Alert reader J: "I've had a vacation stop on the N&R for weeks, even though we were only out of town a few days. Got a chance to see the front page today...JR is going to have to change the name of the paper to Doggie Style...Not hurrying to end the vacation stop."

I know it's summertime, and that people like dogs, and I'm friends with the lost dog in question, but really, people use this new internet thing to communicate with each other?

Do tell. Or, better, don't, at least not on A-1.

Binker, meanwhile, beats the dead horse behind that absurd Hagan story.

Comments

[A.C.]

worst. paper. ever.

[Joe Killian]

The N&R is now and has for years been aimed primarily at baby boomers.

Who love dogs.

Who are enthralled by stories involving new media/online that seem commonplace to younger people.

Who tell us so in letters and phone calls and who make stories like these some of the better read ones on the web site and in the print edition.

I'm a hard news guy myself -- but of the large number of stories everyone on staff now has to produce every year whatever their beat, some of them are going to be about dogs, strawberries, bees, peoples' relationships with their cell phones, etc. Particularly in the summer when we're shorter staffed than usual (staffers with kids take vacations) and several of the hard news beats calm down a bit.

That has really ceased to bother me -- especially since readers generally write and call to talk to us in positive ways about these stories in numbers we never get even when we spend days or weeks putting together in-depth stories on much more important topics. It's just reality at a daily paper.

Is putting these things on A-1 pandering? Could be that depends on whether it's working.

For what it's worth I didn't think Binker's blog post was beating a dead horse...it was describing why it's worth writing about the blogger who out of nowhere decided Kay Hagan should be VP. Because it's important to tell people who are hearing about it and talking about it -- more people before our story on it ran than I'd have thought -- that it's not likely happening and explain why. I do think that's a legitimate community function for a newspaper.

[Ed Cone]

Yeah, I got more feedback on columns about my kids or my dog than I did on serious, reported fare. People love dogs. I love dogs.

But if the N&R is willing to concede A-1 to this kind of stuff -- and to do it so often -- than it's giving up a lot of credibility. Props for acknowledging the obvious, that cuts to the staff are having a serious impact on quality.

Also, Facebook and such are not just commonplace to younger people. They're...commonplace.

Binker's post, like my own link to an analysis of Hagan's win, shows why the original post was inane. Does that make it worth reporting on? Maybe, in some ways, but that's not what the N&R did -- instead, it delivered a breathless recap of a months-old blog post. On the front page.

[Andrew Brod]

And Binker didn't mention the months-old thing.

[Joe Killian]

I am always and forever willing to admit that smaller staffs at newspapers have all sorts of negative outcomes.

Nothing I'm saying here should be read as an excuse -- but hopefully sharing my perspective on these things will help to come to a fuller understanding of how and why these things happen, whether or not any of us are jumping for joy about it.

I'm with you that Facebook and such should, at this point, be commonplace to everyone.

But reality keeps proving me wrong.

The number of readers to whom I speak every day who don't use social networking for anything and who use the net for nothing more than the occasional e-mail -- and not just elderly shut-ins who sounds suspicious of technology -- is kind of frightening to me. In the last two weeks I've spoken to two major moneyed political people in Greensboro who couldn't e-mail me something because they didn't know how to use an attachment in e-mail. But they both subscribe to two newspapers and have for more than 30 years. Most of their friends do, too.

Does that kinda depress me about my industry? That a lot of the people who are most loyal to our product don't use the Internet or don't use it on the level I'd expect most middle school children to be able to use it? Yeah, a bit.

When I was an intern at the N&R -- not all that many years ago -- we were actively trying to bring in younger people. Somewhere amidst economic downturns and major layoffs and huge staff restructuring that became a lot less important. I still occasionally turn out stories that I hope people my age and younger would appreciate and I try never to talk down to anyone, but I think I'm a lot more realistic about who the newspaper's audience really is and what they look like demographically. A lot of them, unfortunately, find the idea of a dog being found using social networking to be fascinating. They'd e-mail it to their friends if they knew how (#Zing!+facepalm).

