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Posts Tagged ‘small-town journalism’

All I want for Christmas …

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , on December 17, 2013| 1 Comment »

Santa letter
Santa may be coming on Tuesday night with a sleigh loaded down with toys, but he’s leaving with enough cookies and milk to choke the U.S. Army, if the letters to Santa printed in my newspaper’s special section this weekend are any indication.

(I was able to get an early peek because one of the little-known duties of local newspaper editors is to serve as a temp administrative assistant for Santa, sorting his mail and typing.)

Most everyone plans to leave out cookies and milk, kind of a quid pro quo: Here are all the toys I want, and since you do such a good job there’s a little something extra that will be waiting for you by the tree.

Except one kid who was going to leave out some cheesecake. Santa probably appreciates a break from all the cookies and milk (one child said he was leaving out some water because he thinks Santa doesn’t like milk – and after the first few hundred gallons, he probably doesn’t).

If you don’t have young children, the letters give you a glimpse into a world you didn’t know existed: the world of what children in 2013 play with. Ever hear of Lalaloopsy dolls? I hadn’t, but they appear to be THE thing for many girls – almost as big a deal as Monster High dolls, which I would have assumed were based on a cartoon, but Wikipedia says I’m mistaken: “The characters are inspired by monster movies, sci-fi horror, thriller fiction, and various demons therefore distinguishing them from most fashion dolls.”

Skimming through the letters, you see a lot of things multiple times. The iPod, iPad and iPhone, for instance, all come in for repeat mentions.

Every now and then, though, something pops out: “I would like a castle and a jail.”

That’s all, just a castle and jail. Everyone knows Santa can read children’s minds, so he’ll know what that means, but I can’t shake the image of a 4-year-old boy in a stone fortress ordering his guards to toss his older siblings into his private dungeon.

“I would want two coloring books for my brother and sister. And two big Christmas hats. And three medium hats.”

Somebody really likes hats.

Another thing the kids say is how good they have been this year. Most of them say that. Some toss in qualifiers:

“I’ve been very good cause I didnt do nothing.”

“I been good this week.”

“I think I have been pretty good this year. Last year I deserved coal for being bad.”

“I was gonna be a good boy but I dont know what happened.”

One turned the issue around: “Hey Santa, have I been a good boy?”

A few slipped in what I took to be pleas for justice that the children feel is not being adequately dispensed at home:

“I have already written what I want so can you please get my mom some earrings and my brother dustin some coal and he is sixteen!”

“I been good this year my brother has not been good.”

“I’ve been very good but Isaiah aint.”

I haven’t written to Santa in something like 45 years, but all together, the letters inspired me.

Dear Santa,

I have pretty much everything I really need already, but there is one thing I really want for Christmas this year, and you wouldn’t even have to leave it at my house. What I really want is a solution to the news industry’s declining revenue. I know that I haven’t always been good this year, but surely somewhere in the country is a journalist who has been good all year and deserves to have this solution first. … Well, maybe that’s expecting too much.

In that case, could you just send me an easygoing billionaire who likes reading and will buy my newspaper and let me hire another 10 or 12 reporters?

If not that, then at least how about some nice hats?

Thank you, Santa. I know you’ll do your best. I don’t have any cookies in the house, but there’s beer in the fridge.

Love,

Guy

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Every day, reliving a specific past

Posted in Personal, tagged on October 12, 2013| Leave a Comment »

No one ever will mistake me for a local, but having worked here in Lenoir once before, I sometimes get the same kind of surreal feeling that I have when I drive through neighborhoods where I grew up in other cities.

One came Tuesday when Sawmills Town Administrator Seth Eckard told me that in the materials the town has from its founding 25 years ago, he noticed that I wrote the story about the town’s incorporation.

I’m not sure whether Eckard had even started elementary school by then, but that’s a different topic.

There was an awkward moment after Eckard told me about that newspaper story. I was silent, my gaze drifted up and to the side. I’m sure my eyes glazed over. Then I looked back at him and said I don’t remember the story, but I remember the community discussion about whether to incorporate.

It wasn’t just that story or topic washing over me that turned me into a momentary zombie. It was that this was another in a series of such moments since I rejoined the News-Topic in January.

