The editor's blog

Celia's humor

For many readers, Celia Rivenbark's Sunday column is a weekly must read. In case you missed yesterday's installment, Celia has been asked to be the North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival Queen, a distinguished honor indeed. As she notes, she is eminently qualified if for no other reason than she knows the true secret for a perfect pecan pie - light AND dark Karo syrup.

Celia shares her insights on mostly the routine matters of living, southern culture, motherhood, current events - all with a broad brush of hilarity. She writes with the particular lilt of a southern accent firmly in mind. You find yourself saying phrases from her columns out loud and you usually end reading them with a hearty laugh. That's excellent humor writing, a skill not many can claim.

Celia's original columns appear first in The Sun News and then are widely syndicated to other daily newspapers across the country. Commentary can be serious, ponderous, thought provoking, frustrating, pick your own adjective. It can also be organic and just plain fun, as Celia shows us each week in our Sunday Coasting section.

Issac's special series

The weeklong series we have published this week beginning last Sunday, Fatal Fallout, has taken our readers on a deeply personal journey with local columnist Issac Bailey, his family and the family of James Bunch, who was killed 25 years ago by Issac's oldest brother, Moochie. In this morning's edition of The Sun News, we printed Issac's answers to questions many of you have asked regarding this series. At the end is one final question that didn't appear in print.

Q. Why did you write this series?
A. It was time. Almost 25 years of living in the shadow of shame was long enough. Also, I
ask a lot of those I interview. I tell them that being open and honest is best, even when there is
pain. I try to hold myself to the same standard. And this particular slice of the crime story is
seldom, if ever, told. I hope families facing what we faced learn from our mistakes.

Q. How did you decide how much information to reveal about yourself? Your family?
A. That was the hard part. My first thought was to give only enough information to pull a story
together. That was because of the lingering feelings of shame and embarrassment. Then I thought
that would be dishonest, so I shifted into a journalistic mode and treated my family the way I do
other families who allow me to probe deeply into their pain.

Q. How did you explain the project to your family?
A. I told my brothers and sisters first, telling them the 25th anniversary of the murder was
near, then I told my mother. I told them it was way past time and that we had an important story to tell. They agreed and cooperated, though I knew it wasn't easy for them. Honestly, though, even if they hadn't agreed, I would have written the story any way.Because I think it's that important.

Q. Describe the conversation among your family about the murder and its subsequent impact
on your lives.
A. Our family is split, and the conversation got heated at times, especially because we got to vent
about the criminal acts committed by my youngest brothers. The older siblings seem more resigned
about believing what happened, while the younger ones believe he was possibly railroaded by police. My mother is having the hardest time. She wants to know how someone she gave birth to could take a life and why he pleaded guilty unexpectedly.

Q. How did you locate the Bunch family, and how did you explain the project to them?
A. I did a few Internet searches, called people I knew in Bonneau and spent hours going
through two years' worth of newspaper articles that are preserved on microfilm in the Berkeley
County library. But my best contact came after stopping in a small cafe housed in a single-wide
trailer. The owners knew about the murder and gave me the number of Mr. Bunch's best friend,
who helped me contact the family. I told them I was doing a story on the effects of crime, and that my brother killed their brother. That was hard. I didn't know if they would spit in my face. Fortunately they didn't. They graciously spoke with me a bit, but I didn't push any further. In other situations, I likely would have.

Q. Why did you decide to write it as a narrative series?
A. I thought the full story would be impossible to tell in one long piece, or if not impossible to
tell, impossible to read. Narrative gives you more space to paint a picture with specific details.

Q. How do you view the project now that it's in print? Is there anything you would change?

A. I haven't read the stories in print and probably won't for at least a few weeks. It's still a bit too
raw. But what I'm hoping the stories got across was that the tentacles of crime are long and
affect everyone - the victim's family, as well as the perpetrator's - and that we would be unwise to continue ignoring that reality.

Q. And a final question: what is the reaction from your mother?
A. I am going to see her tonight and show her the series. I'll let you know.

Guns in schools

We had a quick but lively exchange in the newsroom Wednesday afternoon over where a story about legislation regarding guns in schools should appear in the paper this morning. The story by staff writer Jonathan Tressler describes a bill introduced this week in the S.C. House that would allow people with concealed weapons permits to carry guns onto public school property.

Thousands of bills are introduced in Columbia each year that never become law. Many of them don't make it much beyond the initial filing stage and readers usually never know about them because journalists don't write about them. The guns in schools legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Liston Barfield of Conway and Rep. Alan Clemmons of Myrtle Beach, is an exception. The recent horror on the Virginia Tech campus and the gun incidents in the past few weeks in our area public schools make this topic urgently important in our community. The story includes the point of view from Barfield and Clemmons as well as some educators who oppose the idea.

The legislation may well go nowhere or it may be assigned to a subcommittee for review and begin to work its way toward law. We published the story prominently on the Local section front because we believe it's an issue readers care about and want to participate in solving.   

Covering her beat

No issue is more important to the region right now than the current crisis affecting insurance coverage for homes, condos and commercial property. Gov. Mark Sanford and Insurance Director Scott Richardson were in Myrtle Beach Tuesday for a press conference. Real estate reporter Jenny Burns used her weekly column today to give readers the latest update on who's writing policies and where things stand. Jenny began covering this issue in depth about a year ago, long before many of our readers had ever heard the term "wind pool" or contemplated the latest hurricane risk models for our area of the coast.

A key piece of Jenny's job is to be an expert on coastal insurance and the overall insurance industry as it relates to real estate. Only then can she write about it clearly so the rest of us can understand the state of things. She also serves as an investigator who searches for trends elsewhere to determine if they might impact us here at home. She routinely goes after the latest data, changing market conditions, decisions by stakeholders or impact on regular people so that her coverage keeps us all up to date.

Thousands of us are affected by rising insurance premiums or policy cancellations in the face of the current situation, more than any other part of the Carolinas coast. As Richardson said Tuesday, the situation won't be resolved any time soon, suggesting it will take at least a year before we will know more clearly the long-term solutions. The heart of Jenny's job, and any reporter's job, is to know what questions to ask, where to turn for accurate information and to put the news in the paper and on the website. Sometimes the work prompts change. It depends on what readers do with the information.

Welcome

"Free speech is the core of the First Amendment. And the Internet represents the most participatory form of mass speech in human history." Bill Frist, U.S. Senator from Tennessee. 2006.

Today I begin what I hope will be a lively, informative and interactive exchange with you, the readers and audience of The Sun News and myrtlebeachonline.com. Occasionally over the almost eight years that I've served as editor of The Sun News, I have written columns explaining our news decisions or updating you on changes we are making to our coverage. Now I will use this blog as a more regular way to share our thinking with you.

We want our journalism to be useful, to include information from all parts of our three-county coverage area as well as our nation and world, to serve as the watchdog for our communities and to tell the stories of triumph, courage, love, grief, all the emotions that define us as neighbors, family and friends. Through it all we are seeking to be accurate, fair and contextual. We know that's what you expect and we work at it seven days a week. I plan to update the blog several times a week, and I hope you will join in the conversation. I look forward to it.