Document Actions
Sunday: Back from Philly
posted at 2007-08-05 22:12 | Last modified 2007-11-14 10:38
I'm back from the 2007 Capitolbeat convention in Philly. It's the annual national statehouse reporters' conference, and it was a lot of fun, thanks in no small part to the attendance of my fellow Jones St. regulars Jordan Schrader (Asheville), James Romoser (Winston-Salem), Eszter Vajda (UNC-TV), and Greensboro's Mark Binker. Mark did a fabulous job on one of our panels on multimedia and blogging - including recording, photographing, and posting about the speaker who followed him on the panel while the guy was still speaking, just to prove it can be done. You can see Mark's post from Philly here.
In related news, I was elected president (unopposed - no one else was that crazy), and Raleigh will be the location of our 2008 November conference, headed up by the very capable Mr. Binker as pointman.
The end...for now
The legislature's 2007 session ended Thursday. It's a little sad for us political junkies - no more ready-made gossip - but then again, you can get a tee time in Raleigh again.
The N&O had a great session wrap-up package this weekend, including the numbers, the quotes, and the winners and losers.
Char-O's Mark Johnson and David Ingram had this more succinct rundown of what flew and what flopped.
Rob Christensen (N&O) dug a little deeper into the GOP argument that the state's budget is growing too fast.
And Greensboro's Mark Binker says lawmakers might be headed back to Raleigh faster than you can say "infrastructure."
Black fallout
The other big (maybe bigger) news of the week was the ending of the saga of former House Speaker Jim Black. (More about Tuesday's hearing here.)
Over the weekend, both Charlotte's Jack Betts and the N&O's Rob Christensen weighed in with excellent columns on the Black legacy. And Charlotte's Mark Johnson reports on the dream home Black had planned to build for his wife before the bottom dropped out.
More tomorrow on the bottom line at the end of of the session. Comments? Drop me a line.
