On Tuesday afternoon, the News & Observer blogs will be moving to a new system and a new server. This change will make getting to our blogs quicker and easier. Most of the blogs will change their appearance, while blogs like Taking Stock and Under the Dome will remain the same.

This change requires nothing from the reader. There will be a link to the older posts, and you won't need to change your bookmarks. If you have trouble finding your favorite blog or you have a comment, please email feedback@newsobserver.com.

— Rachel Carter

So the initial fist bump post generated a lot of talk here. And you saw Mike Easley give Senator Obama a fist bump on the front of the newspaper today, for goodness sakes. Our own Peder Zane has put together a video showing the proper way to bump knuckles.

For Tom Paine, who commented on my first fist-bump post, this must all be too much.

A few readers thought my Sunday column about the selection of Holden Thorp as the next chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill was critical of Thorp. Not at all. By all accounts, Thorp is a brilliant guy, an excellent academic, a capable administrator and a strong choice to be Carolina’s next chancellor. Click here and here for more on Thorp.

My point was that the search for UNC’s chancellor should have been open, and that if it had been open, the result would have been the same. Thorp told me he would have applied for the job if the finalists were announced publicly. During the search, he confirmed that he had interviewed for the job.

There was no need for this to be a private search. One reader disagreed with me. He said he trusted UNC President Erskine Bowles, who recommended Thorp to the UNC Board of Governors, to make the right call without comments from faculty, students and staff. Another reader agreed with me. “When we are at our best,” he wrote, “universities show society better ways to do things and keeping the process open and inclusive will always produce the best results.” Post your comments below.
--John Drescher

Starting Wednesday, you will be able to post comments on stories at newsobserver.com, just as you have been able to post comments on this blog. To do so, you must be registered at newsobserver.com.

Here's a link to my column from Saturday's paper about this.

We didn't mention it in our coverage today but I saw Barack and Michelle Obama do a quick celebratory fist bump before he gave his speech in St. Paul last night. It was fast. I looked in the Associated Press photo archive from last night, and I found a shot that showed Michelle with her fist up, but I couldn't tell if this was taken just before or just after they bumped knuckles. I checked our photo gallery at newsobserver.com, and I was pleased to see that our photo editors included that shot in the gallery.

What's the big deal, anyway? Well, I've never seen a presidential candidate and spouse do that. I was born in the 1950s, and I'm sure that Ike and Mamie never did a fist bump, at least not in public. Obama is wa-ay more hip than Eisenhower ever was, but I would still give the big edge to Ike when it comes to things like commanding D-Day invasions.

There was a brief mention of the bump in a Reuters story. I read the New York Times and Washington Post online this morning, and quickly, but didn't see any mention of the bump. I think the media has missed a story.

As in all matters where I want to get more insights, I consulted Wikipedia. Here, then, is the skinny on fist bumps.

Our headline on Page 1 today read: "A last hurrah for Clinton." The first paragraph under the headline read: "Hillary Rodham Clinton won a lopsided but largely symbolic victory Sunday in Puerto Rico's presidential primary, as Barack Obama pulled tantalizingly close to the Democratic presidential nomination."

The media has essentially said that Senator Clinton is toast. Probably no candidate has been proclaimed as defeated, done, over, kaput since Harry Truman in the days leading up to his 1948 upset of Thomas Dewey.

No doubt headlines like this irritate the heck out of Senator Clinton's supporters, who believe that her strong finish should give her the right to duke it out at the convention. The math suggests that, no matter what scenario you choose, this will end up being a very close contest in the popular vote - that popular vote that doesn't count in the nomination fight, but increasingly does.

And while the delegate count puts Senator Obama very close to the number he needs to clinch, she isn't that far behind, truth be told, around 155 delegates.

So even though, on Wednesday morning, after the last primaries, enough superdelegates may declare for Obama to give him enough for the nomination, he doesn't become the nominee until these delegate votes are cast at the Democratic convention in two months. The Associated Press doesn't nominate. Real live delegates do, with their funny hats and windy floor speeches about the "great state of....casts its xx votes for the next president of the United States."

Now, if I had to bet, I would wager what I normally spend on the North Carolina Education Lottery that sometime this week, Senator Clinton will concede. She is very much in the position, this morning, of a basketball team that is down by 9 points with a minute left in the game, forced to foul in hopes that the other team will miss free throws and through the miracle of three-pointers, they can pull even and send it to overtime. In other words, that annoying Dean Smith strategy that made the final seconds of close contests agony for those of us here who didn't matriculate at Chapel Hill.

Clearly, the superdelegates -- elected officials and party wheelhorses -- can't be thrilled with
Senator Obama's performance in the recent primaries.

And if I were to find fault with the media coverage over the last few months, it would be an apparent lack of curiosity about why Senator Obama has been doing so poorly among key groups in the Democratic base. To the contrary, there seems to be an enormous focus on "Why Won't Hillary Quit?" and "Doesn't She Know It's Over?" and "What Is Her Problem?"

