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Greater than good: The State Port Pilot
During this summer while the Carrboro Commons staff members have either graduated or completed J-459 (Community Journalism), this space will follow the statewide ramblings of Carrboro Commons advisor Jock Lauterer who, for the last eight summers, has led community journalism workshops at small papers “from Murphy to Manteo.” So far this summer he has visited with the folks at the Shelby Star, the Gaston Gazette, the News of Orange County and the Lake Norman Times. Herewith is his latest blog from the road.
By Jock Lauterer
Jock Lauterer photo
Director, the Carolina Community Media Project
June 24, 2008
In a day and age when we hear so much doom and gloom about the newspaper industry, it’s a pure pleasure for this old newsie to hit the road each summer to lead workshops at quality, thriving community newspapers.
Maybe you’ve been reading about the buyouts, layoffs and shrinking news hole at McClatchy-owned papers and could use a dose of optimism.
To do that, you might want to take to the “blue highways,” where all-local community papers, including small dailies but especially independently owned weeklies, are holding their own, and then some.
For starters, I wish I could pack the whole glum bunch of professional media funeral mourners into my car and take them to the State Port Pilot of Southport.
The gold standard.
That’s what I call The State Port Pilot. This profitable, innovative, growing, family-owned broadsheet weekly consistently wins annual state press awards for news and advertising by the boatloads.
It’s no accident. The Pilot is a zesty, vital, all-local, visually striking example of what a community newspaper can and should be.
A GOOD NEWSPAPER IN A GOOD COMMUNITY
Their understated motto, “A good newspaper in a good community,” could be more accurate with a couple of greats substituted for those goods.
I give long-time editor Ed Harper much of the credit for crafting this paper into a legendary winner, though Ed will tell you he simply stewards the work of his parents, the late James M. Harper Jr. and the redoubtable Margaret Harper, 91. After years of 70-80 hour work weeks and a heart attack, Ed has wisely begun taking more time for his personal life, yet he still “pilots” the ship with a sure hand.
No commentsThe challenge of covering McCity
By Jock Lauterer
Director, the Carolina Community Media Project
If you want to know how much Mooresville, N.C., has changed in a mere decade, just ask Bill Kiser, editor of the Lake Norman Times.
Jock Lauterer photo
We are having lunch at “Indigo Joe’s,” a hip new sports bar with enough wall-mounted TV sets to keep any sports junkie glassy-eyed.
“My parents’ house was sitting right here,” Bill says matter-of-factly. My bedroom was…about right over there,” he says, turning and motioning towards an adjoining room.
Surrounding our lunch spot, (AKA, Bill’s old homeplace) sprawls Mooresville, revered by NASCAR fans as “Race City, USA.” We are surrounded by malls, fast-food places, shopping centers, apartments, condos, gated communities with generic names, office parks and the sameness of the predictable franchises you see lining four-lanes of Anywhere, USA.
And what is so striking about all this growth, is how NEW it all appears.
“It is new,” Bill agrees, pointing out the window. “That used to be woods. That used to be pasture. None of this was here 10 years ago.”
A native of this burgeoning southern Iredell County region, Bill says his parents watched the economic building boom happening and waited until they got an offer they couldn’t refuse. Then his mom and dad, like many others, moved somewhere else more rural. The way southern Iredell used to be. Before the lake and before the interstate changed everything forever. “It’s hard to find a real native (of Mooresville). They’re selling and moving to Rowan County,” he says.
IT’S A LAKE THING
The “engine” as it were, that drove and continues to drive the regional building boom is Lake Norman, built only in 1961 when the dam was built on the Catawba River, forming an immense body of water that straddles the borders of Catawba, Mecklenburg, Lincoln and Iredell counties, and located equidistant between Hickory to the northwest, Statesville to the north, Salisbury to the east and Charlotte due south.
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A visit to a very cool Web-savvy newspaper
Jock Lauterer photo
by Jock Lauterer
Director, the Carolina Community Media Project
Cool.
