Ordinations at the Diocese of Charlotte

Diocese of Charlotte Ordination 6-5-2010 from Diocese of Charlotte on Vimeo.

This is the first video prepared by The Catholic News & Herald, ably edited by my lovely bride, Patricia Larson Guilfoyle.
The ordination Mass was held on Saturday, June 5 at St. Mark Catholic Church in Huntersville, N.C.
Four men were ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Peter J. Jugis.

Newspaper brings home 13 SCPA awards, five first places

The News & Reporter took home 13 awards, including five first place awards, in the latest S.C. Press Association annual competition, with some staff members showing continued excellence in a couple of areas.
Sports Editor Travis Jenkins took home the first place award for writing the best sports columns for the third consecutive year.
"That's an actual hat trick, scoring three consecutive 'goals' like that," said Editor Stephen Guilfoyle of Jenkins' award. "It's the top prize for sports writers, so he's been the best at what he does for three years running now."
That competition was for papers that come out two and three times a week.
The judge said of his entry, "Nice tribute column to a lady who volunteered to send in race results. Feature column on singing fans made me smile, and writer offered a good opinion piece on the Bulldogs."
Guilfoyle won the Harris Award for Editorial Writing. In that competition, he went up against all the non-daily newspapers in the state.
It is the fifth time he's won the award in his career and the third time since joining The N&R in 2004.
"This newspaper does exactly what it should -- take stands on local issues in thoughtful, well-written editorials that make good cases for newspaper’s positions," the judge wrote.
The editorials considered were, "Picking on the poor," about Gov. Mark Sanford; "Should he have mentioned it?" about former Superintendent Larry Heath; and "County wrong to threaten to sue," about the county threatening to sue county residents during the Fort Lawn situation.
Guilfoyle also won first place in Profile Feature Writing or Story for 2/3 Times weekly newspaper for "Reserved Seating: Friends remember longtime officer," a story on community reaction to the death of longtime Chester Police Lt. Tommy Harrison.
The judge said, "Powerful, well-written story that leaves an impact with readers."
Guilfoyle also won a first place award for Page One Design at 2/3 Times a week papers.
"Nice use of graphics, photos and other elements," the judge wrote. "Designer has a gift for packaging lead story.
He also won the first and second place awards for Enterprise Reporting at 2/3 Times a week newspapers.
The first place award was for the story "'08 Brazil trip filled with work," on an economic development trip to Brazil.
"Interesting probe," the judge wrote of that story.
The second place award was for "$500 million incinerator," in which The N&R broke the news of the Covanta Energy project.
Jenkins also won second place awards for:
• Sports Enterprise Reporting, also an All-Weekly award, for coverage of where to play high school football's weekend of champions;
• News Headline Writing at 2/3 a week papers, and
• Spot Sports Story writing at Weekly 2/3 Times for "Downey raises the roof";
as well as third place awards for Sports Action Photo and Sports Feature Photo.
Great Falls Editor Nancy Parsons won a third place award for Lifestyle Feature Writing at 2/3 Times a week papers for "Eli touches bases and hearts."
She, Guilfoyle and Jenkins shared a second place award for Reporting In-Depth at 2/3 times a week papers for coverage of the school consolidation issue.
In all, Jenkins won seven awards, Guilfoyle won six, with Parsons getting two, including the shared award.
Jenkins' seven total awards were the most won by any journalist in the non-daily ranks.
"One thing the awards show is that we have to do a lot of different things each week at The News & Reporter," Guilfoyle said. "Travis excels at sports writing, but he also pitched in and wrote some news headlines, and those turned out to be award winners. He has always been an excellent photographer. Nancy won not just for a feature in her beloved beat of Great Falls, but also for working with the team to cover the county-wide news story that consolidation became."
"Being recognized by your peers is always good," said Publisher Buddy Aultman. "But when the economy creates an understaffed situation like we have at The News & Reporter, the awards mean even more. In recent years, we have had fewer people doing more and yet we managed to have a good 2009. The editorial awards are like icing on the cake."
In the past three years, Jenkins has won five first place awards and 17 total awards, making him one of the most honored journalists in the state.
In the past three years, Guilfoyle has won eight first place awards and 13 total awards.
In the past three years, Parsons has won five awards, including one first place.
The paper has won 68 awards in SCPA contests since 2005.
Two of The N&R's sister papers in South Carolina also won awards. The Lancaster News won seven awards including two first place awards. The Pageland Progressive-Journal won one.

What she saw on Good Friday

My wife just pasted this on Facebook:
Patricia Larson Guilfoyle: Just saw someone playing Jesus walking down Hwy. 160 in Fort Mill. it's Good Friday, all right!
I, being a smart ass, had a reply at the ready: How do you know it was someone playing Jesus? Could it have been ... Himself?

