The Southern Highland Reader

CULLOWHEE–Western Carolina University transitioned to the next generation of its web presence last night, as it launched a revised version of its website.

According to Dirk Herr-Hoyman, Western’s Director of Web Services, and a release from the university, the site now offers “revamped news and events sections featuring a feed from a live campus events calendar; links to WCU social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter; a lighter color scheme; a less cluttered page header intended to make the page easier to navigate; and an improved WCU site search engine.”

“It’s a tuneup, something that on the web you get to do every few years if you want to keep up,” Herr-Hoyman said.

More from Teresa Killian Tate at The Reporter:

The modifications addressed in the first tune-up were driven in part by the need to improve online publicity about campus events.

“Last year’s interactive audit of the WCU Web site by Stamats consultants confirmed what many of us already knew – the Web is the first place many people go to find out what’s happening at the university,” said Bill Studenc, senior director of news services.

Laura Huff, e-marketing coordinator for WCU, said the tuned-up homepage will not only contain a link to a new comprehensive campus event calendar but also preview select upcoming “hot” events.

“This preview, a short list of events dynamically updated with fresh content, will better promote the wide variety of events offered to the region,” said Huff. “Visitors to the homepage will have easier access to information about all the public events happening on campus.”

Visit WCU’s site here.

REGIONAL–Asheville blogger Ashvegas laments the news that the Hendersonville newspaper, the Times-News (a New York Times paper), will soon move to its new offices in a shopping center.

Right there between Goodys and the Shoe Show, we imagine. Oh, wait, Goodys is history.

Here’s Ashvegas’s lead:

Yes, here’s the announcement we’ve been expecting: the Hendersonville Times-News is moving its downsized operation into smaller space in a shopping center. Over the past couple of years, the New York Times-owned newspaper has reduced staff, moved the printing of the newspaper to South Carolina and made other cost-cutting measures.

And here’s his post.

REGIONAL–The Asheville Citizen-Times has announced the launch of WNC LINC, a “partnership with five Western North Carolina Web-based news and information groups as part of a new initiative to enhance local news coverage and seek out innovative ways to collaborate among organizations.”

The Southern Highland Reader is part of the WNC LINC effort, along with AskAsheville.com (www.askasheville.com), the Artful Parent (artfulparent.typepad.com), the Montford Neighborhood Association and UNC Asheville.

Read the Citizen-Times story here.

Read our earlier news post here.

REGIONAL–The southern mountains’ regional daily, the Asheville Citizen-Times, has learned of another round of cost-cutting measures from its corporate owner, Gannett.

Jason Sandford at the Mountain Xpress gives a rundown, here.

Here’s an excerpt:

Gannett cut 10 percent of its workforce in 2008 and slashed another 3 percent this past summer. At the Citizen-Times, that has translated into about two dozen layoffs. Another 60 employees lost their jobs at the newspaper’s printing plant in January when the company closed down its press. The newspaper is now printed in Greenville, S.C.

SYLVA–The Southern Highland Reader has accepted an invitation to partner with Asheville’s daily newspaper, the Citizen-Times, as part of a nationwide, yearlong initiative by the American University Institute for Interactive Journalism called the Networked Journalism Project.

The project is an effort in five national media markets – Seattle, Tucson, Miami, Charlotte and Asheville – to gather ideas and lessons for future collaborations between media outlets of different sizes, and will be coordinated by the daily newspaper in each of the markets except Tucson, where an online-only news provider, Tucson.com, will oversee the effort. The project is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Southern Highland Reader and its regional partners will form WNC LINC in order to share readers, resources and ideas. The sites will link together and from a portal on the homepage of the Asheville Citizen-Times.

The Southern Highland Reader, launched in 2008, has three main goals: to provide news that pertains to the southern mountains of North Carolina; to serve as an aggregator that leads readers to other online news sources for the region, including all of its weekly papers, its blogs and broader regional dailies; and to offer features and information that help paint an accurate picture of life in the southern mountains.

The Asheville Citizen-Times became one of the five markets involved in the project to some extent on the strength of its web presence. Citizen-Times.com was recently named one of the best seven newspaper websites among the largest publications in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.

BALSAM–Blogger “Gulahiyi” holds forth on whether the internet is storytelling’s bane. His references, as always,  are broad-ranging.

An excerpt:

I know it is tempting to blame the Internet for the death of narrative. But is it really that simple? Any loquacious blowhard can satisfy the desire to tell stories…without the assistance of new technologies. But for a soft-spoken recluse such as myself the Internet provides an opportunity to share stories that would otherwise go untold. If it weren’t for this computer screen, I’d just be talking to the walls. Some might count that reason enough to condemn the Internet. It’s not for me to say.