That word kept cropping up during my Roadshow visit to the Shelby Star earlier this week.
And while “cool” may not be a word most folks associate with newspapers, but it sure applies to the Star.
For the Star is no ordinary community paper. In fact, it may be one of a kind, and an industry leader too.
Since 2006, the 15,000-circulation Freedom-owned daily in the foothills west of Charlotte has fused the print edition with the paper’s Web version, shelbystar.com in every way conceivable.
And frankly, when I visited last earlier this week, the newsroom had more of the feel, energy and go-go-get-this-up-now of a 24/7 broadcast station.
“The Shelby Star was blown up its newsroom – figuratively,” explains a release from the Southern Newspaper Publisher’s Association. “The paper’s newsroom no longer operates like a traditional newsroom and the newspaper doesn’t read like a traditional newspaper. It’s more local. Easier to read. Easier to digest (no jumps!) More interactive. And it fuses with the paper’s Web site.
“Reporters now consistently work to find every opportunity to enhance a story with online content (usually video). Staff photographers and reporters carry video cameras (usually the inexpensive and simple to use Flip) on assignments. Editors encourage the community to submit comments, photos and video. The newsroom has added an Web master and a Web-savvy managing editor (Joy Scott, the Star’s award-winning former investigative writer) and Web content increasing has fused with the print product.”
For instance, the day I was at the Star, a downtown fender-bender netted Chief Photographer Jeff Melton an easy news photo since it occurred just down the block from our lunch spot. But upon getting back to the newsroom, we learned that there had been two other local wrecks around the same time.
In a manner of minutes Jeff had posted on shelbystar.com a brief story accompanied by his photo and a locator map spotlighting the three wrecks. No waiting for tomorrow morning’s newspaper around here!
And it gets cooler.
Jock Lauterer photo
Meet the Star Car: what looks like souped-up SUV turns out to a reporter’s version of the Batmobile — a rolling mini-newsroom equipped with dash-mounted video camera and wireless laptop all connected to the Star Car’s Wi-Fi antennae that allows reporters and photographers to transmit stories, photos, audio and video live from the field.
How cool is that?
Very cool. In fact, according to Publisher Skip Foster, cool has become something of a marketing factor for the Star.
“People see that we’re not a sleepy little paper,” he says. “The Star Car has become a real brand identification factor. I couldn’t put a dollar figure on its worth.”
The mobile newsroom has been a real boon for covering breaking news. Since its debut last fall, the Star Car has revolutionized how staff covers hard news. Jeff cited a car-train collision, a murder-suicide, and earlier that week, tornado-chasing in the upper end of the county.
(The best tornado photo actually came from a reader who submitted a cell phone cam shot, proving that local readers appear to love their relentlessly local shelbystar.com)
“When we started posting information to shelbystar.com, customers came calling in numbers we never dreamed of,” former Publisher Jennie Lambert told SNPA. Lambert, who has since become publisher of the larger Freedom-owned Gaston Gazette, is quoted by SNPA as recalling a memorable incident two years ago right after the Star had converted to the new dual platform: “A surveillance film from an armed robbery in uptown Shelby generated 7,000 downloads within the first 36 hours. We see this response repeatedly. People are telling us that they want a combination of raw data and journalist-produced reports with more photos, audio and video clips.”
Jock Lauterer photo
The Star Car even changes how they cover local high school football. Now they can transmit video from their game of week, edit back at the newsroom and put it up later that same night.
Not only that, but the new Web presence allows the Star to get more local content out to customers. For instance, the print edition of the Star might print two photos from a Friday night football game, on the Web Jeff says he might post as many as 30 photos from the same game.
Another example: While the paper would print only the photo of the winning homecoming queen, on shelbystar.com customers can find pictures of all 12 candidates AND their escorts.