Remember what happened when the Irish priest got through to the Vatican, told the Pope, "I'm not crazy, but the Lord Jesus himself has returned and he's walking down the main street. Tell me what to DO!"
And the Pope says, "Look busy."

By the way. I like Jesus' sneakers.

My wife's new job

I'm going to have to update the home page of my old website, that this blog is someday to replace.
It has the Fort Mill Times on it.
Anyway, Patricia is now editor of The Catholic News & Herald, the newspaper of the diocese of Charlotte.
She sent me an e-mail about a "daunting" aspect of her new job.
She had to edit a piece from 1750 words to 450. So you ask, "So?"
The writer is the Pope. 
I e-mailed her back, saying, "What's so daunting about editing the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, the Primate of Italy, the Archbishop and the Metropolitan of the Roman Province, the Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, the Servant of the Servants of God?"
Everybody needs an editor, my old senior editor Phil Hudgins used to write. 
I mean, the pope doesn't write his column while sitting on the Holy See, see?
(That would denote he is speaking, or writing, ex cathedra, or infallibly.)

Anyway, it was tough for her to leave her old gig behind.

Patricia's passion was the paper

It was with a lot of soul-searching that my wife, Patricia Larson Guilfoyle, decided to take another job.
She will probably add this letter to the things for which she wants to kill me, but she’s also, to a fault, someone who will keep things inside way too much, not wanting a fuss.
More than 11 years ago, she came to Fort Mill to take on the position of as publisher-editor of the Fort Mill Times. She thought it a good job, a step up from where she’d been. She thought the paper needed some help, and she had the skills to do what needed to be done. It was within her professional reach.
One of the things she thought the paper needed was a restored sense of presence in the community. To do that, she threw herself into several different activities and groups, including the Fort Mill Rotary Club, the chamber, the downtown association. She kept herself pretty busy.
She brought the paper around financially, and advanced it to where it was profitable, and also again one of the most awarded, respected large weeklies in the state of South Carolina. She ended up in more than one leadership role in those clubs, and also worked her way up to becoming the president of the S.C. Press Association. All at a very young age, I might add.
If one simply looks at her resume, she is one hell of a journalist and one hell of a businesswoman.
But her job in Fort Mill, from the earliest stages, became more than just a job.
She took on other assignments from her company because her company needed her skills. She did all those other jobs to the best of her abilities, and she did them well.
But it was always the Times and Fort Mill Township that had her heart.
Over the years she would introduce me to several people. Old guys, mostly. They all flirted with her; she tried her best to flirt back. Never anything serious in the conversation as I watched, but once they left, she’d tell me of the respect she held for those men. They are of that Greatest Generation and they are the men who built Fort Mill into something. Many are forgetting those men. But she never did, and always made a point to get them in the paper, to point them out to me.
It’s without a doubt, if she could have remained simply as the publisher of the Fort Mill Times, and been able to do her job the way she wanted it done, the difficult decision she made to leave would probably have been impossible. But her decision also has a lot to do with our family and her desire to find more time to spend with our son.
So, she made a hard choice. She worked about 60 hours her last week with the Times and parent company McClatchy, finishing up Jan. 29. She started her new job Feb. 1.
Because she won’t, I would like to let you know, on her behalf, how much she loved her time with the paper, how important all the readers were to her, and how much she loves Fort Mill. She’ll miss it, greatly.
Her new position is in North Carolina, but that doesn’t mean we’re leaving.
We’re staying right here, because she loves it, and she’s taught me to love it as well. This is a place that gets under your skin, in a good way.
On her behalf, I’d like to thank the readers of the Times for 11great years.
Stephen Guilfoyle

History does repeat itself

Years ago, when I first started working in Chester, and we got more aggressive about getting scoops and posting scoops on the web and taking a little journalistic pride in those scoops.
We got busy. By the time I was named editor, I had created my in-home "breaking news list."
And I got a request from someone to join that list. It was our competition. I liked that. What a hoot.
I might still have the e-mail somewhere. It's the little things like that in life that make you smile, most days. So it was probably a keeper. But we made a little house ad out of it, that we ran occasionally.
Said something like, "When your competition wants to be on your breaking news list, you know you're Chester County's No. 1 news source." Something like that. And it instructed readers on how to join the list.
They aren't really covering Chester County anymore. Not like they used to. Not like they ever really got much of anything first. My first editor at the paper before I took over actually did a little comparison sheet on when we got stories and when they got stories. That's back when they had a Chester County reporter assigned and about four others who would jump on certain stories out of their beats. So they had seven print opportunities to beat us to our two to beat them, and they had us out-resourced by about eight to four, if you counted their photographers.
But they couldn't come close.
Anyway, they are a shell of what they used to be. So I don't take the amount of glee in it I used to. But, as the title says, history does repeat itself.

