The Daily Tar Heel Blogs

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One of the frustrations of being a college newspaper is enduring the various university breaks and holidays, letting the news have its way without being able to produce a paper to cover it.

Even in its on-line state, The DTH still depends on a small army of student journalists to gather, write and edit stories whether it intends to print them on paper or post them on dailytarheel.com.

The hiatus we’re in now is one of the two longest of the year (the December semester break being the other), and certainly the paper’s most vulnerable in terms of missing the chance to bring news to our audience. The next printed DTH will not arrive on the newsstands until Aug. 19, and the next live daily edition won’t take its place until Aug. 22.

Then its full-speed ahead through Dec. 7, followed by a four week void. During December, we’ll do a decent job of keeping the on-line edition up-to-date — especially with basketball — as there are always a few staffers who live off-campus who have light holiday plans. This time of the summer, however, is a different story as key staff is scattered around the country finishing up internships or family vacations or prolonged voyages from home.

The news staff will reunite in Wilmington Aug. 11 for its annual retreat; the ad staff will take over the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber office for training Aug. 14, and we’ll all meld back together the following day to start work on the school year’s massive first few issues.

So please don’t despair at our silence. It’s temporary and rejuvinative. Just think of the fresh-scrubbed energy that will be contained in your next DTH.

Kevin Schwartz

General Manager

1. UNC officials announce that a pair of home football games will serve as a trial run for the new online student-ticket system — and answer questions many students have raised since the plan was made public.

2. A new vendor for CCI. One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. A complete restructuring of online services like Student Central. Though the campus is quiet this summer, these and other technological innovations are keeping Carolina whirring.

3. An indie-rock icon will play Memorial Hall, and a quintet of Tar Heels is headed to the Dean Dome.

Find these front-page stories and other news, features and opinions in tomorrow’s DTH.

From now until the rest of the summer, you’ll be able to differentiate between those pesky sports blog posts, those pesky arts blog posts, and those pesky news blog posts.Yes, it only took us until the second summer session, but we finally added categories — so if you don’t care about Carolina baseball or the local arts scene, you’ll know what to read and what not to read.

And now that we’ve got that announcement out of the way, I’d like to draw your attention to today’s front-page story about the president’s visit to Fort Bragg — and answer the questions posed both in the story comments and by my own parents (who, God bless them, read the paper front to back every Thursday).

We did not send a reporter to Fayetteville on Tuesday with the goal of chronicling only what the president said. It’s not compatible with our belief that local news is our franchise (a decision also made by the Greensboro newspaper), and more pressingly, our story was set to appear a day after the stories in professional newspapers; if people wanted to know what President Bush said to the troops, they knew well before they picked up a DTH today.

What they didn’t know, however — because they didn’t get it from the stories in most newspapers — is what Independence Day meant to North Carolinians.

It is indubitably a big deal that President Bush thanked our troops, and that had to be reflected in our story; at the same time, we thought the troops’ own feelings were more compelling. On a similar note, we thought the protesters — only a few dozen strong, sad and lonely in a military town — were worth talking to.

What resulted, I think, is a piece that gets the job done:

1. It by no means ignores the president’s positive comments, which were definitely part of the story.

2. However, it also finds a way to examine a different side of Bush’s visit — namely, the feelings it conjured up for a variety of people on an Independence Day that saw the country confused about a controversial war and a controversial leader. You will notice that there is precious little commentary about the president himself from the people quoted; rather, they are talking more about what July Fourth, otherwise just a simple date on the calendar, meant to them on that day in Fayetteville. To me, the responses — representing as they do a broad cross-section of American life — were well worth reading.

I would be more than happy to hear from readers who agree or disagree, but that’s what we were thinking.

-Chris Coletta, Summer Editor

If you picked up a print edition of the DTH today, you probably noticed that a pair of big news items — the UNC baseball team’s win and Mohammad Taheri-Azar’s court appearance — weren’t in our pages.

That’s because in the summer, our deadline is Wednesday morning — a few hours before Taheri-Azar’s hearing and well before the Tar Heels took the field against Cal State Fullerton.

Thankfully, the Internet has allowed us to subvert deadlines by letting us post breaking news to our Web site whenever we want. Not so thankfully, not everyone has 24-hour Internet access — and not everyone who picks up a print copy of the DTH wants to read the paper online.

That’s why you’ll see a story about Taheri-Azar’s court hearing in next week’s DTH, though it will probably contain updates from throughout the week. You’ll also see a baseball story or three, though they’ll be less about yesterday’s win and more about the games the Tar Heels play this weekend.

It’s not a perfect solution, but we think it’s the best way to serve the people we ought to be serving — our readers.

Since the last post on this blog is about our corrections, I thought I’d take a turn to the sinful side of life and pridefully point out some of the things the DTH can, and often does, do right — usually with little notice.

If you subscribe to The News & Observer, you may have noticed the newspaper’s lead Sunday story. By higher education reporter Jane Stancill, the piece is an excellent look at the state law, passed last year, that saves booster clubs and scholarship foundations millions by allowing UNC-system schools such as Carolina to charge in-state tuition rates to out-of-state scholars and athletes.

I am sure the story will attract lots of attention and letters to the editor. That’s what placement above the fold in a Sunday newspaper read by hundreds of thousands of people will do for you. And Stancill, a savvy reporter who actually has interviewed me before, did a good job; she deserves the kudos.

