All the news that didn't fit

Putting together tomorrow's issue, and there are a couple of White Noise media items that did not fit. So I am posting them here. With hyperlinks!


‘Best political opinion money can buy’
Incumbents Zack Matheny and Mary Rakestraw withdrew at the last minute from a Sept. 8 candidate forum hosted by the Guilford County Unity Forum (Disclosure: I’m one of the organizers), Matheny saying that he was under the weather, and Rakestraw explaining that she had a scheduling conflict and would be attending a function hosted by the Greensboro Landlords Association instead. Trudy Wade, the incumbent in District 5, has likewise withdrawn from a separate forum hosted by the same group on Sept. 22. Blogger Jeff Martin, popularly known as “Fecund Stench,” attributes it to “The Burckley Effect,” referring to Republican political consultant Bill Burckley, who has reportedly been retained by Wade, Rakestraw and Matheny, along with some challengers. “These absences were no doubt actually the result of the best political opinion money can buy in GSO,” Martin writes. The blogger predicts that the strategy will pay off: “Only in a city so apathetic and ignorant as ours could such a strategy prevail. The incumbents will be returned to office and nothing we do can stop it. Greensboro is governed by its country clubs.” — JG

Alexander assumes post at Greensboro College
Greensboro College has named longtime News & Record reporter Hooper “Lex” Alexander as its new Director of External Relations. A 22-year veteran of the News & Record, Alexander will head up media relations, external publications and public relations for the small private college, which boasts an undergraduate population of 1,250 students. Scott Rash, vice president for Institutional Advancement at the college, said he expects Alexander to “help us tell the Greensboro College story.” Alexander helped create the News & Record’s website in 1994, edited web content and worked with social media. Alexander wrote about technology, health and medicine, public safety, politics, government, religion and ethics, and wrote investigative news stories for the News & Record, according to the Greensboro College press release. Alexander worked for a public relations firm agency in New York City and spent time in radio before embarking on a journalism career that featured stops at the Gaston Gazette in Gastonia, the Sun Journal in New Bern and the Statesville Record & Landmark. — KTB

The true and tragic tale of Susan Walsh

Here's a interesting story for you, just in time for Halloween. It concerns vampires, the Russian mafia and a vanished freelance reporter.

Her name was Susan Walsh, and she hasn't been seen since 1996. Susan disappeared after filing a story with the Village Voice - a story they would never print. It concerned "vampire" clubs in NYC, a phenomena that mixed the goth and S&M communities, and it seems Walsh's story was a little too sympathetic for her editors' taste. Friends say she wrote as if she believed some club-goers' stories of immortality, that she was even romantically linked to one man who claimed to be the real deal.

Despite the obvious appeal of the "Kidnapped by vampires" theory, role-playing club kids were not the biggest threat in Walsh's life. There was also the Russian mafia, who Walsh no doubt angered with her reporting on the sex industry. Walsh put herself through college by stripping, and she used her club connections to write an expose on alleged sex trafficking by the Russian mob. The piece ran in the Voice in the early 90's, and Walsh told friends she feared backlash for it.

Still, the biggest threat to Walsh may not have been external. She was attending AA at the time of her disappearance, and admitted to abusing drugs in college. She was on anti-depressants, including the heavy-hitter Xanax. Her marriage seemed to be deteriorating, and her journalism career seemed stalled.

Yet she was a good mother by all accounts, an avid writer and reporter, and a beloved daughter. And she left a son, who should know where his mother went.

I've known Susan's story for a while, but here are the links that refreshed my memory.

Dealing with the media

Here's how NYC City Councilman James Oddo deals with ridiculous questions from the press. (NSFW — language and attitude)



Okay, so it wasn't real media — the spot was for a Swedish hidden-camera show — but I think there may be a lesson to learn in this footage. I don't know about the rest of you, but I respect the hell out of Oddo for, at least, having a highly sensitive bullshit detector and for not taking crap from anybody. Could anyone imagine our own civic leaders enacting such a display of — I'll just say it — balls?