Raleigh Public Record posits new journalism model
The Raleigh Public Record is a new website dedicated to “nonprofit, independent news for the Raleigh community.” They recently held a fundraiser at the 101 Lounge, and between the speaker’s remarks and my conversations, I learned some quite disheartening news: The News and Observer is conducting yet another round of cuts/buyouts that include a core group of reporters and editors, whose removal more than any others yet announced, signals the beginning of the end for our fine local newspaper.
The Raleigh Public Record is preparing to step into that emerging gap with a new model of journalism that includes cutting edge presentation of public records, in-depth treatment of local topics, and a business model that provides maximum editorial freedom. Charles Pardo, founding editor, is looking for some high ground between the old and fast-eroding bastions of print news and the proliferation of admirable but highly uneven and unpredictable local blogs. The largest of these is prone to slipping into pop culture and advertiser-driven topics – nothing wrong with that, but it’s not quite community service journalism. And the most beloved local blog makes no pretense of presenting anything other than exactly what they feel like – or have photographed the night before! The Raleigh Public Record wants to use the blog forum to develop a juried and professional venue for high quality news. Their fundraiser attracted a strong showing of journalists and intelligentsia, well described at yet another new local blog. The site has changed significantly over its short life and will continue to evolve as it develops tools and sources for a new paradigm in local news.
Back to NandO, which has served this community so well for so long. The list of reporters leaving this week – Wade Rawlins, Ned Barnett, Joe Miller, Jon Peder Zane, and others – represents not trimming fat, nor even amputating trapped limbs, but cutting out heart muscle. Or, as a speaker at the RPR fund-raiser put it: ” The News and Observer has attempted to maintain height in a sinking plane by tossing out the engine – a strategy that will work for just a few seconds.” Doubtless the publishers will say that their younger (i.e. less expensive) reporters will pick up the slack, and they will say that their migration to an online model is going well. We must also remember that NandO is a fairly healthy paper – it is the financial woes of McClatchy, its parent company, that is creating most of the stress. But it seems clear that, in the end, McClatchy will suck the life out or our local newspaper and then sell it off to die a slow death.
In the wake of that tragedy, we will need new models for how to share and come together as a community about the issues of the day. The Raleigh Public Record is a good start, and it is a fascinating experiment in new models of journalism. It deserves our support – check it out!
And as a final disclaimer in this highly personal blog setting, I am thrilled to be part of the Raleigh Public Record with a column called The Natural View.
The Natural View
Farm to Market – Raleigh Locavore Pathways»
John Dancy-Jones is beginning an occasional column on Raleigh nature and the environment.
Lt. Walsh Remembrance Reaches 20 Years
Lt Walsh decoration April 13, 2009
A year ago, in starting this blog, I made use of a personal connection and had a little fun with the mystique surrounding the annual decoration of Confederate Lt Walsh’s grave in Oakwood Cemetery. Just as last year, Channel 5 treated it like a mystery, and for the 20th year, an old friend managed to make his remembrance, hold an afternoon reading, and retire to a well-earned evening of mint juleps with friends unscathed by identification. I missed the reading this year, vacationing in Charleston with Cara, but our experiences there had me well steeped in Confederate lore as I checked by the gravesite and stopped for a quick visit at the post-reading party. I’m quite sure they’re still sitting around in Oakdale as I write this, so the event is in process, but Good Night, Raleigh got out an uncannily timely post about the decorations and directs us to NandO’s contribution to last year’s media coverage ( WRAL had current footage of this year’s decorations joined with a re-run of last year’s story). As I promised a year ago, below is the contemporary account included in the printed handouts that accompany the remembrance/celebration.
The Incident at Lovejoy’s Grove
As witnessed and related by Millie Henry
“I was drawin’ water at th’ well at th’ end of Fayetteville Street when th’ Yankees come. I seen ’em ridin’ up th’ street with their blue coats shinin’ and their horses steppin’ high. I knowed that I ought to be scared, but I ain’t; an’ so I stands there an’ watches.
“Suddenly, as they passes th’ bank, out rides two men from Wheeler’s cavalary, and they gets in the middle o’ the street; one of th’ horses wheels back an’ th’ man shot right at th’ Yankees, then he flew from there.
“Two of the Yankees retracts from th’ army an’ they flies after th’ Rebs. When th’ Rebs get to th’ Capitol one of them flies down Morgan Street an’ one goes out Hillsboro Street with th’ Yankees hot in behind him.
