Our Sunday AP story about Archie Manning cheering for his son in the Super Bowl and The New York Times piece on Tuesday about the Manning family's standing in New Orleans brought back a 30-year-old memory.

First, it's true that there are many good reasons to cheer for the Saints: the downtrodden franchise makes good, the city's continued rebound from Katrina, the prospect of a world-class party in a place that invented world-class parties.

But I've got one good reason to cheer for the Colts, and Peyton Manning: Archie Manning.

I grew up in Mississippi. I went to Ole Miss. Archie was a huge star there in the late 60s, and I spent many a Sunday on the sofa with my parents rooting for him and the hapless Saints. When I got to college, it was striking how available he made himself to college journalists at his alma mater. His home phone was listed. You called for an interview, sometimes he answered. Always, he called back.

Flash forward to the fall of 1979. I'm the sports editor of my college newspaper, heading to New Orleans to cover the Ole Miss-Tulane game. At some point shortly before the trip, it occurs to me that the Saints are playing in the Superdome the same weekend, with all sorts of Ole Miss-related angles. I figure it's too late to get a press pass through normal channels, so I contact a guy I know who's a friend of Archie's and ask him if there's anything he can do.

Then I forget about it. At halftime of the college game, I'm sitting in the press box, and the reigning NFC player of the year walks up to me. "You're Steve Riley, right?" Um, yes. "Here's your pass for tomorrow. If there's anything I can do, let me know."

And he meant it. The next day, the Saints win and go into first place for the first time. Archie keeps looking over the crowd of reporters in front of his locker, making sure the lost kid from college knows where to go, what to do. A few feet away, one of his sons (it could have been Cooper or Peyton) is playing with a rolled-up ball of athletic tape.

So I get all the New Orleans angles. And if the Saints win, it'll be OK. But I'll be rooting for one of Archie's boys to bring home a third title in four years.

This is courtesy of our Page 1 editor, Steve Merelman, who drew my attention to this column by the public editor of The New York Times, Clark Hoyt.  (I didn't get my Times Sunday, probably because of the snow and ice on my street.)

It is about the recent book, "Game Change," which chronicled the
2008 election using a narrative style that relied almost exclusively on unnamed sources. 

Our reporters are working on stories spurred by John Edwards' admission in a statement today that he is the father of Rielle Hunter's little girl. 

Every morning, we have a news meeting at 9:45 to discuss what we are working on that day, for our online site, newsobserver.com, and for the next day's print edition.  Today, Thursday, we had a special meeting after the 9:45 session to discuss the Edwards story.

Because the news broke around 7 a.m., when the statement was released for publication, and then started popping up on every news web site from Bar Harbor to San Diego within minutes, including our own, the story would be nearly 24 hours old by the time the Friday paper hit the driveways. 

That may be, in fact, the way the Edwards folks intended it, that this disclosure would run its course for 24 hours on TV and online, and so newspapers would be less inclined to blow it out on their front pages in the Friday papers, because it would be old news.

That is one of the effects of 24-hour cable and 24-hour Internet. News has a shorter shelf life. Big news has a very short shelf life. 

That puts more pressure on people like us.  We deliver a lot of our news online, the minute we finish gathering it.  But we also produce a print product that people still want to buy and read. Some of these folks have gotten the news already on their laptops, on their phones, and through cable news.

So in the case of the Edwards story, we have to develop the story in a different way, with more context and layers of information. What people want to know online, typically, is What just happened? The answer being:  Edwards finally fessed up to being little Frances Quinn Hunter's daddy, despite previous, strenuous, look-the-American-people-in-the-eye denials.

In print, we can explore questions like: Why did he admit this now? Where does he go from here? What do political types make of all this? What about Elizabeth, his wife? How does this fit in with the federal investigation of Edwards?

And we can reconnect this latest news with the arc of Edwards' life, one of the most astonishing rises and falls in American political history.  With a better turnout for the Democratic ticket in Ohio, John Kerry would have beaten George Bush in that state and won the 2004 election. And John Edwards, an obscure Raleigh personal injury lawyer until a dozen years ago, would have become vice president of the United States. 

When the news broke Tuesday night of a massive earthquake in Haiti, we immediately changed our front page for Wednesday to give the story prominent play. On Wednesday morning we mobilized to devote resources and space in the Thursday edition to a story that we knew would be of significant local interest.
In addition to the interest among Triangle residents with family ties to Haiti, numerous local organizations have worked for years to improve the lives of the people in that impoverished Caribbean nation.
The work of several staff members paid off today when we saw our Thursday front page among the top ten selected by the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
To see the papers cited, go here.

Linda Williams
Senior Editor/News

Jack Hagel, editor of one of our community newspapers, the Cary News, and Sadia Latifi, a reporter for the CN, had a great story on the front of the N&O today about an internet election controversy.  I'll let you read the story to get all the complicated details, but the upshot of it was that e-mails were sent out in the days before last fall election that gave the misleading impression that the group, DavisandHighHouse.org was supporting town council incumbent Jennifer Robinson. Which it wasn't. It was supporting her opponent.

