Remembering Halberstam

News & Observer Editors Blog

To clarify the statistic about black baseball players mentioned above: the report from the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport says that 8.4% of major league baseball players are AMERICAN, non-Hispanic blacks.

American black athletes, it seems, have moved from baseball to other sports because of the programs available to them in their youth, or perhaps because of community preferences for football and basketball or the increasing number of Michael Jordan and Warren Moon and Donovan McNabb role models.

The news is not that black people are being pushed out of baseball, as the striking decline might appear to indicate, but that people from other cultures now make up more of the player pool. There are also significantly fewer WHITE Americans playing major league baseball now, with 29.4% of players considered Hispanic, which could be black or white, American or not. However, the bulk of them are from Latin American countries, including Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and many of them would be considered black by any standard.

Really, it's not lobbying

N&O Triangle Grammar Guide blog

Thanks for the comments and for understanding about my slow response. I appreciate your three valid points.
The usage on "lobby" does seem to have loosened quite a bit.
687 lips!? That's a very good catch. We definitely should have fixed that.

I agree that lobby has loosened. But it remains an extremely disrespectful way to refer to courtroom proceedings - disrespectful mainly to our judicial system itself, but at the same time denigrating the issue and its advocate.

Lobby, as a verb, is not a synonym for request or even for advocate - the reason we have so many words in the English language is so we can clearly express true meaning, and this usage flat fails that test. At best, it is incorrect, and at worst it editorializes.

Lobbying is not a legal term

N&O Triangle Grammar Guide blog

In his challenge of the state's biggest economic incentives deal, Robert Orr was thwarted before he got started. On Wednesday, he lobbied for a second chance to begin.

While the lumpen rhymishness of thwarted and started might bear discussion, the real problem is with the use of "lobbied." The word has a pretty specific meaning, and it pretty specifically excludes a lawyer making legal arguments in a court of law.

I don't care for the good justice nor particularly support his effort here, but nothing justifies flippantly disparaging him and his effort by equating it to the pimping of special interests by frequenting the lobbies or corridors of legislative chambers.

Where'd that lip go?

N&O Triangle Grammar Guide blog
"Dedicated earlier this month, the simple stone sanctuary honors 687 eloquent lips silenced"
How did that one guy lose his lip, to make it an odd number? Or should it say "pairs of lips," perhaps?
At first, when I read it as the blurb on the main news page, I though it was totally ridiculous but then realized the source was the Paul Green quote with the story. So only the counting of lips is ridiculous.

Shot where?

N&O Triangle Grammar Guide blog
Here's a humdinger, from today's NY Times, no less!
"In 1980, Michael Halberstam was shot in his home and killed by an intruder."
I bet it hurts to get shot there. And I wonder how that intruder happened to be there to kill him right after he was shot?

Under the Dome makes the leap

News & Observer Editors Blog
04/22/07 at 09:54
I have already weighed in on the topic of anonymity and posting. However, speaking of faults, I am posting this here because among other things wrong with it, the comment function on the new Dome blog doesn't work.

Your web folks appear to have unveiled that blog a little prematurely. Or do you truly think the names listed in the Profiles section are appropriate? Or worse yet, does someone think they are amusing?

I suspect the following politicians highlighted there might disagree with all three of the above concepts. (It's not ready, it's not correct and it's certainly not funny.)

Speaker John Hackney
U.S. Representative George Butterfield
U.S. Representative John Coble
Candidate Johnny Edwards
U.S. Representative Robert Hayes
"H. Majority Leader" Lindsey Holliman
U.S. Representative Douglas McIntyre
U.S. Representative Ralph Miller
U.S. Representative Joseph Shuler

I suppose you might argue that it's correct to list them by their given names, and I am assuming that that's what they all are, without researching every single one. But you don't follow that practice in the newspaper and no one else does either - and there is also disparity in the titles, with Jim Black listed as "Former Speaker" but Mr. Edwards disparaged with only "Candidate" - since when is that appropriate standing alone, without including either "presidential" or "former senator?" I also don't believe using "H. Majority Leader" or "S. minority leader," or for that matter, "Former speaker" is appropriate either. There's lots of room in that box, and you need to include the body in which each profiled individual serves - assuming, that is, that it is for the use of the general public on the web and not an internal document for those who already know who these people are.

This looks to me like the unsupervised and unreviewed work of an intern – or should I say, that would be the only possible explanation, while still not excusing its appearing in a product trumpeted on the top of the home page of your website. Most of the profiles indicate that they were last modified days ago, and still no one appears to have noticed a little problem. This does not bode well for the future of that web section.

05/07/07 at 14:43
I don't know whether any of you get email alerts about posts to this blog, so I may be speaking into the abyss here. Even so, I figure here is the place to note that a) the problems with the Dome website noted above have been fixed (mostly - apparently the unsuitable abbreviations don't bother you as much as they do me) and b) as of today, it appears the problem that was engineered into the "Printer Friendly" function some months ago has been fixed. I've only tried four or five articles, but they all resulted in an actual usable, printer-friendly page.

