Category Archives: The State

A little feedback, please

I’m happy to observe that readers of this blog are in no way shy about giving feedback. In fact, we just set a new record with a total of 60 comments and counting on this post from last week.

So let me ask for your thoughts on something that, surprisingly, I’ve only heard from a couple of people about today so far:

What did you think of today’s editorial page, which contained no editorials? We’re planning on doing this every Monday — turning over the whole page to the community, while refraining from pontificating ourselves — and comments and suggestions are more than welcome. So please sound off.

“Second-rate?” I beg to differ

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I finally managed to find a way to link to this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece — which several kind folks have brought to my attention — that I think will work. Let me know if you have trouble with it, in which case I’ll go back to the drawing board.

While I’m at it, though, I might as well point out that this is another example of the sort of analysis of Knight Ridder’s situation that shows the writer knows not of what he speaks.

I’m not so much quibbling with his calling Knight Ridder a group of "second-rate newspapers." I can’t, because he doesn’t state by what standard he is rating them. Personally, I believe The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are probably the two best papers in the country. Note that I say "probably," because unlike the author of the op-ed piece, I do not regard myself as omniscient. One would have to read every paper in the country every day, and come up with some way of standardizing judgments of them, to state authoritatively which papers are the best in the nation.

Anyway, after those two, I’m not sure where to go next. The Chicago Tribune? The L.A. Times? The Washington Post? I don’t know even what I think on that score. So let’s say the Times and the Journal are first-rate, no doubt about it. Do you cut it off there? Does that make the Trib, the LAT and the WashPost second-rate? If so, that’s fine company to be in.

I suspect that Mr. Ellis is drawing the line somewhat below that level, but I don’t know; he doesn’t explain. So we’ll let that go.

But when he repeatedly refers to Knight Ridder papers as "second-rate information providers," saying that it is unsurprising that broadband-enabled consumers would abandon them, I have to say, Hold on. This is where he’s showing the sort of ignorance that is typical among analysts who keep pronouncing ex cathedra from Wall Street that newspapers are doomed to disappear.

I don’t know (or care that much) about other Knight Ridder newspapers, but I would like Mr. Ellis to cite a source of news and analysis about South Carolina that is clearly superior to The State. Oh, I suppose the Greenville and Charleston papers have their fans who would argue that they are better on that score, but I’d disagree with them. And I don’t think anyone could make any kind of a case that there is a better source of information on the Midlands than my own newspaper.

If he could cite just one such source, I would be amazed. I’m quite confident that he can’t.

See, this is where the understanding of folks who view the newspaper industry from New York or Boston or Washington often goes awry. They misunderstand what this business is about. It’s about communities. Sure, you can go online and find many better and more complete sources about the recent tsunami, or British politics or the situation in the Mideast. But most newspapers exist to tell people what’s going on right where they live. And they have no serious competition in this endeavor.

If all newspapers (and I use "newspapers" to include their Web incarnations; I’m by no means wedded to dead trees) disappeared tomorrow, someone would start up a new one in every good-sized community in the nation. Why? Because there’s a market for the information that only newspapers provide — however they deliver that information to you.

Yes, newspapers (while remaining profitable, a fact that Wall Street willfully overlooks) are still stumbling around trying to find a way to make enough money to support their news-gathering operations on the Internet. One of the things holding us back is that there is still a market for the dead-tree version. Otherwise, we could ditch that altogether and eliminate more than half our cost, making it much easier to compete on-line.

But I believe we’ll work it out eventually. In the meantime, newspapers remain the first-rate providers of local news, by virtue of the fact that there’s nothing better.

Do ya think?

KR Alumni: Good journalism is good business

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OK, one more on this navel-gazing subject and then I’ll move on to something else.

I thought you might find this piece, about a letter that former Knight Ridder journalists circulated over the last few days, interesting in light of the current situation in which the corporation — and, more relevantly to you and me, its newspapers — find t hemselves.

Here is their statement, as reported by Editor & Publisher:

John S. Knight, a founder of the company known today
as Knight Ridder, believed –- and proved — that excellent journalism is
good business. The undersigned, all alumni of Knight Ridder, have lived
that creed.
As did the late Jack
Knight, we believe profit is not merely nice but necessary. Knight
Ridder routinely has generated double-digit operating profits -– such as
last year’s 19.4 percent. We understand the obligation of an
institutional investor to maximize return on investment. An investor
for whom double digits are insufficient is free to sell Knight Ridder
stock. An investor who instead demands the sale or dismantling of
Knight Ridder merely in the name of a larger profit margin is engaged
not in good business but in greed.
As
did Jack Knight, we speak out of confidence in, not fear of, the future
of the good business of excellent journalism. There is durable value in
businesses that treat their citizens, their communities and their
employees with respect. New technology is an ally of, not a threat to,
trustworthy and nimble media. Competition gives rise to innovation and
efficiency, much as recent declines in print circulation have been
accompanied by increased electronic readership.
Knight
Ridder is not merely another public company. It is a public trust. It
must balance corporate profitability with civic purpose. We oppose
those who would cripple the purpose by coercing more profit. We abhor
those for whom good business is insufficient and excellent journalism
is irrelevant.
We have watched
mostly in silent dismay as short-term profit demands have diminished
long-term capacity of newsrooms in Knight Ridder and other public media
companies. We are silent no more. We will support and counsel only
corporate leadership that restores to Knight Ridder newspapers the
resources to do excellent journalism. We are prepared collectively to
nominate candidates for the Knight Ridder board. We wish to reassert
John Knight’s creed.

The signers, all of whom are listed at the link, include some highly prominent former journalists and executives who have left the KR ranks in recent years. The group said they "are prepared collectively to nominate candidates for the Knight Ridder board," candidates who see the newspapers’ mission as they do.

Corporate’s reaction, expressed in E&P by KR spokesman Polk Laffoon, was that "This is a fine gesture and a well-intentioned gesture by good and honorable people." He went on to say that "Unfortunately, the reality is that more than 90% of
Knight Ridder shares are institutionally held and more than a third of
them are held by three institutions."

Mr. Laffoon, vice president for corporate relations, was quoted by The Philadelphia Inquirer as saying:

"I wish there were an identifiable and strong
correlation between quality journalism as we all define it and strong
and growing newspaper sales. If that were the case, we would not only
know how to meet some of the challenges we would face today, but we
would thrive on doing it. I wish it were that simple. Unfortunately it
isn’t."

So now you’ll want to know what I think, as a current employee of a Knight Ridder newspaper. Well, on that subject, I’ll quote the composite character played by Eric Bana in "Black Hawk Down" — based, incidentally, on a series of stories by Mark Bowden, a former reporter for The Inquirer. Mr. Bowden is one of the "alumni" who signed the above statement.

