Then Daniels got some journalistic religion at a newspaper seminar, the secular equivalent of a good Baptist soaking. To hear him tell it, he suddenly understood that “the relationship between a newspaper and a community has such a richness and history that communities shouldn’t lose that.” And he felt that online services could take advantage of those relationships with readers and advertisers. Today the N & O goes by this philosophy, not entirely but to a great extent. Readers can e-mail many of their favorite writers, while long-time advertisers can buy X number of column inches in the paper editions and receive exposure in the electronic editions.

Something else, however, may have bound Frank Daniels to his paper as well—old family stories and the memories they stirred. The first Daniels landed in North Carolina several hundred years ago, and the family reunions continue to this day. Frank III’s great-grandfather, Josephus Daniels, purchased the N & O at a bankruptcy auction in 1894. He carried on as one of the state’s more colorful and outspoken publishers, with a strong populist streak, and took time off in Washington to serve as secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. I ran across Josephus on the Internet, just as serendipitously as I had found A. C. Snow. Through the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, I could hear Josephus honor two naval heroes with a speech called “There Is No Rank in Sacrifice.” I passed on word of my discovery to Bruce Siceloff, an online editor, and he played another Daniels’ speech for the clan while showing off the paper’s marvels of technology. Frank Jr., publisher of the N & O, tapped the arm of a cousin who had just walked into the room. “That’s your grandfather,” he said as the spooky old wax recording crackled away in its new electronic incarnation.[[4.11]]

Josephus, though his racial views softened, reflected the separatism of many Carolinians in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper itself changed. It eventually hired Claude Sitton, a Pulitzer winner notable for his civil rights reporting in his days with the New York Times. The N & O in some ways became the Times South. Reporters fought racial injustices. Frank III portrayed the paper of that era as never having met a cause it didn’t like. What’s more, he said the N & O, although exposing politicians on the take, was too quick to editorialize for local programs that raised local tax rates. I myself favored the crusading kind of newspaper—in fact, one risk of a high-tech orientation was that it could turn a newspaper into an uncritical cheerleader for business if editors were not careful—but I could understand Daniels’ concern over government spending. At any rate some felt that the N & O was losing touch with many readers, and so Frank Jr. and the others on the board of directors agreed to let Frank III serve as executive editor in the wake of Sitton’s retirement.

The contrast between the old and new editors couldn’t have been more stark. Sitton was a formal man who insisted that his reporters wear suits and ties. Frank III relaxed the dress code. In place of a sign with his editorial title, he stuck up one that said simply, “Frat Man.” Old-timers groaned that this young Duke alum lacked enough journalistic experience. The man had been the newspaper’s operations manager. Wasn’t it apparent? For each year of experience on the State side of newspapering, you could subtract two years of experience with the Church.

Even under Sitton, the reporters typed away on a modern publishing system for newspapers. But that was more or less all they did—write. Many could just as well have been pounding away on old Smith Coronas. They hadn’t any desire to learn the technology, not when there were doors to knock on, vote counts to check, political corruption to chronicle, Ku Klux Klan rallies to report, and courthouse records to search the old-fashioned way. Young Daniels set to work changing all that, and with the most surpassing of allies. The news librarians almost instantly grasped the potential of computerized databases. So did Pat Stith, the senior investigative reporter. The N & O would go on to collect state records showing traffic or hunting violations, or others, and then seek out patterns. “We analyzed all the speeding tickets,” said Daniels, “and found out what percentage of tickets were given at each mile-per-hour level. It turns out that if you go 63 miles per hour in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, you have less than a 1 percent chance of getting a ticket.” Via the same quantitative techniques, the N & O could evaluate the programs of local government. By the time Daniels had effected his transformation, he had squeezed dozens of personal computers into an already-crowded newsroom.

A year or so after Frank Daniels III became executive editor, he first beheld the Internet over at North Carolina State. “An engineering student said, ‘Have you seen this?’ and he showed me Usenet. And about forty-five minutes later, while I was thirty minutes late for a meeting, I was speechless. I walked out. I was just buzzing with the possibilities.” Daniels saw some engineering newsgroups and, yes, some sexually related ones. “I couldn’t believe how many people I saw talking together, just following each other’s conversations. The letters to the editor at the time were the only connection the News & Observer had with its readers.

“Our business is connecting people. Here was a whole world that existed without our knowledge. It was a small world and an elitist world, but it confirmed my earlier belief that computers were going to be ubiquitous.”

Effortlessly Daniels understood that Usenet wasn’t Videotext—people wanted you to talk back. So the Internet was at least on his mind as a possibility for the time when the numbers were right. Daniels for the moment pushed into less exotic areas; for example, he started a useful, lively, but expensive fax newsletter for the elite, The Insider, which covered North Carolina politics with a commitment to detail missing from the daily press. The N & O also offered sophisticated research services, using the databases it was amassing. And the paper let readers dial up stories over the telephone through a technology known as Audiotext.

The electronic action, however, really took off after Daniels hired George Schlukbier, a computer-oriented librarian who had worked wonders at the Sacramento Bee. Like Daniels the frat boy, Schlukbier flaunted a few eccentricities within bounds. An electronic signature at the bottom of his Internet messages identified him as “Chief Bull Goose Looney,” a tribute to the giant Indian who terrorized Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Ken Kesey novel. Some, of course, might argue that the Internet is itself a virtual asylum with the inmates in charge.

Schlukbier and Daniels checked out Prodigy and America Online to see about getting on those networks and decided that the numbers stank. Yes, Prodigy-style services already had their networks in place, and the Los Angeles Times and papers in George, New York and elsewhere would go on to sign up. But the N & O concluded—rightly, in my opinion—that the online services would need the newspapers more than the newspapers would need the online services. Newspapers were the best source of steady, detailed news about local communities. Each year the N & O spent $12 million covering mainly local and state news, an amount that even a giant like Prodigy could not replicate everywhere. “They’ve got their view of the world that’s defined by whatever technology they adopted at the time they started their service,” Daniels would later say. “We got uncomfortable with the fact we’d be living their rules, and the customers would be their customers.”[[4.12]]