spaces on Market in front of the building, or in the N&R parking lot (you'll likely need to enter from the Church Street side after 5 p.m.). At this point I don't yet know whether we'll have the front door open, but if we don't, our Church Street entrance is open and staffed by security 24/7.

If you haven't yet responded but think you can come, please shoot me an e-mail before, say, noon today so we'll know how much to get in the way of refreshments. Questions? E-mail me or call 373-7088.

Hope to see you there!

Tomorrow, GoTriad.com, our arts/entertainment site, will be moving to new servers, as will YourNews. The changes shouldn't affect how you use the site, but as with other such changes we've made, we won't know for sure 'til it happens.

Meanwhile, if you're submitting something to YourNews, please e-mail me a copy as well to ensure your piece isn't lost. Once the changeover is complete, I can then plug in any copy that didn't automatically get moved over.

Thanks!

I haven't been analyzing the GTRC report today because I've been reviewing it with some colleagues as part of our planning for follow-up stories. (On that subject, by the way, I welcome suggestions.)

One recommendation jumped out at me, however: the one on p. 35 of the executive summary that calls for the N&R, "alone or in concert with other media outlets," to "host a citywide citizen group that would comment on news process, content, quality and ethics." The commission believes that such a group could solicit input for "story development, source development, recognizing other perspectives, critique of news coverage, commentary on newspaper practices and suggestions for better addressing community concerns."

Without taking a position on the merits of this suggestion, I would just point out that much of our Town Square plan, particularly the recommendations dealing with transparency and interactivity, is aimed at making the same things happen for the same reason: We believed, and continue to believe, that those changes will lead to more accurate, authentic journalism.

In other words, please don't let the fact that no such citizen group currently exists stop you from letting us know how you feel on any or all of these subjects.

As I posted last week, the News & Record and local blogger Sue Polinsky are co-hosting a get-together one week from tonight, at 6:30 p.m. here at the N&R (200 E. Market St., between Davie and Church), on citizen journalism and how you and the N&R might work together to produce stories of public interest. We'll take questions, kick around possible story ideas and let the conversation wherever you want around that general subject. There'll be refreshments, and it's free. If you would, please let me know if you intend to come so we'll have enough chairs and munchies for all.

You can park in our lot (enter from the Church Street side after 5 p.m.) or for free after 6 p.m. in the metered slots on East Market.

I've already gotten RSVPs from some local folks whose online work suggests they'll have some interesting ideas to bring to the table, so it should be well worth your while. Also, if there are any specific questions you already have, you can e-mail them to me in advance so we can be sure to get to them.

Hope to see you there!

If you're curious about the whole concept of citizen journalism and want to learn more, or if you already get the concept and are interested in joining with the N&R to report a story in your (geographic or interest) community, have I got good news for you.

Local Queen of Technology Sue Polinsky has agreed to co-host a little get-together with me at the N&R for people like you. We'll answer your questions, kick around story ideas and take the conversation in whatever direction you'd like. Date and time TBA; I'll post as soon as we have that nailed down.

UPDATE: We're on for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 6, here at the News & Record, 200 E. Market St. You can park in our lot or in metered spaces on Market out front (they don't make you pay after 5 p.m.). If there's any particular topic or question you'd like to make sure we discuss, e-mail it to me. Also, if you're planning to attend, please try to let me know in advance so we can have enough refreshments on hand.

Hope to see you there!

Effective immediately, I'm returning to reporting in a general-assignment role. I'm still going to be involved with our citizen-journalism initiative, particularly in working with bloggers or others in the community who want to partner with us on reporting stories, but as we seek suitable people/stories for such partnerships, I'll also be doing some reporting and writing of my own.

Again, if you know of a story you think our readership would be interested in, and you want to partner with us to get it into the paper (and on our Web site and yours, if you have one), then get in touch. And, of course, if you just want to pass on a story idea, I'll take those, too. :-)

UPDATE: I'll be working with Margaret Banks and others from the newsroom to cover the release of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission's report on May 25, among other assignments.

On Tuesday, I spoke to a seminar at the American Press Institute on citizen journalism, giving them an overview of "lessons learned" during the 15 months (and counting) of our Town Square project. (Personal aside: I attended an investigative-reporting seminar at API in 1990 that was both a powerful motivator and an extremely practical and useful course; I rely to this day on things I learned during it. I've felt grateful to API ever since, so when associate director Mary Glick asked me to come speak, I jumped at the chance.)

I designed my presentation to be a quick summary of the most important lessons in several key areas, with a ton of time built in for Q&A. At the end I planned to say a little something off the top of my head about why I think what we're doing is so important and what I think is at stake, a fact to which I had alerted API ahead of time.

Q&A ran so long, however -- and they were good questions all -- that I ran out of time before I got to do my little extemporaenous history lesson/explanation/pep talk, or whatever you want to call it. But several participants said afterward they wanted to know what I would have said. So I wrote it down and e-mailed it to them, and I'm posting it here (with some very slight changes in language) below the fold.

I had lunch yesterday with veteran local blogger and Internet maven Sue Polinsky and with information architect/user-interface designer/general Internet genius Sean Coon, who moved here about seven months ago and is up to some interesting things online both professionally (he's redesigning that site) and personally. (An aside: Anyone whose job it is to lure smart young professionals to Greensboro and keep them here needs to talk to Sean.)

Sean already has blogged the luncheon and elegantly summarizes our discussion. Some good things came out of it (although I'm up against a deadline and probably won't be able to begin acting on some of this stuff until week after next), and this conversation will continue. As always, you're welcome to join in.

In Sean's defense, I need to point out that although many people in town probably could offer reasons why his photography should portray Sue as the Princess of Light and me as the Prince of Darkness, that isn't what Sean did. We had a window table, and that's just how the light happened to fall.

Not to say that I don't gravitate toward the shadows ....

The American Press Institute, in its desperation wisdom, has invited me to speak next month at its "Citizen Media: Engaging an Empowered Audience" seminar for editors at various levels from newspapers of varying size. The organizers are asking me to speak on the subject "Town Square: Lessons Learned."

So I've got my own list of lessons learned, and I've asked several colleagues who have been deeply involved with this project what they think we've learned. But I also need to ask you: What do you think we've learned? E-mail me or hit the comments link.

Thanks!

We're finally in the process of moving a bunch of things on our site, such as our blogs, to new hosting. Once the move is finished, we'll be better off from a number of standpoints. And with any luck, you'll never notice anything wrong during the move.

But as we know, "any luck" is too much luck to count on when matters technical are at play.

So: If you spot anything wrong on the site -- graphical weirdness, busted links, whatever -- let me know.

Remember the bad old days when we saw communists under every rock? They're back.

... the Web 2.0 movement ... fuses '60s radicalism with the utopian eschatology of digital technology. The ideological outcome may be trouble for all of us. ...

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the '60s--the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is "personalization." Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

To which I think the most appropriate response is: Huh??

More specifically, Keen seems to think that in a Web 2.0 world there would be, to use his example, no more Bonos. But as someone who actually spent years in various facets of the music bidness, I can assure Keen, and you, that the emergence of a Bono from that bidness is not much more than happy accident. Moreover, what of the musician who does not aspire to Bonohood (in either creative or economic terms) but would simply like to be able to make a decent living doing what she loves while maintaining control of both her art and her career? That's still a tough row to hoe, but prior to the Web it was pretty much impossible. And the comparison applies to any number of other artistic and/or entrepreneurial endeavors, as well.

Keen can't knock the Web on its merits, so he creates a straw man. And while he's knocking that straw man down and screaming about how noble it is to do so, people who get it will go merrily on their way.

Sorry I'm only now getting around to blogging this, but I was delighted to see both familiar and (to me) new faces at this past Wednesday night's blogger meetup. One of the side benefits of events such as this is getting to add links to "Bloggers I know in real life," such as PotatoStew and Cara Michele.

For those of you who weren't there, I repeated my standing invitation to members of the community to partner with N&R staff on stories that interest you, and I took several good questions in response to that invitation. I also had a good talk with Sue about how to build up a group of people interested in this kind of work, along the lines of the old Triad Internet Users Group. And I had a brief conversation, definitely to be continued, with man-about-Web 2.0 Sean Coon, who, unbeknown to me, moved to Greensboro a few months back.

More -- much more, I hope -- to come.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, that city's Times-Picayune newspaper began publishing only online. It had to. Its offices and printing plant were flooded. The city's streets were largely under water, preventing delivery even if a paper could have been printed. So out of necessity, the TP became the first American newspaper to become a purely Web-based operation, even if involuntarily and temporarily.

Two unrelated observers of the newspaper bidness have come to much the same conclusion regarding the McClatchy purchase of the Knight Ridder chain and the looming reselling of 12 of the KR properties.

Jay Rosen of PressThink wonders whether those 12 properties ought to take advantage of the fact that no one really owns them right now to transform themselves, quickly and permanently, into something that can survive, even thrive, in this era.

And Paul Chesser, a contributor to our religion pages a decade or so ago and now a writer for the John Locke foundation, has a piece up at The American Spectator's Web site suggesting that McClatchy use its monopoly position in some of the nation's more desirable markets to ditch print entirely, on the assumption that an educated readership will follow the product online if it isn't already there.

Could we be reaching a tipping point?

... are doing it right -- multimedia, that is.

This is National Sunshine Week, a promotion intended to impress upon Americans the importance of open government. I had my say on the subject last week. Now, Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies has pulled together an impressive list of related stories and editorials on the subject.

Coincidentally, there's also an interesting debate on open records and the news media's role in distributing and/or reporting on them, based on the N&R's reporting on the consultant's report on former police chief David Wray, going on over at JR's blog.

UPDATE: Just to show you that I'm not completely nutso on this topic, here's a case in which a little more government secrecy definitely would be in order.

I've said many times in many venues that to adapt fully to the Web, newspapers have got to find a new business model ... probably one with a profit margin much smaller than those enjoyed by the industry even today.

Related to that, there's an interesting article on the Ad Age Web site that asks: How can news stay free online when it's so expensive offline?