There has tended to be, in the coverage -- particularly in the blogs -- a bit of a presumption that Senator Clinton has been soldiering on because she and her husband feel a sense of "entitlement." There may be some of that. Like they are the only politicians with a sense of entitlement.

But it is also possible that she feels strongly that she has demonstrated clearly that Senator Obama cannot win in November, and that his nomination and a McCain presidency will guarantee 1) at least four more years in Iraq 2) the appointment of more Republican federal judges and Supreme Court justices and 3) no chance of an historic breakthrough in health care.

So maybe this is her last hurrah. But any predictions about what she may do Wednesday must be hedged with the knowledge that since she became a national figure 16 years ago, she has not demonstrated much concern about what the media elite thinks she should do.

Sunday's Q deals with the role of public information officers in state government. Reporters Pat Stith and Joe Neff, two of our investigative reporters, have written the main story. They show how the state's public information machinery is often a public relations apparatus.

Stith and Neff are drawing from first-hand experience. They have long experience trying to get public records out of the bureaucracy for stories they have worked on. There is often lots of wrangling with public information officers over their requests for these records.

There is an understandable tension between the goals of the media and the goals of those in state government. We want to tell our readers how well or poorly state agencies are doing their jobs. For example, Stith and other reporters, such as Michael Biesecker and Lynn Bonner, have spent months examining the problems in the mental health system.

State agencies have a tendency to want to put the best face on things. They want to manage perceptions.

This comes out in different ways, as Sunday's Q will show. Sometimes this means that agencies tightly control who is allowed to speak to reporters. Sometimes this means that they put up a fight when we want to see records that may reveal problems. Sometimes they work hard to make sure that there's a consistent "message" that's being put out across state government.

There is nothing wrong, in my view, with government employing people to disseminate information to the public. Public information campaigns can be very effective at improving public health and safety.

State governments have also done a much better job of using the internet to provide instant information to citizens.

But a state employee who spends most of his or her time trying to manage the boss's image and restrict the flow of information is not necessarily working in the public interest. It's OK, I suppose, if the governor and state agencies want to keep those folks on the payroll (although I can think of better ways to spend the money), but they aren't public information officers in the classic sense. They are political operatives and handlers, regardless of their titles, and there's a difference.

Today, on Page 2A of the N&O, is something new. We are promoting our online content, exclusively, on the top of this page. We used to have a promo box at the bottom right of the page, where we primarily promoted what was coming in the paper in the next day or so. Maybe we would plug a little online content. This change is a recognition that we are producing a lot of content that only appears on newsobserver.com. Such as our blogs, for example. And our multimedia work. We also have two other web sites we want to promote -- TriangleMom2mom.com and Triangle.com, our community publishing site.
Today, for example, I promoted our Sex and the City contest, featuring a video with staff writer J. Peder Zane. Mike Williams, the editor of Triangle.com, edited it. When I saw it, I realized that Peder has a great gift -- he is a natural on camera. Who knew? Check him out by going to newsobserver.com and clicking on the Sex and the City link at the top of the page.

This photo, which we published on page 4C on May 4th, captured the trauma of Kentucky Derby runner-up just before the filly was euthanized after breaking down at the end of the race.

Reader Amy O'Donnell of Durham wrote to say that our decision to publish it, particularly the full width of the page, was "tasteless and unnecessary."

"Please keep sensationalist content out of your paper," she wrote.

Kevin Keister, our regular Sports photo editor, was not working the day of the Derby; photographer Ted Richardson was on the desk. But Keister says Richardson made the right choice:

"The photo Ted selected was the most tasteful of the edit as far as showing anything," Keister said. "Aside from distress in the jockey's face and body language nothing could be seen...The reader may infer the [horse's] distress, but it is not visible in the photo."

I agree with the decision to publish this photo. After the race ended, it was pretty clear that the demise of Eight Belles was at least as big a story as Big Brown's victory.

The size of the photo is a separate issue, and it could be argued that it was a bit large. But at the published size, it quickly conveyed the drama at Churchill Downs. If that fits your definition of sensationalistic, then we are guilty.

Our coverage of the trial of Lynn Paddock, who is accused of first-degree murder in the suffocation of her four-year-old son Sean, has referred to the guidance she received from a minister in Tennessee named Michael Pearl. We have described him as an “evangelical minister.” Click here to read a recent story.

A reader says it’s irrelevant that Pearl is evangelical. “Mandy Locke wrote that Lynn Paddock had turned to Michael Pearl, an ‘evangelical’ minister for parenting guidance,” the reader wrote. “Is Mandy of the opinion that evangelicalism is somehow related to beating your child with plumbing pipe?”

Locke responds: “I use the word because it is often associated with one's spreading of his faith. Inherent in evangelism is a desire to convert. To imply that this man was doing anything other than recruit parents to discipline in a way he suggests is inspired through the Gospel is missing the point of his ministry.”

