No more White House endorsements from Greensboro

Presidential endorsements fall by wayside
It was such a small item on the AP wire that I ran right by it the first time. “No Endorsements” was the cryptic slug, and I wondered if it meant a North Carolina newspaper was revising the way it goes about recommending political candidates.
It was not just one, but three well-known and respected Southern newspapers – and one of them was the paper that provided me with off-and-on employment from the time I was old enough to throw a newspaper on a porch. The daily newspapers owned by Landmark Communications, Inc. – in Norfolk and Roanoke, Va. and Greensboro – would no longer endorse candidates in presidential races.
All three newspapers’ editorial departments will continue to endorse candidates in local and statewide races, the story said, but there’s no longer as much need as there once was to endorse in races for the presidency, the Pilot said in an editorial Sunday. I did not see an announcement on the Greensboro News& Record’s Web site, though I may have missed it.
The news was first broken in an editorial column Sunday in the Roanoke Times, but the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot editorial Monday was what drew the AP’s attention. Here’s a link to that editorial.

“Presidential elections are not our beat,” the Pilot said. “Our time is best spent on local and state problems or those national ones that bear directly on us.”
Endorsements during election campaigns are enormously time-consuming and wind up stirring a lot of passions – some for, some against the practice. My boss Ed Williams had a good column last week explaining how we approach endorsements.
His point was a good one: If you like our editorials, chances are you’ll agree with our endorsements. And if not, you may prefer someone else.
Landmark’s decision is reflective of the changes going on among newspapers generally and editorial departments specifically. We’re all learning to deal with new technology. In my hometown of Greensboro, they’re not only blogging with pictures and audio clips, but are now in the process of putting up video statements from candidates and working on airing the results of a candidate's debate.
This is all a long way from the hot-lead and grease-pencil days of the Greensboro Daily News, as it then was called, where I helped carry the paper as a boy in Greensboro and later on campus at Chapel Hill, wrote high school sports as the $20-per-month correspondent from Page High and after college days was a copy editor, Alamance Bureau reporter, columnist, Raleigh Bureau Chief, editorial writer – and its last Washington Correspondent back in the 1970s.
I had the great good luck to work for smart folks there – Managing Editor Irwin Smallwood, as good a man as I ever knew anywhere, the graceful and erudite Bill Snider, and Rhodes Scholar John Alexander, with whom I’d eat black-eyed peas and collard greens at the old Woolworth’s Lunch Counter on Elm Street before heading back to the paper to editorially flay the hide off some unfortunate for one misstep or another.
The paper usually endorsed in presidential races, but not always, notes my friend Allen Johnson, the editorial page editor there. “We’re still going to write about issues pertinent to the campaign,” he notes, but readers won’t find “that big Sunday editorial” about the presidential race.
Like everything in newspapering, there will be those who like the decision to stop endorsing in presidential races, and those who don’t. I hate to see it end. A good presidential endorsement will get folks talking about issues – and sometimes throwing thunderbolts right back at the paper when they don’t like what they see. That one vivid way you know they’re still reading their favorite morning newspaper.