The Mail Tribune’s editorial advisory board will make its print debut this Sunday with the seven members’ views of the upcoming library levy. This advisory panel was created to give us some broader perspectives on issues from the community and our first couple of meetings suggest that we will indeed get that.

The library levy may not have been the best of topics to get opinions on, since there seems to be a heavy majority that agrees with the MT’s support of the libraries. But it’s interesting to see the different ways they approach the same subject.

Check it out on Sunday’s opinion pages.

(And, by the way, get ready for some big changes on our Web site — Wednesday is D-Day for a full-scale remake.)

We ran a story today questioning the lack of candidates for a number of local races, including for all five positions up for election on the Medford School Board.

A couple of local officials suggested it may be because everyone is happy with the job the current office holders are doing. (Uh-huh, that’s it.) A more likely reason was suggested by outgoing Medford School Board member Peggy Penland, who said the unpaid position can take up more time than a part-time job and that many people just don’t have the time or don’t want to make room in their lives for it.

At the risk of sounding self-centered, I think there’s a better explanation: We (the Mail Tribune) never ran a story saying the positions would be open for election — not one story, paragraph or sentence that I could find in our archive. Now, if you’re very plugged into politics, you would know that school board positions come up for a vote in May of odd-numbered years. But most people aren’t that plugged in and have no idea. In the Medford School District, we have five candidates for five positions. Three are incumbents and one is Penland’s son. You can be pretty sure the district administration knew the vote was coming.

But this is not the school district’s issue — it’s ours. We blew it. Without overvaluing our importance, I think it’s safe to say that had we told people there were open seats to be filled, more candidates would have signed up. It happened last year, when the race for a Medford City Council position had no candidates until we ran a story. Within days, four candidates appeared.

With all that’s going on in schools these days, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these unopposed school board positions would have drawn interest if people had been told about them. But they weren’t and for that we’re sorry.

I recently received an e-mail asking a question everyone in the media has heard repeatedly — Why don’t you publish more news about the good things going on in Iraq? This missive came with a group of photos of smiling U.S. soldiers with smiling kids.

I think there are three basic reasons there are not more good news stories in the local media:

1. There’s not that much good news to report. Yes, there are success stories and pockets of the country where things are going better, but the truth is that it remains a country torn apart. You hear that not just from journalists, but from the troops themselves. There have been some notable good news stories that ended poorly — new schools started and school kids later killed, water treatment plants built and then destroyed by insurgents. I’ve asked our wire editors to keep an eye out for “good news,” but they say they see little of it.

2. We have little control over the war coverage. The reporters on the ground in Iraq are primarily from wire services or major media outlets. They are often unable to get outside the U.S. protected Green Zone, because it’s too dangerous. So if a school or an electrical plant opens, there’s often little or no media there to witness it. Are the reporters on the ground biased against the war? I can’t judge that, but from what I read and hear, it seems they’re just trying to tell us what’s going on, the good and the bad.

3. The military makes it hard to tell the good stories. As strange as that seems, it’s true. We have twice had good stories set up with local soldiers, only to be told that they found out they could not speak to the media. So the stories we could tell from the people who are on the front lines are blocked by the very military that says the media are not telling the whole story. Seems like they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

As I mentioned, the e-mail I received came with photos. But they were pictures of soldiers with no IDs, so we have no idea if they’re from Medford or Oshkosh. If you know of any local people who are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, please let us know, because we do want to tell their stories. We can’t send a reporter to Baghdad, but when the troops come home, we will meet them anytime, anywhere to let them tell their stories.

Got a call this afternoon from an upset woman, who, along with her business had been trashed in our online forum. There’s a forum topic about the best businesses to work for and someone went off on her business, saying she offered no benefits, didn’t give raises and generally was interested only in making money. The caller said the allegations were wrong and wanted the post taken down — and we did.

