Too thin to swat a puppy with

I’m trying to get used to my new News & Observer. You see, on Monday the paper rolled out some major changes in response to its corporate owners dictate that it cut expenses. The paper laid off a bunch of good folks. It also eliminated its stand-alone business section and its zoned editions in order to save on paper costs.

The result rolled out this week. Only one page of opinion on Mondays. State, local and business news all jammed into a “Triangle & Co.” section. Shared sports and political coverage with the Charlotte Observer.

Some of the changes I don’t mind. I like reading Jack Betts, and don’t mind seeing a little Bobcats coverage in the Raleigh paper. So those are pluses.

The rest of it, well, I ain’t too happy. What I noticed this week was a lot of stories attempting to be “regional” in impact, hardly any Durham news that didn’t involve a sensational (and likely false) claim of satanic activity, and a heavier Raleigh focus.

The paper’s public editor, Ted Vaden, asked readers to be patient in his column today:

Here’s the message I’ve been trying to communicate back to the readers who have contacted me. First, give it a chance. The Monday front page, the combined local news and business section and the consolidated Monday opinion pages do look different, but you may find some improvements…

Second, be aware that the changes are being done out of sheer necessity, for a purpose. This is not a situation, as some readers still suspect, that The N&O or its parent company is trying to squeeze more profit out of the paper.

I can dig patience. It was a holiday week, and one in particular that is historically slow for news. I hope that’s why I saw some of the Durham-based writers getting Chapel Hill bylines.

But they’ve only got a few weeks to win me over. My subscription is up in August and if I’m only going to be getting one (or less) Durham stories a day, as I did several days this week, then why shouldn’t I just seek those out online?

What I hope is the paper will make an effort to find space for local news that matters to people in each of the distinct regions of the Triangle. When I moved here, I took the Raleigh paper because it gave me an adequate amount of Durham news while providing superb coverage of state politics, sports in the Triangle, and the University of North Carolina, which is particularly important to me at the moment. If all my Durham news is going to be in the free paper the N&O launches into my neighbors yards every Saturday, I’m not sure I need to take the paper everyday.

Better hope that’s right

So another alleged sex crime in Durham is grabbing folks attention.

This time it involves a low level Democratic Party official, Joy Johnson, and her husband, the Rev. Joseph Craig. They’ve been arrested. Craig’s been charged with rape and Johnson with aiding and abetting.

Today, apparently, an assistant district attorney made a claim that it had something to do with “Satanic” rituals.

From the N&O:

Mark McCullough, an assistant district attorney, urged Judge Nancy Gordon to increase Johnson’s bond to $500,000 from the $270,000 set by a magistrate. “Part of the allegations are that Satanic worship is part of this case,” McCullough said.

That’s a hefty — and on it’s face suspect — claim. It’s also a big part of why this case is starting to gather some media attention outside the Triangle.

See, over here at Indigo Dawn, which is some sort of company that Craig and Johnson own, Craig identifies himself as a reverend and talks about his interest in “magick,” which is a mysticism akin to Wicca. And while it may be strange and have its rituals, there’s a difference between Satanic ( i.e. worshiping Satan) activities and pagan, non-Christian activities.

A cynic might question whether anything Satanic is truly involved, or whether law enforcement just sees a pentagram and thinks devil worship.

Herald-Sun gets another circulation hit

Last week the Audit Bureau of Circulations released its semi-annual circulation reports for U.S. newspapers. And a good bit of the information became readily available to the public on Friday when ABC updated its online database.

There’s some more bad news for the Herald-Sun, which has seen its circulation decline rapidly since Paxton Media Group purchased it in 2004. Between March 31, 2007 and March 31, 2008, weekday circulation dropped 10.8 percent and Sunday dropped 12.6 percent. The paper is down to 32,845 weekday subscribers and 32,711on Sunday. The rate of decline is worse than it looked six months ago.

A rapidly declining newspaper is bad for Durham and circulation, while not a perfect measure, is a pretty good way to get an idea of a paper’s health. It’s a tad oversimplification to say that the lower the circulation gets, the less value advertisers find in their investment — but for the most part it is true with a general circulation daily. The less revenue the paper takes in, the less watchdog journalism it can provide. And the community suffers for it.

Now the Herald isn’t alone in losing subscribers. Of the 25 largest daily newspapers in the country, only two posted gains in the recent ABC figures — The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. And here in North Carolina, all five of the daily newspapers in the Triangle and the Triad lost daily subscribers. But only one was hit nearly as hard as the Herald — its Paxton sister in High Point.

Tables of the Triangle and Triad papers circulation after the jump

At the old ballgame

That’s Bush Stadium in Indianapolis. Except at the time the picture was taken, it was known as Victory Field. From 1931 until 1996 it was the home of the Indianapolis Indians, the city’s Triple-A baseball team. It was one of those great old ballparks with ivy climbing the outfield wall, the scent of cigars wafting through the stands, and the crack of bats on the field marking potential.

As a kid in the Indianapolis area I used to go to a few games a year, especially in my teens. It was a cheap, fun night. Sometime in the middle ’90s the city decided it was time to build a new stadium. They built a beautiful palace of a minor league stadium, also named Victory Field, downtown. When you sit in the grandstand and look out toward the outfield the game is framed by the city’s skyline. Not a bad deal. But it still isn’t Bush Stadium.

The Midwestern shakes

So there was an Earthquake this morning in southern Illinois near the Indiana state line. The Evansville Courier & Press, which is the paper for the closest decent sized town to the epicenter, has the story here. The U.S.G.S. is preliminarily reporting that it was a 5.4 on the Richter scale.

