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Meanwhile, here at Woolworth’s …

September 6, 2013 by Guy

The news coming out of a series of meetings that the new owner of the Washington Post, Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos, had with the paper’s employees this week sounded both encouraging and discouraging to longtime news people like me.

It was encouraging because so much of it reinforced the values we have always been taught.

For instance, this was the first paragraph of the story by Post writers Paul Farhi and Craig Timberg about the meetings:

“Jeffrey P. Bezos had a simple bit of advice for the staff of the newspaper he’ll soon own: Put readers, not advertisers, first. Don’t write to impress each other. And above all, ‘Don’t be boring.’”

But what’s discouraging is just that: Almost everything that those listening to Bezos found worth repeating was so thoroughly familiar that it ought to have been unremarkable.

For instance, every bit of that Post paragraph above was pretty much from News Writing 101. Many reporters hate the idea that advertising is even IN the newspaper, so you hardly have to tell them not to put advertisers first, but getting a writer to think of his story from the perspective of a reader can take some work. And “Don’t be boring”? Get serious. That falls under the category of advice that my wife calls “Don’t shave the cat,” which means it’s advice you really shouldn’t need to hear in order to do the sensible thing. No editor ever chewed out a reporter for failing to load a story full of six-syllable words, math equations and technical explanations.

“What has been happening over the last several years can’t continue to happen,” Bezos said of seemingly never-ending cuts to news staff. “If every year we cut the newsroom a little more and a little more and a little more, we know where that ends.”

I have yet to hear anyone say otherwise, so while it’s nice to know that Bezos doesn’t think you can cut your way to prosperity, that thought by itself doesn’t mean he can get the revenue moving back in the right direction.

What the news industry hopes to see from Bezos eventually is a way for the business to thrive in the world of free and instant sharing on the Internet. The closest he got to that was this:

“Should it be as easy to buy the Washington Post as it is to buy diapers on Amazon? I think it should.”

Can’t argue with that. Many of the business practices at a great many newspapers are firmly rooted in the pre-Internet 20th century. But again, that’s hardly a novel realization. People have been talking about this in the industry for years, yet, just like the weather, no one does anything about it.

Then we get to a couple of things the Post reported Bezos saying that are just depressing to journalists.

“You have to figure out: How can we make the new thing? Because you have to acknowledge that the physical print business is in structural decline,” he said. “You can’t pretend that that’s not the case. You have to accept it and move forward. . . . The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past, no matter how good it was …”

If that’s the death knell, then we’re dead, baby, because journalists have been glorifying the past for decades – particularly at Pulitzer-winning metropolitan papers such as the Post.

“All businesses need to be forever young. . . . If your customer base ages with you as a company, you’re Woolworth’s.”

All I have to say about that is, welcome to Woolworth’s.

Actually, I’d rather end on a positive note, or as positive as any of Bezos’ comments struck me, which was this on what Bezos said his purchase of the Post shows about his outlook:

“If I thought it was hopeless I’d feel BAD for you guys. But I wouldn’t want to join you.”

So he’s an optimist. Which might just be the surest evidence possible that at heart he isn’t a journalist.

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Biased opinion page? Not according to the numbers

August 24, 2013 by Guy

The last two or three weeks I have received a higher-than-usual number of calls complaining that the News-Topic editorial page is nothing but liberal opinions. In particular, many of those complaining say we are constantly criticizing Gov. Pat McCrory and never have anything bad to say about President Barack Obama.

The complaints themselves were not unusual, but the run of calls was. Because I have tried to more or less have a balance of opinion on the News-Topic opinion pages since I arrived seven months ago, I feel a little defensive about such calls.

But I had to wonder.

Since calls have picked up only in the past few weeks, last week I pulled out the past month’s worth of papers and went through them, and I have to say that whatever editorial pages these callers have been reading, they don’t seem to be the ones I put together.