“They catched him out there at th’ Hillsboro [Street] bridge when his horse, what was already tired, stumbles an’ he falls an’ hurts his leg.
“Durin’ that time th’ big man with th’ red hair what they calls Kilpatrick brung up his men to th’ square an’ sets under th’ trees an’ a gang o’ people comes up.
“When they brung th’ young good lookin’Reb up to th’ redheaded Gen’l, he sez: ‘What you name, Reb?”
“Th’ boy sez: Robert Walsh, suh.’
“‘What for did you done go an’ shoot at my army?’
“‘Cause I hates th’ Yankees an’ I wish that they was dead in a pile!’ th’ Reb sez, an’ laughs.
“Th’ Gen’l done got his dander up now, an’ he yells: ‘Carry th’ Reb somewheres outta sight o’ th’ ladies an’ hang ’em!’
“Th’ Reb laughs an’ sez: ‘Kind o’ you, suh!’ an’ he waves goodbye to th’ crowd, an’ they carried him off a-laughin’ fit to kill!
“They hanged him on a ole oak tree in th’ Lovejoy Grove, where th’ Governor’s mansion stand now, an’ they buried him under th’ tree.
“Way after th’ war they moved his skeleton to Oakwood Cemetery an’ put him up a monument. His grave was covered with flowers; an’ th’ young ladies cry.
“He died brave, tho’, an’ he kept a-laughin’ til his neck broke. I was there an’ I seen it; furthermore, there was a gang o’ white ladies there, so they might as well a hanged him on the capitol square.”
Millie was a ten year old servant in the Boylan family household who in 1865 was employed at a Fayetteville St. boarding house.
I concur with Goodnight, Raleigh in saying thanks to the local history lover who keeps this fascinating story alive in our hearts and memories.
A Zane Game-Changing View of the Future
Jon Peder Zane is one of numerous dedicated, serious folks who are working to keep good reporting and good writing alive at the News and Observer. He was the book editor until the drastic changes under McClatchy’s management turned him into the Ideas Reporter, and I have actually very much enjoyed the products of his new beat. He has written about everything from banned Christmas trees to bioethics. He has also consented to create a series of videos for NandO’s website – Fist Bumping is typical. ( He really turns being stiff into a comic artform). But this guy’s writing is just downright stimulating! His book, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, has gotten a great, well-deserved response, and his 1999 Distinguished Writing Award proves he has been doing great work before and through all the changes at NandO.
J Peder Zane: Science visions, dark and bright
He has outdone himself, in my mind, with his response, this year and several previous years, to the Edge annual big question. These highly provocative writings cast a huge net in searching for the meaning of our times. In the essay linked above, he sees hope in the prospect of vastly improved bodies, and justified fear in the idea of transmitted neural signals. He ends with the hope that science will continue to be of overall benefit, as in the past. Zane focuses on issues about which he has written before – stem cells and genomics. But he gave a sense of the wide ranging ideas contained in the series, and I went and downloaded and printed them. I will be processing what I read for a long time, but I will offer the notes below, with thanks to Jon Peder Zane for the motivation and stimulus!
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Edge World Question Center 2009
What will change everything?
I love SF, and these essays skirted SF with regularity, while offering very real solutions for some pretty big problems – like death, endless energy, and radical transparency in the marketplace. The most sinister visions by far concern our growing ability to monitor and “tinker with” the mental experiences generated by the brain. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers, thinks Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” will take chemical and totally effective form. But we alter our consciousness with drugs and media all the time, and I think we’re more resilient than that.
The most practical visions derived from nanotechnology, with the idea that developing molecular, self-directing machinery would make materials goods as “free” as information is already fast becoming. An intermediate step in this process is suggested by both Chris Andersen and David G Myers: universal computers and all that implies.
