Media

In what the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau has highlighted as a national publicity coup, Mark Kleinschmidt takes viewers on a tour of Chapel Hill in an episode of the LOGO Channel's U.S. of Ant show:

Ant talks politics with Mark, an openly gay city council member in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He shows him around town and is soon introduced to Thomas, a student at Chapel Hill who was the victim of a gay bashing.

I don't doubt that the Visitors Bureau is correct about the public relations value of this segment for its audience. Says Director Laurie Paolicelli, "Special thanks to Mark and Mike for carrying the torch and making national viewers/travelers even more aware of our area."

We locals will find the bussing and hugging a salutary alternative to the serious business of mainstream TV journalism.

[Note: those of you who've been around as long as he has will forgive Mike's forgetting that he first ran for Alderman in 1989, not 1993.]

It's another bittersweet end of summer. The students are back, and the first-years are wandering around as lost as ever. I love the heat, but I'm ready for it to start feeling like fall any day now.

Looks like this year's Daily Tarheel Tar Heel editor is a local!

In his new job as editor of the Daily Tar Heel, Joe Schwartz says he wants to keep the paper focused on not just UNC, but all of Orange County.

Schwartz graduated from Chapel Hill High School.

- WCHL 1360: New DTH editor familar [sic] with Chapel Hill, 8/28/06

Looks like Joe knows at least one thing blogs are good for: speaking in your own words instead of just being filtered by the media. ;-)

Dan Siler: Being from Chapel Hill gives you a unique perspective to share with your staff, how do you use it?

I talked about how I know the area. Great. I didn't ever leave Chapel Hill. If I weren't able to use that for the newspaper, or say having connections to South Building as an SBP, it might make me seem kind of scared of the outside world.