To read more about Pearl’s advice, read this story.
--John Drescher

My column, “GOP needs a message,” addresses the question of whether Republicans get a fair shake from the news staff of The N&O. In the recent gubernatorial primaries, we received plenty of complaints from the campaigns of the leading Democrats, Richard Moore and Beverly Perdue. But we received almost no complaints from the Republicans candidates. Our reporting has led to the imprisonment of several state Democrats. Still, some Republican readers believe we have it out for their party. Post your comments below.
--John Drescher

Americans are driving less. USA Today reports that for four months in a row, Americans drove fewer miles than the month before. There had not been a similar decline since 1979. The decline is significant because the U.S. population, as well as drivers and vehicles, grows 1 to 2 percent a year.

Higher fuel prices affect almost every facet of the economy. Among those is the travel and tourism industry in North Carolina, which employs 190,000 people with a payroll of $4 billion. Of overnight visitors to North Carolina, 83 percent arrived by car or truck. So gas at $3.85 a gallon can hurt tourism. However, higher gas prices also can create opportunities for the state’s tourism industry, said Wit Tuttell of the N.C. Division of Tourism. To save money, he said, some people will stay closer to home and spend their time in the Tar Heel state.

Tuttell made his comments on “Headline Saturday,” a joint effort by WRAL and The N&O. It airs Saturday at 7 p.m. Also appearing on the show, which was taped Friday morning, are Eric Goodson, a software engineer who monitors gas prices for gasbuddy.com, and N&O transportation reporter Bruce Siceloff. The show is co-hosted by WRAL’s David Crabtree and me.

At the end of the show, I exhort Crabtree to read our Citizen Q section Sunday about the lessons learned from the recent drought. Crabtree says I was scolding him but really I just want him to turn off the TV Sunday morning and spend some time with The N&O. Everyone knows you get more from reading the newspaper than you do from watching TV, right David?
--John Drescher

After reading Ben Niolet's story this morning about state lottery pay raises, I was curious about what lottery employees are paid. I went online to our database section at know.triangle.com/factfinder. I clicked on the searchable databases, and clicked on the state employees salaries. I looked under boards and commissions, because that's where the lottery salaries are, and then, because the program lets me, I downloaded all those to a spreadsheet. With a quick sort, I was able to isolate the lottery salaries.

We get complaints from time to time from some state employees because we have this database online. I understand their concern. But when there's a question about whether some state employees are making too much or even making too little, this is one way citizens can decide what's happening. In the case of the lottery, salaries are a relevant topic of discussion, because higher salaries mean fewer profits going towards public education.

When I looked at the results I had downloaded, I saw that Tom Shaheen, like the article said, makes around $246,000 a year. Is that too much for a business that handles more than a billion dollars in revenue? You can argue that one all day long. There probably aren't many CEOs in North Carolina running billion-dollar businesses who make only $246,000 a year.

Shaheen has six deputies who make more than $100,000 each. Most of them in the $130s.
Under them, are seven more executives who make in the $90s. All told more than 50 lottery employees make $50K and up.

But.....there are a lot of lottery employees who are not making much. Some 18 of them make in the $20K range. A 5 percent annual raise for them isn't going to mean that much with gas prices where they're going.

It's a small photo at the bottom of today's Life, etc. front, a shot provided by Burning Coal Theatre of actor George Jack sitting on what appears to be an above-ground crypt at Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh.

But it got a big reaction from reader Rex Wheatley, who called to complain.

He said it was bad manners to sit on a gravestone — and bad for The N&O to publish the photo, which he said sends a message that it's OK to do so.

"It sends the wrong message," Wheatley said. "There'd be hell to pay if my mother saw me sitting on a tombstone."

There are two issues here. One, is it a violation of generally accepted cemetery etiquette to sit on a gravestone or crypt? Pretty clearly, it is. Aside from any desecration issues, Joe Freed, executive director at Oakwood, points out that families of the deceased buy the property for the gravesite and therefore control it.

Second, was The N&O wrong to publish the photo? I don't think so. The photo was of a previous performance at the cemetery, and it's a good visual clue as to what Orla Swift's column is about.

It's ironic that these issues arise from a production that is clearly intended to amplify — and even honor — the lives of the dead. Along the way, "Elegies: an Oakwood Cemetery Performance" may also have helped with a refresher course in proper cemetery conduct.

You may be hearing and reading a lot about gangs in the next few months. Evidently, candidates are going to be running against them.
In today's N&O is the story by Dan Kane about the state Senate's action yesterday to approve two bills aimed at cracking down on gangs and ramping up prevention programs. The legislature is controlled by the Democrats. Why do I mention that?
Because the Republican nominee for governor, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, wants to make the gang problem in North Carolina one of the major issues in the fall campaign.

If you want a sense of the politics of the gang issue, look at this item yesterday in our online Under the Dome blog.

Now there's nothing wrong with the gang problem becoming a campaign issue, and for all we know, tough penalties against gangs may be effective at the margins. But there are lots of laws on the books against criminal activity. One question that would be useful for reporters to investigate is whether police departments need more laws, or whether they need more resources.

At the same time that the legislation is putting new anti-gang laws on the books, Triangle counties, cities and towns are having to raise taxes to fund, among other things, the kinds of front-line education, recreation and social services that may make a bigger difference in whether a kid joins a gang. That story is on today's front page.