Here’s the rundown:

From July 21 to Aug. 23, the News-Topic has run 48 editorials. Only two mainly were about something McCrory did: one was positive, one was negative, and both were written by me. Politically speaking, 20 editorials could clearly be identified as coming from the left side of the spectrum, 13 from the right, two from the middle, and five addressed non-partisan topics, such as the legal trouble of UNC basketball player P.J. Hairston or the idea that complaints against judges should not be handled entirely behind closed doors.

So on the one hand, yes, it is fair to say that the News-Topic has run more editorials, both our own and from other sources, that come from the left – but it is less than half of the total, 41.6 percent, so it is not fair to say that we present nothing but liberal opinions in our editorials.

As for the opinion columns that carry the name of the writer, however, there is not much room for complaint. During the same time period, the News-Topic has run 35 columns: 12 from the left (13 if you count the column I wrote a few weeks ago admitting to a rush to judgment that resulted in a left-leaning editorial), 14 from the right, six from the middle, and six on non-partisan topics, such as the wedding of publisher Terese Almquist’s daughter.

And when it comes to editorial cartoons, the people who should be complaining are the liberals. From July 21 to Aug. 23, there were four cartoons from a perspective on the left, 12 from the right, four from the middle, and nine on non-partisan topics such as the weather.

In other words, less than 15 percent of our cartoons have been liberal or critical of Republicans, but more than 40 percent of the cartoons have been conservative or critical of liberals – especially President Obama, the target of nine cartoons. McCrory, I would note, was the target of one cartoon.

Nine cartoons targeting Obama in a negative way – that’s hardly “never” having anything negative to say. If you try to argue that a cartoon doesn’t equal an editorial, I would have to disagree. A picture is worth a thousand words, and I will bet that more people look at any cartoon than any editorial (most of which run less than 1,000 words). Take Friday’s cartoon depicting Obama as a weather vane atop the sphinx. You could take 1,000 words to criticize Obama’s position on the turmoil in Egypt, or lack of one, but would those words really be more pointed than that image?

It is not possible to present a 100-percent-balanced opinion page. For one thing, the pool of editorials available to me – from other Paxton Media papers in North Carolina, from the McClatchy-Tribune wire service, and three a week through the Associated Press – is somewhat limited, both on topics and viewpoints. I struggle to find middle-of-the-road or non-partisan editorials that don’t repeat others I have already run.

Because of that, one caller suggested I should write more pro-conservative editorials. I could try, but I don’t write just to hear myself type. I would rather not gin myself up into an artificial froth on either end of the political spectrum just to fill a quota.

In editorial cartoons, it is fairly easy, within the resources available to the News-Topic, for me to find conservative editorial cartoons. Why there are more conservative cartoonists than liberal ones in this pool is for others to figure out, I just know it helps me balance the page.

And while it also is generally easier for me to find signed opinion columns that are liberal than conservative (during the middle of summer, especially, conservatives often seemed to go on vacation, while the liberals stayed in Raleigh pounding their keyboards), there is a sufficient supply for me to keep things close to even.

This is not to say I will dismiss all future complaints about the tilt of the opinion pages here. But I’m sticking with what I have been doing, because the numbers say I’m pretty close to my target of presenting balance.

Of course, some callers say I should not have balance – that this is a conservative county, so all of the opinions on the page should be conservative. For reasons cited above, that would be pretty close to impossible to achieve, but I also don’t think that makes sense. By that reasoning, newspapers in counties where Democrats are in the majority should ignore Republican opinions entirely. I’m sure the Republicans living there would not like that idea. Besides, if all you want to read are things that reinforce what you already think, there’s no point in reading at all.

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The journalism world is holding out for a hero

August 7, 2013 by Guy

When we were children and encountered a problem, we went to our parents, and they fixed it.

Parents can fix anything.

As we get older we take on more of our own problems, maybe asking advice. Well into adulthood, it’s hard to shake the urge to at least ask for advice when we come up against a really big problem.

Which leads me to the reaction to Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos buying the Washington Post.

I’ve seen this movie before, and I’m getting the serious feeling that everyone in the news industry is waiting for Dad to show up and Fix It.

As the old business model – using low prices for the product to build audience, then making all your money from advertising – began to unravel, no one in the business had a way to fix it.

