The Daily Tar Heel Blogs

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