Mr. Bana was speaking to an actor portraying a real-life hero of the battle of Mogadishu, Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann:

"You know what I think? It don’t really matter what I think. Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that (expletive) just goes right out the window…. Just watch your corner; get all your men back here alive."

Good advice, that, even if no literal bullets are flying. Nobody in San Jose or on Wall Street is asking what I think, and my situation — and those of the people and pages for which I’m responsible — will pretty much be the same whatever I think. We’ve got plenty to deal with right here, addressing the issues of importance to all of us in South Carolina, and trying to put out better journalism each day that we do it. That’s my mission, and that’s how I intend to occupy my time while all the big money people work out their politics and all that stuff.

When I’ve got something else to say about it, I’ll let you know.

Never Mind: Publishers to stay put

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The folks at Knight Ridder corporate just had a major Emily Litella moment.

You know how you’ve been hearing that The State is going to get a new publisher — Lou Heldman from Wichita — while our current publisher, Ann Caulkins, was to go to Charlotte?

Well, Never Mind.

It’s been decided that with the impending potential sale of the parent company, it’s best to keep each newspaper’s leadership in place — for now. It’s a bit of a curve ball when we were all expecting a Ann_1 different pitch, but it makes sense on a couple of levels. The less important advantage is that it saves some money associated with moving executives about. The greater consideration is that in a time of change — and the coming days will be a time of change, however all this shakes out — it’s best to keep people in place who know their newspapers and their communities, to provide some measure of stability and steadiness.

I was looking forward to working with Lou. I was set to have dinner with him week after next to talk about what we’re up to in editorial, but that’s off now; he’s canceled that trip to Columbia. Still, I might get to work with him in the future. I don’t know. Right now we’ve got a visibility horizon of about five minutes around here.

Meanwhile, it’s reassuring that someone familiar will be with us on this wild ride. I know that Ann is disappointed that she won’t be taking on a new challenge — just as it has to be a letdown for Lou, and Lou’s replacement, and the various other folks affected by this. But at least we’ll all still be dealing with some known quantities, and that can be reassuring at a time like this. I think I just said that. Oh, well.

Obviously, I don’t have anything profound to say about any of this, so I’ll shut up. I just thought you might like to know about it.

Knight Ridder column

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What will happen to this newspaper?
I don’t know. Nobody does
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ONLY ONCE in my life have I bought stock all by myself, on purpose, with perfectly good money that was sitting safely in my bank account.
I bought 20 shares of Knight Ridder — the company that owns the newspaper I work for — at the impossibly low price of $62.65. It had been as high as $80 a share just a year before, and was bound to head that way again, right?
In October, it fell to $52.42.
I wasn’t the only one who was, um, disappointed. A man named Bruce S. Sherman, whose Private Capital Management company owns 19 percent of Knight Ridder’s stock (even more than I do) wrote a letter telling the corporate brass to put the company up for sale, or else. Last week, the company took a step in that direction. But while the stock has jumped up close to the price at which I bought it, nobody has rushed to scoop us up yet.
The irony is that people I meet have actually been asking me, as a member of The State’s executive team, what all of this means, and what’s likely to happen next. And I’m the one to whom other senior staffers have to speak very slowly and distinctly when explaining something financial.
Here’s the bigger irony: What I have to say on the subject is as valuable as what almost anybody else says, because nobody knows what’s going to happen (unless it’s already happened and they haven’t told me).
I’ve read what the analysts and the smart business writers at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and other publications have had to say. I’ve read memos from corporate. I’ve discussed it with my colleagues. And I’m about where I started.
Will the company be sold? I don’t know. If so, to whom? I don’t know. Will it be sold intact, or will the pieces be sold off to different buyers? I don’t know. What will it all mean to The State, and the community it serves? I don’t know. What will it mean to me?
I don’t know. There’s a lot of speculation, most of which will be shown to be nonsense when the whole thing shakes out.
While such companies as Tribune (as in Chicago), McClatchy and The New York Times are mentioned, Gannett — the only newspaper chain with larger circulation than ours — is seen by some as the only entity with the motivation and resources to swallow us whole. Then again, we could be bought by Yahoo! or eBay.
The experts say that what has driven this stockholder dissatisfaction is a set of dire portents for the entire industry. The retailers whose advertising is so critical to newspapers are consolidating. Readers are turning to the Internet and other free sources of news. Or they’re just not reading as much as earlier generations.
Experts also say newspapers are still a good buy, and that Knight Ridder is undervalued. The Journal said a “reasonable valuation range” for KR stock is from $70 to $100. It also said it was doubtful anyone would pay that. So much for experts.
I actually think that price range is reasonable (and am prepared to sell you a few shares in that range). I also think many of the evil portents are baloney. Readers can turn to the Internet all they want, and they’ll find newspapers already there, providing news content and selling advertising. Eventually, under current or future management, they’ll find a way to make as much money there as they once did peddling dead trees.
Ultimately, however the news is delivered, it will have to be paid for, either by subscription (a word that freaks out Web-surfers) or advertising. You see, it actually costs something to gather news. If newspapers, with their expensive armies of reporters, all of a sudden went away, you’d find the pickings of actual news on the ’Net to be pretty slim.
But hey, don’t listen to me. I don’t even know for whom I’ll be working in the new year. But I do know this: I’ve been here before.
I worked the first 10 years of my career for The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun, which was owned by The Des Moines Register Co. Some top shareholders in that privately held company tried to sell us to Dow Jones, which owns the Journal. That caused another major stockholder to try to sell the Des Moines paper to The Washington Post, and our little daily to The New York Times (or so the scuttlebutt had it). All those masters of our little universe were shown up in the end, when Gannett waltzed in and bought it all for $200 million. What this experience taught me is that once a company is in play, even those who think they’re driving the process have no idea how it will come out.
I’ve heard stories about what happened after Gannett took over, but I don’t know the truth of it, because I had left to go to work for Knight Ridder in Wichita — not because of Gannett, but because I didn’t get along with a new publisher Des Moines had sent us just before all the craziness started. (As it happens, I’m about to get a new publisher here, just as the uncertainty of a potential sale hangs over us all. Again. Interesting, huh?)
I was miserable in Kansas, and almost immediately after the company bought The State, I came here. As I said, I had gone to Wichita not because I want
ed to be there, but to work for Knight Ridder. Purely a career move. But I learned my lesson, and when I came here I came to work for The State — the largest newspaper serving the people of my native state. I pay little attention to what goes on at corporate (something I can do because Knight Ridder doesn’t believe in meddling in editorial policy). In my first interview for a job at The State, I said my ultimate goal was to be editorial page editor, which was where I thought I could be most useful. And 18 years later, here I am.
So what’s going to happen next? Well, for my part — and that of the team I work with — we’ll keep on doing our best to make the editorial pages a place where South Carolinians can come together to have constructive conversations about the critical issues that face us all, locally and statewide. We will still be motivated by the dream of a South Carolina that is no longer last where we want to be first, and first where we want to be last.
And we’ll do all that as long as whoever owns the paper lets us.