Like it or not, change happens.

Read the entire post here.

CHEROKEE–Uni Watch is a nationally-popular blog that “deconstructs the finer points of sports uniforms in obsessive and excruciating detail”.

In an October 22 post, author Paul Lukas tackles the issue of Cherokee High School’s football helmet, with its mysterious — to those outside of western North Carolina — insignia.

Here’s the helmet:

Here’s Jacob Reed’s explanation:

This is the helmet for Cherokee High School in Cherokee, North Carolina. The school system is operated by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a sovereign governing nation (susceptible to Federal Laws, and some state laws). On their helmets, they use the Cherokee syllabary. The letters on the helmet are pronounced tsa-la-gi (roll the t and s together), so it sounds like sssa-la-gee. It means Cherokee.

Here’s the whole post (scroll down).

SYLVA–Don’t get me wrong, I like lists, too. In fact, I remember a teenage addiction to that eighties phenomenon called “The Book of Lists“.

But these days, when publications have less and less money but reader’s appetites for content are growing leaps and bounds, the lists come at you from every direction. US News and World Report, for example, which was a weekly news staple when I was a kid, is now a monthly publication that seems sometimes wholly devoted to lists of schools, hospitals and whatnot.

Sylva and Cullowhee made a couple of lists recently. Cullowhee got a controversial edge over Boone and Asheville in North Carolina as a “better sports town” in the Sporting News, and Sylva was named by the Mother Earth News as one of 11 “Great Places You’ve (Maybe) Never Heard Of”.

The Sporting News list ranks 399 “sports cities” in the U.S., using a methodology that is vague at best. That aside, the upshot is a 199th-place finish for good ol’ Cullowhee, 15 spots ahead of Asheville and 26 ahead of Boone. The howls of wonderment from the Asheville Citizen-Times sports desk will likely brings wails of  self-defense from Western, all amounting to a tempest in a teapot.

Update: Citizen-Times sports editor Bob Berghaus back-pedaled like a slow cornerback today, publishing parts of an op-ed from WCU’s Gibbs Knotts and arriving at the conclusion, more or less, that maybe Cullowhee is a great sports burg, who knows?

Sylva, meanwhile, is unaccustomed to the limelight. The Reader’s home base is a busy working town, described, out of context, by Edward Abbey as having “the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat”. You can get just about anything you need on Sylva’s Main Street, from fresh-brewed beer to fresh-roasted coffee to fresh-baked bread to fresh fish. You can still get shoes fixed here, and the downtown dentist’s family has been at the same trade in the same place for well over a century.

But in this pre-packaged age, Sylva doesn’t fit the mold of a “destination” (a surprise to its many visitors), so the tourism folks don’t circulate its name much.

Of course, the Mother Earth News isn’t all that concerned with tourism. Here’s what it said about Sylva, which was one of two southern towns to make its list:

“Sylva embodies a vibrant small town that engages its citizenry in a variety of ways,” said John Rockhold, managing editor for the magazine. “Mother Earth News focuses on cool things you can do to live wisely and create community, and we think our readers will identify with a place like Sylva.”

Read about Sylva in the Mother Earth News here.

STATEWIDE–The Raleigh News and Observer’s Brooke Cain blogs today about Saturday Night Live’s send-up of John Edwards.

Writes Cain’s colleague Mark Johnson: “Who says John Edwards no longer has influence? He’s still providing fodder for Saturday Night Live.”

An excerpt:

[In the skit] The panel is comprised of media experts played by Drew Barrymore, Kristin Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis. The group astutely decides that the trouble occurs when  weiners want to go someplace where they shouldn’t, and that such news is so popular because men like knowing what other men do with their weiners, and women like seeing pictures of women who have touched famous weiners so that they can compare themselves physically to those women.

Also, the proliferation of weiners on the internet is hurting “weiner print media.”

In the Edwards bit, Kristin Wiig’s character says: “If you’re a celebrity and you’ve done something embarrassing with your weiner, that’s all people remember. Like John Edwards. He was a distinguished Senator, but  I mostly remember him for his weiner.”

Read Cain’s piece here.

View the sketch on Saturday Night Live here.

CULLOWHEE-Organizers and supporters of Jackson County’s ambitious greenways project celebrated a milestone October 5, when the county board of commissioners voted to purchase a 1.4-acre plot of land near Cullowhee for $39,580.

The plot is the first purchased by the county to augment an existing sewage right-of-way that follows the Tuckasegee River between Cullowhee and Sylva. Organizers envision the Cullowhee-to-Sylva segment as a core element of a larger plan to hook individual greenways segments together to create an alternate transportation system for the county.

Commissioners tabled action on the purchase of an piece of property adjacent to the one they purchased.