I remember when Sam Zell first bought the Tribune papers in 2007, some people (not all, by a long shot) thought he might Fix It. He had made a ton of money, so he must know something about business, and maybe a fresh set of eyes and a less hidebound approach would work. Then he started breaking all the good china, stamping out his cigars in the carpeting and insulting his employees, and it was clear that making a ton of money in one business doesn’t necessarily translate into universal business genius. Then the economy imploded, and that was the end of that.

In 2012, Warren Buffett made a splash with a series of newspaper purchases, which has continued into this year, and there seemed to be a giant sigh of relief throughout the industry. The Oracle of Omaha is widely described as a genius, having made shrewd investments across various industries for decades, so surely he must see the way out of the mess we’re in, or once hip deep in the mess he WILL see it. He must have a plan, right? … Well, he has said repeatedly he does not, and so far Mr. Buffett has cut well over 100 jobs (including mine). If his team has created any new jobs or found a new way to increase revenue, I missed it.

Also in 2012, another very rich man, Aaron Kushner, set journalistic hearts aflutter by doubling down on the old print model, beefing up the Orange County Register’s news staff and cutting off free Internet access. The company claims it is having success, though circulation is flat. As I wrote recently, until someone produces numbers, the jury has to be considered out on that experiment.

Now comes Bezos. He made a bazillion dollars on the Internet! The Internet is at the heart of the industry’s problems, so he MUST be the man to turn this whole thing around. Alan Mutter, generally a sound, pragmatic voice on news-business topics, makes a case for it.

I sure hope so, because I’m getting tired of watching this movie, and I can no longer tell whether its title is “Waiting for Superman,” “Waiting for Godot” or “Waiting for Guffman.”

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Opinion pieces are nothing personal

July 26, 2013 by Guy

“Why don’t you have anything nice to say about the governor?”

A reader called our publisher last week to ask that question. She was someone who knew N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory personally and felt that the tide of editorials and opinion columns mentioning him were overwhelmingly negative and didn’t reflect the person she knows. She wanted some balance.

Let me be perfectly clear: I’ve never heard a negative thing about McCrory as a person, husband, father, neighbor, supervisor or co-worker.

He seems like a generally sunny, positive individual, as those who achieve public office tend to be.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of his intentions to improve life in the state overall.

I met McCrory briefly when he came to Lenoir for the ceremonial groundbreaking on Google’s most recent expansion. I will say with no hesitation that he seems like a genuinely likeable guy. He’s a little bit of a close-talker (the term popularized by Jerry Seinfeld for someone who stands uncomfortably close to you while talking to you), but I think he does that with the media because the TV people tend to push right up against him, so he assumes that’s what all media people want. (I’m guessing from watching how the TV crews crushed in around him in a way that, if I were McCrory, would make me highly claustrophic and fear being trampled.) Were we to meet informally on someone’s back deck, drinking beer and just talking sports and guy talk, we’d probably get along just fine.

That McCrory gets little positive press on the opinion page of the News-Topic, whether from local editorials or the editorials and columns we publish from other sources, is entirely a function of what opinion pages do and what has dominated the first seven months of McCrory’s tenure.

Editorials and opinion columns react to what is going on in the world. At the News-Topic, I have kept the opinion page focused mainly on events in North Carolina. And for most of the past seven months, events in North Carolina have been dominated by the General Assembly and McCrory because this is the first time Republicans control both branches of the legislature and the governor’s mansion.

The editorials we have run about legislation passed this year have not been all negative – most recently, an editorial from the Winston-Salem Journal that we ran on Friday praised the legislature, and the Senate and House leaders by name, for succeeding where their Democratic predecessors had been all talk and no action on providing a small measure of compensation for surviving victims of the state’s decades-long, brutal and immoral forced-sterilization program.

McCrory and the Republican leadership also have routinely won praise in columns we have run by writers for the John Locke Foundation and the Civitas Institute. (We run those columnists on Wednesdays and Fridays; on Tuesdays and Thursdays we run the left-leaning columnists; on Saturdays we have a column from publisher Terese Almquist; and on Sundays we have a column either from me or from someone taking a moderate or non-partisan stance.)