Column on Larry Wilson’s trial balloon

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A comprehensive plan for
making us wealthier and wiser
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LARRY WILSON, one of the chief architects
of the Education Accountability Act, came by the office the other day and offered a pretty compelling vision for what South Carolina should do next.
The local entrepreneur doesn’t hold elective office, and doesn’t claim to speak for anyone but himself. But the ideas he put forth are worth sharing because:

He is a board member for the Palmetto Institute, and that think tank is expected to join with the Palmetto Business Forum, the Competitiveness Council and the state Chamber of Commerce to set forth a unified vision for how to make the average South Carolinian wealthier. Some of these ideas may crop up in that context.
He is also close to the new speaker of the S.C. House, Bobby Harrell. How many of these ideas Mr. Harrell buys into and how many he has told Mr. Wilson — according to Larry’s account — just aren’t feasible I don’t know.

Nor do I know how many of these ideas my editorial board colleagues and I will go for once we sit down and study them.
But I was sufficiently impressed by this set of interlocked proposals that it seems worth throwing out to see what others think. If not this, we need some kind of comprehensive strategy for moving South Carolina forward. We must get beyond the usual piecemeal responses to crises and interest group demands if we’re to catch up.
The critical element that ties all of these ideas together is the unassailable fact that education and economic development are inseparable. If we don’t realize that, we’ll continue to make 80 percent of the national income.
I don’t have room to set out everything covered in our wide-ranging discussion, but here are the most intriguing and/or appealing ideas that I heard:

EDUCATION
Mr. Wilson wants an Education Quality Act that includes:

Early remediation. Third-graders scoring below basic on the PACT would attend school year-round in the fourth grade, under master teachers or National Board-certified teachers. The teachers’ incentive? Higher pay for 230 days of teaching. He would then add a grade level at a time, on up to high school.
Full-day kindergarten for 4-year-olds. This would be provided at “accountable, certified” public and private schools, “financed by vouchers and integrated w/First Steps.” The money might come in part from consolidating current pre-5K efforts, and be distributed in a way markedly different from the awful “Put Parents in Charge” scheme: Low-income kids would get full funding (about $4,000 apiece). The money would go to the school their parents choose. Higher-income folks would get a tax deduction (not a credit) to help with a portion of the cost. “I’m absolutely against vouchers in the public schools, by the way,” Mr. Wilson said. “But this is an area where I think it will work.”
An appointed state superintendent of education.
A BRAC-style commission for reducing the absurd number of school districts in the state. He credited this idea to Rep. James Smith, D-Richland, citing the facts that 41 of the state’s 85 districts serve only 14 percent of all students, but account for 100 percent of schools judged “unsatisfactory” under the Accountability Act.
A statewide salary schedule for educators, by category and qualification. This way, for instance, Marion County wouldn’t lose good teachers to Horry just because the Grand Strand county can pay so much more.

KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
Mr. Wilson would like to increase the lottery money going to endowed chairs from $30 million to $40 million to take greater advantage of this indispensable tool for helping our research universities to boost our economy.
He would also push for an Industry Partners Act that would:

Recruit or set up companies to apply cutting-edge research going on in the state, accelerating the growth of economic clusters built around automotive innovation (Clemson), “Next Energy” development (USC) and biotech (MUSC and USC). The idea would be to market the state’s under-acknowledged assets and provide such incentives as local demonstration projects — say, running buses in the Midlands on hydrogen. The goal: to see these products manufactured here, by highly paid South Carolinians.
Define respective, interconnected roles for the state Commerce Department, universities, S.C. Research Authority and tech system in boosting knowledge-based enterprises in the state.

TAX REFORM
Comprehensive tax reform, of course — the only kind worth talking about. Fortunately, while there’s a lot of talk regarding “property tax relief” as an end in itself, the climate has never been better for realigning our whole tax structure.
Mr. Wilson calls it “tax-balancing.” He would shift the burden of financing schools to the state (the only way to standardize teacher pay and otherwise reduce the gap between rich and poor districts). A Senate panel is talking about replacing the property tax as a school funding source with a higher sales tax. But Mr. Wilson raises two caveats: Care must be taken not to raise the sales tax to the point that S.C. merchants can’t compete with the Internet and neighboring states, and the tax burden must not be shifted to businesses to the point that it stifles job creation.
That latter point is worth considering for a reason he didn’t bring up: If only owner-occupied homes were exempted from school property taxes, gross inequality would still exist between districts rich in industry and commerce, and those without that base.
He would also:

Eliminate the $300 cap on the automobile sales tax.
Raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax.

“The point of all this is, it fits together,” Mr. Wilson concluded. “You can’t fix one problem without fixing the other.”
Exactly.

A newspaper primer

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When I saw this headline this morning, I thought, "What an opportunity! I can write a blog item extending and reinforcing the point about editorial independence that I made yesterday."

Basically, yesterday I had an exchange with a reader that gave me the opportunity to explain the separation between editorial and advertising. I would have mentioned that editorial is just as separate from news, but that wasn’t the subject at hand. Then, lo and behold, the newsroom provides a supreme example of that this morning.

But before I could sit down and write the item, I received this comment (see the second one) from someone else accusing us of "hypocrisy" because the newsroom doesn’t follow our editorial line.

Sheesh. You just can’t win. All right, here’s a primer on how this newspaper works:

News and editorial are as separate as advertising and editorial. When I see a headline I don’t like, I’ve got less ability to do anything about it than you, the reader. You can hoot and holler and write an angry letter. I turn away and tend to my own business, because I’m not supposed to influence, or even try to influence, news decisions.

Am I complaining about that? No. Because just as I don’t try to run their business, they don’t try to run mine.

I really don’t see why some readers have trouble understanding this. Most readers seem to think it would be awful for the news to be reported to fit our editorial position, and our most vehement critics are often those who believe that line is being crossed.

Yet now I have readers criticizing us because we DON’T cross that line, or the other line between us and advertising. Oh, well. I learned long ago that different people want different things from a newspaper.

Any other questions?