So yeah, I kinda had the same reaction when Amanda told me she was writing that story. I wouldn't even be commenting here if I didn't. But you know what? People read it and really liked it. Some of them are now looking at it as a local, tangible example of how maybe the Internets is not just for them sex perverts and kids who want to steal music after all. I'm cynical, but I'm not so cynical that local people being happy that we did that story doesn't make me halt my inner eye-rolling, tech-savvy hipster just a little.

But even without the social networking thing to make that story a little more interesting than the average cute local lost dog story with a happy ending, the real question is -- does this belong on the front page? Lost dog? Really?

I have my opinions about what gets chosen for A-1 and I don't always agree with it but those decisions are made well above my pay grade. I do get the sense that they're being made based on our wanting to have more local news and out front more days of the week and our having fewer bodies to produce that local news, with all of us having to produce more of it. There's also evidence to suggest that having at least one lighter item on your front page is a good idea.

Would my wife and I love to be writing in-depth, hard-hitting local news every day? Yes, most days we would. I think most people who follow the paper would agree that it's what we do most and we're pretty good at it. The numbers show we're certainly writing more of those types of stories every day than anyone else in town.

But writing good hard news stories worth reading takes time and bodies and the newspaper has to go out every day. So some days you're going to spend half your day reporting that great, well researched Sunday story that maybe fewer people actually read and for which no one pats you on the back. The other half you spend writing something short and light because two other people on the already smaller staff are on vacation and we need something local and not too depressing that can be turned around quickly while things on your beat are not breaking three big stories at a time in the summer months.

Which is not to say we don't occasionally roll our eyes when we end up writing about lost dogs or little kids or strawberry season. We do sometimes, of course.

But given the position we're in, I find a lot of other things outrage me an awful lot more.

[Ed Cone]

Thanks for the thoughtful responses, Joe.

[Joe Killian]

Any time.

[bubba]

Of note from the Binker link, here's a little something of benefit to our pal Roch's understanding of the political process:

"Obama helped Hagan, not the other way around. While the president won fewer votes, his organizational team turned out voters in key Democratic strongholds. When you account for presidential under-vote in 2008 (due to the president not counting in a straight-party vote) the gap between Obama and Hagan is smaller."

[Normal Everyday Reader]

I'm not sure what the big deal is other than a difference in opinion about what is news. I would rather have a local story about a lost dog on the front page than an AP story about some disaster overseas that I read online over 24 hours ago. Yawn.

At least the local stories are something you can't find on CNN or Yahoo. I mean come on, everybody complains about the News & Record not doing enough local stories and then when they actually feature local stories on the front page, people complain about it.

I welcome more stories like this because it shows at least they are willing to use less canned wire stories and are doing more local reporting. Snide comments aside from techno-snobs who twitter that they're at HArris Teeter perusing the energy drink selections, there are a lot of people who enjoy reading this type of story.

[GC]

I too welcome local stories in the N&R over AP feeder stories but I am with Ed on this one. I could't believe this story made front page news. I read what Joe had to say re: comments about these types of stories vs. in-depth "real issue" stories. I have to say I appreciate multi- day stories with content and multiple sources. perhaps I am an out-lier in this respect. I like the continuing coverage of the White Hill controversy. I'd love the N&R to dig deeper into the Farmer's Market controversy

[Ed Cone]

I don't know if I'm normal, but I'm an everyday reader, and a subscriber to the print edition. So, for the moment, is the writer of the email that spawned the post. And so were thousands of people who used to subscribe, but stopped.

So I don't buy the argument that regular readers are satisfied with the paper.

Some are, sure, but even the paper's best young reporter admits in this thread that staffing is inadequate to the job, and the paper is being written for poorly-informed older people. That's no way to rebuild a franchise.

I, too, prefer local stories. This one (and it should be understood as an example of a pattern, not a one-off event) would have fit comfortably somewhere other than A-1 -- maybe it could have replaced one of the wire service stories from around the country that dominate the Life section. Something from the N&0 could have taken it's place on the front page -- a third of which was already given over to photos of people cooling off from the heat wave.

[Joe Killian]

I wouldn't say the entire paper is being written for poorly informed old people.

But I would say that "People know that social media is used for all sorts of things and it's no longer novel to them" is not an argument that would hold much weight in the newsroom when talking about the paper's audience, writ large.