That most of the editorials and columns have been negative has far less to do with partisan politics than the nature of editorials and columns: Those who write opinion are far more likely to react strongly to changes with which they disagree than ones with which they agree, and nowadays Republicans are driving the change.

I was not writing editorials or opinion columns when Democrats such as Liston Ramsey, Marc Basnight and Jim Black ran the General Assembly, but I well remember the strong, negative editorial reactions that their actions and legislative shenanigans often prompted. And former Govs. Mike Easley and Bev Perdue likely do not get the warm fuzzies when thinking about how the state’s editorial writers and opinion columnists treated their administrations.

Now that the 2013 session of the General Assembly has adjourned, I expect you’ll see the editorials – our own as well as guest editorials from other publications – and opinion columns shifting their focus.

The governor does not adjourn, however, so he probably will keep popping up. But whether those items treat him positively or negatively, as the popular saying from “The Godfather” goes, it isn’t personal. It’s strictly business.

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Too early to call it a success

July 25, 2013 by Guy

Lord knows I want the Orange County Register’s print-centric business model to be successful. It is the model of simplicity: Beef up the content + charge for content = Profit!

But an article at The Guardian that asserts that model’s success doesn’t actually show any success, except in the area of spending more money.

The article sums up the paper’s approach since CEO Aaron Kushner took over Freedom Communications a year ago: Add more staff and pages, prioritize print over digital, erect a hard paywall. A quote from editor Ken Brusic perfectly captures the reasoning:

“Imagine it’s your daily coffee. Each time you put down your money the cup gets smaller and the brew gets weaker. That’s essentially what’s happened to American newspapers. We took things away from people and at the same time gave content away free on the web.”

I happen to agree with that. The first instinct of publishers over at least the past 10 years (if not since the dawn of publishers) has been to cut payroll and expenses first, seek new revenue channels later — which is lunacy. I was in Media General’s corporate offices in the late 2000s when the economy began collapsing, and the company’s three metros went, among other cuts, from four racing writers to zero, two science writers to zero, full-time state capital staff eliminated except at the one paper actually located in a state capital, each newsroom collapsing to focus on “the franchise,” local news. You had the sense of medium-sized, hefty dailies with big ambitions shrinking their staff and ambitions to become oversized small dailies. But the prices stayed the same. I always wondered what would have happened had they offered readers a choice and laid out the economic realities, explained that advertising had collapsed and what that meant for staffing. What would the readers have chosen as their preferred way of handling the budgets? Maybe the same thing. We’ll never know for sure.

In Orange County, Kushner’s approach essentially is turning back the clock to experiment with the approach no one tried: Provide the content and see if you can make that work. The Guardian asserts that “as the paper prepares to celebrate the experiment’s first anniversary, it appears to be thriving.”

But the definition of “thriving” I’m familiar with wouldn’t seem to apply here:

“Home deliveries are flat, compared to a year ago, but circulation overall is sharply up if you include an expanded stable of 28 weekly newspapers.” I would not count them, because the rest of the article didn’t talk so much about beefing up the staff and content of the weeklies. “… Revenue is ahead of target, said Kushner, without elaborating. Annual figures are due to be published in September.”

Where is the skepticism we would bring to any other businessman? Kushner SAYS revenue is ahead of target. But what was his target? You double your staff in one year and make your paper so heavy that, as deputy editor of local news Rob Curley says, it could kill a cat, you incur gigantic expenditures. It’s really easy to ramp up spending. Ramping up revenue is a good deal harder. So what does the Register and its there’s-no-more-free-content approach charge readers for this giant, cat-killing package? Print or online, it costs just $1 a day. I would be shocked if that covers even the cost of the newsprint and ink the Register is using. The Register has been working to increase advertising, but with readers contributing just $1 a day, the idea that advertising has increased enough in just one year, especially coming out of a recession and in a national slump in advertising, for the venture to break even seems ludicrous.