The truly revolutionary nature of information technology is overshadowed by hyperbole about it. Kevin Kelly of “Wired” envisions a conscious intelligence arising from the Web – a “ubiquitous AI embedded in the feedback loops” of cyber civilization. Kevin Sloan, a “digital technologist,” predicts the accretion of a universal memory. As I read through the numerous essays that predicted the reality of artifical intelligence, I was always disappointed by the clear fallacies in the various positions, and comforted by the divining rod of clarity I received so many years ago from Coleridge. Clarity, that is, as to the certain uncertainty in defining the creative element that informs and energizes the human mind. They can map every darn neuron and correlate every one with a function, but that still won’t give them what they need to build a true thinking machine. Coleridge described it as a balance of “Fancy” and Reason – later Chomsky used the very methods of rational science to prove the uncatchable infinity that is human expression. Art represents a conscious presentation of creative forces that inform every aspect of human culture. That element will always be missing from artificial intelligence. Not that it’s missing from true science – which is the making of new knowledge. Timothy Taylor, an archeologist, points out the creativity generated in the “tension… between fixity and change” – science, in his view, being the major source of change. Science gives us our material culture, art attempts to re-present and name the meaning of that culture. The latter, for Taylor, is attempting fixity, but I think that’s true only for the linguistic scientist, not the poet and artist. Good art gropes to name and describe the changes, and thus makes in actuality a “new thing.”
The basic point is made by several writers in the series. Celebrating our “new” awareness of rationality’s limits, Randolph Nesse from the University of Michigan sees good science “recognizing that the body is not a machine.” Stuart Kaufman, a proponent of the value of “biocomplexity,” simply states: “the universe is open, neither fully lawful nor random.” Every artist, aware or not, assumes a non-linear infinitude of possibilities in order to work. These essays have taught me that scientist working in many fields have so much reason to feel the same. Closing with the words of Mr Nesse: “Some evolved systems may be indescribably complex.” For me, a comforting thought.
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Postscript
From the future to the past, J Peder Zane just wrote a couple of pieces for NandO that take a hard look at Southern culture. First he really stuck his Yankee neck out with a call for destruction of the Confederate memorial on Capitol Square. Several people were really ready to chop down on that neck! Today’s Sunday edition brings a look at Southern comic caricatures and what they say about the South. Keep up the good work, Mr. Zane! We natives need all the intellectual prodding we can get!
Roasted Tomatillo Salsa!
Two measly little tomatillo plants I picked up as discards from the farm where I got my heirloom tomato plants went crazy in our organic compost this year. Tomatos have done great as well, so I’ve been playing with salsas.
Tomatillos are a new thing for me: I first saw them on a homework field trip with my son to a Hispanic grocery several years ago, but this summer was the first time I have cooked with them. The papery Chinese lantern green balloons grow first, then the fruit swells up to fill the inside. When they’re ripe, they fall to the ground and the papery covering protects them quite well. Below is a selection of our urban garden harvest: the tomatillos in the red bowl have had their coverings removed.
Here is the procedure I followed:
Start a fire. Skewer a pound of washed tomatillos. Skewer a quartered onion, 4 small serrano peppers, a quartered bell pepper, and 4 garlic cloves. Roast these materials. (Mine ended up more smoked than roasted). Place roasted vegetables in blender and puree with fresh parsley ( I dislike cilantro) and seasonings. Sautee this result in olive oil. Add a little lime juice and then a cup of broth. Simmer, cool, chill and serve.
Above are the roasting vegetables. Below is the final product with libation. To see a full album of pictures, including an alternative libation, go to the related post at Pecans and Mistletoe, my nature project blog, which is fast taking on a life of its own as a space for the fascinating issues of sustainable heritage agriculture and locavore food culture in this area, which will be adressed at an upcoming Raleigh conference.
I would have never predicted a food post for Raleigh Rambles. But Lily had exposed me to the best of the cooking shows, and reminded me of the great science lessons in cooking processes. Sarah over at Quiet Quality has provided a post and links that reminded me of food as a hot blogging topic, and last but not least, my buddy Clyde issued a kind of challenge after I bragged about the success of my first batch of roasted tomatillo salsa – that first batch being roasted over a charcoal grill.
Now I have a confession to make. Being overly enthusiastic to use my newly built brick barbeque for this project, and it being the first Friday night of the school year, with the ensuing enthusiasm and libations, I wasn’t on top of my fire game at ALL and, as previously alluded to, I trashwood smoked instead of coal/flame roasted my vegetables. The final result was an overly sweet salsa totally dominated by the powerful smoky flavor. The slightly hilarious twist is that my challenge salsa makes a truly magnificent barbeque sauce for chicken, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed it that way. I’m still going to make a fresh batch for Clyde!
Done!
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portrait by Guillermo Velasco
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