Dog blood donors, thin slices and singing a scandal

Coming up, a story about dog blood donors. Do dogs get orange juice when they donate blood? A sticker after they’re done? Get asked the same questions as humans?

“Have you sniffed a Rottweiler lately?” said managing editor Gary Graham, which according to meeting table reactions, trumped the other question from another editor, “Have you had unprotected sex?”

Thin slices

• Kudos to John Blanchette’s column at this morning’s meeting.
• There was a thread removal on Huckleberries Online - the explanation appears at today’s date on this page

Our columnist can sing better than your columnist?

There’s plenty of Sen. Larry Craig stuff online right now: news story , Doug Clark column , and a News is a Conversation thread .

But the really big deal this morning was Doug Clark’s new song . Some callers called it Doug’s “best perv song ever,” although Smith “thought Barista was pretty good,” he said.

On the other hand, managing editor Gary Graham and senior editor Carla Savalli brought up the point that by producing media to go with Clark’s column about Craig, it’s…

• an extra step in poking fun of a public figure that involves not just Doug Clark, but the time and energy of Spokesman-Review staff if the multimedia team were to blockade the men’s room for music video production.
• Poking fun of a public figure in a way that can make us ask, Is this something a newspaper should be doing?

“That’s one step further than I’m comfortable with,” Savalli said about taking columnist views to a new media platform.

Smith and others argued that ridicule of public figures is a standard tone in Doug Clark work, although they agree that “It is Spokesman-Review content.”

City editor Addy Hatch and business editor Alison Boggs asked how featuring Larry Craig in Clark productions is different from featuring former Spokane Mayor Jim West in the same.

Smith also pointed out that Graham shared a link to Brownback Girl , a parody of Material Girl that makes fun of Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas. But more importantly, this video is a newspaper product and came from Wichita Eagle staff: opinion editor Phillip Brownlee and editorial cartoonist Richard Crowson.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” Savalli said.