Walking With Dinosaurs Coming to RBC Center
The Walking With Dinosaurs tour will be hitting the RBC Center for eight shows beginning October 22.
Raleigh Unveils New Logo
The Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau unveiled a new logo for the City of Raleigh yesterday. The new look is the result of 15 months of brand strategy research, with the intent to extend the concept of Raleigh as a great place to live, work, and visit as the new Convention Center opens.
Raleigh 10th in New Residents
The Census estimates for 2006-2007 are out and they report that Raleigh ranked 10th in raw number new residents. The list included (in order, top to bottom): Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Fort Worth, New Orleans, New York, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh.
Cary ranked 5th in proportional growth for cities over 100,000. Raleigh ranked #13 while Durham was #27, and Charlotte was #31.
Displaying Her With Etiquette
Don’t forget, regardless of portrait or landscape orientation, the proper way to display the flag (for this purpose) is with the stars on the upper left . The photo on the left, which appears on the back page of today’s North Raleigh Observer, shows a house of patriots who simply rotated their flag 90 degrees. They needed to rotate and flip , like North Hills did, to put the stars in the right place.
Vote for Bodie’s Renovation
JELD-WEN
windows and doors recently announced its “Reliable Lighthouse Restoration Initiative”. Public voting is now open for selecting a winning lighthouse to receive new windows and doors from JELD-WEN. Bodie Island Lighthouse is among the 12 finalists, and your vote can help the tower win 8 windows and one door that are reproductions of the originals.
As you may recall, Bodie Island Lighthouse was pulled from the budget just minutes before the US Senate voted in December 2007. Funding for its restoration will be requested again, but it has been passed over for several years, and there is no guarantee of its future funding. Help restore the windows and door by voting today .
Art Institutes Finds Triangle
The Art Institute of Charlotte, a branch of the national Art Institutes brand, is opening a branch in the Triangle. Classes at the Art Institute of Raleigh-Durham will begin on August 21. The institute will occupy about 34,000 square feet in the American Tobacco District complex in Durham.
“I am excited about the opportunity for The Art Institute of Raleigh-Durham to provide a career focused, market driven education to the residents of the Triangle and surrounding communities,” said Michael DePrisco, newly appointed president of The Art Institute of Raleigh-Durham. “We look forward to working with the many fine businesses and community agencies in the region to help meet their employment needs.”
Raleigh Wide Open Welcomes Lou Gramm
The
Raleigh Wide Open 3
(RWO3) celebration, set to begin Friday, September 5, will be a 36-hour fiesta this year. The fun begins with a Noon ribbon cutting, while at 5pm that afternoon RWO3 will take over Fayetteville Street.
The celebration this year is focused primarily on the opening of the new 500,000 square foot convention center, where the International Flavor Festival will be running.
Saturday’s celebration begins at 11am and ends at 11pm with the music of Lou Gramm , lead singer for Foreigner.
WineStyles Now Open in Brier Creek
National wine retailer
WineStyles
now has a store open in Brier Creek’s Alexander Place (in addition to their Beaver Creek location). The old-world designed store aims to categorize wines not by origin, but by eight different taste categories.
Their aim is the be accessible, not a warehouse, yet offer competitive prices. A couple of customers have alerted me to this outlet, and I’ll have to check it out the next time near one of their stores.
Blount Street Commons Breaks Ground
The exciting redevelopment of four major downtown Raleigh blocks officially began today. Though site preparation has been ongoing for months, city officials were on hand this morning to break ground. The overhaul involves a 19-acre tract bounded by Peace, Person, Lane, and Wilmington Streets in Raleigh.
Centered around 25 historic houses dating to the mid 19th century, the Blount Street Commons project will add enough new construction to form a classic neighborhood including carriage houses, row houses, stacked townhomes, garden flats, and urban lofts. There will be almost 500 condominiums, and over 100K square feet of new retail space when the project is completed.
News & Observer Reorganizes Local Coverage
It’s already starting to happen. The homogenization about which I theorized last week is in its first steps. The N&O is moving most of its unique, Triangle-related material to a revamped “B” section of the paper named “Triangle & Co.” (is that short for “county” or “company”?). All they have to do is move the high school sports coverage to “B” and they’ll have a paper with all but one section that can be exactly reproduced in Raleigh and Charlotte.
From today’s Local section:
“Starting Monday, your City & State section will become Triangle & Co., a brand-new, larger section that combines the best of our local and business coverage. Monday through Saturday, Triangle & Co. will bring you Triangle and state news stories, roundups of local briefs, national business briefs, stocks, Under The Dome, your favorite columnists (sic – there should be a comma here) and more. As part of the new section, you’ll now get a page of business news on Mondays. Starting July 6, the Sunday City & State section will become Triangle & State and will include a new Sunday Under The Dome column. The popular Life Stories feature will move to the Monday Triangle & Co. front starting July 7…”
Raleigh Tops Another Places To Live List
MSNBC
took a stab
at America’s top 10 metros, and
Raleigh came out on top
. The list is an amalgam of the recent lists by Forbes, Kiplinger, Money, Fortune Small Business, and Relocate-America.com. Charlotte, the only other city in the South on the list, finished #9.
Goodbye Local Newspaper
Earlier this week
The McClatchy Company
, owner of
The News & Observer
and
The Charlotte Observer
announced a
restructuring plan at both papers
. Along with sweeping job cuts at both papers, many redundant efforts will be merged. For instance, the Sports department will be run out of Charlotte. It is clearly a cost-cutting measure that will vastly improve one side of the balance sheet.
One the other hand McClatchy is forgetting the key purpose of a newspaper, the glue that ties a community. Like them or not, the News and Observer is the meeting place through which an enormous portion of citizens get their information. As evidenced by the Plensa Plaza reaction, it is a place where politicians get the area’s pulse. It’s a two-way interaction that is immeasurable by bean counters, but it doubtlessly is there.
The local flavor of a paper helps define a region. While the Charlotte Observer and the News and Observer both cover UNC basketball games, for example, the interpretation of the game and its effects on fans is different in one city than it is in another. The real estate dedicated to stories shows the area’s interests as well. As mentioned, the Sports page will be run from Charlotte. While the sports pages will not be identical, are we going to get unwanted increases in Panthers, Bobcats, and Nascar coverage? Is it possible for anyone in Charlotte to comprehend the importance of the Carolina Hurricanes?
While the two papers will remain as two separate editions, there will be many more common stories. Stories about state politics, food, and lifestyle issues, for instance, will be carbon copies in both papers. Don’t be surprised if the next stage in this evolution is to merge the two papers as the “Carolina Observer”. Using McClatchy’s logic, there is no reason that 90% of the newspaper can’t be a canned carbon copy in both cities. Each city’s Local section is where local news, local sports, and local business/real estate could be housed. By centralizing content, layout, and production of 90% of the newspaper, McClatchy could save an additional fortune in costs.
While McClatchy is taking care of business on one side of the P&L, are they ignoring the other? Time Warner’s News14 Carolina has already shown us how catatonic and watered down homogenized regional TV news can be. As the paper moves in this direction (the Sunday paper’s content is totally useless to me these days), special interest web sites like this one keep popping up. With more outlets for news, will people feel the urge to pay attention to the ever-homogenizing “local” paper? I, for one, am seriously considering canceling my subscription. While I still need something with which to line the cat box, there is just too much free information and idea exchange out here to keep paying attention to other cities’ interpretation of yesterday’s news. I think I’ll go stew over this at the Raleigh Times Bar.
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