But I like to think every good newspaper is a sort of buffet. Not one of the many people who liked the dog story? Fair enough. There are plenty of crime, business and education stories -- even on the front page. I wouldn't argue that any of the stories that don't happen to interest me shouldn't exist, though. Whether they should be on the front page is obviously a matter of opinion.

Arguing about what is and isn't news -- or front page news -- in a daily paper is one of the weird joys of it.

I don't think the staff is inadequate to still put out a good newspaper every day. I know plenty of people -- friends, relatives, not total cranks -- who live in terrific newspaper cities and who will tell you any day of the week why their local newspaper sucks and how the staff and the editor have their heads up their asses. Some days they're right and some days they're wrong.

I do think the N&R staff is inadequate to never have any days where we're writing some lighter, shorter local stories while we're also working on in-depth harder news stories that are going to take a news cycle or two to do properly.

There just aren't the bodies -- in our newsroom or really in the newsroom where any of my friends in the business now work, either -- to never have a day (or a number of them, especially in the summers and around holidays) when there are some folks on vacation and the budget's looking sparse and we need something we can turn around quickly. That is one of the unfortunate effects of the staff shrinking, for sure. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying.

It can also sometimes be a feast or famine situation in daily local news. Amanda and I have had days and weeks at a time when we're producing a story or two stories a day and things are breaking all around us at a rate where we have to hand things we'd rather do ourselves off to other reporters. We also have periods where a lot of our sources are on vacation, not a lot of meetings are happening and it's difficult to get hold of people you need for some of the "project" stories you keep at the back of your notebook.

On those days I don't feel bad about writing a lighter news feature. With the number of stories I produce for the paper I don't have to feel bad about it. I can occasionally write something that people are going to think is a bit light for their tastes but which other readers will enjoy because it'd be hard for anyone to seriously make the argument I'm neglecting the important parts of my beat to write easier, softer stuff. That goes double for my wife who writes more stories than I do (and writes better stories) AND blogs more.

I haven't been with the paper as long as some of the reporters on staff -- but I have spent a lot of time going through our archives. I too sometimes look at what the paper was like when the staff was much larger -- when we had an enterprise team, when we had a staff of business reporters, when our sports and feature staffs were larger, when we had more general assignment reporters -- and wish it was like that again. I think a lot of young reporters feel that way. I'm sure there are plenty of long time readers who do too.

But Greensboro and the N&R aren't especially cursed. Papers everywhere are having...well, I guess you'd have to call it "shrinking pains." We're all trying to figure out how we do this now - with the industry in flux, with less money, with fewer bodies, with what the daily local newspaper means changing in our current media environment.

That's why I don't bristle at criticism as long as it's not being delivered in a way that's simply rude -- and I get plenty of that. I'm happy to talk to readers about how we do what we do, even when I don't have all the answers and the ones I do have aren't always satisfying for them or for me. I don't kid myself that we're perfect but I think we're still doing a lot of good as we figure out how to be better.

[Ed Cone]

Thanks, Joe. I hope posts and comments here are, on balance, constructive. I talk to a lot of people around town about the paper, and I can promise you that these opinions have a constituency.

You know that I'm an admirer of your work, and that I'm rooting for you and my other friends and acquaintances on Market Street. And as someone hoping to eke out a few more years in our chosen profession, I feel your pain.

At the end of the day, though, what I want is a good newspaper in my hometown.

So, what is a good newspaper? The buffet analogy is a good one, but a lot of the steam trays that once held popular dishes are no longer in the mix -- people have fewer reasons to come to the buffet in the first place.

The value I get from the paper is in news and feature reporting. The economics of producing those things are uncertain at best, which is why we're having this conversation.

Good front page today, fwiw, canine angle and all.

[Kim]

Maybe it was front page news because it was Walker and Dabney's dog.

[Joe Killian]

I've been down in the submarine working on something that's kept me out of the paper for the last two days, but I think today's front page was a good one too. Mostly stories that didn't get turned around on a dime, but worth the wait.

Like Ben Bradlee said: "Our best today, better tomorrow..."

[Margaret Banks]

Got a good paper coming out tomorrow, too.