Thanks for paying attention, sort of, sometimes!

Mother Of All Blunders

Washington Post
Ms. Parker forgets that the military here, as well as in the United Kingdom, consists of volunteers.

I was one of them, and I politely request that Ms. Parker put her nose back where it belongs. While I don't want to be raped or tortured, I also don't want anyone else to be raped or tortured - and the things that were done to people I know in Vietnamese POW camps are no more acceptable because they were done to men.

Everyone who joins the military knows of the tiny risk of that happening to them, and they volunteer anyway. I can't imagine what she is talking about in differentiating the rape of women by men and men by whomever, other men I assume. I would like to challenge her spurious logic with another bit of it: since the rape of men by women most resembles sexual relations as God created it, and the rape of men by men is abnormal and an abomination (I am using the perspective of Ms. Parker and her ilk here, by the way, not my own) then the latter is worse, so perhaps we should send all men home to protect their nether areas.

And the bit about training men to ignore women being assaulted is crazy too. Since when does any military member ignore one of his or her buddies being assaulted for any reason? And since when do men in pain not scream? This kind of right-wing propaganda is just laughable.

Pearls Before Breakfast

Washington Post
What an absolutely fabulous story. I expected precisely the outcome you obtained, but the writing and analysis of the situation was great, and I think Joshua Bell is probably as fine a human as he clearly is a musician - and I'll bet many of those people did appreciate the music, if not recognize or compensate the musician. I don't live there now, but when I was riding the Metro, busker exhaustion set in after about the first week. I simply didn't budget to pay every one I ran across, no matter how talented they may have been. Sad, but true.

Odd turn of phrase

LA Times Kinseygram blog

STEREOTYPICALLY WILD: Apparently reneging on or trying to wiggle out of disagreements with his attorneys, "Girls Gone Wild "creator" Joe Francis has been ordered back to jail, according to Fox News.

Just out of curiosity, could you possible explain how one reneges on a disagreement? I think I might have done that once.

Zell Wants End to Web's Free Ride

Washington Post
I'm not a businessperson, but I am a vast consumer of news. And except for the top 5 or 6 papers I visit every day regardless, my visits to other media websites - and exposure to their ads - are generated entirely by Google News. Google News doesn't aggregate entire stories, which this story and/or Mr. Zell appear to imply, just a few words.

Mr. Zell is a fool if he thinks that the couple of lines that appear with a Google News hit are stolen intellectual property, worth more than the visit generated to the website where the story actually appears. If not for that referral, the content and its accompanying advertising would be the tree falling unnoticed in the forest to all but the core readership of local subscribers. And I'm pretty sure the comprehensive media website business model depends on far more than their readership.

On Apex animal control and the house full of sheep

Independent Weekly
I completely share the "zero" assessment of Apex and Wake County zoning and law enforcement officials and animal control officers, who felt there was nothing they could do even as this situation spiraled out of control over months and years.

But I add to that assessment a new and future zero for the Apex council, for their knee-jerk reaction in banning all livestock in Apex. You're right - some people kill other people driving tractors down country roads. Let's ban all tractors!!!

Apex is not Cary, at least not yet, and I think it's really too bad that they would now prohibit someone with a big, fairly natural lot from having a couple of goats to tend it, or prohibit a backyard duck or two.

The problem wasn't with the livestock or even the lack of a livestock-regulating ordinance, it was a complete lack of common sense and/or observation skills on the part of those enforcers. The stench described has probably been a public nuisance, regardless of source, for years, and the description of the animals' condition leads me to believe the situation evolved into animal cruelty at least several months ago. If they didn't see or address these obvious violations, why pass more ordinances they can fail to enforce?

What's going on at The N&O?

Independent Weekly
Thanks for the expanded info. I had gathered most of it from the various bits dribbled out by the N&O, but appreciate the exposure of how badly the whole episode was handled – rather than an episode, they stretched it, for no apparent reason, into an arc.

You may choose not to include this lengthy missive in your forum – I understand that it belongs to you, which many of those outraged by the N&O's deletion of its forums don't. I am not particularly on their side on that issue – but I am as one with them on the way the N&O handles input and its users' concerns.

My perception is that the N&O is one of those smarter-than-thou, phony-solicitous operations. You know, the ones that collect big bags of input from their viewers/readers/users/visitors – and then shred them unopened, because after all, they are the pros and know what's best.

I am one of the readers Ted Vaden mentioned in his column, who contacted him about what this article refers to as "nitpicks." He quoted me in the column – but made it sound as though slightly nitpicky information I included as background to my complaint, that I detest all jumps in online news items – was my complaint. It was not, as can be seen in the email below. It was to complain about the technical execution of their decision to add the detested jump pages, which was as poorly done as I've seen on any newspaper website, even the tiniest backwater burg's.