But I think I should point out to DTH readers that we had this story exactly one month ago.

Unfortunately, our summer papers are quite small, so we couldn’t devote the kind of space to the story that Stancill did — making her story a rather useful companion piece to ours. But I am proud that we were able to get the information out to our readers much earlier courtesy of reporter Eric Johnson, for whom this phenomenon is becoming almost commonplace. (Another front-page Stancill piece from this week — an article on online education — echoed a story Johnson had published in the DTH a few weeks prior.)

The DTH has improved noticeably in my four years at Carolina in the number of stories it has reported before other local media. That’s good; we’re the student newspaper, smack in the middle of campus, and so we should get those stories.

We are young, and we will make mistakes. Pretending otherwise is silly. What we can do, however, is work on minimizing those mistakes — and maximizing our best reporting.

-Chris Coletta, Summer Editor

Such is the purpose of corrections — in our newspaper and in any other. But when the mistake is particularly egregious, the reader’s natural reaction is to wonder whether the rest of the story is right.

As a journalist, there’s nothing more frustrating. Take the correction in this week’s DTH, in which we report that a story (not online), written by yours truly in a frantic rush last Wednesday morning on deadline, misidentifies the person who was offered the deanship of the journalism school almost a year ago.

Mind you, that’s not what the story was about. The article was a piece that, based on the kind reporting of multiple anonymous sources, allowed us to report the fact (that had become pretty much common knowledge among law students) that popular professor Jack Boger would be named dean — of the law school, not the journalism school. The j-school information was simply added to the end of the story as background information.

We beat the local papers to the punch on the Boger story; we beat the University’s own announcement by four hours or so. But because of the incorrect background information on a different dean search, readers had every reason to wonder whether the rest of the story was right.

Thankfully, it was. But you can’t write that in a correction — no matter how much you might want to! — and the implications of our mistakes are disturbing nonetheless. That’s why I was pleased to see only one correction in this week’s paper, down from 3 in the two previous weeks. Our staff is young and inexperienced, but we’ll continue doing everything we can to prevent errors.

-Chris Coletta, Summer Editor

A few people have asked me today whether we’re going to do a story on J.J. Redick’s reported arrest. My answer, which I think has surprised them, is “Why would we?”

In the last few years, the DTH has made strides toward becoming more of a local newspaper — reducing our coverage of national issues, which you can get elsewhere (and better than we could ever possibly do it), and increasing our coverage of Chapel Hill, Carrboro and the surrounding area. In other words, we’ve focused more on our franchise: covering things that only papers based in this area would cover.

Personally, I think we could do a better job of covering the group that’s even more local to us than Chapel Hill — the University. I’d like for us to ratchet up our coverage of campus minority issues and campus organizations, in particular — something we’re trying to do this summer with articles, for example, about Project Uplift and a piece planned on the campus NAACP’s summer registration drive.

Why? Because if we don’t cover these groups, nobody else is going to.

The DTH has done a good job, I think, in improving and augmenting its coverage of Orange County. It’s a valuable service, and often, we’ve actually beaten the two professional newspapers in the area to stories.

But I don’t think of the papers in Raleigh and Durham as competitors. That’s because we have a unique niche: UNC. Nobody covers the University quite like we do, and for that matter, our coverage of other issues (whether it’s the state budget or the Town Council) also reflects the fact that we are a student newspaper with an office in the Student Union. Carolina’s our bread and butter.

Former Duke basketball players, on the other hand? Everyone is covering those guys. And by the time we publish a print edition Thursday, J.J.’s legal woes will be old news — and, perhaps, the schadenfreude will have worn off a bit.

Anyone who cares about Mr. Redick’s troubles is going to hear about it elsewhere — and isn’t going to get a unique perspective on the issue from the DTH. You’ll see it in our pages, but as a brief.

-Chris Coletta, Summer Editor

Well, hello, folks. We’ve had a few issues with these pages this summer, but now our blog — our medium for talking to readers directly and for having readers talk to us in the same way — is up and running.

I’m as pleased with that as I’ve been with any development we’ve had all summer. Because we only publish once a week, we frequently don’t get the chance to talk to readers as much as we’d like. Now, however, we can carry on that conversation every day.

And I would like this to be a conversation for the five weeks during which we’ll still be publishing. As John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record (full disclosure: I was an intern there last summer), wrote on his blog way back in the dark ages of 2004: “This blog opens the door wider to the way we work. Come on in.”

So if you have any questions about the DTH — why we reported a story the way we did, why we did or didn’t cover something, why we’re godless Democrats or heartless Republicans — feel free to ask them here. Or just visit once in a while; I’ll be making a variety of posts that will include information about our weekly paper, news tidbits, ruminations on UNC and the Carolina community, and more. Our section editors will also get into the act, though (unlike in the past) we’ll leave everything on one blog for the sake of expediency.

We’re looking forward to chatting with you.

-Chris Coletta, Summer Editor

This will be my last post on this blog, or as this blog owner. It has been an amazing year. I tried to articulate the complicated emotions I am feeling in my “farewell column” Friday.

It’s tough to give up this post and all the bags and tricks it has brought with it, but it is time. It’s time for Joe to come in and try his hand at this thing. I have no doubt he will do an amazing job. You all will enjoy interacting with him in this space.

So, thanks for the year - every second of it. It’s been quite a ride. Look out for me along the Moore County information superhighway .