Hearing the news this morning immediately reminded me of June 10, 1987. I was 9 years old and playing a game of pick-up football in the empty lot next to our house with some neighborhood kids. It was a warm southern Indiana evening.

All of a sudden the ground started to shake. Lasted for just a few seconds. None of us knew what was going on. Someone speculated a bomb had gone off — the Indiana Air National Guard frequently used a nearby lake for training exercises. Maybe they accidentally dropped a live one.

One of my sisters came out of the house. She wanted to know what was happening too. She’d been sitting on the couch when it started shaking, like the way it would when one of our Newfoundlands was behind it wagging her tale. Only when my sis leaned over to look at the dog, she wasn’t there. Kind of spooked her.

I suggested that it could’ve been an earthquake. No sir is what I was told. Actually I remember getting laughed at. “We don’t have earthquakes in Indiana!” Well, turns out we did. Like this morning’s, it was a 5.1 just over the Illinois state line. And hopefully this morning’s is like that 1987 quake in another way — just giving folks a start and not causing any real damage.

The quake 20 years ago caused a lot of fear as people learned about the New Madrid fault line that runs from Southern Illinois south and is supposedly overdue for a major earthquake. It was the site of four major earthquakes in a three month span from 1811 to 1812. Quakes of that magnitude would be devastating today in the Middle West with the number of large cities, Memphis and St. Louis in particular, near the fault line.

Midwesterners, at least in that part of the Midwest, had become comfortable with the idea that only folks on the left coast had to worry about the ground shaking.

Oopsy Daisy

On Friday the Durham Herald-Sun reported this:

DURHAM - Jason Marvin Nichols, 38, died Wednesday, April 9, 2008 from injuries sustained in a car accident. Services will be announced at a later date.

Apparently the report was a bit off. Today on page B1 was the following correction:

An obituary for Jason Marvin Nichols should not have appeared in Friday’s paper. Mr. Nichols is alive.

Buying a newspaper; maybe not such a good idea

Forbes has an interesting analysis today of the effect of the newspaper industry’s sagging economics might have on the sales of newspapers. The overall gist of it is pointing out that large purchases by Lee, McClatchy and JRC have not gone over well for those companies. But I found this line interesting for those of us keeping an eye on the sale of a local company:

[A]s the market for print advertising continues to worsen and deal financing becomes harder to come by, other newspaper properties on the block could have a tough time seeking buyers

That’s relevant around these parts because the state’s third largest newspaper is on the block as part of the overall sale of Landmark Communications. No word has leaked out yet about potential buyers for Landmark’s newspapers, which include those in Greensboro, Roanoke and Virginia Beach. There are some signs of movement around the Virginian-Pilot though, with the paper getting a publisher of its own last week — a job which was long one of several titles for a Landmark corporate executive. The first round of bids are supposedly in for The Weather Channel and a bidding war may be on the horizon for the Las Vegas T.V. station.

Also today, the new AJR has an opinion piece from respected newspaper analyst John Morton pointing out the folly of newspaper publisher’s insisting on ridiculously high profit margins. Newspaper futurist Phil Meyer has long called for newspapers to operate on smaller margins, recently in the N&O (not printed on the web) that a 3% margin was better than the 17% plus that they’re maintaining by axing staff.

Anyway, here’s a bit from the Morton piece:

If newspapers hope to survive the Internet transformation, in which their brand name and reputation will be paramount to success, they must stop the ax-wielding and accept that the era of exceptional profitability is over. Or should be.

Durham off the hook (almost) in civil rights case

On Nov. 3, 2006, freelance photographer Julian Harrison was arrested by Durham police while attempting to take photographs of a crime scene. He was outside the crime scene tape. It was the seventh time in 14 years that he was arrested by Durham police while trying to do his job as a journalist.

And just like the previous times, he didn’t come away with any conviction. In all but one case the charges were dismissed before trial or ended with a not guilty verdict. In the other, a conviction was overturned on appeal and eventually the charges dropped. This time around, the charges didn’t even stick long enough to process Harrison into jail: A Durham County magistrate ordered Harrison returned to the crime scene and the charges dropped as soon as he heard the story.

Fed up with his treatment by Durham police, Harrison sued in federal court last summer on claims of false arrest, assault and battery, and violations of his First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, stemming from that Nov. 3, 2006 arrest. He named the arresting officer, Capt. D.L. Dowdy, former Chief Steven Chalmers and the City of Durham in his lawsuit.

Last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Russell Eliason issued a significant blow to Harrison’s case. Eliason dismissed Chalmers from the case and capped damages against the city by eliminating punitive damages, which is where large awards tend to come from. It effectively takes the “deep pockets” out of the case. Harrison’s claims against Dowdy can go forward with the option of punitive damages.

While the Duke lacrosse lawsuits are in front of a different federal judge in the same district, I wonder if this case could portend how the courts will view potential damages in those cases.

You can read Eliason’s opinion here

You know your state is in play in the Presidential primaries …

… when you wake up in the morning to hear Barack Obama giving his Final Four predictions on the local sports-talk radio station.

Probably a pretty good way to pick up some votes in a college hoops mad state. At least picking Carolina to win it all was a good idea. Now he’d better hope they don’t lose, else there might be blame for cursing the Heels.

By the end of the day, his predictions on 850 The Buzz were national news.

I’ve been laughing all morning

And dammit, I like some of that stuff.