I didn't just lay the complaint on the table, I fully explained it and gave examples of how and where it is done better, in several different ways. But in the column, I came off as a whiner, provided with the patronizing explanation that jumps allow the paper/website to sell more advertising. I would argue with that point, but even if it's true, my complaint was more with the way their jumps are presented and the absence of navigational assistance to use them.

My message to him, and to Orage Quarles, the publisher, was the second one I sent. The first, to the management and technical staff of the online N&O, was ignored.


Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 2:55 PM
To: oquarles@newsobserver.com; tvaden@newsobserver.com
Cc: gsmith@newsobserver.com; dfeld@newsobserver.com; ericf@nando.com; cmachali@newsobserver.com; dsipe@newsobserver.com
Subject: [Fwd: Next page > NONSENSE]

I find it stunning that not a single one of the addressees below could be bothered to acknowledge this message, let alone respond to it or better yet, reverse the exceptionally bad decision to add the Next page > jumps to the online version of the News & Observer. My opinion of them remains the same and I am equally stunned that it's not being done better by now.

Date: 2007/01/28 Sun AM 10:53:00 EST >
To: , , , , >
Subject: Next page > NONSENSE

What in the world is this new jump-page nonsense, and why are you doing it both differently and in a less user-friendly fashion than any other online newspaper?

I absolutely detest jump pages in online news. There is just absolutely no reason to jump anything short enough to have run in a newspaper. I read about 2 dozen papers online regularly, and your new format is the first I have seen that ONLY says "Next page >" and/ or "Previous page >" in the same size font as the body text, and on my browser a pale blue, with no indication of how many pages there are and where in those pages I currently am.

The Los Angeles Times, which runs far more very long-form articles than the N&O, has always had a page-count/position indicator/page selector at the bottom of every page of an article. In the past year or so, they apparently realized that their most desirable – that is, brighter and better-educated – readers were not amused by clicking through 12-page articles ad nauseam. They have added an icon next to the numbered navigator to allow the reader to select "Single page" instead. The New York Times also offers the single-page option now, and the Washington Post has a red “Continued” indicator and a clear, numbered navigator.

The International Herald Tribune, which used to offer only a very different 3-column format and barely perceptible navigation at the bottom, now offers a choice of one or three columns. Both offer visible and useful position indicators at the bottom of the page, especially the latter version, where they are now significantly larger than the body copy.

The only escape from multipage presentations - unless a single-page option like the LAT's and NYT’s is provided - is to use the printable version instead. But months ago you made your printable view useless when you chose to include the giant box full of garbage on the right in that view as well.

I am one of those select few who was a member of NandO.net as soon as it was born and have been a loyal reader over the many years intervening, and a print subscriber when I have lived in the actual circulation area. It is true that in the early days, the NandO folks broke ground in online news and its presentation, but that is far from true now. You have demonstrated that with this silliness, which reeks of a desperate attempt to do it differently than the current leaders in the industry while failing to understand that different is definitely not the same as better.

You all should be absolutely ashamed of these ill-advised attempts at progress, which instead push your product farther down the slope to irrelevancy.

On Floyd McKissick vying for Jeanne Lucas's Senate seat

Independent Weekly
Mr. McKissick does indeed have significant experience and other qualifications for the job.

He also has the significant disqualification of having entered the process under an ethical cloud, which is not a good thing ever, and especially these days. The last politician I remember pulling this trick is Dick Cheney - and he's certainly not the role model for ethical leadership I would want if I lived in the district still.

He should eliminate himself as abruptly as he inserted himself into the race.

Send In the Clowns. Don't Bother, Sanjaya's Here

Washington Post
I don't watch American Idol, have never seen any of the performances by anyone but the Sanjaya clips on the news, and couldn't care less about who wins it.

However, I did just watch Blake Lewis on Youtube, just because this description sounded so goofy. And I made a remarkable discovery - this description is so inaccurate and negative that I can safely say it's a lie. Stroking himself? He put his hand a few inches inside his jacket, in the neighborhood of the breast pocket, once, for about 4 seconds. Never touched any other part of his body, much less 'stroked' anything, at all. Spinning? He did a sort of little circle dance step maybe 3 or 4 times during the song, not the single slickest maneuver in history but nothing terribly weird or uncoordinated or anything else bad about it.

I have never liked Mack the Knife and think the lyrics are weird, but this is the first time I ever was actually able to understand the whole story of the song. And finally, he didn't confide to Ryan that he didnt 'get' the lyrics - he was asked which was more difficult this week, going first or the lyrics, and he said lyrics. And Ryan said, 'It was a little tough in rehearsal this week - ya got it.'

I think he has a very nice voice, that it was a cool jazz vibe, for that show at least, likewise pretty hip for that show, and not the worst version ever of that song. And I think this exaggerated and snarky summary of the performance borders on the uncalled-for. That's just my opinion, but at least it's based on what really happened.