As the forums have grown and grown, it’s become tougher to avoid those kinds of conflicts. Our general rule is that we don’t monitor the posts, but will respond to a complaint about a post or may remove a post on our own if we come across something that we know to be incorrect or highly offensive (in this day and age, just plain ol’ offensive probably won’t get your post removed).

Removing posts is really not something we want to do — partly because we don’t want to interfere with the discussion and partly because trying to track the thousands of posts daily would be an extremely time-consuming job. The good news is that removing posts has been a fairly rare occurrence. One of the positives about online forums is that the forum users do a pretty good job of policing their own — if somebody crosses the line, they’ll usually get a negative reaction from other users. Unless they like the abuse or are just jerks, that usually cools them off.

Legally, courts have so far ruled that the providers of forums are not liable for the postings, as long as they don’t approve them before they’re posted or edit them. I liken it to us owning a telephone pole. Just because we own the pole doesn’t make us responsible for the notices people tack up as they pass by. Removing posts after complaints are raised is OK, just as it would be to pull down an offensive sign posted on the telephone pole.

We don’t have a list of what’s allowable and what’s not, but a few things are landing on the no-fly list. Generally, they include personal attacks or allegations about a private party that can’t be proven and, of course, offensive posts involving language, imagery or sex. Some of the latter issues are automatically weeded out when they set off obscenity screens. For the others, users can hit a “Report” button to alert us to a problem. Or they can do what the woman did today and use that old-fashioned mechanism called a phone to let us know.

Think the closing of our libraries won’t affect anyone beyond library card holders? Think again. With a month to go before the libraries are scheduled to close, Jackson County — and Medford specifically — have made the national news twice that I know of in regards to the closures. The latest is this story from the San Francisco Chronicle. Can you say “black eye”?

OK, I don’t want to say we’re not on the cutting edge of things, but I worry about the future of YouTube now that the MSM (mainstream media) has discovered it. My concern grew even more when I checked out a YouTube video posted today by state Rep. Dennis Richardson of Central Point. No offense, Dennis, but a silver-domed lawyer-politician might be even less hip than the Mail Tribune.

I can’t really see the YouTube teens glued to to esteemed legislator’s discussion of the approval of a rainy day fund for the state of Oregon. But if you’re interested, you can check it out here.

You also can check out our latest video — outtakes from Wednesday night’s South Medford playoff basketball win, with some behind the scenes shots from the lockerroom and a shorter clip of an impressive dunk by Kyle Singler, who showed why he’s headed for Duke University to play basketball. The dunk is on YouTube, but you can get to both videos by clicking on our Multimedia link on our home page.

Maybe you don’t have to be hip to enjoy a good dunk.

I had a phone conversation yesterday with a concerned reader/news junkie, who was sure that local media are cutting back their news staffs. Much of her concern seemed to center on reports of layoffs at major metropolitan newspapers and a sense that local TV stations are not covering as much local news as they once did.

I can’t speak for local TV — although one staff member at a local affiliate told me he thought their staff was actually a bit larger than a few years ago. Not a lot larger, but a bit. My caller said one of her concerns was the number of national stories that show up on “local” TV newscasts. I agree with her — it always seems a bit odd and/or jarring to see a national story during the local news: “Rogue Valley news at 11: Family dies in house fire! (in Tennessee.)”

As for us, we have about the same size staff that we’ve had for years — approximately 40 people in the newsroom. We have expanded our reporting capabilities, because we are paying for more freelance reporting than ever before, while maintaining the number of staff reporters.

What that happy news doesn’t reflect is the fact that we are also doing a lot of new things — particularly on the Web — so we do feel stretched in trying the cover all the bases. For us, though, the Web has proven to be a way to add readers and to add them consistently month after month. So the extra effort does pay off with more eyes on our news reports.

Big city papers are having a tough time. Virtually every big city paper has reduced its staff in recent years or months. They’re still reaching hundreds of thousands of people in their circulation areas, but that number has been on a decline. As with us, though, most of them (all of them that are really trying) are seeing big gains on the Web.