Fact gets in way of perfectly good post

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A colleague points out a flaw of omission in my last posting, as follows:

She said that when the lottery was created — over our strenuous objections — we advocated that the authorizing legislation contain language that would prevent the state from doing what other states had done, which was to promote the lottery as a get-rich-quick scheme to an excessive degree. For instance, advertising in other states had portrayed people who studied and worked hard to make a living as saps, and lottery players as the smart ones who knew the way to fortune.

Well, I remembered that part. What I didn’t remember that in connection with the legislative restrictions that we advocated, the lottery operators also would be required to urge people to play "responsibly."

But here it is, clear as can be, in state law:

The commission must promote fair and responsible play, including
disclosure of the odds of winning, and must ensure that any advertising
used does not exhort the public to bet by misrepresenting, directly or
indirectly, a person’s chance of winning a prize.

Fact noted. So now I will make these two points:

First, if the only reason the lottery director is urging us to play "responsibly" is that the law requires him to, that means the situation is even more ironic, not less. Doesn’t it?
Second, I must apologize to Ernie Passailaigue if my previous words implied hypocrisy on his part. If he’s forced by law to say words that sound hypocritical, then he’s not the hypocrite, the state is.

But then, that was always the case. Ernie’s just a guy doing a job. The guilty party here has always been the state.

Like two peas in a pod

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Did you notice that excerpt (scroll down in the link to "Rebuilding casinos") we put on the Sunday op-ed page from the Biloxi paper?

I thought it was interesting for two reasons:

First, the paper put this editorial on the front page, which is kind of freaky and unusual.

Second, this is for those of you out there who persist in believing that Knight Ridder, which owns both the Biloxi paper and The State, dictates editorial policy to its newspapers. There are loads of ways I could demonstrate how false that assumption is, but few would be as dramatic as this one. Can you imagine The State, given its positions on video poker, the state lottery, and casino boats would take such a position — much less feel so strongly about it as to break the conventions by putting such advocacy on the front page?

Well, I should smile, as a Mark Twain character might say.

Regarding Warren’s column today

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This is to lend my own perspective in support of what my colleague Warren Bolton has to say in his column today.

There are an awful lot of white folks out there who are by no means racist but who nevertheless get impatient with black folks seeming to talk about race "all the time." I’ll admit that while I don’t quite go that far, I have had a similar reaction: Sometimes it just seems odd to me that black writers or speakers will inject race into their comments on a subject that seemed — to me — to be totally unrelated.

But while I’m not the most empathetic person in the world, I have managed to figure out that the reason I have that reaction is that I’ve never had the regular experience that black folks have of race being thrown in their faces, and usually in an extremely unpleasant way. This usually happens out of the view of the kind of white folks who would never dream of doing, saying or thinking anything racist, and thus such well-meaning folk think it’s their black neighbors who have an unhealthy fixation.

Working with Warren has helped me see this. I’ll give you an example.

Sometime after Warren Bolton joined our editorial board, he wrote a column or two about the Confederate flag that was then atop our State House dome. At that point, I had already written on the subject — demanding that it come down — about 200 times since I had joined the board myself in 1994.

Warren’s style of writing about it was milder and more polite than mine. He objected to the flag’s presence in a kinder, gentler manner than was my wont. This was partly due to the difference in our personalities. But I suspect it was also because Warren knew, far better than I, what was coming.

You see, I thought I’d seen it all in the way of negative reactions from flag defenders. The editorial department secretary hated the days that one of my pieces on the subject ran, because it meant a day of fielding — and passing on to me — angry call after angry call, followed by a flood of letters.

But what I’d experienced was hugs and kisses compared to the slime that came bursting out of the woodwork from the very first moment that Warren dared to touch upon the subject. The vitriol, the pure hatred that was aimed at him was like nothing I had seen. And what was the difference between his columns and mine? Well, there were two: Mine were somewhat more provocative, and a picture of a black man ran with his.

I was already at that point tired of hearing the canard about how support for the flag never had a thing to do with race, but I really got fed up with it at that point. What provoked the hatred; what was Warren’s offense? Simple. He was guilty of having an opinion on the flag while being black.

This did not surprise Warren. He had, after all, been black all his life. But it was an eye-opener for me.

Warren quotes — with epithets blanked out — one of the worst recent phone messages he’s received. But reading about it doesn’t communicate it. You need to hear it to get the full impact (and sorry, but my attempts to convert the recording to a format that I could link to here have been unsuccessful). The caller starts out speaking VERY softly, so that Warren or anyone else listening would press the receiver more tightly to his ear, and turn up the volume on the phone. Then, without warning, he SCREAMS the really nasty parts at a volume intended to hurt the eardrum of the listener. That this stranger hated Warren could be in no doubt. Nor could the reason be obscure. He hated Warren simply because he was black, and he wanted to put that point across in as offensive and painful a manner as possible.

I’ve never had anything quite like that aimed at me. And if you’re white, you probably haven’t either. If you and I suspect black folks are just a little on the touchy side about race matters, that’s probably because they are. And they have reason to be.

Setting a few things straight

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Wow. I was going to remonstrate gently with Bob McAlister about one or two points in his op-ed column today, but now that I see this comment from Bud Williams on Bob’s blog, I know there’s someone out there in much more need of a few actual facts.

Let’s take his flights of fancy one at a time. Here’s the first:

I think the liberal tone of the paper comes from higher up.

First — and this is a question I posed just yesterday to Bob — what liberal tone? Secondly, however you define our "tone," it is ours, and no one else’s. A publisher will have an influence on editorial policy, as a member of the editorial board. (And that influence is gentler and more benign that most people realize; for instance, I can’t think of a single editorial position in the 11 years I’ve been on this board that was dictated by a publisher against the wishes of the consensus of the board.) As for "higher up" than the publisher? That’s unimaginable. There might be some newspaper companies out there that "dictate" editorial policy to their papers, but I can’t think of how they would manage it. People in San Jose don’t have the slightest idea about the issues and people we’re writing about here (and about 90 percent of what we write is purely South Carolina). How could they even form an opinion on these matters, much less communicate their wishes to us? And when I say the tone is "ours," to whom does that refer? Well, first, it refers to me. As vice president and editorial page editor, what appears on our pages is my responsibility. It also refers to a team of people whom I, a South Carolina native, have chosen to hire. Those are the associate editors. It also refers to whoever is publisher at a given time. All of the above are the members of the editorial board. And while publishers may come and go, the rest of the editorial board tends to be here for the long haul. The member of the board with the least seniority at this newspaper has been here for 15 years.

If you notice, many article are reprinted from other Knight Ridder papers and
they generally follow the same line of thought.

