Carrboro in Norfolk

UNC's own Jock Lauderer of the journalism school was the star of the NNA session yesterday called "Filling the gap--a new kind of community 'paper.'" He and his colleague Andy Bechtel talked about their experience creating and editing the Carrboro Commons. He talked about the rush the students experienced as they realized that their class was not dealing in hypothetical news stories--they were actually, really and truly, going online! Jock is running the show alone this semester, but in the spring once again he and Andy will turn their reporting and editing classes loose in and upon Carrboro.

They and others in this session stressed to these mostly non-daily newspaper editors and publishers the need to have an online presence that does more than just "shovel" the content of the print edition onto the web. Use the strength of the web--its immediacy--to your advantage, they urged. Break the news as it happens. Follow up later, but be the first to get it out there. You are not "scooping yourselves" when you do that, these presenters said. Rather you're bolstering your own audience.

Presenter Elizabeth K. Hansen of Eastern Kentucky University illustrated the point with a photo by Jack Delano taken in 1940 in Brockton, Mass. It's of a newspaper office posting headlines of news that had broken since the last edition.

This American Carrboro

Paul has posted this great parody of "This American Life" that Tom Maxwell and John Ensslin have done, "This Carrboro Life." (Duncan, you would have gotten an email thank you by now, but your mail address bounced, even though I used "reply"!)

Cosmopolitan Carrboro High

Who would have guessed that the design of the new Carrboro High School is inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, Italian painter of the early 20th century "metaphysical school," precursor to surrealism?


De Chirico (more or less), marketing a high-end Russian "housing estate."

The international focus of Carrboro High is off to a good start.

Uncommon Carrboro

December 4 marked the debut of the Carrboro Commons, an online newspaper blog for the town to the left of Chapel Hill. Writes journalism professor and adviser Jock Lauterer,

[T]he Carrboro Commons will be a bi-weekly, interactive “e-zine” or Web newspaper, a “lab newspaper,” if you will, (meaning that this news and information site is an experiential learning project and an integral part of the required classwork for JOMC 459 Community Journalism.) What you are looking at today is our prototype edition — the result of a flash of inspiration in class earlier this fall, days of brainstorming, many sleepless nights, more of what the Buddhists call “auspicious coincidences,” and a nearly vertical learning curve for all of us — plus a lot just plain old-fashioned journalism shoe-leather.

I particularly like the in-depth story on Bruce Thomas and the Weaver Street lawn controversy; it details his experience with the Human Kindness Foundation, run by Bo Lozoff and his wife Stia. If you don't know about what goes on out there in rural Orange County, it's worth asking for a tour. It's no wonder Mr. Rogers called Bo one of his "personal heros."

Congratulations and best wishes to the staff of the Carrboro Commons. No doubt about it: It's Carrboro.




RELATED: Kirk Ross' Carrboro blog The Mill.