Yahoo, Google and other portals essentially set up a business model that pointed people to work that was done -- and paid for -- by a lot of other companies. Until very recently, Yahoo and Google didn't employ news staffs, or writers, or directors. During the early years of phenomenal growth, they were essentially soaring off the backs of companies still tied down to paying printing costs and employing large staffs of people who made phone calls and asked questions to find out what was actually going on.

Yahoo last year began to add some original content to its site under entertainment czar Lloyd Braun, but that has yet to pay off. What the giants of the Web are starting to realize is that creating all this content is hard and expensive. It's also a lot more time consuming than just setting up browsers to let surfers know what's out there.

Information wants to be free, as they say on the Web, and because it's essentially a commodity, it often can be free, or nearly so.

But news -- a special subset of information -- can be expensive. It takes people, training, time and money even when powerful interests are NOT trying to suppress it, which is not always the case. I say that not to argue pro-newspaper or anti-blogger but to illustrate that from an economic standpoint, we're talking about two different models ... and we don't yet know what the online business model for news is going to look like, or even if one can be found.

But the report mentioned in the article suggests that we're going to have to grow online readership much more quickly than our print readership is shrinking if we're to remain profitable, and that's true even if our ultimate business model reaches equilibrium at a profit margin well below the ones newspapers enjoy today, which I suspect will be the case. How we get there with a minimum of pain for us and a maximum of relevant, useful, enjoyable content for you is the question we continue to wrestle with.

I am not a lawyer. But if I'd gotten paid market consulting rates for every lesson in open-records law I've had to give public officials in the course of 22 years of newspaper journalism, I could party like one seven nights a week and still have enough left over to feed my family.

Well, I got tied up on stuff yesterday afternoon and tied up on more stuff this morning, so I'm only now getting around to blogging the meeting at which we were going to discuss how partnering N&R news staffers with interested readers to produce stories for print and online might work in the real world.

The meeting was called by my immediate supervisor, Mike Grossman, and also included the next three steps up the News Department food chain: City Editor Mark Sutter, Managing Editor Ann Morris and the department head, Editor John Robinson. We had a list of issues to discuss.

We didn't discuss them, much, however. We did a little, but the bulk of the meeting was a kind of free-flowing airing of our hopes and fears for this part of our Town Square initiative.

Some participants said their fears -- or, perhaps more accurately, their concerns -- about this experiment outweighed their hopes about the good it might do. (Interestingly, in the 15 or so months we've been pursuing the Town Square model, this is the first time I've heard someone say that.) And there are, for sure, some risks -- ranging from wasting staff time in an era of reduced staffing and resources to serious legal repercussions and damage to the paper's reputation. But the five of us ultimately agreed that this was an experiment worth pursuing.

You can't report well on a meeting you're an active part of, so I didn't really try. I did scribble some notes, some of which I reproduce below. Comments attributed to specific individuals should be understood as paraphrases, not necessarily direct quotes.

JR: Because we'll be working with people who may or may not come in understanding how we work, we'll need to be flexible and patient. But we'll also need to be steadfast enough to say "Let's back out" if something isn't working, or if someone is pushing us in a direction in which we can't ethically go.

Me: (I think it was around here that I said that what little research there is on this subject suggests that a lot of people want to contribute to the journalism of their community but don't necessarily want, or feel able, to report and write a story on their own. So I would hope we'd be flexible and open enough to meet would-be contributors at whatever their individual comfort points might be and work from there.)

Ann Morris suggested that there might be some initiatives already ongoing in the community -- not necessarily journalistic initiatives, as journalism is commonly understood, but efforts aimed at gaining knowledge -- that we could form partnerships with, rather than just waiting for ideas to come in over the transom from individuals.

I questioned whether such efforts would be understood by the community as "open-source journalism" -- i.e., something driven by the community rather than by the N&R. I pointed out that to the extent our efforts have been welcomed thus far by the online community, it has been because we have tried to be, and to appear, respectful of that community and have not tried to bigfoot it. But I also said I thought that that question was separate from the question of whether such stories would be worth pursuing.

JR suggested another hypothetical example: Suppose we knew that some professors at N.C. A&T had done some research on the conditions of North Carolina's highways and we approached them to work with us on an examination of that issue.

JR pitched a question to the group: Do we cast a net (for stories suggested by readers) or choose our own? Both, Ann said -- let's cast a net AND pick out one or two to experiment.

We agreed that Mike, Mark and I would compile some ideas and meet next Thursday. So if you have an idea, you're interested in working with the N&R to get that story reported and written and published, get in touch with me so we can get your idea on the list that will be discussed at that meeting.

UPDATE (5:05 p.m. Friday): After a conversation with JR this afternoon and an e-mailed comment from a reader, I realized this post might unintentionally be understating our commitment to this experiment. Short version: He was saying yesterday that he, too, understands the risks, some sizable, that we will be taking -- but that at his point, his attitude is "no guts, no glory."

So to the extent that this post might have led anyone to think we were having second thoughts, that'd be a big ol' "no." We're charging boldly into the fog. Come join us.

Earlier I said we've reached the point at which we're ready to try creating real-world partnerships between the professional journalists on the N&R staff and people in the community who are interested in pursuing news stories that would appear both in print and online.

Both you and some of my co-workers had some questions, which could be summarized mainly as, "How will this work?"

As flexibly as possible, is my hope. On Thursday, I'm going to be meeting with my editor, Mike Grossman; City Editor Mark Sutter; Managing Editor Ann Morris and Editor John Robinson to discuss that big question.

Earlier this week, I threw together some specific questions that I think fall under that general heading and sent them to those four so they could be thinking about possible answers before our meeting. But of course, I also want to hear from you. The issues/questions on my list (followed, in some cases, by my comments to you in italics) were:

• How and by whom coverage ideas will be vetted. (I posted earlier that Mike and I would be deciding, with Mark backstopping us. So far as I know, that's still the case unless someone comes up with a compelling reason for us to change.)
• How and by whom the appropriate medium/media will be determined and assigned to particular ideas/stories.
(We want to take full advantage of the online medium, but our resources -- photojournalists, tech folks -- are not unlimited.)
• What the nature and extent of contributing readers' involvement will be. (I personally envision readers' playing as large or as small a role as they are comfortable with on any particular story -- everything from providing info for a photo caption to co-writing a lead Sunday story.)
• What the nature and extent of editing/supervising contributing readers will be, and who will be responsible.
(Credibility is paramount, so nobody works without a net.)
• What conditions we may wish to impose on contributing readers in advance of publication; what conditions we may wish to agree to in return. (For example, can the reader blog about the story before it's published, or publish it on his/her blog before we publish it in the paper and/or online?)
• How and to what extent we will make N&R resources -- photographers, artists, video/audio equipment, legal advice, etc. -- available to contributing readers.
• Whether and how we will credential contributing readers who are working in tandem with N&R staff. (For stories involving government documents or publicly accessible events this won't be an issue, of course.)
• Whether creating partnerships with contributing readers creates any legal jeopardy not already recognized as part of our day-to-day journalism.

I'm sure I've missed some important issues, but that's part of the reason why I'm posting this here before the meeting. Please give me your thoughts on these issues and tell me what I might have overlooked.

Thanks!

Via Steve Yelvington, we see that the Newspaper Association of America has done a survey of heavy users of newspaper Web sites. The full report won't be out for a couple of weeks, but some of the headlines include:

• $73,000/year household income (compared with national median of about $43,200).


• 91% of such users have recently bought something online.


• 68% of such users have a broadband connection (compared with fewer than 50% of households nationwide).

More to come.

And so it is that we're finally able to move our stuff to a new server, which we hope to finish doing by March 1. I'll spare you the gory details behind why such a move was necessary (many of which I'm probably unaware of) except to say that we need it to 1) enable comments on articles; 2) implement the kind of registration/commenting system we need to strike the best balance between freedom of expression and accountability and 3) move the blogs, the better to get all our online content into a single searchable database.

Being almost illiterate from a technological standpoint, I probably can't even imagine how tedious the move will be. So I'm staying focused on the good stuff awaiting us on the other end and thinking happy thoughts.

I've spent the last couple of days compiling the responses to our survey on our weekday afternoon e-mail news update. About 70 of our more than 1,200 daily subscribers responded. A quick summary of the findings:

• Not to brag, but we've got a lot of very satisfied customers. That's particularly impressive in that UNhappy customers tend to be much more likely to get in touch than happy ones, all other things being equal.
• Not surprisingly, readers want us to tweak the content, if at all, even more toward local news. That's considered by far the most "useful" part of the content.
• We need to continue to be sure that a headline contains enough info to actually tell the story; "Man dies in Reidsville" isn't especially informative, one reader noted.
• Several folks mentioned they get sports/weather/entertainment news elsewhere and so find it less useful, but at the same time there wasn't much call for dropping them.
• We face a particular problem with sports, however: Midafternoon is just about the least productive possible time in the sports-news cycle for an update. We had a few complaints that the e-newsletter merely repeats what was in that morning's paper, and to the extent that that is ever true (it's not supposed to happen at all), it's more likely to be true in sports than anywhere else. If there's no really breaking sports news at newsletter time, perhaps we should simply plug a local story that will be appearing in the next day's sports section. That would reinforce our local emphasis and get us out of the no-win game of competing with ESPN.com. At least one respondent suggested adding a listing of the upcoming evening's sporting events of local interest.
• Technical issues: 1) A few people expressed an interest in receiving the newsletter in HTML rather than plain text and/or asked that photos be included. Should we experiment with offering the option of HTML? 2) At least one respondent said AOL users have some particular problems following our links (but did not elaborate). This is the first I've heard of that, and I'm looking into it. 3) At least one respondent suggested summarizing the top 2-3 news items right at the top, without links, so they'd show up in Outlook preview panes. 4) We need to make the link from our home page to the e-newsletter subscription form more informative and more prominent.
• Delivery: 1) Most people like the once-daily format, although many said they also would welcome another e-mail any time significant news breaks. One user habit that supports that approach is that most people check e-mail more regularly than they do a Web site (perhaps because it's easier to do that and still look like you're working). 2) Several readers called for more RSS feeds; we've already said we plan to add more. 3) Current users didn't call much for SMS/wireless service. I'm just guessing on this at the moment, but I think we'll probably experiment with it anyway because it might well appeal to a different audience.