I don’t know what that means. The only columnists we regularly run on our pages who happen to work at KR papers are Trudy Rubin and Leonard Pitts. Perhaps the gentleman refers to the news pages, which run stories from KRT, a joint news service between Knight Ridder and the Chicago Tribune company, right alongside stories from the Associated Press, the New York Times News Service, and the Washington Post/L.A. Times service. But why are we talking about this anyway? That’s on the news pages. And Bob was talking about my bailiwick — editorial.

Writers like George Will give us thoughtful, well considered writing but veer
only slightly right of center…

Excuse me? George Will isn’t conservative enough? He’s the dean of conservative columnists (now that William Safire has retired). And maybe that’s the problem. He’s a REAL conservative, as in traditional conservative, as opposed to one of these newfangled nutballs who want to shrink government down to a size where they can drown it in a bathtub.

An occasional Michelle Malkin piece is thrown not so much, I think…

Well, I’m not familiar with Ms. Malkin (or is it Miss, or Mrs.?). If we’ve run her, she doesn’t show up in a search of our archives database. In any case, I’m betting that she doesn’t give her opinions away for free. And for the past few years, my budget has been shrinking to the point that all I’ve done is cut columnists and cartoonists (and the last columnist I cut, by the way, was avowed liberal E.J. Dionne), not add them. If you want to gripe about corporate influence, gripe about their influence on the newspaper’s budget. That’s something they care about, not our politics. (Of course, the real culprit is the stock market, which continues to demand unreasonable profit margins from newspaper companies.)

I suspect the publishers know they must toe the line or those promotions you
refer to won’t be made available to them.

Well, I can’t speak for publishers and their motivation, but I can reiterate that the only line they are expected to toe is the bottom line. They are expected to meet profit goals. And I can assure you that I’m not looking for a promotion. This is it for me. This was my career goal, and wish only for the opportunity to keep using this position to serve the people of South Carolina until I retire or until (and this is far more likely, given my pecuniary situation) I drop dead at my desk.

Is the mission of a newspaper to reflect the opinions of its readers or to
convert those opinions to the editorial board’s?

That’s an odd and puzzling question. If you’re talking about the editorial page, its mission is to do both (although I wouldn’t word the latter part that way). We run the opinions of our readers verbatim. And when we write our opinions, we certainly aren’t doing it for fun. We’re doing it because these are the things we believe, and certainly we want to persuade people to our point of view, if we can. If not, we hope they will at least have considered the points we raise. As for "converting" them, I don’t know what that means. Our basic values are pretty well aligned with the broad center in South Carolina. We would like to get the extremists on the right and the left to calm down and see reason, but we have no motive to "convert" most South Carolinians, because they’re right where we are.

I think people would be surprsied to see the liberal leaning of a paper called
The State in a state so solidly conservative.

Well, so would I, since I am not familiar with any newspaper called The State that fits that description.

This last one is my favorite:

I knew we were in for a major shift in philosophy shortly after Knight Ridder
bought The State when a senior editor wrote in her introductory column that she
was sitting in a coffe house in San Francisco when President Nixon resighned and
she celebrated by getting a tatoo.

There could be no better illustration of the fallacy that this is a more "liberal" editorial board than before Knight Ridder. That column was written by one of the pre-KR associate editors, who after having been here since (I think) the 1960s, retired seven or eight years ago. When I joined this editorial board in 1994, I was the only person in this department who had arrived after KR (and in my case, I got here only about six months after). And this is going to come as a shock, I know, but the only writer in the department who was as conservative as I was was my boss and predecessor, Tom McLean. Since then, all of those folks have retired, and I have been careful to hire people whose views — while they vary across the spectrum (intentionally, because I wouldn’t stand for having a group that thinks just alike on everything) — average out to being closer to the South Carolina mainstream than the old group’s were.

New publisher column, w/ links

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Initial, feeble efforts
to figure out the new boss
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
OK, I’M GOING to withdraw from the multidirectional gossip matrix for as long as it takes to write a column — or until one of my calls to Wichita gets returned.
As you probably know by now, I’m about to lose a good boss, and get a new one who I think is a good guy, but only time will tell. (Wait. You don’t think he’ll read this, do you?)
Ann Caulkins, president and publisher of The State, is leaving at the end of the year to run The Charlotte Observer. Hence the call I received a while ago from an editorial type in Charlotte asking what they should expect.
Meanwhile, Lou Heldman, publisher of The Wichita Eagle, is to take her place. Hence my calls to Ann Wichita, where I worked from 1985 until I came home to South Carolina in 1987.
Anyway, I told my caller from Charlotte that they couldn’t do better, from the perspective of editorial. While she is from a business-side background, she’s taken a healthy interest in what we do on these pages — while respecting the consensus process by which we make decisions.
As a publisher overall, she has led the paper surely and ably, and kept the business as a business on a sound, profitable course. (At least I think she has. I’m not good at reading spreadsheets.)
She has been more involved in the community than any publisher I’ve ever known. I know she will be missed by folks outside our walls as much as by those of us here at the paper.
Besides, she gave me a promotion. You can’t beat that.
Now, on to the new guy.
I first met Lou Heldman in 1989. He spent that summer at The State directing what was called the “25-43 Project,” or less formally, the “Boomer project.” It was a Knight Ridder effort to find ways to attract younger readers to newspapers. Yes, baby boomers were then considered young.
I didn’t get all that involved in the project myself, but I did sit in on one or two of the brain-storming sessions, and found Lou to have a nimble and creative mind, and to be fun to work with. (I mean, on further reflection, you’ve got to assume that he is going to read this, right?)
I had a chance to get somewhat reacquainted with him Monday night at a dinner with some other members of the paper’s senior staff and Knight Ridder Vice President (and former editor at The State) Paula Ellis.
The dinner reinforced my previous impressions. An illustration:
He said that when he first went to Wichita, he kept seeing the paper’s mission statement posted around the building. His mind apparently wandering during meetings (more on that later), he found himself thinking about what he saw as missing from the statement.
He said this is what he would have added:

“Have fun every day.”
“Be proud of what we do,” which means he expects the kind of good work of which one has a right to be proud.
“Make a lot of money for the shareholders.” (Hey, his background might be in news, but he’s a publisher now, so cut him some slack. Besides, in my own tiny way, I am a stockholder.)

He shared these thoughts with others, and someone suggested he had left out one important consideration. He agreed, and added it to his list:

“Be grateful for it all.”