I rarely use my twitter account. But what I do use it for is to post breaking news. It feeds from Twitter into Facebook, (which I call, "The Face"). So I can kill two birds with one stone and get the word out.

Saving pennies, losing customers

So my mother is a subscriber to the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, S.C.
Like any newspaper in the country right now, it's having to face some tough financial times as advertising revenues dwindle.
There is a lot of navel contemplating in the news industry, even back in the good ole days. And I don't want to add to it. But there's something that hasn't gotten a lot of attention lately.
The big chains are having to make a lot of difficult choices. Some have filed for bankruptcy. Others have gone to web-only models, or web during the week, with a strong weekend edition, a Sunday. That's an interesting one.
But it seems like the bigger they are, the harder they are falling.
They are also doing things that other businesses have tried.
And so here comes Mom.
She would be described as a loyal newspaper reader. She wants to get her paper and have it be a PAPER. She wants something she can hold in her hand.
Apparently the paper switched the carrier on her route, however. Because when she gets her paper, more often than not, it's a mess.
She has a newspaper tube. She's had it for years.
But the carrier most of the time drops the paper at the end of the driveway. The tube is old, and there's a bush. But it's not invisible. After the first complaint about the paper being dropped in the driveway, it should have started going in the tube.
Sometimes it is in the tube. But we've had some heavy rain off and on over these past few months. The paper she gets, too often, is not in a bag. Even a couple that have been bagged have not been tied. So with unbagged or untied bagged papers in the rain, what does she get?
She gets a wet paper. Sometimes it's just a little damp. But sometimes it's a soggy mess.
One time, it was dumped, unbagged and came apart. My mom's paper scattered all over the neighborhood. The neighbors weren't too mad, the ones with subscriptions. That happened to them at other times.
The person running the newspaper route doesn't care.
Someone once said the very basic thing a newspaper can do is deliver a clean dry paper on time that's full of interesting things to read.
I won't speak for whether the Herald-Journal has anything interesting to read in it. As I said, my Mom wants the paper.
But she's getting fed up. The real problem isn't just a carrier who doesn't give a damn.
The Herald-Journal doesn't value her as a customer. It made a decision to put in a phone system that makes it hard to talk to a human being. When she finally got a human being on the line, she was able to get the person to admit where my mother's call went to.
Manila. As in, the Philippines. As in overseas.
The person had an accent, and it raised her curiosity.
With all the navel-contemplating that the news industry does, I don't recall a story about the New York Times Group of newspapers outsourcing a vital function like it's circulation department. The Herald-Journal is a New York Times newspaper. I used to be a stringer for them while I was in college, by the way. Full disclosure. Always liked them.
My mom called me last week, since I'm out on leave, and was telling me of her struggles to get a clean dry paper delivered to her home. I suggested she go to the phone book itself and see what numbers are listed there.
There are just two. One was the same number listed in the paper for redelivery issues. What would be the point of calling that number.
She tried the other number and finally got through to someone at the Herald-Journal office in downtown Spartanburg. That person was apologetic.
She suspected that the person actually running the route was not the assigned carrier but someone else helping that carrier out.
My mother was gratified to talk to someone who was sympathetic. But my take on the situation was that the person who took the call couldn't do anything to fix it. Despite having a file filled with complaints from other subscribers.
The person who took the call was frustrated as well. She said she urges everyone who has a complaint to write a letter to the editor.
Now, that might bring some notice to the problem in the public's eyes, if anyone actually takes her up. But the editor has nothing to do with the delivery of the paper.
The editor should be mad as hell about it. But a complaint like this has to be resolved by the publisher. But in the case, the publisher's hands are probably tied as well. because the corporate overseers made a decision to outsource most of their circulation work.
Many newspapers, when overseas outsourcing started ramping up, editorialized against the practice. Many realize that some kinds of outsourcing is the necessary end-product of free trade. We lose some jobs here in the hopes that the savings realized lead to development of other jobs, possibly better paying jobs, later.
But many of the companies that were outsourcing customer service functions have started coming back here. It is completely a short term savings issue.
My mother has reached the final straw. If she has to call Manila again, it will be to cancel her subscription. This is a person who wants a clean, dry paper, delivered on time, filled with interesitng things to read.
How can the newspaper industry attract new readers in different medium when it can't serve the people who, right now, want the product they are producing?
This isn't about my mother's complaints, per se. Her situation is absolutely representative of what is going on in this industry however.
The New York Times Newspaper Group isn't the only big company that has outsourced.
Some companies are using overseas companies to design and lay out their products. That doens't directly impact local customers. But others have onerous phone systems that don't allow you to speak to a human being. Press "1" for this person who won't help you, then press 2 for this person who will forward your call to a voice mail that won't get answered.
The sitaution is wearing on people at newspapers. As I said, the local human being that my mother finally got to said she tells EVERYONE who complains to write a letter to the editor, even though that won't do much good, logistically.
(A former publisher of mine noted the probable reason for this. Everyone knows that Perry White was the editor-in-chief of The Daily Planet and Superman's boss. Nobody knows who the publisher is.) The editor is the identifiable "authority" figure at most papers, to the public.
I know of one paper that has its circulation clerk out on the days when the paper is delivered. It frustrates everyone who calls when they they are told a message will be taken.
Another company has a person who has fielded so many calls from people frustrated by the automated call system, pressing this number than that number than this number, ad infinitum, that they should just press "Zero."
Zero gets you through to an operator at the local office. But the automated message was changed so that callers are never told that.
Automated calling systems. An outsourced to the Philippines circulation department.
These are done because accountants know they will save pennies.
But when you lose customers, LOYAL customers, customers who want your product, than it's a long-term disaster.
I hate to resort to it, but it seems, most days, that newspapers are taking their customer service cues from Dogbert.