Mike Grossman, Mike Fuchs and I will be reviewing the results in more detail before proposing any changes. In the meantime, we welcome any questions or additional comments.

Apparently the question of whether or not to link reporters' bylines to their respective e-mail addresses is a burning question in some quarters.

Not ours. We intend to. We're just trying to find a non-labor-intensive way to do it.

Right now, we can do it manually in our Web-publishing system by simply inserting the "mailto" link code around the story's byline. (E-mail addresses and phone numbers also appear at the bottom of each story but are not linked.) I've done a couple of random bylines on stories from today's paper just as a demonstration.

What we can't yet do is format bylines in DTI, our print-publishing system, so that when stories are automatically copied to our Web-publishing system the bylines are hotlinked, and we can't (at least not yet) set up our Web-publishing system to automatically format the incoming bylines.

But we're working on it.

For the past couple of years, our Web site has offered a free subscription to a daily e-newsletter, compiled and transmitted around midafternoon most weekdays, containing the day's headlines and breaking news as well as an updated weather forecast and some other information.

We're examining whether that newsletter still serves a useful purpose. If you tell us that it does, we may still want to change it to make it even more useful to you. If you tell us that it does not, we'll want to know what other services you might want us to offer in this area. (We already know that an expanded range of RSS feeds, to name just one example, is high on a lot of people's wish lists.)

If you don't want to wait 'til this afternoon's letter, you can fill out the survey now and e-mail your responses to me. (You might want to cc this address in case our e-mail server acts up again.) Here it is:

1) How long have you subscribed to the newsletter?

2) How often do you follow any of the links included in it?

3) Would you rate it as a) very useful, b) somewhat useful, c) not very useful or d) not useful?

4) What feature(s) do you find most useful? Why?

5) What feature(s) do you find least useful? Why?

6) What change(s) would you make if given the chance?

7) What other format(s) should the N&R consider for providing you with middle-of-the-day news updates? (e.g., RSS, wireless text messages, etc.)

8) How often would you like to receive such updates? a) daily; b) every couple of hours; c) hourly; d) more often than hourly; e) whenever news breaks.

9) Do you have any other comments about the e-newsletter service?

Thanks for your help!

I spent this weekend with about 40 members of the College Media Advisers group at their "Reinventing College Media" gathering at the University of Mississippi. You can read a little of what I said here, but this blog post only scratches the surface of the conversation that we had. The good news is, these are bright people dedicated to giving this country the journalists it will need in the future, and they're wrestling hard with some serious issues and problems. The bad news is, I'm not sure even the best things they can come up with will be adequate.

Of course, the same thing should be said of the newspaper industry.

We are not the first newspaper to begin regularly posting readers' contributions online. That honor, so far as I know, belongs to The Bakersfield Californian, whose Your Words section posts reader-written stories online. Some of those stories also have been printed in the newspaper.

We launched YourNews almost a year ago and continue to receive and publish contributions. But we're also hoping to team professionals in our newsroom with interested people in the community to produce stories of general interest that are intended, from the git-go, to be published both online and in the print edition of the News & Record.

Since we launched the Town Square initiative 13 months ago, we've tried to make journalism more of a conversation and more of a partnership/collaboration with the communities we serve. Those concepts can be understood metaphorically, but we're talking about literal, meatspace partnerships, too. If you're interested in taking part, or have a story idea, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Early in our transition toward an online Town Square, I suggested in numerous venues that we might one day want to create a real partnership between N&R journalists and people in the community who might want to work to get a particular story of interest to the community into the pages of the N&R. Now, 13 months into this initiative, a lot of what we still need to do online has been reduced to issues of money and technology, two subjects outside my primary area of expertise, I'm refocusing on content in general and journalism-as-partnership in particular.

There aren't many examples of this kind of partnership out there. On the other hand, that means we're not artifically constrained by another news organization's idea of how this kind of partnership should work, either. There aren't any organizational rules, so we're free to figure out what we think would work. I don't have any preconceived notions regarding structure or coverage subject, nor do I have any Orders from On High regarding those things. So we're free to figure out for ourselves how this should work.

Are you interested in contributing to the N&R's coverage of a particular issue? Do you have an idea for a subject you'd like such a partnership to look into, even if you can't or don't want to participate yourself? Comment here or, if you're feeling shy or need to submit a tip in a less-than-completely-public way, e-mail me. (Yeah, our e-mail is still out, but I'm sure it'll come back up sometime.)

As you might have read, we've been having problems with our e-mail server here at the N&R. I just got into the office, and I'm told it's been down since early this morning. It was down much of yesterday, too.

I'll spare you the gory details. Just know that if you need to reach me, you can call 373-7088. But there is one other detail that's relevant. Typically, when someone comments on this blog, I'm notified by e-mail. Obviously, that won't be happening right now. I'll check back from time to time, but if I don't respond pretty quickly to your comment (which I normally try to do when a response is called for), please be patient; I will get back to you.

Thanks!

UPDATE: I'm being told our e-mail will be out until at least Thursday. In the meantime, you can e-mail me here.

Dan Gillmor, author of "We the Media" and one of the principals behind the Bayosphere citizen-journalism initiative, is pulling out of Bayosphere. He talks about his reasons in a lengthy post, and he also talks about lessons he learned, some of which are relevant to what we're doing. His list, summarized:

• Making people take responsibility for their words, although it cut the pool of potential contributors somewhat, was the right thing to do, and the contributors who were left generally contributed better content.
• Citizen journalists need and want help and guidance, including clear direction on what they're supposed to be doing. What they're doing, however, should not be limited to, say, filling in the blanks.
• There must be incentives for people to participate (beyond the thrill of seeing your byline in print).
• Participants are essential, but the audience matters most; most people who come to the site will never contribute to it.

One of the things we hope to do this year is increase the amount of citizen journalism on our site, so the advice about people needing help, guidance and clear expectations is particularly apt. But to the extent that I'm involved in that initiative, I'll try to keep all these lessons in mind.

Just a reminder: We have a photoblog you can post to, and this morning we're featuring some nice photos someone took at the MLK Day parade and e-mailed in.

A year ago today, I posted on this blog my memo to the N&R news department's senior editors on how we could make our Web site more of an online "Town Square" and why we might want to do that. (The memo is still available in Word format here, if you prefer.) Shortly thereafter, Editor John Robinson made "making it so" my full-time job, and the rest is history.

So, a year down the road, where are we?

Yesterday I spent a fair bit of time with newsroom technology maven Herb Everett, figuring out how we can use Publicus, our online publishing program, to blog. The N&R Interactive folks (Charlie Stafford and Stephen Paschall, primarily) have asked us to do this because they want all our bloggers to be using our Web-publishing program, Publicus (a/k/a Saxotech Online), rather than our current blogging tool, Movable Type, within the next few months.

The main reason is that we want to get all our content into a single, searchable database, which will make searching easier and more productive for us and you alike. (That, in turn, will make the site more attractive to the advertisers whose money pays my salary.) Also, because the blogs currently are hosted in a separate environment that requires time and money to maintain, using Publicus to blog will save us both. The change also will free at least a small amount of money (for software licensing) to be better spent elsewhere and reduce the number of page templates that have to be maintained and upgraded as we tweak our designs.

If we want to do something online, we can have no tool at all, the wrong tool, a tool that will do the job but isn't perfect and the perfect (perfect in the sense of "best mix of 'available' and 'appropriate'") tool. For blogging, Publicus falls into the third category, and I think our bloggers can work with that.

Preparing for the change is not sexy, and it's certainly not something we can point to online and say, "Hey, look what we're doing!" and be able to impress you on the spot. Also, it's kind of a mind-numbing time-suck if, like me, you're not a programmer. (Actually, the programmers may feel the same way.) But it's essential to making life easier down the road for both you and us as we work together to build the kind of online presence we all want.

One of the major steps we need to take in turning our Web site into the kind of virtual town square we envision is making our Web site more robust, taking more advantage of the capabilities of the medium. Up to now, we've been hindered in News by a lack of hardware and software with which to create and edit audio, video and Flash presentations. What we've done, we've done by borrowing equipment from our tech folks (or, in a few cases, working with personal equipment).

But I'm delighted to say that's changing. We'll soon be getting computer equipment that will enable us to create and edit multimedia presentations here in the newsroom, without having to hit up our friends across the hall for their equipment. It's not as much as we need or want, but at least it'll be ours and it'll be here. And we hope to begin posting the fruits of our new resource very soon.

Lisa Williams, the blogger/citizen-journalist who started the community-journalism site H2otown in Watertown, Mass., has a guest post up on Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, describing how she began doing what she does, how and why she does it now, and what lessons she thinks might be applicable to other communities.

It's a fairly lengthy essay even by PressThink standards. But she gets at a lot of good stuff -- from nuts and bolts to the psychology behind what she does -- and she's an excellent writer, so it's time well spent. She mentions the N&R, but she doesn't talk about YourNews, as you might expect; the part of our little experiment that she likes best is our Letters to the Editor blog.

Go read what she has to say, whether you want to write the first Pulitzer Prize-winning citizen-journalism expose or just post a snapshot from your cell-phone camera. You'll be glad you did.

First, you can download the *.mp3 here.

This session, "We News," was intended to enlighten us as to how Big Media is adopting to/co-opting/exploiting/what-have-you citizen journalism. My thoughts are below the fold, in thoroughly disjointed shorthand fashion.

We've been kicking around the idea of posting reader-submitted photos pretty much since Day 1. The question was never whether to do it. The question was how, from a technical standpoint, to administer it.

Long story short, we're using TextAmerica and launching a photo site now. You can see the photos at http://triadphotos.textamerica.com/ on a computer browser (our staff already has put up a few) or http://triadphotos.tamw.com on your mobile device.

To contribute a photo:

Take a picture or video with your camera phone or digital camera and e-mail it (one at a time) to triadphotos.nr@tamw.com. Your subject line becomes the title of the photo and the body of your message becomes the caption. Files must be JPEGs and less than 700K in size.

We will be looking at photos as they come in, but we'll be posting them as soon as possible.

So get clickin'.

Allen is up to something cool. But I'm going to wait and let him tell you about it when he's good and ready.