For the shelbystar.com to work, there has to be staff buy-in. And this was a major theme I witnessed. The Star’s newsroom is comprised of about 18 staffers who are a mix of locals (like chief photog Jeff Melton, a native of Shelby) and bright new kids from other places. But all are Web-savvy and video-friendly. This 20-something generation has grown up using video and digital cameras practically as toys, “so it’s not much of a stretch to get them into our multimedia world,” observes Editor Jon Jimison.
I saw this in action when I was in town. Reporter Kirsten Thomas had covered the Gardner-Webb University commencement the night before. There on today’s front page of the newspaper was her six-inch (no jump) story.
BUT, she had also shot video, which SHE had edited that same night and posted before midnight. Instead of viewing this as a burden, Kirsten, an L.A. native with a master’s in journalism, told me, “With the Internet you’ve got to take advantage of all the mediums.”
And it’s a brave new world that requires risk-taking.
Editor Jon Jimison recalls “it was kind of scary” when the Star put up a drug bust story “completely without editing.” But Jon thinks this is just a new dynamic newsfolk may have to get used to. “There’s not always going to be an editor around,” he says.
Staffers also blog on a regular basis: For instance, today the site features blogs by the editor Jimison harping about the vagaries of local driving, Copy Editor Adam Fenwick (a self-avowed “avid fan of NASCAR”) posts his photos from a recent race, night-shift copy editor High Koontz blogs about a fine day of trout fishing, photog Melton posts photos live from a local wreck and assistant sports editor Gabe Whisnant blogs live, inning by inning, from the local high school’s baseball playoffs.
Jock Lauterer photo
Doubters have only to check out the shelbystar.com Web site to see the variety of breaking local news that the Star covers. Skip Foster’s enthusiastic staff includes an editor, a managing editor, a city editor and a design editor, and the staff is comprised of (depending on how you do the counting) about five reporters, two sports guys (an editor and assistant editor), two photographers, three copy editors, and a Webmaster.
As to measuring up to Charles Kuralt’s “relentlessly local” standard, the print edition I’m looking at today is about 80 percent local, while the Web version of the Star appears to be chocka-block 100 percent local.
From a business side, the experiment is still a work-in-progress. While the Web page views are through the roof, compared to pre-2005 figures, print circulation has remained flat, according to the publisher. Foster notes, “While print revenue is tough, we continue to make headway with online advertising.” The silver lining is that the Star’s online revenue is up 76 percent over last year.
So what are the downsides to fusing the Web and print news operations?
It takes a lot of time in the newsroom to shepherd all those reader-submitted photos and videos, explains editor Jimison.
Also, Publisher Foster says, “We used to talk about ‘feeding the beast,’ but now in this 365 — 24/7 operation, it’s worse — and it’s better. The beast has to be fed many many times a day.” Foster wonders that perhaps the sort of time-consuming, in-depth investigative reporting that the Star was once famous for, has been sacrificed at the expense of the Star’s new “this-just-in” imperative.
Maybe so, but whatever the Star is doing, they sure seem to be doing community journalism right in this new age. I left Skip Foster’s shop wishing I were 20-something again, fresh out of college and full of spit and vinegar.
Next time I visit Shelby, I’m gonna beg a ride-along with Jeff in the Star Car. Whaddaya say? Let’s go tornado-chasing!
On second thought…
The transformation of the Star was the brainchild of Jon Segal, president of Freedom’s Community Newspaper Division, according to a SNPA release about the “Innovation Project,” in which Segal picked the Star to be the company’s incubator for new ideas at the community daily level. The Star Car is a joint project between Freedom Communications, the international newspaper trade association known as IFRA, and the University of South Carolina’s “Newsplex” at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Columbia.
No commentsStudent documentary puts face on homelessness
by Allison McNeill
Carrboro Commons Writer
Originally, Hunger and Homelessness Outreach Project, a UNC-Chapel Hill Campus Y committee, wanted to hold a 5K to raise money and awareness. Instead, the members decided to produce an eye-opening documentary about homelessness and poverty in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
Photo by Allison McNeill
On Feb. 5, about 30 people sat in chairs and on the floor and leaned against the walls of the back room at Open Eye Cafe in Carrboro for a screening of “Faces of Franklin.”