If you were to tell me that Kushner expects to lose money for a while, build the product and its reputation, use that to bring in more advertisers and revenue streams, gradually increase the cost to readers, and eventually get it to where both the print and online products are sustained as primarily pay-for-content products supported by readers rather than advertisers, I could believe that.

Just don’t tell me it’s “thriving” right now and expect me to believe it without any numbers to prove it.

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A ‘backwater’ is a lot better than it sounds

June 29, 2013 by Guy

I want to thank writer Julian Turner for helping not just me but any Lenoir-area work supervisor who sometimes has to place help-wanted ads.

It can be agonizing to come up with the correct wording that both sounds enticing and doesn’t oversell the job or the community.

But Turner, in a business story he wrote for the New Statesman magazine, “How Google is changing small-town America,” provided the perfect words to form the heart of a pitch.

For instance: “Nestled in the shadow of the iconic Blue Ridge mountains is the unassuming backwater of Lenoir, North Carolina.”

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. It sounds a little condescending. But if you analyze the language, it changes your perspective.

Take “backwater.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “water backed up in its course by an obstruction, an opposing current, or the tide,” or else, “a body of water (as an inlet or tributary) that is out of the main current of a larger body.”

Symbolically, Lenoir is a little backed up by an obstruction, otherwise known as the economy. And if you have ever had to bring a job candidate here, it’s hard to deny that we’re a little “out of the main current” of travel.

Besides, backwaters are quiet and tranquil. They gurgle instead of rush. Their gentleness eases your mind. Backwaters are where you find the great blue heron slowly hunting in the grasses. They are where you paddle a canoe lazily and watch for red-shouldered blackbirds stirring in the otherwise still brush nearby.

So “backwater,” though usually used as a pejorative, has some positive connotations, properly defined.

And look on the bright side: He didn’t say “jerkwater,” a term for a place that’s remote and unimportant or trivial. To not be unimportant implies that in some ways you must be important.

Worse still would have been a word such as used in the overwrought opening of Turner’s story, which referred to a fictional Texas town as “flyblown,” a word meaning covered in fly eggs (or maggots).

Not only could backwater be taken as an accurate if sometimes uncomfortable description, he modified that noun with “unassuming,” which the dictionary says is a fancier term for “modest.” That’s a compliment. To be unassuming or modest means the town doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not, the people are polite and welcoming, not prideful and off-putting.

To be “assuming” or immodest would mean we’re putting on airs, getting above our raising or being boastful, even brazen. “Immodest” used to be one of the euphemisms used in polite company for a young woman who bared too much of her body as though it were for sale; in impolite company the word used might have been “trollop.” A trollop of a town would be showy, shiny, brassy, loud, painted up and dressed down, in a hurry for action and with a lust for money.

No, if I have a complaint with Mr. Turner’s phrasing, it’s that it’s hackneyed, redundant and cliché. If you tell me a place is a backwater, am I going to envision a mini Las Vegas strip? A downtown filled with gilded 20-story buildings? No. I’m going to assume it’s unassuming. That’s why it’s a backwater.

The article essentially is an over-intellectualized journal entry about the pace of change and what that is doing to small towns. In his very first sentence, Turner uses “elegiac,” meaning “expressing sorrow, often for something now past.” It’s a word I would rather writers not use if they want to be understood, since most folks have to look it up, but it certainly applies to how many residents feel about what the economy has done to this area’s major employers.

Turner concludes: “Google is … transforming the town of Lenoir into a living monument to the accelerated pace of technological change that has characterized post-war American life and industry.”

Well, maybe.

That change is happening everywhere, backwaters and main currents alike. I saw it in Richmond too – it even took my job.

Maybe it’s just more noticeable here because the waters are still enough that you can see what’s changing.

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What if Warren Buffett is telling the truth?

