We're watching the terrorist attacks in India unfold and wondering if anyone from Western Virginia has friends or relatives who might be there in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). If so, have you heard from them? Are they safe?
If you have friends or relatives there, or other Roanoke or New River Valley connections with Mumbai, senior editor Dan Casey would like to hear from you. You can contact him by email at dan.casey@roanoke.com
Whenever I walk past music writer Tad Dickens' desk, the odds are he's got a set of headphones clamped to his ears. He's not always jamming out to tunes, either. More likely, he's working on a podcast -- an audio interview that you can download onto your ipod.
In the past few weeks, you've seen a series of interviews in the Extra section he's done with musicians who have been coming through the Roanoke and New River valleys -- today, it's country star Vince Gill. Last week, it was country star Jason Aldean and New Orleans piano stylist Allen Toussaint. Before that, it was bluesman Derek Trucks, country singer Crystal Gayle, Dave Matthews collaborator Tim Reynolds and, well, you get the idea.
With each of those, Tad produced not only a print story, but also a podcast.
Want to take a listen? You can find Tad's most recent podcasts here -- and the older ones cataloged here.
Want to meet some of our journalists who are featured in some of our most popular blogs? (And maybe a few others, too?) Come out to the Stocked Market at the Roanoke Civic Center on Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 15 and 16) and you can chat them up in person.
Here's the schedule:
Saturday 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.- Carole Tarrant, editor, and Jenny Kincaid Boone, retail reporter and columnist and Storefront blogger
Saturday 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.- Nona Nelson, "Happy Wag" columnist and blogger
Sunday noon to 2 p.m.- Stephanie Ogilvie, Inside Out editor, and Lindsey Nair, food columnist and Fridge Magnet blogger
Sunday 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.- Shanna Flowers, metro columnist and In the Flow blogger.
It's a tradition in every newsroom I've worked in that election night means one important thing -- free pizza. We've placed our large order for delivery to this newsroom tomorrow night. We expect it could be a long one, so we're taking the unusual step of bringing in extra food to feed the staffers who'll be here well after midnight producing our election coverage online and in Wednesday's jam-packed paper.
I hope you'll be following the developments during the day on roanoke.com, which has produced this handy voters guide. We have assembled a small army of reporters to report their observations all day on roanoke.com. You'll also hear their reports if you're listening to WVTF Public Radio.
Want to check in on what's happening while you're away from office or home? Pop our URL in your smart phone and you'll get the latest results wherever you are tomorrow night.
Most important of all, we want to hear from you. What was your voting experience like? E-mail news@roanoke.com or call our newsroom at (540) 981-3423.
In Sunday's paper, we have a story by reporter Michael Sluss on the latest Mason-Dixon Poll in Virginia, which shows Barack Obama with a small lead over John McCain. In that story, pollster Brad Coker notes there are an unusually high number of undecided voters in his sample -- the highest number he's seen at this stage of a Virginia election since 1989, when Doug Wilder ran for governor. That's potentially significant, because a) neither candidate has more than 50 percent in the poll, so the undecideds will make the difference and b) Wilder was black. So, too, of course, is Obama -- and there's a fair amount of scholarly debate about how accurate polls are when African-American candidates are on the ballot.
This is known nationally as "The Bradley Effect," named after Tom Bradley, a black candidate for governor of California in 1982 who led in the polls up to Election Day, but then lost. Did white voters lie? Or maybe those undecided voters weren't really undecided after all -- they just choose to offer what seemed a "socially acceptable" answer of "undecided" when really they had no intention of casting a ballot for the black candidate. Here in Virginia, we prefer to call it The Wilder Effect.
With this latest poll, Coker offers an addendum about hidden racial bias in polling, and I'll include it in full below.
First, though, a couple words about polling. There are, of course, lots of polls out there. One of the best collections is on Real Clear Politics, so you can see how this Mason-Dixon poll in Virginia stacks up against others, in the state and across the country. I think you'll generally find that Mason-Dixon is one of the most cautious polls out there, so it often doesn't show as big a margin as others do. That sense of caution is one reason we've worked with Mason-Dixon over the years.
I had a column October 5 that offered some consumer advice on polls, and then another on October 26 that discussed The Wilder Effect, with a blog post that offered additional resources on the subject. Now comes Coker himself with his own thoughts: Read more »