That's what we hope, and expect, citizen journalism will be someday soon.

I pass on without comment this Online Journalism Review article that reviews various citizen-journalism sites around the country, including Greensboro101.com (but not us). Note, particularly, the discussion going on in the comments.

One of my co-panelists was Susan DeFife, president and CEO of Backfence.com, which is setting up hyperlocal community-journalism sites in the Washington area. I just got an e-mail from her announcing that the company has gotten a $3 million investment from SAS Investors and the Omidyar Network. With that money, Backfence will create additional sites around Washington as well as expand into at least two other metro areas (which the company isn't naming yet).

No one knows whether there's money to be made off citizen journalism, but if the venture capitalists are getting involved, they must be fairly sure there's a way.

I spent this past Wednesday up in New York at the We Media '05 conference, sponsored by the American Press Institute's Media Center and The Associated Press. It was held at AP's new digs on West 33rd, which, I must say, look like a Hollywood set designer's idea of what a global wire service's world headquarters should look like ... and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

The speakers ranged from former Vice President Al Gore and the heads of some of the country's biggest news-media organizations to, well, me. The crowd was overwhelmingly white and wealthy, largely male and middle-aged or older, and pretty sure that the universe of citizen journalism, blogging and other forms of participatory media, in some form, is where we are, and need to be, heading.

As you might expect with such a crowd, the most urgent questions could be boiled down to: How can we make money off of this? That came up even in my session, about which more anon. It might or might not comfort you to know that you probably know as much about the answer to that question as any of the suits in the room did, or were admitting to.

In the first session (audio here), one of the speakers either was or was quoting (I'm not sure which) Chris Willis, co-author of the 2003 report "We Media" (*.pdf file here, HTML version here). His point was that although some of us might have utopian visions of "citizen journalism" in which lay people burst forth with well-documented, well-written pieces to contribute to the Web sites of traditional media, the typical person wants to participate in some way in the public conversation but doesn't necessarily want to be, or be thought of as, a "citizen journalist." I don't have any indication in my notes that the speaker discussed the ramifications of that fact. I do have a note to myself to determine whether our Hometown Hubs approach is the correct way to serve such readers. Now that we have our second weekend of Hometown Hubs: Summerfield under our belts, I'm pretty sure that is, if not the correct way, at least one correct way to do so. I'm open to suggestions on others.

The speakers briefly discussed the geek tools that are not only making contributing to the conversation easier but also making it easier to find contributions by subject. I'll spare you the gory technical details, but photo-hosting sites such as Flickr, "tagging" code from Technorati and Web syndication figure heavily into the mix. They noted that after the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, people in the affected areas found their voices through blogs and "exhibited the instinct to be storytellers."

Are we moving from a media-consumption culture to a "contribution culture"? I sure hope so, because we've got our chips placed on that particular part of the roulette table.

UPDATE: (10/12/05): Per Mike Orren, the speaker was indeed Willis; passage above that mentioned him has been edited to reflect that fact.

One of the reasons we launched the Town Square initiative was because many advertisers are devoting increasing percentages of their ad budget to the Web. Now comes a report that that strategy is paying off:

Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for [auto maker] Audi, titled "The Art of the Heist." Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds -- a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign's landing page.

If that's the case, I'm guessing those blogs could justifiably charge a lot more than they're getting right now ... which, in turn, has encouraging ramifications for what we're up to. But I hasten to add that the business end of this experiment isn't my specialty, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Audio files from the third round of hearings of the Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission have arrived, courtesy of Ed Whitfield, and they've been turned over to Kevin Lockamy and Bruce Webb of our crack online tech staff for posting. I'll shout when they're up.

The BBC had been moderating public comments on its Web site, but that job has overwhelmed the staff. So they're ditching the moderation.

Our article comments, once activated, also will be unmoderated. Comments on our blogs already are, by and large, although blog owners can go in and edit or remove comments in extreme cases.

We've received a number of complaints about the tone of some comments in the Letters blog and, to a lesser extent, on The Chalkboard, but beyond that, comments on our blogs have been largely civil. That speaks well of the participants in the community we're trying to build. Yay, y'all! Let's keep it up.

Our launch of Hometown Hubs: Summerfield, our first community-based online site for reader-contributed news, is still on schedule for this Sunday.

The project will include both a section on our Web site, with content added as readers submit it, and a weekly portion of each Sunday's local-news section in the print edition, with selected content from the Web site.

On Monday evening, community editor Betsi Robinson, staff writer Tom Steadman and I had a good meeting with more than a dozen people in Summerfield who are interested in contributing to the hub. Yesterday afternoon, I met with our tech folks -- Charlie Stafford, Stephen Paschall and Kevin Lockamy -- who will be making the Web end of things happen, and we appear to be good to go.

Once the Summerfield hub is up and running, we'll be establishing Hometown Hubs for other communities. You also can post your news to our Web site anytime at YourNews.

You'll be able to find Hometown Hubs: Summerfield at http://www.news-record.com/hometowns/summerfield

(The link isn't live yet or I'd have hot-linked it.)

The Houston Chronicle has created a blog on which several Houston-area folks are blogging their experiences as Hurricane Rita approaches. You can check it out here.

FWIW, I've read some Houston-area blogs that suggest the storm surge, although likely to be large, won't be as much of a problem as the flooding likely to occur if, as expected, the storm slows down after landfall. The whole region is pretty flat, and with a projected 10 to 30 inches of rain, there's going to be a lot of water without much place to go. Whether or not that's true, it's going to be a long, long weekend in east Texas and western Louisiana.

Members of the Greensboro Interfaith Mission to Israel have filed the ninth and final installment of their reporting on their trip. You can read it here.

Tomorrow and Monday, I'll be filling in for online-news editor Mike Fuchs, who's taking a well-deserved long weekend. (The fact that this long weekend coincides with the arrival of a Category 5 4 hurricane in the heart of the nation's oil-refinin' bidness is, I am certain, not something he factored into his plans.) The down side is that I am, um, somewhat less fluent in our Web publishing system than Mike is, so if y'all see some horrible problems on our home page, by all means let me know, but please be gentle, mmkay? Thanks.

Local contributing readers Jill Wilson and Jan Capps continue to file dispatches from the Holy Land as part of the Greensboro Interfaith Mission trip to Israel. I got a bit behind posting their dispatches while I was home sick the past two days, but we're caught up now and you can read their stories, and others, at the YourNews archive page.

I also failed to take timely note of a milestone regarding YourNews. One of the many questions we received when we began the Town Square initiative was: Would reader-contributed stories ever be published in the printed edition of the News & Record? We said yes, and that actually happened for the first time on Monday, as Jan and Jill shared a byline on a story that was published on page B9 of the Greensboro section. (The story comprised the first two installments they filed from the Holy Land.) I'd've pointed it out at the time if I'd been well.

But you don't have to travel to the Holy Land to contribute stories to YourNews. Just go here.

The third YourNews installment of the Greensboro Interfaith Mission's Holy Land trip is up here.

As JR mentioned (and as I should have mentioned yesterday), some members of the 44-person group of Christians, Jews and Muslims from Greensboro who are on a trip to the Holy Land are filing accounts of their experiences to YourNews. Part 1 is here; Part 2, here.

Members of the group are interested in a discussion and community dialogue about the issues raised by things they see and hear. So take a look at their dispatches and let them know what you think. I'll post notices here when subsequent dispatches are online.

This is the first extended use of YourNews by any local person or group to foster discussion on an issue. We'd like to see more, but we also want to make sure the experience works well for users. So tell me what you think about the forum: Does it work? How could it work better?

... is, at long last, up at http://www.gotriad.com/go/katrina. Use it for anything -- reports from friends/relatives in areas affected by the storm, discussion of planning/response, whether/how New Orleans ought to be rebuilt, missing/found people, whatever you see fit.

Thanks to Mike Fuchs for doing the actual work.

In recent years, the term "weather porn" has been coined to describe the, uh, orgy of overcoverage often devoted to weather events. Lotsa heat, not so much light, to coin a phrase.

Even allowing for the fact that Hurricane Katrina likely will end up the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, much of the coverage hasn't been all that informative.

But this post at Kathryn Cramer's blog shows how bloggers, using the (relatively) new Web tools Google Earth and Flickr to illustrate storm damage in the New Orleans area better than most of what you've seen on TV or on the TV networks' Web sites. They're bringing light to a hot topic.

Back in July, you'll recall, I talked about our plans for an online Summerfield site with a print component, with community residents writing about their community for online and the best submissions being included in a weekly print page. Community Editor Betsi Robinson, who is overseeing this effort, has come up with a name for it: Hometown Hubs.

Earlier this week, tech maestros Charlie Stafford and Kevin Lockamy met with me, Betsi and the senior writer on Betsi's team, Tom Steadman, to talk about the practical aspects of getting the online component of Summerfield's Hometown Hub up and going.

We'll be launching the site in a few weeks, and this afternoon Betsi and I met with JR and Managing Editor Ann Morris to figure out where else we might launch Hometown Hubs later this year. We settled on two that we hope to launch before year's end and two more we hope to launch soon thereafter, and the only reason I'm not telling you now where they are is that we have to notify some people in-house first, and some of them are still burning vacation.

The initial focus of Hometown Hubs is on geographic communities, but we think the concept will work for communities of interest, as well. I'll be talking more about these projects as we get more details nailed down, and as always, if you have any thoughts on what they should include, give me or Betsi a shout.

It's quiet. Too quiet.

That's because we've kind of taken care of all the stuff that's quick 'n' easy, and the stuff we're working on now is more complicated and requires more behind-the-scenes effort up front. Community editor Betsi Robinson and her team are putting together the Summerfield online/print section. Our tech folks will be tweaking the home page a bit more, including adding a tab for Public Square-related features such as YourNews, as soon as they get some non-Public-Square stuff off their plates (such as GoTriad's Readers Choice project). I'm compiling a database of info on News Department employees to which each staffer's byline eventually will link, and I'm also pulling together data for a capital-budget request so we can get some more cool toys essential hardware to greatly increase our multimedia production capability.

