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RDU prepares to defend ban on newspaper racks

Lawyers for Raleigh-Durham International Airport have struck out after three attempts to have a federal judge consider new evidence they say would justify the airport’s long-standing ban on newspaper coin vending racks.

Now they’re getting ready for oral arguments Oct. 27 in Richmond, Va., where they will appeal a November 2008 ruling by U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle that the ban violates newspapers’ First Amendment right to distribute the news.

The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments from lawyers for the airport and for The News & Observer and three other newspaper companies that want to sell papers from coin boxes in the RDU passenger terminals.

Boyle refused in April and again last month to consider new evidence offered by RDU to bolster its argument that airport travelers have ample opportunity to buy newspapers from newsstands and bookstores. The Fourth Circuit rejected a similar request Thursday.

Airport officials contend that newspaper boxes would cause visual clutter, ... [MORE]

Harder than it looked

Cronkite, and the print and television news business.

Cox to sell N.C. newspapers

Cox Enterprises will sell its three daily newspapers and 10 weeklies in eastern North Carolina to a company controlled by John Kent Cooke, a former owner of the Washington Redskins.

The deal includes The Daily Reflector in Greenville, Rocky Mount Telegram and The Daily Advance in Elizabeth City. It also includes weeklies in Snow Hill, Williamston, Windsor and elsewhere.

Cox, the Atlanta-based media conglomerate that owns cable-TV, radio and other holdings, announced last year it planned to sell its papers in North Carolina amid a sharp decline in revenue across the media industry.

Cooke's eldest son John Kent Cooke Jr., will move to the Greenville area to become president of Cooke Communications North Carolina and publisher of The Daily Reflector.

Cooke Communications expects to keep "virtually all employees" at the North Carolina papers.

Cooke previously was a part owner of the Washington Redskins football team, The Los Angeles Daily News and the Chrysler Building in New York.

Punctuation particulars: the long dash

A colleague's recent note led me to try to find the rules for using dashes.

The Sunday comics, part 2

Until last week, I had managed to have a 35-year career in newspapers without having my name associated with any decision about the comics pages. Ah, the glory years.
To recap. In recent months, this newspaper has had to cut columns of space because dwindling advertising forced us to reduce expenses. Until last week, the comics pages were left alone. Despite dire warnings of the perils of "messing with the comics," it became untenable to continue to reduce space alloted to news and other popular features while continuing our generous offering of comics at the same level. On Sunday, we dropped two strips.
The N&O publishes 44 comic strips Monday through Saturday and still carries 27 on Sundays despite reducing the Sunday color comics section from six pages to four. (The fees for the rights to carry the strips are modest. It's the cost of the newsprint that is a bear.) We continue to carry more comics than most daily newspapers.
Still, the Monday mail brought a flood of complaints. A few readers disagreed with the decision to drop "Peanuts" and "For Better of For Worse."  They were dropped from Sunday because both are in essence reruns. Both continue in the current Monday through Saturday comics pages.
Most of the people who weighed in said the type in the new 4-page layout is too small.  That was a surprise because we tested the new layout in the newsroom among people of different ages and people who have less than perfect vision. 
It turns out that sizing the comics is not a simple process. Each strip had to be reduced proportionately to the original size. So, it's not a simple matter of making each the same size, or shrinking one to make another just a little bigger.
We can revisit the size of the strips, but it won't be pretty. This might require eliminating one or  more of the strips in the 4-page layout. So, if I can get all of you to agree on which strips go away....
 
Linda Williams  
 
 

The Sunday comics

The Sunday comics section will have a new look, starting Sunday.
The strips will be presented in four color pages, instead of six. However, the new design required the elimination of just two of the 29 strips we were running each week.
"Peanuts" and "For Better or For Worse" will no longer appear on Sundays, but will continue in the current Monday through Saturday comics pages.
Many of you have given us feedback on our selection of comics. We know that each of the 44 strips we publish daily (a far greater selection than most newspapers) has passionate fans. Selecting just two to eliminate on one day was not an easy task, but was necessary because of our financial realities. 
We hope you will continue to enjoy our vast selection of daily comics and the Sunday section.
We welcome your comments.
 
Linda Williams
Senior Editor 

In defense of editing

John McIntyre, director of the Baltimore Sun's copy desk, has a few things to say about Wikipedia in a recent blog post. But he also has something to say about editing:

"My whole professional effort for nearly three decades has been to make sure that the published texts at the newspapers for which I have worked are, as far as human fallibility and the pressures of time will allow, factually accurate, grammatical and clear. To do this requires knowledgeable, trained editors."

Amen, Brother John. 

How to preserve today's newspaper

Given the interest in yesterday's inauguration of President Barack Obama, most newspapers of any size printed special sections for folks to keep for posterity.

We at the News & Observer did one; please go grab a couple for the grandkids.

And when you do, click on the youtube link below to learn, courtesy of Duke University's libraries, how best to preserve the paper.

 

 


We're in the book


A handsome coffee table book arrived in the mail today. It is the Poynter Institute's collection of the best front pages of newspapers published on November 5, 2008. That, of course, was the day after America's historic election of its first African-American president.

The News & Observer's page is one of 100 from around the world selected by Poynter, a St. Petersburg, Fla. nonprofit devoted to journalism education, for this book. Our sister publication, The Charlotte Observer, is also included. A team of journalists contributed to this page, but we are especially proud of news designer Jennifer Bowles, a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism, has designed many News & Observer fronts and special projects.

The print newspaper has sometimes been undervalued in the age of the Internet. "Election Day, November 4, 2008, was different," cartoonist Garry Trudeau, writes in his introduction to the book. He describes an election evening of boistrous celebrations around the globe. "And then the next day, after the street parties were over, people went out and did something many of them hadn't done in years. They bought newspapers. Yes, newspapers. By the trainload, actually."

The printed paper was not for the purpose of information, Trudeau notes, rather to the people who stood in long lines, it was a tangible keepsake "that can forever evoke and refresh a deeply consequential memory."

Prior to election, we mostly saw this reaction with sports championships.

Here's to the ink-stained, bird cage fillers, fish wraps that we love.

The Poynter book is available here.

Linda Williams

Comic distraction: bring vs. take

I know. It's downright picky to comment on word choice in a comic strip. Nevertheless, Sunday's "Rhymes With Orange" prompts this short post.

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