Meghan Prichard, a first-year student from Cary majoring in journalism and mass communication and American studies, says she learned of the event via an Internet social-network invitation.
Hannah Frederick, a sophomore history major from Raleigh and member of HOPE, said the documentary started last semester. She said that although the documentary is only 20 minutes, the creators plan to eventually make it a full-length feature.
“Faces of Franklin” focuses on six homeless men in the community. Maggie West, a sophomore double majoring in public policy and Latin America studies from Raleigh and a member of the documentary team, said she and other members spoke to homeless individuals — without a video camera.
They went to Franklin Street and the Inter-Faith Council of Chapel Hill at dinner and spoke to people at each table. Those interested came back the next day to start the interviews. The team also left a sign-up sheet at the IFC.
No commentsNew bike path helps Carrboro housing
by Tracey Theret
Carrboro Commons Co-Editor
A new bike path available to Carrboro residents will help pave the way for a family to purchase an affordable home in town.
The path, which begins in the back of Roberson Place, runs behind a long strip of the neighborhood’s backyards and snakes up to a piece of property on Eugene Street, formerly owned by Piedmont Electric.
Photo by Tracey Theret
When the Carrboro Board of Aldermen initially discussed purchasing this property in efforts to complete the path, members said they wanted to use the remaining Eugene Street land to build an affordable home.
“Anytime we get an opportunity to add even one affordable unit we want to take it,” Alderman Jacquelyn Gist said.
The board unanimously passed a resolution transferring the remaining property to the Orange Community Housing and Land Trust in a meeting Feb. 5.
The Land Trust is a nonprofit organization that works to provide affordable housing to people who live or work in Orange County and make less than 80 percent of the area’s medium income. It has provided 13 units of affordable housing in Carrboro since 2000.
Executive Director Robert Dowling said plans are in the works to build a single-family bungalow-style house at the Eugene Street location. The house will have three bedrooms and two bathrooms, comprising about 1,400 square feet.
It will cost approximately $190,000 to build the house, Dowling said, but it will be sold at about $125,000. The trust uses federal and state subsidies to make affordable housing available to Orange County residents.
No commentsCarrboro realtors coping with slump in home sales
by Allie Maupin
Carrboro Commons Writer
Real estate in Carrboro has not fully escaped the effects of the deteriorating national housing market, but local real estate agents remain hopeful for 2008.
estate slump but thinks sales this year in the Carrboro market will be strong.
Photo by Allie Maupin
Bronwyn Merritt, a real estate agent with Community Realty in Carrboro for the past two years, said she has seen a definite lag in sales since the beginning of 2006.
“Here in Carrboro, the marketplace is slow,” Merritt said. “There are more homes on the market for longer periods of time.”
She said that Carrboro has seen a significant change in its home absorption rate, a calculation of the average amount of time it takes to sell a home in a given area.
“It is all about supply and demand,” Merritt said. “A home that would usually sell in three months now takes up to seven because the market is flooded.”
Ben Johnson, a UNC-CH junior originally from Valdese, NC, saw this first-hand with the Carrboro home he rents on Ruth Street, off of Laurel Avenue.
“The house I rent now was on the market for a while, but it just did not sell,” Johnson said. “My landlord had to rent it out instead because he could not get the price he wanted.”
Nationally, the real estate market continues to fight its deepest recession in recent years.
On Feb. 7, the National Association of Realtors released a report predicting a further recession in the U.S. housing market through the first half of 2008. They predicted that despite lower mortgage rates, home values are projected to drop 1.2 percent this month.
However, lower property prices in Carrboro do not necessarily mean decreases in home values. Merritt believes that sellers have to lower prices not because the home is worth less, but to get an edge over other homes on the market.
No commentsCarrboro wants freestanding library
by Alexandra Mansbach
Carrboro Commons Writer
Josie Steele carefully glued cotton balls onto her cut-out sheet of paper, smiling proudly as she finished creating her own Russell from the children’s book “Russell the Sheep.”