We're also recruiting staff internally for some additional blogs that will deal with the general subjects of pets and TV shows. JR is still deciding what the ultimate formats will turn out to be.

But all is not frozen behind the curtain. On Monday, I'm delighted to announce, N&R staffer Jim Schlosser will begin blogging at Architecture, Artifacts and Antiquity (whether or not the banner graphic is finished by then).

Jim brings to the subject his unique, engaging and award-winning writing style; his deep knowledge and love of all things Greensboro; and a passionate layman's interest in architecture. If you liked "Urban Image," the column he wrote for the N&R's CityLife section in the mid-1990s, you'll love this blog.

The blog is intended to complement, not compete with, A Little Urbanity, a blog written by classics professor David Wharton, who also sits on the Greensboro Historic District Commission. Although Wharton discusses historic buildings and architecture from time to time, he mainly focuses on more current and big-picture issues. Jim will be spending more time on the history of our community and using his bright writing to bring the past alive. I can't wait.

UPDATE: There'll be one other interesting new feature, too, but it's Allen's baby, so I'll let him tell you about it when he's ready.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Town Square tab is now up on the home page.

What to do, what to do.

This is the first time I've ever been asked to speak at an event I couldn't afford to attend. It's also proof positive that if you blog long enough, you'll eventually end up on a panel with Wonkette. Or at least be a speaker at the same event as she.

On the plus side, I and fellow citizen-journalism evil genius Susan DeFife of Backfence.com (more info on her here) will be quizzed, the way James Lipton does it on "Inside the Actors Studio," by Dan Gillmor, author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People," for an audience of a couple of hundred people who will be paying close to $700 to be there (many of whom will be liveblogging the event). He had a conversation with N&R staffers and some local bloggers back in February, and a good time was had by all, so it should be fun. I'd love to stay for the whole thing -- and would love even more to spend some extra time in New York catching up with old friends -- but that's two days before ConvergeSouth, so I'll probably just do an Ed and fly up and back the same day.

Well, Ocean Isle was nice, but there's only so much sleeping 'til 10 a.m., eatin' fresh seafood and downin' lots of red wine and daiquiris that one human being can stand.

In my absence, colleague Melissa Umbarger's N&R cooking blog, Mel's Kitchen, made its debut. She had been food-blogging on her own for a couple of months independently of the N&R, and even if you're not a huge foodie, I think you'll like this. She had me at the part about poaching salmon in the dishwasher.

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.

... 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.

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:

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

As digital video equipment gets smaller, cheaper and more common, committing your own videography in the service of journalism gets easier and easier. The British Broadcasting Co. is all in favor of that and has posted a course online in how to shoot better video. So trip on over there and get yourself some edumacation. We can't all be this good, but we've got to start somewhere.

During my recent, extended absence from the office, I fell behind on a lot of things. I'm caught up on almost all of them, but one big one on which I'm still way behind is YourNews.

At this point, I've edited and posted everything submitted through June 1. But that still leaves a backlog of about 15 pieces at this point. If you're one of those unfortunate authors, please bear with me; I hope to finish catching up within the next few days.

You can preview our redesigned Web site here. For those of you who are techs, think of this as a beta release ... and whether you're technical or not, please give us your comments, impressions, feedback, on both substance and style. (There's a "Feedback" link on the page.)

Sorry for the long absence. I've been dealing with a family emergency, and it ain't over yet.

Coming Sunday: Reporter Allison Perkins looks at some local b-boys, and we'll have video online with a b-boy offering explanation of, and commentary on, the moves you'll be seeing.

This was the production I accidentally almost killed earlier this week. The surviving remnant, assembled during a frenzied 2 1/2 hours on Tuesday, lacks all the frills like matching sound levels, neat visual transitions and, well, coherence that distinguished the original, but at this point it's better than nothing. All praise to Allison and videographer Taylor Webster Kevin Lockamy; all criticism to me.

Today I'm rehashing how we currently put breaking news online so that on Monday and Tuesday I can fill in for Mike Fuchs, the newsroom's online-news editor, while he takes some well-deserved time off. Obviously we all had hoped to have Publicus up and running by now, but that hasn't happened. So I'm reacclimating myself to the wonderful world of spit, bailing wire, strings, rubber bands, paper clips, duct tape and hamsters-in-exercise-wheels we currently use to post news online, a system I last used more than a year ago.

Lemme tell you, absence has not made the heart grow fonder. And forget the price of gasoline -- have you seen what they're getting these days for hamster chow??

This past Friday I had the privilege of speaking to the Minnesota AP Association's annual awards banquet in St. Paul. This was a fly-up, do-my-thing, fly-back kind of gig, so I didn't get to see much of Minnesota, to which I had never been. It was supposed to be springtime even that far north, but it wasn't cloudy, foggy and damp the whole time I was there, for which my hosts apologized profusely. But my hotel room had a nice view of the Mississippi River, which, that far north, isn't much more imposing than, say, the Yadkin west of Winston-Salem.

My thanks to Dave Pyle, chief of bureau there, for inviting me, and to everyone I met for their hospitality. "Minnesota nice" isn't just a marketing slogan.

If you're so inclined, you can read the text of my speech below the fold. With a few minor variations, what you read is what I said.

... is working 'til 1 a.m. on a video project to meet a noon Tuesday deadline, only to find that when you stitch all your edited segments together, your painstakingly edited -- and essential -- soundtracks of voice-over narration have disappeared.

I warned you this was going to be a learning experience.

Pegasus News has dubbed this effort we, and they, are up to "wedia", as in, "we [are] the media."

Which is fine -- indeed, a crisper name than, say, "citizen journalism," but I had to think about it a second; my first reaction was that it made me think of weeds.

The post goes on to list things that a hyperlocal news business should do. I'm sure we'll be using that list as one of our guideposts, even as we develop some interesting variations on it.

Barring further complications (and I certainly wish I could, but that's a wish, not a command), our Web redesign will be getting what's called a "soft launch" within the next couple of weeks.

That means that one day we'll just put up the new design for you to see. It inevitably will have problems, glitches, rough edges that need smoothing, and so forth. (For you geeks, think of it as still in beta testing.) We welcome your bringing any and all of these to our attention -- indeed, we're counting on it.

Many of our problems up to this point have had to do with the shotgun marriage of our new Web-publishing system with our existing print-publishing system. As in any shotgun wedding, there are certain incompatibilities, reservations and hesitancies. But every shotgun wedding also features someone with a shotgun, at least metaphorically speaking, and JR wields a mean one. This wedding will be going off, hitches (so to speak) and all. (Just don't ask me which system is the pregnant one. I don't even know which one's the boy and which one's the girl.)

And once we get the kinks ironed out, we'll have a big "public" launch. I'm not involved in promotions, but I think it would be nice if the public launch included a party of some sort. We, and you, have certainly earned it.

Craig Newmark of craigslist.com says newsrooms still matter:

With all the excitement about citizens' media, it's easy to forget how important current news operations are. We have a lot of journalists there, but also, fact checkers, editors, and so on, and they perform an indispensable function.

I feel that citizens' media complements that, and that professional and citizen journalists will blur together in networks of collaboration.

I'm not sure what I will have to do with this, maybe just encouraging this movement, maybe something financial. ...

He goes on to say that he doesn't even know whether his company would get involved, or just him personally. (He's not the only owner anymore.) At any rate, that vision certainly is compatible with ours.

Recently I've had a couple of opportunities to talk with other people who are also moving toward open-source journalism about what we're doing, what works, what doesn't, and so on. The only reason I didn't blog about them at the time was because I was swamped. But that worked out OK, because the fruits of those conversations are now publicly accessible.

The first forum was an e-mail discussion that took place at the behest of Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review. Besides Niles and me, it also included Mike Noe, editor of RockyMountainNews.com, and Lauren Ward, editor of the Bakersfield Californian's reader-written Northwest Voice.

A complete transcript is here.

The other discussion took place just yesterday, when I took part in the recording of a pilot program for Public Radio International called Open Source. It's the brainchild of Christopher Lydon, whom you may know from NPR's "The Connection." The show (which has a blog here) will premiere on May 30 and will be an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the Web and blogging on the air. Check out that blog; the creators of the show are offering a variety of ways for the public to contribute. And the podcast of our pilot, a 54-megabyte *.mp3 file, can be downloaded here. (The musical interludes you'll hear are for news and station identification.) And let me give a shout-out to Jennifer Curry and the folks at WFDD to thank them for allowing me to borrow their Greensboro studio to take part in the production.

My colleague Allison Perkins has written Storagepalooza, a neat feature on rock bands who practice in the same self-storage place out on West Wendover Avenue where they keep their equipment. This is one of the multimedia projects I've been working on, and you can see the fruits of my learning experience here.

I'm currently working on another such project with writer Tina Firesheets, and Allison and I are planning still another. Given our limitations on equipment at the moment, as well as my other job responsibilities, two irons in the fire at a time is about the best I can manage.

Lest anyone think otherwise, we're not trying to put Lenslinger and his colleagues out of business. But to make online the integral component of the Public Square that it needs to be, we in the newsroom need to learn how to produce multimedia content that people will find useful and/or entertaining. I welcome your feedback, in the comments or via e-mail.

UPDATE: The co-leader of the seminar I attended in March weighs in:

It's a great start. Now, you're ready to take another big step. Since I don't know what that story will be, I'll offer some suggestions for this story, as if you had a chance to do it over again:

Instead of going linear, put a large photo with inviting text, and link to a pop-up window.

In that popup window, incorporate text, audio and a couple more photos
with the Flash file you did. Text includes the name of the storage
area, the number of bands, etc. Audio moves from from busy street
sounds to band sounds (better to hear than describe in text).

That means in shooting your video that you get a couple of street
scenes with audio -- that gives you the establishing shot (plus a
close-up of the name of the storage area), and moves you (via visuals
and audio) to the inside, where the bands are playing.

B-roll would really liven up your videos and tell more of the story
that's in text. So...how to do this and sync the wide shots with the
music? Get them to play the same song twice -- once for the wide shots
and to lay down one uninterrupted song, once for a whole bunch of
closeups and differents point of view so the readers can see what the
band members see. Also incorporate closeups of things like
soundproofing, what they're drinking or eating, the time on a clock (if it's late) -- whatever visuals fill out the story. Also, if you have the time, hang around and get quick interviews with them, and cut those into the video. After all, this is a story of their rehearsals, and those can be tedious, fun, antagonistic, etc., etc. -- you're really giving readers a glimpse into an aspect of band life that few will ever witness.