Dogbert: There are two essential rules to management. One, the customer is always right; and two, they must be punished for their arrogance.

Still learning about son

In many ways, we know nothing about my son. He’s almost 11 months old.

We see him do something new and think, is that what he will be?

Yet we still aren’t sure what color his hair will be, permanently. It seems blond right now. But I was blond as a child, they say. His mother is blond, but my son doesn’t use any such products on his hair. (That line might have been a suicide attempt. Not sure.)

I watch him throw things around, with his left arm more than his right arm lately. And they are tossed with such force.

He will be a major league pitcher, I think. A quarterback. I’m sure of it.

His little donut ring toy — he rolls it around, so he might could be a bowler. Or maybe a mechanic or a tire changer on a NASCAR race team.

His favorite toy right now is a little wooden biplane with big wheels. It’s meant to be ridden somewhat like a tricycle, but his feet don’t reach the ground when he’s on it. But he leans on it and it’s helping him learn to walk.

He can roll along so good with it — he loves it.

Will he be a pilot?

Or a runner? That would be certainly falling far from the vine, as his daddy isn’t a runner. I’m not even a brisk walker.

He’s a good boy. I’ve heard people say that about their kids and seen evidence, quickly, that it isn’t exactly so.

He’s got a little bit of mischief in him, but he does it in plain sight, that little smile on his face letting all know he knows he’s pushing a button.

But he’s 99 percent good and happy, and only unhappy when he bumps his head or has got a cold bigger than the usual baby sniffles.

Whatever happens, I think he will be a gentle man and a gentleman, like his grandfather, for whom he is named.

He got the biplane from my wife’s parents. The maternal grandparents also got him a huge fluffy ball of a toy, a duck. When you squeeze it, it makes a noise, a ducky, coughy kind of noise. That’s his second favorite toy, I think.

He doesn’t squeeze it with a hand or an arm. He attacks it, attacks it like he’s a paramedic doing CPR.

“I … won’t … let you die!” he seems to be saying as he fiercely pushes onto the duck’s “heart.” Is he the next Johnny Gage/Roy DeSoto? (Does anyone remember the guys from “Emergency.”)

We have baby gates at the top and bottom of the stairs. He crawls over to them, stands up, rattles them.

“Let me out, ya screws!” I say everytime I see him do it. He’s like Jimmy Cagney in “White Heat.”

Whatever he becomes, he won’t make a good jail bird, I think.

The way he swished about in the bathtub, we knew he was going to be a great swimmer. I love to swim, but his mother, she used to competitive swim as a girl.

Is he the next Mark Spitz?

So when he got into the pool at my sister’s development, we were surprised he didn’t want to stay in as long as we thought he might. But it was a relief, a bit, to me. I’m not too sure I like the idea of any progeny of mine going about in a Speedo.

He just stares at things at times, and I think he’s going to be a scientist. Deep, deep thoughts.

He pushes a box along, opens things up, tries to take a few things and I think he might be like his Uncle John or his Grandpa Tom. A handy man, good with tools.

We don’t know anything, really. But we look at all he does, simple, silly things, all of it new to him and made new to us.

I don’t want to find out too soon, but I am also dying to find out what this little man might someday become.

Then I change one of his diapers, one of THOSE diapers, and I know.

He’s going to be a politician.