Newspapers are not going to disappear anytime soon, but I suspect the newsrooms’ routines will continue to change a lot in the years to come.

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MEDFORD OR
207 PM PST MON FEB 26 2007

…WINTRY WEATHER TO CONTINUE THROUGH TUESDAY…WITH SNOW LEVELS DROPPING AGAIN TO MOST VALLEY FLOORS TONIGHT…. UP TO 1 TO 3 INCHES OF SNOW CAN BE EXPECTED TONIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW MORNING OVER LOWER VALLEY LOCATIONS……..

We get that sort of message from the weather service periodically during the winter months. The above arrived this afternoon and warned of snow on the valley floor for tomorrow. It’s big news around here, but if I have my way, you won’t read this in Tuesday morning’s Mail Tribune. No, not because I’m keeping secrets from our readers, but because the only thing worse than a wrong weather story is a weather story that you can tell is wrong by looking out the window.

An impending storm suggests news is on the way and that causes newsrooms to get jumpy. We don’t just want to get the news, we want to get it first. So our competitive impulse is to write a story with a lead something like this: “Weather forecasters say you should expect to be trudging through the snow on your way to work or play this morning.” The problem with the snow story is that by the time readers see it in the newspaper, “this morning” is now and if there’s no snow on the ground, the story — and the newspaper — seem pretty lame.

So we qualify our stories with words like “possible,” “likely” and “predicted.” But the bottom line is that we don’t want to say something is going to happen when we don’t know for sure — especially when our readers can tell in a glance if we were right or wrong.

One other weather-related pet peeve for me — Saturday’s paper on Page One said, and I quote: “A new storm system moving in today is unlikely to drop snow on the valley floor, forecasters say.” Saturday’s paper on Page 8A said, and I quote: More snow is expected in the Rogue Valley today and tonight, with as much as 1 inch accumulating … .”

I guess there is a way to predict a snow storm accurately — say it will snow and say it won’t snow, in the same paper! Sigh …….

OK, if I were truly a dedicated blogger, I would have kept the blogs coming for the past several days. Got to work on that. What really happened: I spent two days trying to catch up from being gone for a week, and then spent two days home in bed, sick. But I’m back, and, upper respiratory issues notwithstanding, ready to blog again.

I’ll keep it short: More video on our Web Multimedia site to check out — a couple of snow videos and a very cool piece on a local music group, AnnieMac. Things are changing here at the ol’ Muddy Turbine, that’s for sure.

We’re still trying to figure out how much time to spend on things like video. The snow videos were not time-consuming, but the music piece was. A good use of our resources? We’ll be sorting that out over time.

So here I am on the right coast (that’s right as in opposite of left, not a value judgment) at an American Press Institute conference about the changing nature of newspapers. We’re told we have to change to survive and there’s not much argument from the assembled 48 editors, who came here from Oregon, Texas, Illinois and a whole lot of other far-flung places, including Spain.

We’re told — and already knew — that we still have a loyal newspaper audience, but much of it is a middle-age and older audience. So we need to reach out to the rest of the world by spending more time and resources on line, by providing news as it happens, rather than only once a day, and by providing news and information in different ways and through multiple media.

A year ago, I might have wondered how we, at a relatively small newspaper in Oregon, could possibly pull that off. Today, I sit in a cafe in Virginia that offers free wireless, writing a blog after having just watched a multi-media slide show on the Mail Tribune’s Web site. All things are possible!

If you haven’t seen the slide show, check it out. Photographer Jim Craven accompanied a barbershop quartet on its rounds as the four men delivered singing Valentines on Wednesday. He took a lot of photos, recorded the quartet as they sang, mixed it together with some text and produced a really nice piece. You can get to the slide show by clicking on the Multimedia link in the left-hand column on our home page or, better yet, by clicking right here.

It is a brave new world, and it looks like it might be fun, too. See you back on the left coast in short order.