Another way to look at this is to look at the band Web sites -- it's
easy to see what you as a journalist/storyteller does differently from
what they do, and what you do that's the same.

One more thing -- in the Flash file, with this I'd either use black as
a background. Or I'd overlap the layers closer together so that they
faded directly into one another rather than fade to the background.

You're on your way! Send me the next one!

OK, she lost me at "Instead of going linear ... " because I don't even know what she means by that.

But I'm going to find out.

Our Inside Beat blog has spun off a new blog called Capital Beat. Written by Raleigh-bureau reporter Mark Binker (who recently moved to that beat from the Guilford County government beat), Capital Beat will focus on state government and politics with an eye toward how they affect us here at home.

Guess I need to check the links in my sidebar and on our home page to make sure they're updated appropriately.

Katharine "Kit" Seelye of The New York Times is here today and tomorrow, reporting on the Public Square initiative. If you want to talk to her about what we're doing, shout here or e-mail. She spent about 45 minutes interviewing me earlier this morning and is now talking to other N&R staffers who blog.

I continue to slog away at multimedia editing/production for stories by Allison Perkins and Tina Firesheets that remain in the works. I'm learning as I go, so be patient ... and say a prayer for my co-workers, because I'm going to have to turn around at some point and start teaching them this stuff, too.

As promised, two new blogs appear today: Bargain Blog, by our newsroom's online editor, Mike Fuchs, and the north High Point/Jamestown blog, written by reporter Justin Hayes, who lives there and is in search of what he calls "backyard epics."

And we have a few others up our sleeves, too. Stay tuned.

-- Spent yesterday morning editing video with Allison Perkins for a story she's doing. We didn't finish, but hope to on Monday.

-- Tonight I'm shooting more video for an upcoming story by Tina Firesheets. Here's hoping it's not as rainy as it was last week when I shot Allison's video.

-- Two more N&R blogs will be appearing within the next few days. Mike Fuchs, the newsroom's main Web guy on weekdays, will be writing the Bargain Blog, which he plans to make a coupon shopper's paradise. (UPDATE: Mike says his blog will make its debut Monday morning.) And reporter Justin Hayes in our High Point office will be starting a blog focusing on the Jamestown/North High Point area. Also, our existing SportsExtra blog will be gaining two new voices: Charlie Atkinson, who has been a sports writer and editor here for more than 20 years and currently works on the night sports desk, and Bill Hass, another long-time sportswriter who currently covers the Greensboro Grasshoppers.

-- An update on our new Web-publishing system. I'm told we've got all the organizational kinks worked out in getting story categories in that system to line up with story categories in the system we create and edit stories in for print, but that there are "a few kinks" left. We can't finish creating story templates, story-category templates, etc., in the new system until those kinks are worked out, but we hope to have that process finished within a week. (Extend that to two weeks if we have problems with the software that will enable commenting on individual stories, but that's a feature we think you'd be willing to wait another week to get.) Presumably we'd launch the new site a couple of weeks after that.

-- Key newsroom people will begin receiving training within the next week or so on how to post stories online with the new system. (Actually, they won't be doing it "with the new system," they'll be doing some things in the existing print system that will allow the new Web system to grab and publish those stories, but I'll spare you the gory technical details.)

-- I'll be appearing at 10 a.m. tomorrow on WNAA's Table Talk talk show with host (and friend and former co-worker) Joya Wesley to talk about grassroots journalism, including but not limited to what we're up to here, and its implications for community and democracy. WNAA is at 90.1 FM, with a live Webcast here. It's also a call-in show, and I believe the number to call if you want to comment or ask a question is 334-7952 (or send e-mail here).

Steve Outing, who has been doing online since way before online was cool, has a post up at the Poynter Institute's site on whether, and how, news organizations should train citizen journalists. For what it's worth, I'd like to see us do that (although there are a number of other things I'd like to see us do first, he said, with a grimace). I think helping a team of citizen journalists produce a really good local investigative story/Web project would be about the most fun I could have without involving nudity, explosions or my kids.

What do you think?

The actual content won't be news to anyone who has been paying attention, but Monday's Wall Street Journal article on citizen journalism, which mentions us, is now out from behind the subscriber firewall.

It doesn't really report anything new about what we and some of our newspaper brethren and sistren are doing ("new" being relative, of course). It's more of a trend piece: Bit by bit, piece by piece, American newspapers are starting, ever so slowly, to catch on. Jay Rosen said this should be national news, and so it is.

Coincidentally, Jay has an interview up today with Bill Grueskin, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, who has some interesting things to say about what places such as ours are up to. Grueskin's site is making money while everyone else is sitting around wondering how to make money, so go give him a read.

Two nights ago I went out with staff writer Allison Perkins to shoot video for a multimedia presentation we hope to create, tied to a story she's writing. I don't want to steal her thunder, so to speak, so I'll just say that the sound was muddy, the lighting borderline, the shooting angles tightly constrained and the weather atrocious -- all conditions that actually were appropriate to the subject, even if I might have gotten pneumonia out of the deal. (The subjects, I should add, were cooperative and charming.)

Schedules permitting, we'll edit the video today and hope to have the whole thing ready to go next weekend. Stay tuned.

Within the next few weeks, some of the N&R's news folks, including me, will be holding neighborhood gatherings to let us hear from small groups of area residents on issues of interest to them and their neighborhoods, as well as on the paper/Web site in general. We don't know whether this will become a regular ongoing thing, although I hope it does -- if only for the chance to eat barbecue on the company dime more often. We'll be reaching out to some area residents, asking them to host these gatherings -- and letting them decide whom to invite. Community editor Betsi Robinson and her team will be organizing the events, but I wanted to mention them because I'm excited about their potential for helping us to help you tell your stories.

In The Thread That Wouldn't Die over at TheShu's place, the possibility has been raised that the N&R might somehow take local bloggers' content and make money off it without sharing the revenue with the bloggers. The ensuing discussion led me to share an anecdote that I'm cross-posting here:

Shortly after we first started all this, I decided to try to compile a weekly column with excerpts from local blog posts. I had no preset criteria other than "local" -- timely, funny, pithy, anything might do. Although, as Ed Cone points out [higher in the comment thread], we weren't legally required to seek permission from the bloggers whose work we intended to use in this way, I tried to do so anyway, as a courtesy.

I attempted to contact upwards of a half-dozen bloggers. One got back to me granting permission. One got back to me denying permission (for perfectly good reasons that I am not criticizing). None of the rest got back to me at all.

So we scratched that idea for the time being -- not because we were afraid of breaking the law but because we wanted to be considerate (and not suffer through the bad PR of being accused, even falsely, of stealing people's content). But I'd like to know: In your opinion, did we do the right thing? Or should we have gone ahead and used excerpts?

I ask again here: What, in your opinion, should we have done? If it had been your blog, what would you have preferred that we do?

Through magic modern technology and the hard work of the newsroom's Herb Everett and Mike Fuchs, we've now got posted about 20 minutes or so of the Thursday night meeting of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, here. This was the segment in which the board split along partisan lines regarding an audit of the county tax department (today's story here). When I left the office earlier this evening, the file was about 70 megabytes (i.e., don't try to download it on a dial-up connection), but if you haven't ever been to a commissioners' meeting, this'll give you a sense of just how argumentative they can be.

On a related subject, reporter Allison Perkins and I are scheduled to do some video and audio taping Tuesday for a Web presentation she is planning. There'll be a spin-off article for the print edition. I'll keep you posted on our progress in producing it, but please be patient: We're both learning as we go.

Metro columnist Lorraine Ahearn can now be heard as well as seen. We've got podcasts of two of her columns up here, and we'll be posting more, although schedule/frequency are still to be determined and might be affected by our Web-publishing-system switchover.

As I mentioned, I spent last week at a seminar on multimedia and convergence at Berkeley. The seminar is held under the auspices of the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism by the graduate schools of journalism at Berkeley and Southern Cal.

There were 15 of us, mostly working journalists plus an educator. We spent most of the week working in teams doing real-life reporting and editing on multimedia presentations (or at least the first couple of pages of them) while learning practical techniques of reporting for the Web: audio and video recording and interviewing, recording standups and voiceovers, editing sound and video and creating Flash presentations.

(For grins, you can look at my team's presentation here. Our assignment called for us to create a site of at least three pages, incorporating at least two video clips, at least one audio clip and at least one Flash presentation. But as a piece of journalism, none of us would would call this "finished," so you need not e-mail me about holes in the reporting, etc. Anyway, it's about a Berkeley professor researching the possibility that herbicides may be causing certain species of frogs to grow ovaries inside their testes. It's called "A Man and His Frogs," a title my team chose after rejecting my suggestion, "Dude! Where's My Gonads?!")

I've got a background in music and radio production, but the last time I edited audio was with Ampex tape and a razor blade, so my immersion in digital editing was quite the awakening. If this technology had existed when I was in high school, I suspect my life would have taken a very different course.

In addition to the practical work, we also learned more about the philosophy of online journalism vs. more traditional news media, including some things to keep in mind when attempting to report a story for the Web from the git-go, rather than reporting for print and then spinning off some sort of Web presence for the story.

We also heard from such new-media luminaries as Neil Chase, ex-Marketwatch managing editor and now with NYTimes.com; Bill Gannon of Yahoo; Craig Newmark of Craigslist; and Rob Curley of the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, KUSports.com and Lawrence.com. I'll spare you the details (Curley's got a great story and tells it well, but his presentation ran more than 2 hours and included a 98-page PowerPoint file), but taken as a whole, their remarks and predictions were interesting ... and reassured me that, if there is a way out of the dead-end situation in which the newspaper industry finds itself, we're probably headed in the right direction, albeit too slowly.

