Following the Nose:

It will be a small Thanksgiving this year, just the three of us, and a few friends later for dessert. No long drive, no folding children's table tacked on the end of a fully-extended oak antique. No bevy of aunts acting as sous-chefs to the baster-wielding matriarch. But it is only a short quiet pause, after grandparents and parents have left us only memory and a few bits of good china, and before we ourselves occupy the head of a three-generation table. Terry has all the makings of a pretty fierce matriarch herself. So we give thanks for our lives and for the lives that came before, and the lives that will come after, following their noses to partake in the feast.

Yeah--you can have some:

To a writer, nothing beats the pleasure of being all alone in a comfortable chair with a blank paper or screen and a head that's snapping and bubbling like a deep fryer full of frozen jalopeno poppers. But a pleasure that comes close is the opportunity to introduce new work, good work, by other writers. This week NCPR Online begins its long-promised follow-up to the email serial of Tim Brookes' book The Driveway Diaries with not one, but two new email serials: a full volume of new poetry from Native American writer Maurice Kenny, and a holiday special--a five-week serial of a spooky North Country Christmas story by Paul Willcott. These books are available nowhere else. I'm tempted to rub my hands together and mutter "mine, all mine," but in kindergarten I was taught to share. Don't make me sorry--sign up.

Season of Change:

NCPR Online will be busy over the next few months implementing some changes to our web service. I will be foregoing my morning "polar bear" swim to switch our audio archive and live broadcast streams to .mp3 format only. This will enable our listeners to use any of a wide variety of commercial and non-commercial players to access our programs and archives. Instead of competition free-style snowboarding, I will be enabling visitors to post their own events to the Community Calendar. No snowshoeing the length of the Appalachian Trail this year--instead I will be seeking online underwriters to pay the pixel bills. And the UpNorth Concert Hall and Gallery will be getting a little spiffing-up, and email book serials will return. As long as my curling stone and broom are staying in the closet, this is a good time to suggest any other new features you would like to see at ncpr.org.

Left, Meet Right:

Kelly McBride, in Poynter Online's Ethics Journal, suggests that an opportunity exists to turn the rancor and misperceptions of the recent take-no-prisoners election campaign into a long overdue conversation about the moral content of politics, right, left and center. She quotes blogger Colin Hansen, "In what will surely come as a shock to mainstream media, more voters cited moral values than either the economy/jobs (20 percent), terrorism (19 percent), or Iraq (17 percent) [as the determing factor in their vote, ed.]." She asserts that "We [journalists] have to introduce one half of the country to the other half."
No--not the moral half to the immoral half--but how the political preferences of each half are shaped by moral principles that can be made comprehensible to the other. This is not a piece of work that can be accomplished through slogans, sound bites, buzz-words and attack ads. It will require persistent, patient, thoughtful, and heartful storytelling--journalism at its best.