A big, slow, dumb hippopotamus sitting on our chest

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GREENSBORO, NC -- A big problem with this town? Entrenched institutionalized mediocrity and incompetence suffocating innovation and new ideas. (Another problem, the people who think it's only polite to defend it. "It may be a big, slow, dumb hippopotamus, but it's our big, slow, dumb hippopotamus and it's rude to point."

The following post was originally published on October, 24, 2008. In light of the News & Record's new website fiasco, it could have been written again today. Hippopotamuses are hard to move.
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News & Record history online goes "poof"
October 24, 2008

This morning I was trying to research some of the media coverage of the events surrounding stripping former Greensboro Police Chief David Wray of his authority and his subsequent resignation. I am frustrated and disappointed to find that search result links to News & Record articles lead to page after page of broken links: "Page not found. We're sorry, but the page you've requested does not exist."

This blog post by News & Record editor John Robinson about the N&R's reporting of the Wray affair has seven links to what the editor purports to be relevant News & Record articles. Each one is broken.

The local newspaper should serve as an historical record. It doesn't. It sucks. The whole enterprise should be gutted, torn down and rebuilt from the ground up with the goal of some modicum of competence; or someone should start a new media enterprise to replace the N&R. That could probably be done for a quarter of the rumored sale price of the N&R and without the drain of a legacy culture and financial overhead that weigh like an anchor of perpetual incompetence around the neck of the N&R.