I've briefed JR, outlining generally where seminar leaders think we need to go from here: 1) I need to practice my new skills and get really proficient (and I'm going to need some software to do that); 2) I need to get with others in the newsroom to begin a) getting them to start reporting stories for the Web and b) training them in the practical techniques; and 3) finally, once Nos. 1 and 2 are well along, begin training people in the community who are interested in multimedia reporting for our site.

Without betraying any confidences or scoops, I can tell you that I've already begun Steps 1 and 2a (and I can edit audio/video at home in a pinch). So this seminar is already beginning to pay dividends for me, the N&R and, I hope, you.

Below the jump, I'm posting a list of links to sites that helped inform our learning and discussion during the seminar, courtesy of seminar co-leader Jane Ellen Stevens.

To whoever at UCLA's Center for Communications and Community was kind enough to send me the Winter 2005 edition of the journal "Context," thank you very kindly. There's a lot to chew on here. I'll get to it ASAP.

I spent last week at a seminar in Berkeley (snippets from which archived here), which I did not publicize in advance because I thought it might not be a good idea to tell all the Internets that my wife and kids were going to be home without me for a week all alone. Except for the guns. And the dogs. And the landmines.

I'm just sayin'.

I have much to share, but before I do, I need to 1) file the kind of expense report that JR dreads getting and 2) check my inbox for anything needing my immediate attention. Once those tasks are done, I'll come back and fill you in on what happened and, to the extent I know it, where we go next.

The good news: I'm done with two-and-a-half days of training in Publicus, the new Web-publishing system we're going to be using.

The bad news: We can't just start producing new Web pages and new content right here, right now.

Our instructor told us that the absolute soonest he'd ever seen a new site launch was four weeks after training, and that was at a site that wasn't doing any major redesign. (We, of course, are doing a major redesign.)

The main reason is that the system relies on a set of files -- templates and other things -- that have to be created before Web publishing can commence. That would take a while even if we were using an existing, basic page design. But we're designing from scratch, and although that process began before training, we're nowhere near done.

I'd been under the impression that that work was complete, or nearly so -- that it was supposed to have been completed before training began. That's not correct, and to the extent that anything I've said may have led people to share my misimpression, I apologize. And I promise: I'm not going to offer any more estimates or predictions.

Good thing I work in the communications bidness, huh?

As JR said earlier today, I and several other N&R staffers have begun three days of training in the use of Publicus, our new Web-publishing system. Speaking as someone who has been blogging for years and still doesn't really get CSS, the markup language used to design many blog pages, I can say after one day of training that I am in a world of trouble and really, really need a beer.

Online Journalism Review, published by the School of Communications at the University of Southern California, has published three online guides for would-be citizen-journalists, students and other people who aren't journalists but might want to function as one. They're in Wiki format, so if you learn something in your work that isn't covered, you can add that information yourself.

Information is here.

The guide to ethics.

The guide to reporting.

The guide to writing.

I'll have more to say about these later.

This essay on what open-source digital media can learn from the open-source software movement. Hint: We're gonna need new business models, and I don't envy whoever has to sell that notion to The Powers That Be.

We were pleased on Monday to play host to Dwight Silverman, online editor for the Houston Chronicle, who is here for a few days this week to learn about the N&R's online initiative and the Greensboro blogging community. (He was scheduled to be getting together today with some local bloggers, including Roch, Chewie and Sue.)

While he was here, he talked with me and a variety of other staffers in both News and N&R Interactive. He liked a lot of what he saw, but what appeared to blow him away the most was the dialogue on Patrick Eakes' blog involving a post in which Patrick challenged a couple of factual assertions in our Sunday article on character education. "You're so calm and serene about it!" he marveled. Well, yes, I said, because in the future we're trying to create, this is exactly what is supposed to happen. (And you can keep to yourself any snarky comments about my being calm and serene. Hee.)

Dwight talked about some obstacles he sees to trying to do in Houston what we're doing here, even as he listed some encouraging signs. To Dwight or anyone else, I would say: This stuff looks a lot more feasible once the truth really sinks in that business as usual will kill your business. As Ed Cone has said frequently, there's nothing all that special about Greensboro. This could be happening in a lot of other places, if a few people simply decide to make it so.

... that, yes indeed, blogging can indeed be journalism:

It was amazing to see how many participants, at how many sites, took part, and the skills at their command, mainly Web-based. The material the detectives at DailyKos and other blogs drew out of obscure or abandoned Web sites -- and caches -- regarding Talon, Gannon, and a dozen other threads was astounding, although I couldn't quite tell if any of the searches and grabs required talents well beyond the reach of even the most advanced computer wonks. ...

Well, I was growing impressed with blog research. Cutting away the over-the-top rhetoric, snarkiness, and conspiracy theories, most of their far-fetched facts were standing up. So when Americablog uncovered what appeared to be nude photos of Gannon/Guckert advertising his wares as an escort, along with something of a paper trail linking him to those sites, I was no longer skeptical. Soon The Washington Post was citing this evidence. ...

Sure, there is plenty of junk-research out there on the blogs, and unproven or offensive comments still abound in the postings. But what surprised me the most were the resources the major blogs (as opposed to the Mom-and-Pop operations) can call upon for this type of story, enlisting experts around the country -- non-journalists, but people with similar, or even more highly developed, Web skills.

And here's the nut of it: In the blogoshere, it's often asked, on both the left and right, "Why can't the mainstream media get to the bottom of these scandals like the blogs sometimes do?" I understand part of the answer now: No single news outlet has anywhere near the army of workers who toil at the larger blogs.

A couple of people have e-mailed seeking instructions on how to write news stories for our Web site.

I hesitate to give specific directions because I don't want to stifle anyone's voice. In general, it's a good idea to make sure your article answers the traditional "5 W's" of journalism -- who, what, when, where and why (or how). You need not begin your article with them, however -- if you like, just tell the story the way you might tell it to a friend over a beer or a cup of coffee.

Questions of ethics are handled differently in different newsrooms, but many newspaper codes of ethics are modeled after one created by the Society of Professional Journalists. That code can be found here. The N&R has one, but I'm working from home today and can't lay my hands on it at the moment.

Please, keep the submissions coming and don't hesitate to e-mail if you have other questions.

If you look at the News & Record home page, you'll see under the "Top News Updates" a little orange button reading "XML." This is a link to the RSS feed for breaking news on the site.

In plain English, you can use an RSS news reader -- either a program that runs on your computer or a Web-based one such as Bloglines.com -- to keep track of these and other feeds, which alert you to changes or updates to their sites. More information about how these feeds work and how you can use them is here.

We will be incorporating many more RSS feeds into the site after we've installed our new publishing software, to make it easier to track changes and updates to various features and other parts of the site. Places we'll probably add them include online section fronts (news, sports, Go Triad, etc.). For now, though, we have them on all our blogs as well as on our breaking-news list. If there's any particular feature or section of the site that you think needs an RSS feed, let us know.

I'm compiling a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for people who are interested in submitting stories to YourNews but maybe have questions about what they should do or how they should do it. I can guess what some of those questions might be, but let's make this as helpful as possible: What are your questions? Post them in the comments below or e-mail me, and I'll get the question, and an answer, into the list.

I can answer one question right now: Yes, we plan to introduce a blog or other display of reader-submitted photos. Soon.

Told you yesterday I hoped to have some Public Square-related news to report today, and I do.

The News & Record's YourNews has gone live. You can now write and submit your own news stories for publication on our site.

This link takes you to where readers' stories will appear. The first, a reflection on his recently completed Army tour in Iraq by Greensboro native Adam Williams, already is up.

And, yes, comments are enabled.

You can submit your stories here.

You can get more information on submission requirements here.

This setup likely will have to change once we install our new Web-publishing system in a few weeks, but this feature was too important to delay, so we're going ahead and launching it now.

So please join us.

Pegasus suggests one you might not have thought of:

Now maybe I read too many comic books as a kid, but I remember the square-jawed goons were always looking over their shoulder to see if some nosy cub reporter was around the corner. 'Cos in an old-timey narrowly-drawn geographic beat system that newspapers used to employ, there was a fair chance they might be. ...

... it seems to me that if a hypothetical news organization had a crew of 50-70 professional reporters, stringers and Citizen Journalists roaming the city, armed with cell phones and cameras; investigating every neighborhood crime they could scoop and actively patrolling for neighborhood news -- our little burg [Dallas -- Lex] might not be in such dire need of saving. Because that, in and of itself, might be almost as much of a deterrent as a vigilant(e) group of volunteers.

In the past several days, we've launched two new discussion forums, two new blogs and a podcast. And this was a week that started off with me thinking not much new would happen until our new Web publishing system arrived.

But the newsroom's main online guy, Mike Fuchs, fired up the forums without consulting me. And once Charlie and Stephen got the new blogs ready to go, they just notified those blogs' owners, who started posting; no one checked with me first.

I was involved with planning for the podcast -- it actually began almost two weeks ago -- although I spent way more time listening than talking during those discussions. And when Jeri and Nicole were ready to record it, they just did. And when it was ready to be posted, someone posted it. Again, without checking with me.

My immediate reaction was to think, "Hey, shouldn't they have checked with me? It's not supposed to work like this!"

But then I thought: No, it's supposed to work exactly like this -- ideas bubble up, they're acted on, and we move on to other things, all the while drawing more people in the newsroom into the effort. And very soon, we'll be drawing more people in the community into the effort, as well. We've already thrown some gates open, and there will be more.

If we had one, I would say that everything is proceeding according to plan.

We're podcasting, baby!

GoTriad, currently both a weekly entertainment section of the N&R and a happenin' Web site, now branches out with GoRadio, a downloadable audio program in which GoTriad staffers Jeri Rowe and Nicole Ortega talk about upcoming events highlighted in this week's GoTriad section. Download it now, then listen to it on the drive home to start plotting planning your activities for the weekend.

We're kicking around ideas for other regular podcasts as well. If you have suggestions, hit me with 'em.

When I wasn't looking, our new racin' blog popped up: The Spotter, primarily written by assistant sports editor John Newsom with occasional contributions from motorsports writer Dustin Long and columnist Ed Hardin.

Business writer Dick Barron, who maintains a fairly intense side interest in Formula 1 racing, also might make an occasional cameo appearance (or, as he puts it, "assault (Newsom's) sensibilities") on that blog once the F1 season gets cranked up, starting in a few weeks.