June 4, 2013 by Guy

I was exasperated the other day at the latest entry in the “No, come on, what is Warren Buffet really up to?” genre of columns. There are two things these things seem to have in common: One, the writers all believe Buffett is a genius who can’t make a bad call; two, they think that he can’t possibly be telling the whole truth about why he is buying newspapers. I am not remotely qualified to judge the first, but I’m willing to bet he’s telling the truth about his newspaper plans, which is merely that he wants them run prudently and well, and he thinks that under the right conditions, considering the markets they are in, they will be profitable quite a while. That seems to meet with a lot of skepticism. I certainly was among the skeptics, but since going to work in January in the kind of market Buffett seems to favor, my perspective is changing, at least some.

There’s a saying in medicine, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” It’s the Occam’s Razor principle: When multiple explanations are available, the simplest version is preferred. In other words, I think too many people are overthinking this situation and skipping the simple answer. When people look at the papers Buffett has bought and notice that most of them are in North Carolina and Virginia, and deduce from that some kind of grand plan, I have to shake my head. When he bought Virginia-based Media General’s newspapers in 2012, that accounted for all but two of his current NC/Va papers, and those other two (Greensboro and Roanoke) came from one Virginia-based company, Landmark, this year. Essentially that’s two points (MG and Landmark) on a graph. But before buying MG he bought Omaha in 2011, and after buying the MG papers he bought two in Texas (Waco and College Station). And before he bought Omaha, he owned only Buffalo. Plot all those points on a graph and it’s not as tidy.

One argument that has been made is that with all of those papers in a relatively tight geographic area, there’s potential for pooling resources and eliminating duplicate costs. Indeed. Or, indeed there used to be. MG and Landmark each did quite a bit of that; putting the two groups together will allow a bit more, but I would bet not a huge amount. And on the news side, I can say as one of the two people who had been at MG in charge of encouraging the sharing of news resources and responsibilities, those who bet for moves on that front again are ignoring what Buffett has said. Editors are reluctant to give up control of their own resources, or to turn over traditional areas of coverage to other publications, even within the same company, or even just to stop doing things that duplicate what sister newspapers are doing if they view the topic being duplicated as important to them. It can be done — see what Digital First Media is doing — but to make that part of the company strategy would go against Buffett’s stated intention of letting editors run their newsrooms independently, without central direction of what their coverage should be.

With all of the above rolling around in my head, this morning Steve Buttry pointed to a column about a parallel situation of basic psychology. In the column Are you mad at me? Adam Bryant talks about how people are constantly reading their bosses, often reading too much into little things and misinterpreting the situation. I think that’s exactly the kind of thing going on in the news business with Buffett. He’s not the boss of most of us, but in a way — he has the money and he’s calling the shots, at a time when no one else seems willing to — he really is.

But I’m going to treat Buffett the way I wish my employees would treat me: I’m taking him at his word.

So, are you willing to say Warren Buffett is a big, fat liar?

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Watch your news metrics and adjust what you do

May 13, 2013 by Guy

In a world of dwindling newsroom resources, one of the harder questions is how much of your time and attention to place online. The view I tend to align with is that the future audience is going to be all-digital, and likely mostly mobile, so we need to make sure we are moving ourselves.

Then comes this new study that shows that when it comes to news consumption, a lot of what you put online may as well be wasted effort in comparison to how much use the print product gets: 92 percent of the consumption of news is on legacy platforms, only 8 percent on digital.

The temptation is to say that everyone should then devote 92 percent of their time and energy to the legacy platform. I know that’s too simplistic.

What if digital news consumption is relatively low because we just aren’t that good yet at grabbing digital users?

Or maybe the real message is to spend your online energies tailoring what you do present online to the on-the-run way that people use that medium, which in turn may mean there are things you are doing online now that you don’t really need to do, given how little use it is getting.

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Duties of small-town editors: bugs and fruit

May 11, 2013 by Guy

As the warm weather pushed in here again last week, it reminded me of one duty of a small-town newspaper editor I learned about during my first stint at the News-Topic 25 years ago that I have not yet begun to prepare for.

At some point I have to designate a Big Bug and Weird Fruit Editor.

It’s more an honorary title than an official one. Certainly there’s no money attached.

My first editor, Lee Barnes, introduced me to the concept. When the weather gets warm, things start growing. Things that are able to move start moving.