Photo by Alexandra Mansbach
Steele is one of the many children who enjoy making crafts after Story Time on Saturday mornings at the Carrboro Branch Library.
Story Time is just one of the programs the library offers to the town and surrounding area — programs, some say, that could reach more people if Carrboro had its own freestanding library.
“We could do so much more with different age groups and seniors,” said Nerys Levy, Chairperson of the Carrboro Library Art Committee and member of Friends of the Carrboro Branch Library, a group that has spent 19 years pushing for a freestanding library in Carrboro.
“We have constantly been asking for a library,” Levy said. “And it’s constantly being eluded.”
In 1995, the Carrboro Branch Library opened at McDougle Middle School. The library is shared with both the elementary school and middle school on the property. This means that patron hours do not begin until 3:30 p.m. Monday to Thursday.
In addition, the library is closed Friday, open Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and open Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
“The hours are basically confusing,” Levy said, adding that many people do not come to the library because of its irregular schedule. “This huge investment is locked up a lot of the time.”
No commentsRising fuel prices drive food requests
by Shera Everette
Carrboro Commons Writer
The increasing prices at the pump are hitting poorer local residents harder in their pockets. According to Chris Moran, executive director of the Inter-Faith Council, the financial burden is making organizations like his program more crucial, especially in the winter.
Shera Everette photo
“Fuel increases have caused other basic essentials to go up in price, such as food, transportation, and so on,” said Chris Moran,. “What’s evident is our basic costs have gone up recently, but our wages have not. There’s been an increase in expenses, but not in paychecks.”
The struggling economy has increased the public’s call for services from the Inter-Faith Council, located at 110 W. Main St. The Inter-Faith Council’s food pantry also provides bags of groceries and monetary assistance to the people in the program. Moran said the food pantry currently serves 1,068 households, which is up from previous months. In the past few months, Moran said the pantry has seen a 40 percent increase in food distribution, a 21 percent increase in the requests for monetary assistance and a 56 percent increase in interviews – people who desire to become part of the program because they need financial assistance.
According to its Web site, the faith-based organization gives assistance to families in the form of shelter for men at the Community House in Chapel Hill, shelter for homeless women and children at HomeStart in Chapel Hill, and food at the Community Kitchen.
“I think it’s a serious challenge,” Moran said. “I wonder how many people really care about those who are poor. We don’t want those people to become homeless. There needs to be more outpouring [of] assistance to help people get over the hump.”
Kevin, a Carrboro resident who did not want to give his last name because of embarrassment about his financial hardships, said he could not get into the Community House because he has a family, but his family eats at the Community Kitchen nearly every day.
No commentsBOLD: tutoring in English to make a difference
by Allison McNeill
Carrboro Commons Writer
A local organization led by UNC-CH students hopes to assist Carrboro and Chapel Hill Spanish-speaking men but has faced obstacles while trying to achieve its mission.
UNC-CH student J.D. Brannock, center, who has been tutoring with BOLD for a year, tutors Enrique Cadena, left, and Jose Aryza, right, at a BOLD class last week at Carrboro Elementary School.
Eve Greene photo
Co-President Derek Paylor has hope for BOLD, Building Opportunities through Language Development, and if others believe in his “when you find a good thing, you don’t want to keep it to yourself” outlook, BOLD will have no problem reaching its goals.
BOLD began in 2005. It followed in the footsteps of MANO, Mujeres Avanzando hacia Nuevas Oportunidades (Women Working Towards New Opportunities), which is a female-only Spanish-speaking tutoring program.
BOLD holds classes Monday and Wednesday nights from 7 to 8:30 at Carrboro Elementary School. “Because MANO is already established at the school, it made it easier for BOLD to hold its classes there, too,” said Paylor.
The school’s location also makes it more convenient for students. The elementary school is easily accessible by bus. Because both of the organizations’ classes are held at the same place and time, it makes it possible for couples and families to attend classes.
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