County greenways project manager Emily Elders says the purchase is significant.

“It’s the first property purchased specifically for greenways in Jackson County after nearly ten years of hard work by our volunteers,” she said. “Hopefully, with future donated conservation easements, other successful negotiations and grant funding, we’ll be able to put a project on the ground soon that will demonstrate the wellness, transportation and recreation benefits of greenways for the whole county.”

Three newspapers are covering Jackson County’s greenways progress: the Smoky Mountain News, The Sylva Herald and the Cashiers Crossroads Chronicle.

The Chronicle is primarily concerned with the several Cashiers-area elements of the greenways plan, so it didn’t weigh in on Monday’s vote, but the Herald and News both did. Bibeka Shrestha’s story for the News emphasized the commissioner’s decision not to purchase the adjacent property, noting that if they had, the first mile of the 4.5 mile stretch would’ve been in county hands. The Herald, which has recently taken county commissioners to task for what it considers profligate spending on county payroll and the Dillsboro Dam fight, emphasized the property’s price tag.

Read the Smoky Mountain News piece here.

Read the Sylva Herald piece here. (Archives=$)

REGIONAL–Ken Wyatt, a New York native and a professor of communications at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, is wrapping up a documentary about Eric Rudolph.

Eric Rudolph

Rudolph, a “domestic terrorist” responsible for bombings at the Atlanta Olympics, abortion clinics and gay nightclubs, is a western North Carolina native. An outdoosman, he took to the back woods near Murphy to avoid capture, and was able to do so for many months.

Rudolph was captured rooting through a dumpster in Murphy in 2003, but not before he became somewhat of a folk hero. Wyatt’s goal was to learn something about that phenomenon, and the people of Cherokee County in general.

Here’s an excerpt from a story in the East Carolinian:

“The film will include where he is from, but the film is really not about Eric, it’s about the people in the area where he grew up. The film is about my neighbors. Who am I living amongst? I went to townspeople and did interviews. It is a beautiful area,” said Wyatt. Wyatt’s goal is to expose people to Western Carolina through his eyes. “I was on a journey to find out about my new neighbors, share this with an audience all around the world,” said Wyatt.

<snip>

“I learned a lot about my neighbors and North Carolina. I think people should be more willing to meet people face to face rather than going off of stereotypes. If we all did this, it will be a better place to live. North Carolina is really diverse,” said Wyatt.

Read the whole piece here.

Jack Betts

STATEWIDE–The Charlotte Observer’s Jack Betts, a four-decade veteran of the North Carolina political scene, knows theater of the absurd when he sees it.

So, after South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst at President Obama Wednesday night, Betts quickly suggested that the NC senate loan its “Ox Meter” to to the nation’s capitol for a while. The Ox Meter, apparently, is a gizmo that the NC Senate passes around as a reward when a member says something particularly clueless.

Here’s an excerpt from Betts’ blog post:

Sen. A.B. Swindell, D-Nash, got the Ox Meter a few years ago for a long story he told about his mother’s potato biscuits and the way she used to sew him into his flannel shirts before school every day.

The Ox Meter used to repose from time to time on the desk of former state Sen. Fountain Odom, D-Mecklenburg, who had a string of stories to tell about, and sometimes on, his colleagues and other folks in the leadership. Other senators have enjoyed, if that is the right word, possession of the Ox Meter from time to time.

Read the whole post here.

STATEWIDE–There’s right much being made of this passage from Congressional Quarterly:

NORTH CAROLINA: Democrats stand a chance of picking up the state’s other Senate seat if they can find a solid challenger to Richard M. Burr , who in 2004 succeeded Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards. Obama narrowly won the state last year, and Democrat Kay Hagan unseated Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole. Burr might have gained running room when popular state Attorney General Roy Cooper announced in May that he would not run for the seat; Democratic recruiters are still looking for a top-tier candidate.

And while it stands to reason in the current NC climate that Burr could be challenged, the suggestion — as one publication made — that he “faces a tough test” might be a little premature. After all, the same paragraph above notes that he has no actual competition.

2009-07-17: Publishers Weekly’s annual survey of publishing employees painted a grim picture of the book industry last week, reporting that a staggering 70 percent of the more than 1,400 respondents saw hiring freezes at their companies. PW also found that eleven percent of polled employees felt “very insecure” about the state of their jobs–an all-time high for the survey. In addition, travel expenses, printing budgets, and bonuses were reduced for many respondents.

“66% of industry members reported that their companies have reduced marketing budgets, and 63% have cut travel and entertainment expenses. A number of industry members also mentioned that their companies have reduced attendance at trade shows, and others are moving more titles to print-on-demand or digital.”