I realize that the discussion occasionally gets a bit, well, intense in the comments on our letters-to-the-editor blog, but please, folks, let's try to stay focused on ideas rather than personalities. This is one area in which the N&R should not try to emulate such better-known publications as Newsweek, whose online chat with its reporter in Iraq, Rod Nordland, produced this gem:

Hopatcong, NJ: Do you, Masland and Dickey mean "------g Murderers" when you say "insurgents" and "fighters" in your STUPIDITY? I've grown sick and tired of you "politically incorrect" reporters. Why don't you have the gumption to call a spade a spade?

Rod Nordland: OK, you're an idiot. How's that?

Yes, I think we all can do better. Let's please try.

The N&R's coverage of the St. James Homes II project has generated a lot of public response, so we've created a new forum to discuss the issue. If you need background, you'll find an archive of our coverage (and a link to the forum) here.

We've also created a new forum for discussing red-light cameras, whose future is in doubt after a ruling in a court case that originated in High Point.

Check these and our other forums out and share your thoughts.

Yup. Biz Buzz, a new blog by N&R staffers devoted to business news, is open for, um, business.

We've gotten a couple of unrelated complaints in the past few days about our promptness, or lack thereof, in pursuing a story idea or tip. Since I'm not currently involved in the day-to-day or even week-to-week flow of reporting for the time being, I could've let 'em slide.

But in the interests of greater transparency, I'm not gonna do that.

Here's the thing: Readers with a story idea or tip sometimes act as if the reporter who would be responsible for pursuing it was just sitting around, drinking coffee and waiting for something to happen, when the tip came in. Maybe there's a newsroom that works like that, but I've never worked in one.

At the N&R, reporters tend to have ideas and stories-in-progress stacked up like airplanes trying to land at LAX at 5 p.m. Anyone who spends much time sitting around drinking coffee and waiting for something to happen tends to have a short and unhappy career with us. Our folks *have* to be productive, particularly with regard to centerpieces, the big stories with lots of photos or other art that anchor each section front every day. And they are. And yet, rare is the Monday on which one city editor or another doesn't have to send out a message to reporters, begging them to list coming stories on the budgets (story lists) for the coming week and weekend.

Working in opposition to this tendency is the fact that a lot of the tips we get are the kinds of stories that, although undeniably important, require more investment of time and energy than the average story. Ideally, reporters would always be working on their best stories. In the real world, editors often -- too often -- have to insist instead that they work on the stories they can finish quickly. (I include myself in that criticism; I've experienced it from both the reporting and writing ends.) And the N&R is far better than most papers its size at getting high-impact stories into the paper fairly quickly. (Former editor Tim Porter has some related thoughts here and here on this subject.

So what's my point? I have a few, actually.

As JR announced today, you're now officially invited to contribute stories to the site:

Everyone can be a reporter, and we want your stories. Know about some news? Write it as a story and e-mail it to us. Know an interesting person or place? We'll publish a story about it online. Disagree with how we've presented a news event ... you attended or participated in? Rewrite our story the way you think it should read. E-mail all such submissions to Lex. ... They will be lightly edited for libel, veracity and grammar.

If you don't do much writing, approach your story as if you're just telling it to someone you know well over a cup of coffee or a beer. Don't try to write like professional journalists. We tried that, and all we've got to show for it is falling circulation. :-)

So, Greensboro and the Triad, we know you have stories. It's time to bring 'em.

Just four days after Dave Winer's visit, I dragged myself into the office this morning (actually, I ditched church) for a quasi-public forum featuring Dan Gillmor, a well-known tech writer and the author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People," whose work informs much of what the News & Record is trying to do with its Public Square project. Dan had asked us to 1) make the event open to the public but 2) keep the group manageably small, so JR invited a number of local bloggers and also threw it open to the entire news staff, a surprisingly large and diverse number of whom came.

It was an excellent discussion, and I think all of us, including Dan, left heartened that the N&R and the larger Greensboro blogging community are on the right track. I'm not sure if anyone was recording it, but if I find that a podcast is available, I'll link to it.

UPDATE: Right at the end of the discussion, Dan mentioned four things that, in combination, could replace "objectivity" as a tenet of journalism. For those who weren't taking notes, they were thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency, and he elaborates on those points here.

... Audio Activism has posted a podcast of last night's community forum at the N&R with blogging guru Dave Winer.

So we've been recreating this Web site as an online public square, you and I, for about a month now. This strikes me as a good time to stop and see what we've accomplished so far.

... in announcing the debut of Fast Forward, a blog about Triad transportation issues by reporters Eric Townsend in our Greensboro office and Amy Dominello in our High Point office. It left the starting line (how many bad metaphors can I pack into this post?) this past Wednesday.

Revved up about road rage? Curious about how bus routes get chosen? Drive on over.

Reminder: Our forum Wednesday evening with community-journalism guru Dave Winer is free and open to the public, but we need a head count. If you're coming, please e-mail me ASAP to let me know.

Thanks!

I'm delighted to announce that the N&R will host a public discussion featuring blogging guru and Scripting News editor Dave Winer, scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 9, in the auditorium here at the News & Record, 200 East Market Street (parking available on the street in front of the building or in the Davie Street city garage). Admission is free. Dave will be discussing participating in a discussion about blogs and community journalism.

UPDATE: I repeat, admission is free -- but if you're planning to come, please e-mail and let me know so I'll know how many chairs to set up, how much to get in the way of refreshments, etc. Thanks!

As we continue to change our online presence from lecture to conversation, and as more of you prepare to become, for lack of a better term, citizen journalists, Tim Porter, a journalist and blogger who has the wherewithal to ponder Big Questions, raises some of them on Morph, a blog hosted by the American Press Institute. He directs them at newsrooms, and our newsroom certainly needs to think about them. But I think anyone who sees him- or herself contributing to news-as-conversation probably needs to be thinking about them as well. Some examples:

What is a "story"? What information should it contain? Which is the most important? How long must it be? How can it be presented in a form that is most useful to readers? What elements besides words are essential?

What is a "beat"? How, for example, should "education" be covered? How can we minimize institutional coverage in favor of stories about people and their concerns without abrogating our responsibility to, as one reporter once told me, "keep an eye on these scoundrels?" What skills are needed for good beat coverage? How do we ensure that our reporters have them and our editors permit the reporters to use them?

What is our role as a "watchdog"? How do we move from "gotcha" to context so the community believes we are on their side? How transparent should our reporting be? How much documentation can we provide that so we can not only underwrite our findings but also demystify our process?

Go read the whole thing. Then do some thinking about answers to the questions he raises ... and hit the comment link.

Another small step toward making N-R.com a true public square: There's now a link on the home page, right underneath the Top News Updates, whereby you can submit a suggestion for a story directly to me. I'll forward your suggestion to the appropriate editor or reporter. I'll also let you know via return e-mail when I have done so and to whom I forwarded it.

This arrangement isn't quite as rich and transparent as the one suggested by Jim Wilson and described in my memo. In fact, it's not hugely different from what we were doing before I wrote the memo. But it's what we're capable of doing now with the staff and technical resources we have, and we'll be working to make people more aware of this feature. As we move closer to true open-source journalism (and once our Web-publishing system is updated), we'll take bigger steps, but for now, just click on the link and hit me with your best ideas.

Thanks!

Eleven years ago this month, I was pulled into a meeting here at the N&R of a bunch of people, most of whom were much higher up the food chain than I, and learned that we, via our corporate parent, were getting into the Internet bidness. A few months later, I was assigned to lead a team of newsroom and tech folks in planning content for what would become the N&R's first Web site, Triad Online, which started going up between Christmas and New Year's Eve of 1994.

One of my team's early meetings involved brainstorming content. Someone suggested that we would probably want to post online the contents of Discover the Triad, a special section we publish every year that's a kind of user's manual for this region.

Dave Stroble, a writer with an even unhealthier interest in computers than my own, then suggested what we were being trained at the time to call a "paradigm shift": Rather than re-reporting each year's edition from scratch and then sticking copy from the printed edition online, he said, we should maintain the information online, make different newsroom people responsible for keeping the different sections up to date, and then download the contents each year to produce the printed edition.

It was a good idea at the time. Now, with our more advanced technology, it's an even better idea. And I was reminded of that by this post at Southern Rants, in which Sue talks about an acquaintance who noted that a charity that appeared in the N&R's recent wish list for area charities was seeking something that he could provide, cheaply. And he provided it.

In the brief ensuing discussion, a commenter suggests that the list be kept online and interactive, "like a wedding registry," which would better serve local charities and make it easier for people to help. This is a perfect, and arguably even more productive, example of what Dave Stroble, who since has left the company, was talking about. I don't know what the technical obstacles to this idea would be, but I'm going to find out.

Perhaps, then, the first manifestation of what I'm going to continue calling the Stroble Paradigm will appear soon as a service linking people who want to help with agencies that need the help.

Got any other ideas for exploiting online's advantages over print in this fashion? Send me an e-mail or hit the comments link.

Mike Fuchs, the N&R newsroom's online-news editor, has just created two new sports discussion forums, one for NASCAR and one for the ACC. Y'all are now free to, as whatzername on "Saturday Night Live" says, talk amongst yourselves, although don't be surprised if I or other N&R staffers make the occasional appearance as well.

The list of links to all our forums is here.

In response to a request from a reader, we've created new forums for each of the colleges in and near Greensboro. Links are here, or they can be accessed from the News-Record.com home page by clicking on the "message boards" link near the upper right corner of the page or the "message forums" button right underneath the Top News Updates.

Late Wednesday, I met with two of our online staff, Charlie Stafford and Stephen Paschall, to discuss additions/changes to our Web site that would enhance interactivity and could be done fairly quickly and easily, without having to wait until our new Web publishing software goes online.

One thing we looked at was online forums, which we've had in some form or fashion since our first Web site went up 10 years ago. Our current forums are here; on the News & Record home page, look for the "message boards" link near the top right corner of the page.

In addition to previously created forums on specific subjects that we'd covered heavily in the paper, you'll find two new forums, one for area news and one for sports. I'll spend some time over there regularly, and I invite you to do the same.