One of the lessons of this is that if you are going to set up a web site, political or otherwise, it's usually a good idea to make sure that you pay the money to register all possible domain names that sound like your organization. 

Domain names (like google.com, newsobserver.com, etc.) are essentially regulated by an organization called The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) through a web site InterNIC. There are any number of domain name registrars that, for a fee, help individuals, businesses, non-profits, register unique domain names through InterNIC.  The whole point of this is to make sure that the level of chaos that reigns on the Internet is held down to a minimum.

In 2001, comedian Billy Crystal's movie "61*"
was released.  It was about Roger Maris' record-setting 1961 season,
when he broke Babe Ruth's home run record. (The asterisk refers to the
controversy over whether the Maris record should have been recognized
given that the season was eight-games longer than Ruth played.) There
was a scene at the end of the movie showing Mark McGwire embracing
members of the Maris family when he breaks Maris' record in 1998.

Reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin have written a narrative of the 2008 presidential campaign, which includes a lengthy account of the political meltdown of John Edwards.  It has been excerpted in New York Magazine.

The  book is called Game Change.  It goes into great detail about Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter and presents Elizabeth Edwards in a somewhat different and highly unflattering light. The book has also caused Harry Reid considerable heartburn.

Next up for Edwards on the bookshelves: The book by Andrew Young, his one-time aide who claimed for a while to have fathered Hunter's child.  Edwards, meanwhile, has fessed up to the affair with Hunter but has not, as yet, publicly acknowledged paternity of her baby.

Edwards has been spending his time lately building houses in El Salvador.

I was interested in the story in the business pages today about Lulu.com, a local company that helps authors self-publish books. For two reasons. 

First, Bob Young. He's the CEO of the company. I met him briefly, oh, around a decade ago when he took Red Hat public. I was the business editor here. We had lunch at a sandwich shop.  I think he was wearing a baseball cap. At the time, his net worth in Red Hat stock was about 1 billion dollars, because the stock was in the dot-com stratosphere.  (I have only met two billionaires in my life, Bob Young and Michael Dell, the founder of the computer company. Dell was visiting UNC and I interviewed him. He didn't say anything remotely newsworthy.)

The other reason I was interested is that today's story quoted Jon Cox, who used to work here as a business reporter. He's now the marketing chief at Lulu. Alan Wolf, the assistant business editor, was trying to get Lulu to say something about reports that the company is considering an IPO in Canada to raise money. (Young is from Canada).  

In Wolf's story in the paper, I read "Lulu spokesman Jon Cox said it is company policy not to comment on rumors or speculation." 

Hah. 

Cox used to spend all his time here trying to get the skinny on rumors and speculation in the local business community.  I enjoyed watching him have to say the stuffy corporate flack thing in print. 

One of the reasons that Cox is here in the Triangle is that, after I hired Wolf from Bloomberg, we had another opening, and he recommended his buddy Cox, who was also at Bloomberg, covering the FCC in Washington.

Which was the job Wolf did before he came here. Business editor Mary Cornatzer, who succeeded me in that job, hired Cox,  and it was one of the best hires she ever made. Jon is a very smart guy who earned his MBA from UNC while he was working for us, and now he has an important job out there in the world, handling marketing and communications for a very interesting Bob Young company.

And telling nosy reporters that he can't comment on rumors or speculation.

A few minutes ago, we were reminiscing about the Y2K scare. Ten years
ago right at this moment, we were preparing to cover what might happen
at the stroke of midnight.

The Obama administration is saying that Janet Napolitano's "The system worked" comment after the abortive plot to blow up a jet has been taken out of context. The homeland security chief has been getting beat up a lot over this quote by commentators and bloggers and Republicans, who argue that our heightened, post-9/11 security measures failed to keep a would-be bomber off a plane.

If you listen to the interview, it is pretty clear that Napolitano is talking about what happened after the bomber tried to ignite explosives. 

So the administration has a point, that her remarks were taken out of context. 

But Napolitano created her own problem by trying to get too clever, and by relentlessly trying to change the subject from the failures of our security system to what happened after the fact.  It was like saying that after a bridge fell into the river because of faulty construction and inadequate inspections, the fact that ambulances showed up promptly to take away the dead proved that the "system worked."  

In the old days, her statement wouldn't have made much of a stir. But today, in the 24/7 news cycle and with the blogosphere elevating every gaffe to the status of cosmic blunder, her comment has had an extended shelf life.

One of the reasons that I don't much care for cable news shows is that virtually every comment by every guest is predictable. It's either defend, defend, defend or attack, attack, attack. It is like watching two high school debating teams, constantly trying to score points.  The administration refuses to admit any errors and the opposition refuses to cut the administration any slack. Nuance is banned. This is the environment in which Napolitano was operating.  But there is a difference between being accountable for your governance and being a talking head on cable. 

More context doesn't help Napolitano here.

--Dan Barkin