That’s the way he strikes me so far — as an approachable guy who likes to have fun while definitely getting the job done, and never forgetting to be grateful for life’s blessings.
He also said that he needs somebody pragmatic, focused and straightforward working with him to keep him grounded and on task. First chance I got, I asked Paula if she’d put in a good word for me as one who could help him keep his feet on the ground. She laughed (a little bitterly, I thought). She did, after all, work with me for years down in the newsroom.
But hey, I’m a professional journalist, so I’m not just going to go with my own inadequately informed impressions. To get the real skinny, I called my old friend Richard Crowson, Wichita’s editorial cartoonist. Richard and I go back to about 1974. One of the first cartoons he ever did illustrated an opinion column I wrote for our college paper at Memphis State University. We then worked together for years at The Jackson Sun in Tennessee. After I moved to Kansas, I got him to fly out, plied him with liquor, and he’s been there ever since.
On Tuesday, I abused his trust once again and got him talking freely about what it’s like to work with Lou. I had about half a page of good quotes before I said, “You know this is on the record, right?” This was a total shock, as he had thought we were gossiping. (Not that he’d said anything bad, Lou.)
Once he knew he was going to be quoted, he started saying stuff like, “Lou is extremely personable…. I’ll miss Lou, because I really thought he was great.”
When I read those quotes back to him, he added, “And he’s really kind to animals.”
He did say one or two substantive things. He said that while Lou told the Eagle’s editorial folks when he first arrived that he was politically conservative, that was probably because he had just come from a college town. Richard suggested that he was more of a centrist by “red-state Kansas” standards.
Anyway, I’m running out of room here at the same time I’m running out of stuff I know, or think I know, on this subject. One more thing: Lou’s family is going to stay in Kansas until his kids finish the school year. In the meantime, he’ll need a place to stay. So if you know of “an old-fashioned rooming house with a wi-fi connection,” let me know, and I’ll let him know. That should put me in good with him.

More on Ann, Lou

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OK, so I had to go back and change the headline on my last posting, which originally read, "You read it here first." Fact is, thestate.com beat me to it by a few minutes. I had mine written earlier, of course, but it took me a little too long to get back upstairs and change the item from "draft" to "publish." So I was scooped. But I suppose that’s as it should be.

But let’s see if I can accomplish another first — at least, a first for this blog. And that is to publish a video clip of the announcement down in the atrium. Let me know if it works when you try to call it up. The clip begins when Lou is starting to share his thoughts about The State as a newspaper, and the Midlands as a community. The joke about remodeling the basement in his honor is a reference to the recent flood damage, which has necessitated extensive renovation downstairs, a project that is still in progress.

In case the video doesn’t work (and as I write this, it seems that it’s still trying to load) here’s a still photo from roughly the same portion of the meeting. That’s Lou Heldman speaking front and center. At the left is Kathy Moreland, assistant to the publisher, and to the right is Paula Ellis, who is now a Lou_005 vice president with Knight Ridder. You may remember Paula from her days here in Columbia, where she served as managing editor, and later as an executive over several departments, including advertising. She then became publisher of The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News, before her move to San Jose.

Some brief comments about both Ann and Lou — which I plan to enlarge upon in a column for tomorrow’s paper (assuming I stop blogging long enough to write it):

Before Ann had to leave Monday to meet with folks in Charlotte, I popped into her office to tell her rather awkwardly that she’d been a great boss, and she would be missed. "Awkardly" because I don’t give praise easily — to peers, subordinates or bosses. I only managed it this time because it couldn’t be seen as sucking up, since she wasn’t going to be my boss any more, and I haven’t the slightest interest in ever working in Charlotte — or anywhere besides here, actually. Which reminds me — I think I forgot to congratulate her. (If I did so, it was so perfunctorily that I don’t recall.) My thoughts were running more along the lines of "Poor Ann, she has to go to Charlotte." But the fact is, this is a great opportunity for her — and a well-deserved promotion, given the size of her new paper.

I just got a call from someone in the editorial department of The Observer, wanting to know what she’s like to work with. I told them they couldn’t do better. She will be an active member of the editorial board, and will make her influence felt, but will by no means a dictator of editorial policy. She has worked really well within the consensus process we use for decision-making. The interactions we all had with her were well-grounded in mutual respect, and you can’t have a better situation than that.

Now I know I promised to share some reflections about Lou, but I’ve gotten behind now, and need to get started on that column for tomorrow — especially since my deadline is less than an hour off. So read the paper. I mean, do you expect me to give you everything free?

Papa’s got a brand-new boss

Out amongst ’em

Welcome, thecolumbiarecord.com bloggers!

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I hereby issue a hearty welcome to a slew of new bloggers, all associated with the newspaper’s new community blog, TheColumbiaRecord.com. I do this with slightly mixed feelings, as this is competition I can ill afford. Some of these people (if not all of them) are already better at this than I am. I hope they will only spur me on to make my blog that much better. Either that, or the pressure will provide that last little straw necessary to make me crack, and you’ll see me running naked through the streets screaming "The Visigoths are coming!" in Esperanto. Which to you will appear normal, but I promise there is a distinction here somewhere.

Anyway, I thought the most neighborly way I could greet these interlopers would be to run Cindi’s column about them, right here on our stage, with handy links.

So here it is:

TheColumbiaRecord.com will change
how you think about bloggers
By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE
Associate Editor
BLOGGERS, like the talking heads on TV “news” channels, tend to be loud-mouthed know-it-alls on the political extremes who delight in their uninformed ignorance and spew disdain upon the rational among us who actually know what they’re talking about.
So what in the world are Democratic Rep. James Smith and Republican Rep. Ted Pitts doing writing a blog together? Not as point-counterpoint crazies, but as friends and colleagues providing an “issues-based political dialogue”?
Well, I can’t say for sure yet; they can’t either: They’ve been brainstorming the idea for the past week, and they’re going to lunch today to sketch out a plan. But I know it’s going to be interesting. It might even help break down some of the partisan barriers that are so poisoning our politics, our government and our society.
This may be a little bolder than the rest of the offerings, but what James and Ted are doing is typical of the approach you’ll find at TheColumbiaRecord.com, which debuts today as the Midlands’ on-line gathering place.
Like James and Ted, the folks who are already blogging are people who know what they’re talking about. And contrary to the other cliche about blogging, most of them have little or nothing to say about politics.
This is no accident. The team at The State who developed TheColumbiaRecord.com set out to create something different from the Wild West of the blogosphere, but also different from the typical newspaper site. We sought out people in our community who are experts in their fields — oftentimes fields that don’t get as much coverage in a newspaper as aficionados seek. We recruited some people you know. But we also realized that our community is full of interesting, intelligent, knowledgeable people whom most of us have never heard of, and so we went looking for them.
The first such person we found (with the help of State food reporter Allison Askins) was cookbook author and culinary instructor Susan Slack, who is now sharing her original recipes and her knowledge to help the rest of us learn to cook like a pro.
I knew Kathy Plowden had the personality to be a great blogger when she told me about how she had transformed herself from “the person who killed artificial plants” into a master gardener.
Arborist Jay Clingman heard about the project through word of mouth and contacted us with a full-blown proposal of how he would guide and moderate a dialogue on “trees and forests, timberland, wildlife preserves, wetlands, urban forests, tree problems and even tree and forest politics”; it was a topic we never would have thought to include on the blog site, but what he’s written so far is fun reading.
Actor/storyteller Darion McCloud, whom State reporter Pat Berman described as “among the most open, enjoyable and quotable people I’ve talked to in the past couple of years,” plans to talk about a bit of everything as he seeks to integrate the arts into modern life.
And the list goes on, from astronomy buff Hap Griffin and ultra-marathoner Ray Krolewicz to Lisa Yanity, a guidance counselor at A.C. Flora High School and Army Reserve captain who’s serving in Afghanistan, and Dr. Leo Walker, who is integrating non-traditional approaches with traditional medicine to help readers achieve “not merely the absence of disease but an optimum state of physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being.”
Of course, you’ll also find politics on TheColumbiaRecord.com, and readers of these pages will find familiar names: Three of the best writers from our old “community columnists” op-ed initiative — political consultant Bob McAlister, systems development specialist Mike Cakora and hydrologist Frank Chapelle — are blogging. (Go to the public square and find out, in his fabulous first posting, how Bob discovered that fellow blogger Brad Warthen isn’t into porn, or what Mike thinks of David Wilkins’ use of the queen’s English. Hint: Mike’s headline is “Did he really say that?”)
The site also includes Columbia City Council members Daniel Rickenmann and Tameika Isaac Devine, the Columbia Urban League’s J.T. McLawhorn and Brandy Pinkston, who runs the state Consumer Affairs Department and is offering tips and answering questions on scams, pitfalls and urban myths. And, as soon as they work out the details, James and Ted.
The blogs are just one part of TheColumbiaRecord.com. There’s also a place for people to send in their news about their schools, churches, neighborhoods, clubs, hobbies — whatever interests them. I think that’s going to create exciting and useful community conversations.
But that’s just what I think. What I know is that the bloggers are great. As we’ve read the early postings, my colleagues at work, and my new blogger friends, have come away time and time again amazed by the great writing and the thoughtfulness of the postings, and by what we’ve learned. It’s changed the way a lot of us think about blogging. I think it will do the same for you.
Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

Boy, did we screw up

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His name is Jim St. Clair.

He is a member of the Lexington 4 school board, he works for U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, he is a major in the S.C. Air National Guard, and he is running for the Republican nomination for the District 1 seat on Lexington County Council. And his name is Jim St. Clair. His name most assuredly is NOT "Jim Sinclair," as we said today in what is the worst mistake we have made in a political endorsement within my memory.

There is absolutely no excuse for that happening. The associate editor who wrote it knew better, I (who edited it) knew better, and yet it still happened. And we are deeply sorry. Warren Bolton and I have both called Mr. St. Clair to apologize. (Incidentally, anyone else who read these proofs had no reason to doubt Warren and me — since we’ve never fouled up quite like this before — and therefore no reason to suspect that something was wrong. "Snclair" would have looked wrong to them, but "Sinclair" did not, since they had never met or heard of Mr. St. Clair.) A correction will run on Sunday’s editorial page. We’re doing that because it has higher readership than Saturday. In the meantime, this blog item is all I can do.

Why are we so embarrassed by this one misspelling (aside from the fact that ALL errors are embarrassing)? Because Mr. St. Clair is one of three highly qualified candidates for this position — all of them with good records for community service — and we endorsed one of his opponents, Pelion Mayor Charles Haggard (the third candidate is Jim Kinard, also a member of the Lexington 4 school board). So by misspelling his name, we added insult to injury, which makes it worse than making the same mistake under other circumstances. As Mr. St. Clair himself said, the misspelling bothered him more than not being endorsed. I understand that, given the importance of name recognition in a political race. Politicians aren’t usually joking when they say, "Write what you want about me; just spell the name right."

(By the way, I keep saying this was a "misspelling" rather than "the wrong name" because it occurs to me that "Sinclair" is actually derived originally from "St. Clare" or "St. Clair." People with that particular Scottish name can claim kinship to one Henry St. Clair, who fought alongside Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, according to one Web site. That’s no defense; it’s just as bad either way. I didn’t even think of it until the error was pointed out to me this morning. I have irrelevancies run through my head in times of stress — and the rest of the time, too — and in this case, as my eyes focused on the error like a laser beam as they failed to do yesterday, I thought, "Those names MUST be from the same root." I looked it up, and I was right. Which doesn’t make it any better; I just thought it was interesting. We didn’t make the mistake because we thought it was the same name spelled differently; we made the mistake because it looks roughly like the right name, and since we didn’t know this gentleman or write about him before this week, we didn’t have alarm bells go off automatically in our heads saying "That’s wrong!" the way we would if someone wrote "Sandford" or "DiMint.")

Anyway, we screwed up, and this is the best I can do today to make it right. I realize it isn’t enough.