2009-07-17: From Ashvegas:

Earlier this week, the Asheville Citizen-Times carried a front-page lead story on the conjecture that Sinclair, the parent company of local news competitor WLOS, might go into bankruptcy. The story came a few days after the Citizen-Times and its parent company laid off 15 people at the newspaper, the latest in an 18-month run of lay-offs and furloughs ordered by its struggling parent, Gannett. But you won’t find that reported on the front page of the Citizen-Times. Just pointing out the obvious.

2009-07-10: Asheville blog Ashvegas reports on the newest round of firings at the Citizen-Times. The number stands at 15 or 16, including Julie Ball and Andre Rodriguez.

2009-07-05: Gannett Company, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher and owner of the Asheville Citizen-Times, will announce another round of layoffs in the next few days. Veteran journalist Jason Sandford, at the Asheville blog Ashvegas, writes about it here.

Gannett will cut 1,400 jobs nationwide. Sandford suggests that this round might hit the newsroom, a department that has been largely spared in past cuts. Also to be cut: the paper’s sheet size.

2009-07-05: The Sylva Herald began to charge for access to its archives a few weeks back. One other paper in the southwestern mountains (in addition to the Asheville daily), the Highlands Highlander, does this, although the Highlander comes at it from a slightly different angle. The Highlands paper gives subscribers to its print edition access to more online content through a password system.

NATIONAL–I’ve read and heard a few op-eds recently given over to the fact that the author’s mothers have shown up on Facebook. Alarm, they express.

Scott Monty, who is the social media guy at Ford Motor Co., hashes over some recent Facebook stats in this blog post.

An excerpt:

According to a report in March of 2009, Inside Facebook noted that there were more Facebook users 26-44 than 18-25 today. And in a separate report, they also noted that Facebook is seeing massive increases in adoption among users 35-65. In fact, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is still women over 55.

One commenter asks if ‘they’ll change the name to Facelift’.

• Josh Mitchell, who covered Jackson, Macon and Swain Counties for the Smoky Mountain News during parts of 2008 and 2009, has resigned.
• Donald Rose and Joseph Martin, publishers of the Cherokee Times Online and vocal critics of Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Principal Chief Michell Hicks, have announced that they each will seek a seat on the Cherokee Tribal Council in upcoming elections.

• The Asheville Citizen-Times, our “local daily”, continues its tailspin. Delivery is on-and-off, layoffs have stretched the staff thin, and, according to hearsay, morale is low. When the Gannett-owned operation started reacting to the same pinch that all papers are feeling from the internet, among its first layoffs were from — you guessed it — its internet staff. More scuttlebutt: the paper may not staff Asheville Tourist baseball club home games this year, and may have already cut plans for coverage of what little it does cover west of Balsam in the coming months.

• The Sylva Herald and Graham Star have recently completed updates to their respective websites. The Star, in Robbinsville, had virtually no presence before its wintertime upgrade. The Herald had an expansive site in place, and, under the leadership of tech guru Nick Breedlove, has added a newsblog.

• The Asheville Citizen-Times covered Kellie Harper’s arrival in Raleigh Thursday by sending political reporter Jordan Schrader. An interesting upshot of that move was Schrader’s note that WCU didn’t allow its players – each one an adult, we guess – to comment to the media about their coach’s departure. We also guess that we wouldn’t have heard about that policy at all if a sportswriter had covered the story. In the end, this type of policy will always embarrass the school more than anything a young person might say to a reporter. It suggests an atmosphere of mistrust and condescension toward the student body which the audience can’t help but tune in. It’s cringe-worthy.

• The Smoky Mountain News, which covers Haywood, Swain, Macon and Jackson counties, has added a business section.

• The Highlands Highlander is making parts of its website viewable to newspaper subscribers only. It’s a battle every paper is facing, but this solution seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

WAYNESVILLE-Jeff Schumacher, General Manager of the tri-weekly Waynesville Mountaineer, has taken a similar position at the Fayetteville Observer.

The Fayetteville Observer owns Iwanna, a weekly classified ad publication.

More from Ashvegas.

CULLOWHEE–Justin Caudell, a WCU junior and award-winning reporter, has taken over the top keyboard at Western Carolina University’s student newspaper, the Western Carolinian.

Caudell, who has two years under his belt as a reporter with the Cashiers Chronicle in Cashiers, NC, inherits a virtually clean slate with the Carolinian, which has drifted through several design metamorphosis in past years, and has shown little editorial direction.

We wish Caudell the best in shaping this very public representation of  Western’s student body.

Read more here.

ASHEVILLE/REGIONAL–The local daily is trimming staff and operations. How will the product reflect these cuts? Ashvegas has a look.