Sometimes the growing things grow into odd shapes that perhaps look like Lyndon Baines Johnson, or Buddha, or Jim Nabors. They might not look like anything more than lumpy plant material to you, but to the one who grew it, it could practically start speaking.

Things that move are liable at some point to move into the path of a human who has never seen such a thing before. Maybe it looks like a Transformer, if those were only 2 inches long. Or a tank. Maybe the person just wants to know what it is but thought of us before thinking of the Cooperative Extension Service.

Or maybe it’s just that whenever people encounter vegetables that look like dead celebrities, fruit the size of a human head or insects that look like shrunken alien war machines, they all have one thought: If I don’t get a picture of this in the paper, something will happen to it and everyone will just say I’ve started drinking again.

So they come into the newspaper, often with a shoebox under one arm (for a big bug) or something large, ripe and maybe red in one hand (weird fruit). Sometimes the thing they brought is out in the pickup.

The job of the Big Bug and Weird Fruit Editor is to take a few photos of the Phenomenon of Nature presented and write down all the relevant information so we can run a photo in the paper. (We probably are not going to write a story, but you never know until you see what comes in the door.)

There actually is not a single person designated as Big Bug and Weird Fruit Editor (so you can relax, Kim), the duty falls to whomever is in the office. Back when I was a rookie, it often was the editor himself. But editors are well known as capricious despots, so one person might get picked on the most if I get tired of doing it (Kim).

I don’t know what the News-Topic’s policy previously has been on misshapen vegetables or scary bugs, but I plan to have an open door policy: Bring it here, but if it can fly then don’t open the door. I’ll come outside.

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Small town’s past, present visible from one corner

April 26, 2013 by Guy

Until the ceremonial announcement April 19 that Google is going to expand its data center in Lenoir, I didn’t even realize where the data center was.

I had driven past it at least a dozen times since arriving here in January.

I don’t think anyone at Google intended for it to be poignant when they selected a site within Lenoir for the company’s data center, but that’s what happened. When you leave Google and turn left to Morganton Boulevard, you face Bernhardt Furniture’s Plant 3. There at the traffic light, you sit smack between looming symbols of this area’s past and what may be its future.

When I worked here as a reporter 25 years ago and furniture was at something close to its height, every afternoon around 3, black smoke poured from the smokestack at that Bernhardt plant. At least in my memory, a thick plume boiled against the sky for 20 or 30 minutes, and then it gradually eased. People I knew who had worked there or knew people who did said it was from workers clearing the scraps from their work area at the end of the shift, tossing everything into the incinerator.

I haven’t seen smoke like that since returning.

Out of curiosity, last Saturday morning I drove up Lynnhaven Drive past Google’s entrance and into the old neighborhood there. The juxtapositions can be striking. In certain places, it can feel as though a spaceship has landed and altered the landscape.

Tall chain-link fencing draped with concealing green fabric lines Google’s perimeter, but you can still glimpse the large, white buildings lined with towering cooling equipment, with an empty field between them and the fence. At one point along Overlook Drive, which has no overlooks, there is a sheer earthworks wall at least 50 feet high where a holler was filled in. It too is topped with fencing.

On the opposite side of the road, meanwhile, are woods or modest houses of the kind you might find on any country drive.

Before long the road passes out of range of Google, and you could be in any hilly spot in Caldwell County, if you didn’t know where you are.

I’m left with the lingering images of old and new. Old neighborhoods on one side of a winding residential road, new hillside and fencing on the other. Old Caldwell industry and new, almost face to face across a city thoroughfare.

The former Broyhill Furniture Industries headquarters on U.S. 321, soon to be home to a growing pharmaceutical company, still seems to me the greatest single symbol of the local economy’s transformation.

But there on the street outside Google’s gate you get a greater sense of the sweep of change. From the Google sign you can look at the company’s guarded, high-security gate and the almost-new buildings beyond them, look to one side at the Bernhardt smokestack, and then look to the other up the hill to houses where some people have lived since before the founder of Google was born.

Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov said: “It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”

Who could have foreseen this world?

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