August 7 column, with links

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Folks op-ed sparks lively
discussion in blogosphere
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
LAST WEEK we ran an op-ed piece from former gubernatorial press secretary Will Folks headlined, “My side of the domestic violence story.”
As you most likely know, Gov. Mark Sanford’s ex-spokesman was charged with criminal domestic violence after he allegedly kicked open the door of the home he shared with his now-former fiancee and pushed her into furniture, bruising her back.
When, to my surprise, he called Tuesday to offer a column on the subject, I was quite interested. Folks_mug_2 Of course, I could not decide whether to run it until I had seen it. And I had to make the decision quickly, because he had indicated his intention to share it with other papers. That meant running it, if at all, the next day. We don’t knowingly run local op-eds that have run elsewhere.
We ended up running it pretty much as it was, with one exception: I removed a passage in which he quoted what he claimed was an e-mail from his ex to his mother. Before making that decision, I asked to see the e-mail, and he forwarded it. Important context was missing from his citation of it. Besides, this was supposed to be his account of what he did, not his version of her account.
I wrote an item for my blog about the piece. I included the part I had cut, followed by a fuller quotation from the e-mail he had forwarded. The way he had selectively quoted the e-mail to his advantage was striking.
There was high reader interest. That day, the story about the new “four-strikes” rule at USC got the third-highest number of page views on thestate.com. My blog item and Mr. Folks’ op-ed came in first and second.
Most interesting to me were the comments readers left on my blog. In keeping with my ongoing quest to make clear to readers why we do what we do, I thought I’d quote some of those comments, and answer them. I only know these correspondents by the names or nicknames they gave on the blog. But their identities are less important to me than the substance of their comments.
I begin with “Lisa Turner’s” comment for an obvious reason: “You’re becoming a pretty good blogger. While I am intrigued by all the behind-the-scenes iterations of this story, I do not think it should have been run. You say that it was an opportunity The State shouldn’t pass up, but do you really think that Will Folks was going to do anything but try to help himself out?”
Mr. Folks probably was trying to help himself out. But that’s not what he did. He defied legal (and his father’s) counsel in doing so. I knew I wasn’t helping him a bit by running it. But I wasn’t trying to hurt him, either. It wasn’t about how it affected him. My reasoning was the same as with anything we choose to publish: I ran it for my readers, who had a legitimate interest in knowing more about the man whom the governor had kept for years as his spokesman, despite his obvious liabilities.
“Bob Steel” wrote: “I think it is irresponsible to allow Mr. Folks the opportunity to give his side of the story without hearing from the victim. It is very apparent Mr. Folks has friends at The State and was able to call in some favors.”
If Mr. Folks has friends at The State, they certainly weren’t involved in this decision. And again, no favor was done here, as I suspect any attorney would tell you. As to the “other side” angle: I won’t solicit a point/counterpoint on a domestic dispute. The op-ed page is not “The Jerry Springer Show.” If the former fiancee, or anyone else, offers me a relevant, publishable piece rebutting Mr. Folks, I’ll run it. But I am not going to harass someone who (unlike Mr. Folks) is not a public figure during a horrible time in her life by calling and saying: “Your ex-boyfriend has written something trying to defend his actions. You want to respond? By the way, you’ve got about an hour.”
“Elsa Green” wrote that “The State Newspaper has made a poor decision in allowing Will Folks to write an op-ed about his own personal problems.” But she went on to make my argument for me as to why to run it: “What is particularly frightening about this case is that Will has been an adviser to the top executive of our state.” Exactly. If the column had been simply about a man’s “personal problems,” I would have had no interest. It had value because of what it revealed about that man’s character and judgment, and therefore about the judgment of the governor.
“Randy O’Toole” understood: “I think that Mr. Folks has a serious problem and it reflects poorly not only on him but the Governor and the State of South Carolina.”
Not everyone saw it that way. “John Smith” wrote: “The real winner in all of this is, of course, Mark Sanford. After running headlong into a brick wall in terms of ‘taking on’ the governmental status quo, the Governor has now gotten rid of the ‘pit bull’: the very voice and symbol of his renegade attitude towards dealing with the legislature. Perhaps we will see a more cooperative effort from the executive branch as re-election time nears. After all, the voters like to see results.”
“Deaver Traywick” thought I was unfair to the author: “My only suggestion is that you might have given Mr. Folks the option of running the piece as edited or not at all. As a writer and editor, I am concerned about the editorial policy of publishing changes or truncations without the writer’s consent.” As I regularly do when I make such a substantive change, I called Mr. Folks and told him of it. I half expected him to withdraw the piece, but he didn’t.
“Thomas McElveen” came to my defense on that point: “Based on my personal experience, Mr. Warthen is extremely fair in his editing, and very graciously allows op-ed contributors input and even critique of his editing.” I wouldn’t dare try to
say it better.
Finally, “Robert Trout” wrote, “I don’t get Mr. Warthen’s decision to not run an unedited op-ed piece in the newspaper, and yet run it in his blog. I don’t see the differenceæ.æ.æ..” Personally, I see a big difference.
One of the reasons I took on the demanding additional work of a blog is that it gave me a chance to say things I couldn’t say in the newspaper for lack of space, or because it was unsuitable. The blogosphere, as you may have noticed, is a very different place from a family newspaper. One way I make use of that different forum is to give behind-the-scenes looks at the paper itself. For instance, I recently posted a Robert Ariail cartoon that we had judged too salacious for the paper, and asked readers whether they would have made the same decision. Most said we made the wrong call. Such is life.

Joy to the World!

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At long last — at the ripe young age of 42 — our own Warren Bolton is a Daddy.

Alexander Warren Bolton came into the world at 10:54 p.m. Saturday. His stats are perfect — seven pounds, nine ounces and 21 and a quarter inches. Alexander, Mother Tanya, and of course Warren himself are doing great, aside from only having rested about half an hour since the blessed event.

Alexander is one lucky young fellow. I don’t know of two people in this world more likely to be wonderful parents than Warren and Tanya. This is something I’ve looked forward to for a long time (I’m sure the happy parents have, too, but hey, this is my blog), since long before the couple even met. There are just some people you meet and one of the first things you think about them is what wonderful, nurturing and wise parents they would be, and you just can’t wait for something like this to come along and provide the means to prove you right.

Speaking of being right, I’ll have you know that I predicted this child would be a boy from the start, based upon my infallible "morning-sickness" test. Girls disturb their mamas’ hormones more than boys do, sometimes giving them morning-noon-and-night sickness, and Tanya had little trouble with anything like that (or so she reported; she’s not the sort to complain). Science may scoff at my theory, but I haven’t been wrong yet when I have ventured to make a prediction based on it.

I was a little off on one thing, though: The baby was due July 4, and all last week people kept asking me, "Any news from Warren?" To which I would say, "News? Oh, that. This is a first baby, and first babies are generally late. I don’t expect this child until Friday afternoon, after we’ve put all the weekend pages together and Warren can take his proofs with him and read them at the hospital." OK, so I was a day off. Warren (and son Alexander, and Mama of course) are very conscientious, and obviously wanted to get the entire page production process out of the way first.

Silly rambling aside, I’m just as pleased as I can be at this news, even though we’ll miss Warren during the few days he’ll be taking off to get the hang of his new role. And he’d better bring that boy in to see us ASAP.

But if I’m happy, that is nothing compared to what Warren and Tanya are feeling. As for Alexander, he is indeed a lucky child to be going to live in as loving and godly a home as anyone can ever wish for. (And he’d better act right. But I know he will.) Joy to them all. I can think of no one who deserves it more.

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits

Category Archives: The State

A little feedback, please

“Second-rate?” I beg to differ

Do ya think?

KR Alumni: Good journalism is good business

Never Mind: Publishers to stay put

Knight Ridder column

Column on Larry Wilson’s trial balloon

A newspaper primer

Fact gets in way of perfectly good post

Like two peas in a pod

Regarding Warren’s column today

Setting a few things straight

New publisher column, w/ links

More on Ann, Lou

Papa’s got a brand-new boss

Out amongst ’em

Welcome, thecolumbiarecord.com bloggers!

Boy, did we screw up

August 7 column, with links

Joy to the World!