THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9501010093
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Editor's Notebook
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
A newspaper is a strange and wonderful thing.
On the one hand, it's a daily guest in more than 200,000 homes and workplaces, including yours. It's familiar, intimate, part of a daily ritual.
On the other hand, it's a mysterious intruder, dragging with it the ills of the world, asking nagging questions, poking into problems.
How can one bundle of ink, paper and ideas be both friend and interloper?
Whenever newsroom folks attend parties or public functions, we're asked how the newspaper works. Who decides what's covered? Why is there so much bad news? What do we have against Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, George Allen, Tom Moss, the City Council. . . ?
This notebook will be a regular effort to address these questions. I hope to explain how and why we cover the news and introduce you to the folks who shape our reports. Occasionally, I'll write about our common life as citizens and what newspapering as a calling shares with other vocations.
We are constantly re-examining our work. We want to liberate and discipline ourselves simultaneously in order to invent new ways of making the newspaper more meaningful to you.
The paper is put out by creative thinkers - intuitive, independent, spontaneous, unconventional, bull-headed - and by practical thinkers - empirical, organized, adaptive, problem-solving, bull-headed.
Some of us stay for a few years, some a lifetime.
For example, for 80 consecutive years - until Friday - we've had a Borjes on our staff. Charles Borjes, a pre-eminent news photographer, worked here 43 years, from 1913 to 1956. On Friday, his nephew Russell, an accomplished sports writer, sports editor and city editor, retired after 37 years. We will miss him.
Good journalists like the Borjeses are lifelong students of the human condition. We want to match our talents with the interests of the half-million people who read the paper every day. We want to recruit colleagues who will help us reflect the diversity of Hampton Roads. We want to engage in continuing conversations with you and to immerse ourselves in the communities we cover.
We don't aim to pander, or reach the lowest common denominator, or even keep everybody happy with everything we publish. Much of it is sad or infuriating or disheartening. But it is essential information if we, as a free people, are going to confront our problems. We report the news so you can make your community or your own life better.
We are also exploring the captivating universe of new technology, so you can get news and information whenever you want it from wherever you are.
These services include InfoLine, which gives you access to news and information by telephone (640-5555), and InfiNet, our partner in providing access to news and information through personal computers and the Internet.
In some ways, new technology competes with what we do. But we believe the newspaper will remain vital for decades. Fourteen years ago, a master of newspaper research named Leo Bogart made this still-timely observation:
``An evolving communications technology is rapidly finding new ways to compete with the newspaper's function as a routine record of the day's events. But no technological change can ever challenge the newspaper's command of big ideas, its traditions of deep inquiry, sweeping synthesis and inspired advocacy.''
In that spirit, we work hard to put a great newspaper in your hands every day.
Sometimes we fall short. Sometimes we make mistakes.
We ain't perfect.
Sometimes we're not even grammatical. by CNB