I go to the courthouse to help cover a trial, and I remember when reporters and lawyers alike were allowed to go up the back stairs, which now is behind a locked door. Reporters sat with the lawyers in the chairs to the side of the judge’s bench, opposite the jury seating, not out in the public seating, and we mingled in the law library behind the courtroom. I was in the hallway behind the courtroom when a man on trial for murder was brought over the catwalk from what is now the old jail, and a TV cameraman beside me working for a Charlotte TV station walked in close to the man, who suddenly became angry and punched the TV camera lens (why he wouldn’t instead punch the man holding the camera is probably related to the kind of thinking that lands a man in jail for murder in the first place).

When I go into the county administration building downtown, I remember how in 1987 no one – not a solitary soul, it seemed – referred to it as anything other than the Belk building.

When I drive along Southwest Boulevard, I remember an entire special section full of stories I wrote about that road’s construction, particularly one about what seemed like a high number of churches that had to be moved, were torn down or lost land to the road project.

But unlike someone who grew up here or has lived here for many years, my memories are not a continuum of change. I have two distinct reference points: 1987 and now. The intervening years, however, seem so fleeting that I feel more like a time traveler than a person who lived here, moved away and moved back, as though I visited long enough to learn some essential information about the place, then decided to skip ahead 25 years or so and visit again. Everything I see now is compared to my 1987 memory.

Going down Connelly Springs Road, mentally I check off, “That was there, that was there, that’s new, that used to be something else” – and that reminds me of a column I wrote in 1987 about trying to get directions to almost anywhere in this county. Over and over, people gave me directions citing landmarks that weren’t there anymore, as in, “You turn left where the (fill in the blank) used to be.”

I couldn’t follow such directions then. I might be able to now. But only if the landmark was there in 1987.

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Biased opinion page? Not according to the numbers

Posted in Print media, tagged , on August 24, 2013| 3 Comments »

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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Opinion pieces are nothing personal

Posted in Print media, Writing, tagged , on July 26, 2013| Leave a Comment »

“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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A ‘backwater’ is a lot better than it sounds

Posted in Personal, Writing, tagged , on June 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

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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Duties of small-town editors: bugs and fruit

Posted in Personal, Print media, tagged , on May 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »

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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Gathering the notes from my desk …

Posted in Print media, tagged , on February 22, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The years away from a community newspaper made me forget how close a relationship a small paper has with death.

Most often it is formal. At times it is close and raw.

In the former category, death has its own email address at the News-Topic, and many other newspapers. The names of the dead flow in as regularly as church announcements and the fundraisers for the community calendar.

An obituary is like an English butler who enters to tell the host that death has arrived and is waiting in the foyer. It is part of the ritualized structure society imposes that makes death feel orderly, filing off the sharp edges. The names of family and loved ones pass in sequence. No child is ungrateful or estranged, no marriage troubled or blemished. Gray areas are brightened, smudges erased.

The order can be chipped away with a phone call from a grieving mother. She lives in another county and knows the day her son was murdered but not when the obituary ran, and she desperately wants a copy, the final record of his passage through the world. We page through the papers, day by day by day by day, find it and carefully cut it out and seal it in an envelope, imagining her seeing the paper’s name on the envelope, and the tremble in her hands as she realizes what it contains.

Sometimes we learn how death arrived, even if we don’t yet know the name of the dead. In the morning we get word that several hours earlier, as our reporters lay sleeping and our pressmen readied to print the coming day’s paper, a young man who perhaps was sleepy, perhaps tipsy, rounded a bend in the road too loosely; his tires slipped off the pavement, so he jerked the wheel back, and his car careened across the road sharply, pitched over an embankment and hit a tree. In the suddenly quiet darkness, he and the car grew slowly colder.

Those reports, from the Highway Patrol or a police or sheriff’s department, are like a note from death left on the desk. “Was in the neighborhood, took care of a few things. …” The reporter knows he’s not the first to learn where death had been, but he knows he is among the first.

Sometimes we’re close behind death. Hearing a report on police scanners, we rush off and, as a laden ambulance speeds off, arrive to see a crumpled mass of metal that 30 minutes earlier was a car barreling down the highway, but where a driver had been there now is only a tiny pool of blood on the Scotchguarded fabric of the seat.

Sometimes we arrive and the ambulance is still there, its crew standing in the darkness near a dimly lit, dilapidated mobile home. Standing outside the property line, still we can hear the anguished sobs of a man telling officers what happened. We see flashlights sweep a window from inside, where investigators inspect the bloody evidence. We shiver against the gathering frost, but perhaps also against the sense that on the other side of that window, death might be looking out.

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